Yossi Klein Halevi: Campus Lessons
June 2, 2004

Yossi Klein Halevi is one of the leading commentators on Israeli affairs, and it is always interesting to hear what has to say. Growing up Orthodox in Borough Park as the son of Holocaust survivors, he was drawn as a youth to the right-wing Zionism of Betar. He later joined Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, where he was especially active in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry. In his book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, he tells of how he would purchase front row seats when Soviet troupes came to perform in New York, only to throw containers of animal blood onto them in the midst of the show. Soon after immigrating to Israel, however, he would abandon his radicalism. Now, he lives in Jerusalem as a correspondent for the center-left New Republic, and remains a wise and bold advocate of Israel and a great writer. His latest book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, was extremely well-received.

The majority of the hundreds on this listserv are college students, spread over around thirty or so campuses from coast to coast. As we’ve all seen, there is something particularly brutal about the way Israel is treated on campus, mirroring its treatment in the international arena. Ask any sane “peace activist” if they think terrorism is bad, and they will likely agree that yes, it ought to be condemned. But this commitment often seems to dissolve the minute Palestinian terrorism becomes the terrorism in question. Terrorism, however, is nothing other than deliberately applying violence to civilian societies in order to cause anxiety, demoralization and death. It does not matter who is doing it, or for what reason, just like it does not matter who commits a murder or why they say they did it – stolen property, perceived injustice, anger, blood feud, sociopathy – only that they did in fact choose to murder. That Israel does not target civilians and makes every effort to avoid collateral damage gives it the moral high ground in this war. Pro-Palestinian activists try to label Israel as terrorist too, because blurring the definition of terrorism is in their interest. The day Israel responds to a suicide bombing in an Israeli nightclub, with perfect equivalence, by sending a missile hurtling into a Palestinian nightclub, we can call Israel terrorist. But until then, let us be clear about the dynamics of this conflict: the problem with Israel is the occupation; the problem with Palestine is terrorism.

Worst of all are criticisms of fundamental legitimacy, made by bigoted people who have no interest in peace. These criticisms tar Israel as colonialist, apartheid, fascist or racist and some combination of them all. These are powerful words with powerful implications that those who invoke them probably do not stop to think through. If these charges were actually true, rectification would mean Israel’s abolition or at least some wholesale reordering of Israeli society, for we believe that apartheid or fascist states are illegitimate and should not exist. If Israel is the Third Reich or an agent of Satan, then Israel is inherently evil and there can be no political solution to the conflict. If Israel is a Western colonial implant, it follows that its existence should be understood as temporary, alien, and in need of de-colonization. As long as these labels are applied, Israel must remain unnatural and offensive. It becomes acceptable to hate evil Israel, and unacceptable to make peace with it. Anyone who uses these terms does not only disagree with the policies of Israel; they disagree with the national existence of Israel.

If you believed these things, it would be hard to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with anything but righteous outrage. It is this attitude that leads to the brutality that differentiates the pro-Palestinian cause as practiced at UC Santa Barbara from others, like, say, the Tibetan freedom movement. Professors do not offer lunchtime lectures “objectively” explaining how terrible China is. There is no divestment from China campaign. There is no academic boycott of China. There are no classes on the state of human rights in China. Casual anti-China brickbats aren't hurled out by professors in the Environmental Studies or Dramatic Arts departments. Even at Tibetan freedom concerts, rare would be the attendee that declared China a fundamentally illegitimate country and demanded its abolition. Yet, if the movement doesn’t act quickly, Tibet will hardly exist in ten years.

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Only the uninformed get hysterical about the Middle East conflict. If you keep your wits about you, you find that there are people in power on both sides working to end the conflict, and that the issues take time and patience to understand. Weak and disordered minds are the ones that resort to paranoid conspiracy theories to explain matters in ways favorable to their interests. When Sharon first announced his plan to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle its settlements, the outcry from the Arab League arose instantly, which makes me think they would oppose anything Sharon put forward. Isn’t withdrawal what Palestinians have been demanding all along?

