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Liberal Zionism and the ethnonational imperative | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views

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  • Ali Abunimah, another Palestinian luminary, so robustly criticizes anti-Semitism that right-wing anti-Semites accuse him of being a covert Zionist, unaware perhaps that they’re reproducing a feature of Zionism.
  • In the months after being fired from a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois in August 2014, for condemning Israeli war crimes, I was periodically aggravated that some commentators were unwilling or unable to recognize that my supposedly anti-Semitic tweets actually defend Jews against essentialism. In those tweets, I warn against conflating an entire community with the behavior of a nation-state busy showering civilians with bombs and chemical weapons, a warning I offer in much of my work.
  • It was remarkably frustrating. These folks could obviously read, even if not competently. They all have impeccable credentials, but I tried not to hold that against them. I couldn’t understand their phonic malfunction until I forced myself to think like an apologist for ethnocracy. The political identity of liberal Zionists is filled with acute incongruity. They cannot consume or disseminate ideas without the magical benefit of denial. Disassociating Judaism from Israel renders Zionism superfluous. That kind of disassociation requires one to rethink the commonplaces of Israel’s self-image. It is more convenient to outsource failures of imagination to the Palestinian.
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  • The liberal Zionist must constantly choose between a self-professed commitment to democracy and protecting Israel’s reputation.
  • Every Palestinian activist or intellectual who delinks Zionism and Jewishness – which is to say, nearly all of us – suffers the conflicted rhetoric of colonizers pretending to be enlightened. The problem isn’t that liberal Zionists ignore what Palestinian activists and intellectuals actually say. They listen closely, in fact. They’re merely terrified to hear the native express a desire for equality. If actualized, that desire would force the destruction of an ideology they refuse to abandon. I term this phenomenon the ethnonational imperative, which explains spurious accusations of anti-Semitism not as an inability to comprehend the delinking of Zionism and Jewishness, but as an inclination to link them permanently and to punish those who do not.
  • I will no longer respond to accusations of anti-Semitism by appealing to my accusers’ sense of fairness or discretion. They don’t raise those accusations to foster reconciliation or dialogue, to use the favored parlance of the liberal Zionist. They do it to cause harm.
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Zionist groups planned to lobby Univ. of Illinois trustees over Salaita appointment | T... - 0 views

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  • Nelson, a professor of English at UIUC, also spoke frankly about his affiliation with the Israel on Campus Coalition, a Zionist advocacy group funded by an extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim ideologue. Nelson also revealed his own ties to the editor of a far-right website that has been monitoring Salaita.
  • In both of my conversations with him, Nelson insisted that he has never spoken to anyone in the UIUC administration about Salaita’s case. But he did acknowledge that he has given advice to off-campus Zionist groups since the Salaita story broke. “I’ve had at least fifty emails from people about the [Salaita] tweets and some of them are from people who I’m sure have a role in one organization or another,” Nelson said. “I had a call from someone who does represent an outside organization asking for my opinion about whether that organization or other organizations should approach the Board of Trustees to make some statement against Salaita’s appointment and I advised that they should not,” he added. “I said that the academic process should run its course and that while it was fine for people outside the university to comment negatively about any faculty’s work, they shouldn’t attempt to influence university decisions.”
  • Nelson’s advice is disingenuous to say the least. The Zionist group or groups he is counseling on strategy hardly need to intervene directly when Nelson is effectively doing their dirty work for them.
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  • Nelson has served as self-appointed public prosecutor, offering a tweet-by-tweet exegesis of Salaita’s words in an article for Inside Higher Ed. This includes the canard that some of them are “anti-Semitic” – a charge based on misrepresentation that no one who has engaged in good faith with Salaita’s history of ethical scholarship and advocacy can take seriously.
  • While he didn’t mention it in our conversation, Nelson is scheduled to speak on an ICC-sponsored panel at this December’s meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The panel is titled “Boycotting Israeli institutions of higher education abridges academic freedom.”
  • Asked what due diligence he had done on ICC before allowing it to use his name, Nelson stated, “several of my friends are part of that group, so I did talk to my friends, to people that I trust about the role of the organization and whether my playing these kinds of roles on campus would be useful.” He said that at the time he was asked to join ICC, the group’s website was down and so – unlike Steven Salaita’s Twitter page, The New York Times and The Electronic Intifada – he had never looked at it. Now that he knows, it will be interesting to see if Nelson cancels his affiliation with the Israel on Campus Coalition, or keeps up his public association with it as a more honest reflection of the strident Zionist and anti-Palestinian views that evidently motivate his current campaign against Steven Salaita.
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Cary Nelson faces backlash over his views on a controversial scholar - 0 views

