https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/overwriting-palestine?pc=1620
Ussama Makdisi
06 August 2024

The most intense bombardment of a concentrated urban space in recent memory, the fastest deliberate starvation of any population in recorded history, the greatest number of journalists killed in any conflict worldwide, and the greatest number of United Nations staff slain in any period: Israel has set out to methodically obliterate every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, with the Lancet estimating that its war may have already left more than 186,000 dead. As part of this ten-month rampage, Israel has targeted schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural centres, heritage sites, mosques and churches. It has assassinated professors and massacred teachers, faculty and staff, along with their entire families. It has also caused irreparable harm to tens of thousands of students, in what UN officials have described as a ‘scholasticide’.

In the United States, the country most responsible for overseeing and abetting these horrors, university and college presidents have, at best, responded with stony silence. Many of them had rushed to denounce the violence perpetrated on October 7th, swept up in the panic over what Biden called the ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’ and the lurid fabrications about beheaded babies. Since then, they have expressed concern for the alleged safety of their Jewish students and introduced mandatory ‘antisemitism awareness’ training (along with an occasional nod to Islamophobia, but with scarcely a word about the anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism rampant on campuses).

It is extraordinary that to date not a single US university has officially condemned the genocide in Gaza – or, at the very least, the systematic Israeli destruction of universities there. On the contrary, they have insisted that they will maintain institutional ties with their Israeli counterparts, including those that are implicated in the war on Palestinian society and life, as well as their investments in the corporations gorging on the profits generated by Palestinian death. The fact that Palestinians, Christians and Muslim Arabs, as well as Jewish anti-Zionists, are now well-represented in many Western universities – mostly as students, and to a lesser extent as faculty and staff – means they have an intimate view of their own erasure.

For much of its history, the American academy was unapologetically Eurocentric, existing in what W.E.B. Dubois called a ‘white world’. This is no longer explicitly the case. Higher education is ostensibly more racially inclusive; curricula are ‘decolonized’. Yet unlike every other case of Western settler-colonization – from the enslavement of Black Africans to the genocide of Native Americans to the conquest of Algeria and South Africa – the oppression of Palestinians has outlasted the mainstreaming of concepts such as ‘human rights’ and ‘racial equality’. Apologists for apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South would not be tolerated in any major Western university today; yet Israel is openly embraced despite it being a state founded and sustained through the mass, and ongoing, dispossession of the native Palestinians, and despite being described by leading human rights organizations as an apartheid regime even before the Gaza genocide. Israel is also unique in having a large network of academic centres, visiting professor programmes and cultural and faith centres on American campuses, which are committed to defending and promoting an anachronistic and openly anti-Palestinian colonial ideology that seeks to fuse modern Jewish identity to an exclusivist ethno-nationalist state.

In recent years, some universities have removed monuments to slaveholders or renamed buildings to acknowledge their complicity in colonialism. Yet these same institutions, along with bodies like the American Historical Association (AHA), have refused to engage directly with the issue of Palestine. In May 2024, the AHA issued a statement criticizing police violence against campus protesters but managed to avoid using the word ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian’ even once. It seems that the only victims who can be mourned are those safely buried in the past. The ‘Palestine exception’ thus reflects the disjuncture between support for Israel and its ideology of colonial Zionism, on the one hand, and attempts to make amends for racist and colonial history, on the other. In this ideological landscape, Palestine is denied the status of a moral and political question, and Palestinians that of a people with significant history. Admitting the moral and political imperatives of Palestinian history and humanity contradicts the West’s highly selective self-image.

There are, of course, material and political costs to siding with the Palestinians. Zionist institutions and pro-Israel donors routinely smear Palestinian students and professors as ‘antisemitic’, while pressuring administrators to clamp down on anyone advocating for Palestinian rights, which is said to amount to ‘hate speech’. The Israel lobby has supported Congressional investigations into Palestinian activism on campuses. The pro-Israel Brandeis Center wages constant lawfare against universities and public-school districts to ensure they toe the line. One billionaire hedge fund manager has led a crusade against pro-Palestine student protesters, calling for some of them to be locked out of the job market. Most American politicians have stood with Israel since the onset of the genocide. They have not merely demanded that university presidents follow suit, but pressured them to do so through congressional hearings evocative of the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s. Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said that the Palestine solidarity protesters should be no more tolerated than KKK racists would be on campuses.