What Sharon is doing is significant. By offering to withdraw from Gaza without any guarantees from Palestinians, Sharon is stepping outside the old Oslo framework of reciprocal concessions. This is called unilateral action, and it has gained momentum in recent months because the Israelis have concluded that there is simply no Palestinian leader with which Israel can make any agreements. It was the Labor Party that long called for this policy – also known as “divorce” – while the Likud Party argued such a move would hand the terrorists an emboldening victory. Now Sharon, of Likud, is proposing the plan, and Labor is presenting its own version of the disengagement plan. The Gaza withdrawal has enormous bipartisan popular support in Israel (the May Likud referendum against the plan reflected the opinion of only 2 percent of the Israeli populace).

Sharon is so serious about withdrawal from Gaza that two rightist parties – National Union and National Religious Party – are threatening to exit his coalition, and members of the former have even called Sharon a traitor. Arab leaders understand his seriousness too, which is why Sharon and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak exchanged letters last week, and why Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom is going to Cairo on Thursday to discuss the withdrawal. Egypt has an important stake in a stable post-IDF Gaza because it borders on Egypt, and sort of Palestinian Götterdämmerung would have destabilizing consequences on them. To prevent the densely populated Gaza Strip from devolving into chaos or a Hamas-ruled fundamentalist dictatorship, Israel and Egypt are working to ensure that a responsible, non-fanatical administration steps into the vacuum. The anti-Intifada moderate Mohammed Dahlan is the ideal person to take control, and a few European countries said they back the plan along with President Bush.

In order to accomplish a proper handover, the Palestinian Authority needs to, first, consolidate its twelve overlapping security agencies under unified command, and second, compel Arafat to hand over the security portfolio to Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia (pictured above left). This is what Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman is reported to have told Palestinian leaders in a recent Ramallah meeting (Suleiman has been active in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and was the one pelted with shoes while visiting the Dome of the Rock last year). There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, but the bottom line in Gaza and the West Bank is that only when a responsible Palestinian leadership has police control over its own territories – meaning it arrests terrorists, seizes weapons and materiel, closes bomb factories and freezes terrorist funding – will Israel be in a position to negotiate.

This scenario probably sounds to many like a replay of the spring of 2003, when Arafat was supposed to cede security authority to then Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Instead, Arafat blocked meetings between Abbas and Sharon, retained control over all 12 agencies, and had his terrorist militia, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, refuse to participate in any cease-fire talks, all of which led Abbas to resign in September (see our discussion of Abbas here). Israel has long given up on Arafat as a partner for peace, and even King Abdullah of Jordan last month called on Arafat to step aside and make way for the younger, more moderate PA leadership. Now, it’s between Egypt and Arafat. Egypt is expecting a response from Arafat soon.

 

 

 

 

Essay: Campus lessons

Yossi Klein Halevi
from The Jerusalem Post, April 23, 2004

I recently taught a course on Israeli society and politics at Colorado College, a small, first-rate liberal arts college in Colorado Springs. And though that limited experience hardly makes me an expert on the question of the image of Israel on American campuses, I did learn several potentially useful lessons about how to convey the complexity of our dilemmas to smart but largely ahistorical American students.

My goal wasn't to teach the Israeli-Arab conflict but Israel, on its own terms. That is, to present the Middle East conflict as part of the Israeli story, one of many political, social and cultural conflicts that define the Jewish state.

Still, I had this dilemma: How would I switch to objective presenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict without betraying my beliefs? My friend and unofficial adviser at the college, Prof. David Hendrickson of the political science department, suggested these guidelines: "Tell the students what you think, because you owe it to them and they'll want to know. Just be sure to make them aware of all points of view."

I thought I might be able to handle that.

My first test happened immediately, during the opening session. I was explaining to the class how Judaism places a religious value on both peoplehood and land, and noted that a secular Israeli who risks his life protecting the Jewish state is fulfilling a religious category and so is in some sense considered a "good Jew." A student raised her hand and asked, "So Judaism would call someone a good Jew who rapes and murders Palestinians?"

Welcome to post-Leon Uris America.

How to respond? Do I begin the course by arguing against the big lie and risk being dismissed by students as a mere polemicist, or do I let my response unfold gradually over the coming weeks? I opted for the latter and said only, "Judaism wouldn't consider that particular person to be a good Jew."

As the course progressed, that interaction was a constant reminder to me of the need to explain the basics of Israeli reality.