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  • In blog posts, open letters and news story comment threads, Nelson’s critics -- some of whom were longtime friends -- accused him of abandoning his principles and twisting the definition of academic freedom to serve his own political beliefs. A vocal opponent of the Israel boycott, Nelson suffers from a “blind spot” about Israel, some have said.
  • I believe faculty members generally have a social responsibility to try to speak rationally, not just hurl insults, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict regularly meets with abusive and counterproductive faculty remarks from both sides.”
  • Nelson believes it’s impossible to separate institutional boycotts from individual boycotts, and that no scholarly association has fully considered the long-term impacts of such actions, either geopolitically or in terms of academic freedom. He therefore opposes the boycott movement (the American Association of University Professors, of which Nelson is a past president, also opposes academic boycotts as incompatible with academic freedom).
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  • "Usually [Nelson] and I, when we have these debates, I'm usually much to the right of him and he's much to the left of me, and in this instance we seem to have traded places a bit," Fish said.
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When 'liberals' fail to defend academic freedom | openDemocracy - 0 views

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  • This confirmed suspicions that the decision— taken without any academic consultation — had indeed been based on impassioned tweets that Salaita, a Palestinian-American, had posted during the first half of July as terrible destruction was wrought by the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
  • Such routine misuse of a serious charge runs the grave danger of diminishing the gravity and reality of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism itself, doings its actual victims a real disservice.
  • one of the most striking aspects of the affair has been the willingness of self-defined liberals to either mitigate or endorse the firing of Salaita. As such, the case has also thrown light on the limits of liberalism and its acquiescence to the encroaching depredations of the corporate managerial culture that now afflicts universities across the world. Apart from anything else, this is a case of high-handed administrative behaviour, increasing corporate influence (the Board of Trustees is composed of powerful business people who know little about scholarship or teaching) and the steady erosion of the vital principle of scholarly autonomy.
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  • Before Wise—and then the Trustees—put out statements defending their patently political and partisan decision, the chief attack dog for the anti-Salaita camp was prominent left-liberal academic, emeritus Professor Cary Nelson, a former President of the American Association of University Professors (whose officer-bearers have been swift to decry the decision and to distance itself from him) and still a member, ironically, of its important Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee. Praising Chancellor Wise for ‘doing what had to be done,’ Nelson, denounced Salaita’s tweets with McCarthyite relish as ‘venomous’, ‘loathsome,’ ‘foul-mouthed… hate speech’ and ‘obsessively driven’ on the matter of Israel- Palestine (hardly surprising in context given that the area constitutes one of Salaita’s scholarly specialisms).
  • Nelson was among the first to articulate the peculiar notion, now given as an official rationale for Salaita’s dismissal, that students had a right to be protected from discomfort (slyly conflated with ‘abuse’) in the classroom and that strong views held outside the classroom posed a danger inside it. 
  • Academic freedom, Nelson opined, ‘does not require you to hire someone whose views you consider despicable’ (though it remains unclear who the ‘you’ is, given that Salaita had earned scholarly approval after a rigorous search process).
  • Salaita was ‘the wrong case’ for such defence, having ‘crossed’ some patently imaginary ‘line’ to do with ‘civility’ and ‘collegiality.’
  • Wise’s statement itself is an exemplary exercise in managed diversity with its exhaustive encomiums, on the one hand, to ‘principles’ of academic freedom, diversity, contentious discourse, robust debate, critical arguments, difficult discussions, differing perspectives, confronted viewpoints, and challenged assumptions, and on the other, a litany of vague and confused disciplinary notions whose content and provenance will also be decided from on high. They include ‘respect for students'’ rights as individuals,’ a ‘civil and productive manner,’ no ‘demeaning and abusing viewpoints’, ‘valuing students as human beings’ and dialogue which is ‘civil and thoughtful’ and ‘mutually respectful’ - all of which seems unexceptional enough but can hardly be specified objectively, particularly in relation to difficult emotive issues.
  • Should British academics worry about this act of racialised institutional violence against a vulnerable colleague? We would be suicidal not to. Without tenure, we have less protection as it is, even as the worst aspects of business-speak and corporate rule are swiftly taking over British universities as well. ‘Collegiality’ and ‘civility’ are routinely used by administrators here to police politically ‘difficult’ colleagues. Used disproportionately as a disciplinary mechanism against mouthy women and ethnic minorities the ‘civil’ in ‘civility’ is also the ‘civil in ‘civilise.’ As managers shift disciplinary goalposts at whim, we must not remain rooted in the comforting delusion that we are not ultimately all, even the least outspoken among us, Steven Salaita.
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The strange death of the liberal university | openDemocracy - 0 views

