This thesis is interesting, but it rests on a number of tortured misapprehensions and what must be deliberate misreadings. For one, the video in which the allegations are put forth has been completely discredited. The statements attributed to Professor Massad and Professor Saliba are at best in dispute; at worst, they're lies. Massad contends that, "In fact, Tomy Schoenfeld, the Israeli soldier who appears in the film and is cited by The New York Sun, has never been my student and has never taken a class with me, as he himself informed The Jewish Week. I have never met him." The second quote is more of a misrepresentation. As Professor Sabila clarifies, "What seems to have happened is probably a misquotation of an argument I sometimes make and may have made then. The gist of it would be to say that being born in a specific religion, or converting to one, is not the same as inheriting the color of one's eyes from one's parents and thus does not produce evidence of land ownership of a specific real estate." This is quite different, in style and substance, from the alleged quote. Professor Dabashi's editorial spoke to the cultural undercurrents of Israeli society and made not a single reference to Jews as an integral group; I do not think any of these academics has ever made an overtly anti-Semitic statement. This raises the question: What sin have they committed?
The answer, I think, is criticizing Israeli foreign policy, because, ultimately, that is what this is about: finding scholars who forthrightly attack the morality and legality of the Israeli occupation and demonizing them in a modern incarnation of McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt. This game is played in the same way, with the same rules and the same moves, every time: organize a massive campaign, usually funded by a wealthy non-Israeli Jew, to attack a (hopefully) non-Jewish academic. Conflate censure of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism. Remove said scholar, and hopefully his views, from the realm of scholarly discourse. Rinse and repeat.
This synthesis is the central point, for guarding the vulnerable keystone of Sidman's article and argument is the chimera she has concocted, a dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism and criticism of Israeli foreign policy. The tactic is familiar: raise the hue and cry about anti-Semitism whenever one hears the faintest susurrations of ideological mutiny. This is multifariously problematic, because criticism of Israel is just that, criticism of the state, and thus criticism of the values and motives of the power centers that exert influence within that polity-not incidentally, among them the American government. This is far different from assailing classic Zionism, the desire to establish a Jewish homeland within the geographical confines of Palestine. It is perhaps not so different from an attack on Zionism in its modern, post-1948 manifestation: an ideology typically encompassing support for an overtly racist theocracy, one that by statutory law makes distinctions of religion and race when apportioning civic obligations and civil rights, one that seeks to control Judea-Samaria as a colonial Bantustan.
Nevertheless, none of these criticisms is inherently anti-Semitic-that is, anti-Jewish. Neither Israel nor Zionism are analogs for Jews or Judaism. Jews are an ethno-religious group that would exist if Israel were to crumble into the Mediterranean basin. Using obscurantism to hide this point is perilous, for the right-Zionist's chimera is Janus-like; it can as easily turn on its conjurers, leading to massive upsurges in anti-Semitism, as work in their favor to effect a decrease in criticism of Israel. In any case-and vastly superceding the tactical problems-this strategy is morally and ethically bankrupt, with tremendous concomitant costs, both human and other.
We can ask, then, what is the point? What is the goal? I would say that it is to maintain Israel as America's mercenary state, and in the process morally legitimize the intellectual razing of the aspirations of a struggling and repressed people. Good luck with that.
Ajl can be reached at
msajl@amherst.edu