The next challenge happened in that same opening session. In trying to explain that the Zionist return wasn't just motivated by anti-Semitism but by love of the land, I offered myself as an example of an American Jew who had moved to Israel simply to come home.

"I don't understand what you mean by 'home,'" a student interjected. "For me, home means family and neighborhood. How can 'home' be something as abstract as a country?"

My next test happened a week later, with the suicide bombing of bus 14 in Jerusalem. There was no way that, after a sleepless night on the phone with family and friends in Jerusalem, I could walk into class the next morning and pretend that nothing had happened.

And so I came as I was, an aggrieved and angry Israeli. I played the students mournful Israeli music by Ehud Banai and read elegiac, ironic poems by Yehudah Amichai. For three hours, they experienced something of our reality.

Afterwards I was challenged by Jorge, a Palestinian Christian student who had grown up in Peru.

"I want to know how Israelis are affected by the conflict," he said. "But why don't we learn also about how Palestinians feel when their people are killed by soldiers and their homes are blown up?"

I explained that this was a course about the internal Israeli experience. Several students, though, took Jorge's side, arguing that the Palestinian conflict is so integral to Israeli reality that it's unreasonable to exclude a Palestinian perspective.

Justifiably, Jorge was constantly measuring my fairness. And I was constantly pushing him to go beyond anger - which is precisely why he had taken the course, courageously, in the first place. At one point I set up a debate between Jorge and Elena, one of the Jewish students in the class, about the origins of Zionism. I insisted that Jorge take the Zionist side and Elena the Palestinian side. "Say 'we,'" I urged them, when they defended their respective positions. Both performed admirably - until the very end, when Jorge shouted, "I can't take this anymore!"

Obviously I wanted students to sympathize with Israel's dilemmas. But most of all, I wanted them to understand the tragedy of history, which gave the Jews no choice but to try to return to the land and gave the Arabs no choice but to try to stop them. That same tragic inevitability has led Jews and Arabs to see each other as the embodiment of their worst historical enemy, so that Arabs became our Nazis and we became their colonialists.

When discussing the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis, the perspective that resonated most with students was that of historian Benny Morris, who argues that the Arabs declared a war of genocide, and the Jews responded with a war of ethnic cleansing.

The students I encountered had no moral expectations of Israel - or, for that matter, of any other state. In fact, they assumed that states are corrupt entities that will do anything they can get away with. That cynicism is not necessarily detrimental to Israel: It means that the Jewish state isn't placed on a pedestal, only to disappoint. It may be unflattering for Israel to be considered little better than its enemies, but it spares us the double standard to which Israel is often held.

At the same time, most of my students have been affected by the Holocaust. They are part of the first generation of Americans to be raised with the Holocaust as their symbol of ultimate evil. One of the most shocking revelations for students was that much of the Arab national movement was pro-Nazi.

"How can the Palestinians say they're right when they supported Hitler?" one young woman said, disoriented to discover that the Palestinian issue was more complex than she had assumed.

While there is little sentimental affection for Israel, there is much curiosity. The anti-Israel demonizers haven't yet won the debate on campus. Thoughtful college students respond to complexity, and my students were fascinated by Israel's courage in grappling with its insoluble political and ideological problems.

One of the most effective moments in conveying the decency of Israeli society was the screening of an episode about mass immigration from the Israeli TV series Tekuma, which deals with the history of Israel. When it was aired in Israel in 1998, the series was bitterly critiqued by the Right for being too self-critical. Yet all of those interviewed in the segment that I showed - whether Holocaust survivors or Sephardi immigrants or more recent Russian and Ethiopian arrivals - not only complained of how they were received by veteran Israelis but also expressed their love for Israel and gratitude for being here. For me, the lesson was that we don't have to be so defensive about our flaws. What seems to us as self-flagellation is sometimes admired abroad as candor.

At the end of the course, my Palestinian student, Jorge, gave me a gift: an icon of his favorite saint, San Martin de Porres, who was renowned as a peacemaker. In the icon, he is presiding over a plate of food shared by a dog and a cat.

I knew I'd passed the course.

The writer, an associate fellow at the Shalem Center, is a contributing editor and Israel correspondent of the New Republic.