Saree Makdisi
The Israel Divestment Campaign and theQuestion of Palestine in America
S
erious and thoughtful people are advocatingand taking actions that are anti-Semitic in theireffect if not their intent,’’ warned Harvard Presi-dent Lawrence Summers at a morning prayermeeting one day last September. ‘‘But whereanti-Semitism and views that are profoundlyanti-Israeli have traditionally been the primarypreserveofpoorlyeducatedright-wingpopulists,profoundly anti-Israel views are increasinglyfinding support in progressive intellectual com-munities.’’
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Summers’s examples of supposedlyanti-Semitic activities on university campusesinclude the call for an academic boycott of Israel(initiated by a letter to the
Guardian
from twoJewish academics in London), and, closer tohome, the nascent campaign on American uni-versity campuses—modeled on the successfulantiapartheid campaigns of the s—callingfor divestment from Israel until it implementsUN Security Council resolutions (some of whichit has been ignoring for more than fifty years)and adheres to the standards of internationalhumanitarian law as codified, for example, inthe Fourth Geneva Convention (which Israel hasbeen violating on a daily basis since its conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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The
South Atlantic Quarterly
:, Fall .Copyright © by Duke University Press.
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Saree Makdisi
It is in fact astonishing that the divestment campaign should have gen-erated so much controversy, given that its primary demand is simply thata country that is showered with official and unofficial American assistance,investment, and general munificence—some ten million to fifteen milliondollars a day and more, in addition to billions of dollars in loan guarantees,even at a time of massive budget cuts depriving American citizens of theirmostfundamentalneeds—merelyacknowledgeandimplementtheruleof law. After all, Iraq, which has violated some of the same laws (albeit for amuch shorter period of time) has been punished by two devastating wars,one ‘‘regime change,’’ and over a decade of crippling sanctions in between,which, by some counts, have caused up to a million otherwise prevent-able deaths, including those of half a million children. By comparison, thesuspension of investment in Israel for its much more brazen and longer-lasting violation of UN resolutions and human rights principles would bethe merest slap on the wrist. Indeed, the likelihood of such a move seemssomewhat remote for the time being: the United States extended an
addi-tional
billion dollars of military aid to Israel even as the second AmericanwaronIraqforitssupposeddefianceoftheUNwaswindingdown,withU.S.armyunitsimposingamilitaryoccupationoftheirown.Andyetthedivest-ment campaign has generated a wave of seemingly hysterical reactions,defined not merely by the rhetorical tactic equating criticism of Israel withanti-Semitism, but also by stirring calls to rally to the defense of what itsapologists represent as an unfairly singled-out victim of a hate campaign.ConflatingtheU.S.divestmentcampaignwithagrosslydistortedaccountof the European academic boycott (which in any case is more a statementof principle than of concrete action),
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the hostile reaction to the divestmentcampaignintheUnitedStateshasbeenarguedpartlyonthegroundsofaca-demic and intellectual freedom—hence Summers’s rhetorical comparisonofthecampaigntoright-wingpopulismaimedatanuneducatedaudience—and partly on the grounds that it is unfair to single out Israel from amongthe crowd of the world’s human rights abusers. ‘‘The whole campaign fordivestment is educational malpractice by professors,’’ writes Harvard Lawprofessor Alan Dershowitz. ‘‘It turns the world upside down. It takes thecountry which has probably best struck the balance between security andlibertyandturnsitintothepariah,andrewardscountriesthatdon’teventryto strike a balance.’’
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Although many supporters of the divestment move-ment, including one of the earliest proponents of the movement, Profes-
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Divestment and the Question of Palestine in America
879
sor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, and the legendary antiapart-heid campaigners Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, compare Israel’sviolation of Palestinian human rights and the rule of law in general withSouthAfrica’sbehaviorduringtheapartheidera,suchcomparisons—alltheminutelydocumentedfactsbackingthemnotwithstanding—are‘‘hideous’’according to Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-DefamationLeague (though by that one presumes that he is disturbed by the com-parison itself rather than the insurmountable facts underlying it).
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‘‘Theanalogy that some are attempting to draw between disinvestment in SouthAfrica and Israel is misplaced,’’ says Lawrence Bacow, president of TuftsUniversity,alsovigorouslyopposedtodivestment.‘‘Iknowofnooneonanycampus in the U.S. who defended apartheid.The only issue for debate waswhether disinvestment would be effective. By contrast, reasonable peoplecandisagreeaboutwheretheequitieslieintheconfrontationbetweenIsraeland the Palestinians.’’
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Reasonable people can disagree about where the equities lie in the con-frontation between Israel and the Palestinians?It remains unclear what room there is for disagreement about the sup-posed equities between, on the one hand, a tormented, brutalized, dispos-sessed,andessentiallydefenselesspeoplelivingunderashatteringmilitaryoccupationthatconfinesthemtotheirhousesforweeksonend,demolishestheir homes, uproots their ancestral olive groves, cuts off their water andelectricity, bulldozes their villages, robs them of their education, reducesthem to poverty that has now taken some beyond the edge of malnour-ishment, and lures their children ‘‘like mice into a trap,’’ according to one
NewYorkTimes
correspondent,andthen‘‘murdersthemforsport’’
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and,onthe other hand, an aggressive and domineering state whose colonial ambi-tions—articulated long before they took the actual form of a state—haveconsistently received the support and encouragement of one or anotherof the world’s great powers from the end of the nineteenth century untilthe beginning of the twenty-first, and that uses heavy battle tanks to con-front crowds of stone-throwing children, helicopter gunships firing armor-piercing laser-guided antitank missiles to assassinate individual humanbeings (along with anyone else who happens to be in the way), sixty-tonarmor-plated bulldozers to demolish the pathetic homes of already twice-and thrice-dispossessed refugees and crush their meager possessions todust,and,whenallissaidanddone,illegalcheckpointstopreventthemove-
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Makdisi - The Israel Divestment Campaign and the Question of Palestine in America
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