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  • Students, in turn, are treated more like consumers than they are citizens, increasingly defrauded with a candyfloss world of university branding and marketing gimmickry. Grant capture, consultancy, citations, impact, quality assurance, unique selling points, student surveys and league tables, have become the new deities that all shall worship.
  • UK academics (among whose number I include myself) are themselves partly to blame for the passing of academia as a liberal bastion: ‘striking absence of powerful and united collective dissent’, ‘consensual silence’, ‘docile polity’, ‘almost complete capitulation’, are just some of the charges that have been leveled at university lecturers and professors. And those academics that do attempt to retain their integrity by refusing to observe the ‘Gospel of Mammonism’ risk being inculpated (as with the inquisitions of the Counter-Reformation) of error, blasphemy, heresy even - censure, denunciation and excommunication soon follow if the accused declines penance and reconciliation.
  • It was in a similar fashion that Edward Thompson noted the reactionary and self-regarding nature of the species Academicus Superciliosus, ‘the most divisible and rulable creature in this country’, following the expose of the so-called ‘Warwick files’ controversy in the early 1970s. Living their lives as if ‘struck by a paralysis of will’ and ‘in a kind of Awe of Propriety’, Thompson opined that though talk of academic freedom ‘is for ever on their lips’, academics are in fact ‘the last people to whom it can be safely entrusted, since the present moment is never the opportune moment to stand and fight’.
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  • Finally, with his usual prophetic boldness, and with Julien Benda’s trahison des clercs in mind, Thompson predicted that most university teachers would retreat ‘within the limited area of manoeuvre allotted to him within the managerial structure’.
  • More recently, former Essex professor and literary critic, Marina Warner, has voiced several scathing criticisms about her own unfortunate experience of university managerialism, whilst simultaneously recognising that she herself may have been ‘culpable of doziness’, ‘naive, culpably unobservant as I went about my activities at Essex’.
  • sinister forces presently at play within British universities and their damaging effects: ‘the culture of obedience and deference’ that is cultivated through ‘fear, insecurity, precarious social conditions and shame’; ‘the silence of no comment which universities resort to when confronted with protests and complaints’; and if all else fails, constructive dismissal and the use of ‘gagging orders’. Warner’s most damning indictment, however, is her likening of UK higher education and its ‘rulers’ ideas’ to ‘the world of Chinese communist corporatism’:
  • Not unlike the three wise monkeys who ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’, rather than face down the conditions of their present existence, too many workers in UK universities have chosen to turn a blind eye or to actively collaborate, yielding here, profiting there:
  • These are just some of the distortions and hidden injuries of the UK higher education sector. And though some of the above wrongdoings can be put down to everyday careerism, hypocrisy and cowardice, others are symptomatic of an increasingly marketised system that encourages and rewards unfettered commercialism, bullying and deceit. Such developments are furthered by a new cadre of university managers who have become a class apart, an oligarchical elite who, as was the case with the press barons of inter-war Britain, seek to exercise power without responsibility
  • More worrying still, just as the Third Reich persecuted whole communities (and their structures of feeling) simply because they failed to conform to its Aryan vision, there is a clear and present danger that group after group of higher education employees (liberals, patricians, socialists, feminists, trade unionists, for example) could be similarly purged for refusing to quietly comply to the illiberal tenets of the neo-capitalist university.
  • the Lesson of Munich reminds us, to quote Noam Chomksy’s 1960s polemic that criticised US intellectuals who knowingly provided the ideological justifications for the Vietnam war,[that] a powerful and aggressive nation with a fanatic belief in its manifest destiny will regard each victory, each extension of its power and authority, as a prelude to the next step.
  • Or, and to return to George Dangerfield and the decline of parliamentary liberalism in early twentieth-century Britain, colleagues could choose to bear witness to all that is happening in academia, warts and all, and thus bid farewell to that ‘fine old Liberal Hegelianism of at once believing in freedom and not believing in freedom’. Anything less risks universities being turned into enemies of truthfulness and intellectual honesty; indeed, it would be tantamount to the strange death of the liberal university by assisted suicide.
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