Yet the heart of the Palestine exception is not simply the crude denial of Palestinian history and humanity. More significant is the constant overwriting of this history by a different one: that of modern European antisemitism, with which the Western academy is deeply familiar (Jewish scholars were, of course, once barred from many of the same Ivy League institutions that now crack down on Palestine solidarity encampments). With this act of substitution, the ongoing reality of Palestinian slaughter is erased from ethical consideration. Palestinians and allied students, including Jewish anti-Zionists, protesting apartheid and genocide are presented as anachronistic ‘antisemites’ by a liberal (and, interestingly enough, by the increasingly ‘conservative’ and right-wing) West which has supposedly outgrown its historic Judeophobia. By the same token, supporters of the state that carries out genocide, or those who identify with its ideology, are cast as victims in need of institutional and police protection.

Beneath this distorted discourse is the West’s selective commitment to philosemitism: its professed love of Judaism and the Jewish people, which it views as necessary to atone for its record of racism and prejudice against them. Philosemitism has, in turn, been conflated with philozionism: support for Israel’s ethno-nationalist state ideology. As a result, contemporary Palestinian subjugation has been obscured by a narrative that presents historical Jewish victimhood as more consequential, and the state of Israel as a safeguard against it. By this means, ‘fighting antisemitism’ often implies erasing Palestine, not talking about Palestinians, not acknowledging that there can be no ethical consideration of contemporary Zionism without centring the Palestinian experience of subjugation at the hands of the self-proclaimed Jewish state of Israel. This is a disastrous outcome for anyone invested in the genuine and conjoined struggle against anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian racism.

The development of this outlook can, of course, be traced back to the Nazi Holocaust that decimated European Jewry. In its aftermath, the establishment of an Israeli state was presented in the West as a means to expiate the sin of Western antisemitism. In the debates leading up to the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948, the Palestinians were described by Western diplomats as impediments to this redemptive project. Palestinian life was not valued on its own terms, but simply in relation to a Western-identified ‘Jewish problem’. As Du Bois noted in his 1940 Dusk of Dawn and Aimé Cesaire argued in his 1955 Discourse on Colonialism, the victorious Allies had portrayed Hitler as a singularly German creation, rather than recognizing him as part of a pantheon of Western leaders who had long embraced virulent racism and carried out systematic genocides against non-Western peoples. Playing to this narrative, the newly established state of Israel launched a propaganda campaign which endures today, in which it presents itself as the victim of Arab ‘terrorism’ and a bulwark against a return to antisemitic barbarism.

The persistence of these tropes means that Palestine is rarely placed in its centuries-old Ottoman and Arab context or seen as an integral part of a multireligious Mashriqi region. In the Zionist imaginary, the only possible remedy to the historic plight of the Jews in Europe was to establish a uniquely modern, European-style Jewish state in Palestine. This state, so the story goes, has since its inception been besieged by hordes of Arabs who are afflicted by the kind of antisemitic hatred that European Christians are supposed to have abandoned.In The Jews of Islam (1984), orientalist Bernard Lewis writes that Arab opposition to Israel has little to do with colonialism or dispossession; he claims that its origins lie in a new ‘Arab antisemitism’ which was imported from Europe and brought an end to peaceful Judeo-Muslim coexistence. Palestinians have no place in this story, except as inheritors of Western anti-Jewish prejudice. ‘The Arab’, as Edward Said remarked in Orientalism (1978), ‘is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew’.

It is no wonder that the Western academic hierarchy, bound to these profoundly misleading narratives, and to the political, financial, and cultural investments that sustain them, has been silent in the face of Gaza’s immolation. To change course is no easy thing. The Western world’s last settler-colonial regime, committed to an ideology born in nineteenth-century Europe, remains remarkably adept at diffusing a story that erases Palestinian humanity, including in the realm of higher education. Most students, however, no longer buy this Eurocentric erasure – nor does most of the global population.