Liberated Zone III

The politics of self defeat

This is the third in a series of dispatches from the Columbia campus. You can read the first here, and the second here.

I was walking with a pro-Palestinian protest in October last year when a woman began to abuse me for being a Jew. I’d been chanting alongside her for nearly ten minutes before she noticed my face. When she did, she began to tell me to fuck off, to leave, to get the fuck out of here, etc. The way she said ‘Jew’ let me know she thought the word was a slur. I didn’t know what to do. I’m not, as it happens, Jewish, but it hardly felt right to deny it. All I managed was to look at her with disgust.

I wish I had managed to call her an antisemite; had let her know what I thought of her worldview; but if I’m honest I didn’t want to attract attention in a crowd that no longer felt safe. Instead I did what she wanted: I left. Whether I was prudent or cowardly I’m still not sure. But as I turned to go I took one last look at her, peering at the face behind her keffiyeh, and realised that she, like me, was an outsider to the conflict. She was an East Asian.

What to do with such information? Antisemitism is so deeply embedded in our culture, so persistent and virulent and contagious, that an Asian American marching for Palestine will mistakenly attack a white gentile marching in solidarity for the same cause. Antisemitism is a world-historical cultural toxin that resurges in moments of tension and crisis. Any person who thinks that it is not present across the political spectrum is in denial. No political group, to my mind, is not infected with the disease. So too with Islamophobia.

I’ve been thinking about that moment over the last 24 hours as I consider the real instances of antisemitism in and around the Columbia student protests. By “real” here I’m actively ruling out the ridiculous, cynical fabrications of characters like Shai Davidai, mentioned yesterday, who seem to consider the mere existence of Muslim students dangerous to Jews.

Instead I have in mind horrific instances like this one. Jews leaving campus were abused; someone yelled out ‘go back to Poland.’ It is disgusting behaviour. I want to emphasise that in the last five days reporting on-site I have not myself witnessed a single instance of this sort. Still, one instance is bad enough, and one instance will be used to delegitimise an entire movement.

I thought this comment from Yoni Kurtz, a Jewish student giving firsthand testimony from campus, was measured and thoughtful. I’m going to reproduce some of his words here:

There has been a divide for a while now between the leaders of SJP inside campus (who may chant things like “intifada”, but know that the second they actually lay hands on a student, they will be kicked out of college and their movement will lose legitimacy with wider campus) and those who are random NYC residents that, in the past, have only sometimes showed up outside the gates when there are protests (who have zero repercussions for their actions, are basically professional anarchists and antisemites and may scream at visibly Jewish students).

Kurtz believes that the vocal antisemitism recorded last night came from outside groups. I think this is probably right. The perennial challenge for the left wing has been the coordination of diverse, unruly political groups under a single banner of opposition. The hegemonic position is stable and united; the anti-hegemonic coalition is unstable and fragmented. You cannot always decide who turns up to “support” your rally. In short: alliances are unholy; “bad eggs” are all too common. And what emerges is a structural tendency towards self-defeat. As Kurtz writes, the student protestors would be wise to publicly disavow the outsiders.

Meanwhile, the students themselves deploy a range of chants, up to and including calls for the end of Israel. My attitude on ‘eliminationist’ chants is that they are best fully-contextualised, are often semantically-slippery, and are even sometimes better understood seriously rather than literally. But reading such chants in this way takes significant charity. Jewish students who manage it demonstrate deep moral-sympathetic capabilities, and are not under much obligation to do so. It would be churlish, even absurd, to expect them to not take the worst chants literally.

The chanters object that, in the meantime, the actual, real-world genocide of present-day of Palestinians is underway. They are right. But it is the unfortunate task of protest movements that they must be significantly better than the powers they are trying to overthrow. There is simply no way for such groups to win political power without winning political sympathy. Lacking material power, they are competing for public opinion. And the political effect of unchecked anti-semitism, beyond its own noxiousness, will be to derail the protestors’ political project. Even this post, by beginning with an account of anti-semitism, directs attention and energy away from the issue bringing people together today: the massacre of Palestinians.

Still, the protestors are lucky that they are not the only ones who suffer from the tendency of self-defeat. The groups they oppose have also, perplexingly, made consistent choices that go against their own interests. Some perverse death drive underpins this entire conflict. This is true at the level of government: the US-Israeli war on Palestine has basically assured the creation of a new generation of Hamas militants. And it is true of last week’s arrests on campus, which triggered solidarity protests at campuses across the country; hardened the resolve of protestors on this one; and made the administration look cruel and authoritarian.

And still the administration continues to make political decisions that weaken their own hand: last night, campus security burst into the Columbia WKCR-FM radio station, which broadcasts across the local community 24 hours a day, and demand they shut down and evacuate (this was later determined to be a ‘miscommunication’). Then, this morning, the University’s faculty awoke to an email telling them that their ID cards would be disconnected, and that they would need to be escorted from the gate to their classroom. At the university level all of these missteps combine to prod the sleeping bear that is faculty.

It is no surprise then than the faculty are, as I called for yesterday, beginning to organise. Yesterday the AAUP of Columbia and Barnard released a statement that condemned ‘in the strongest possible terms’ the suspension of students, demanded ‘that suspensions and charges be dismissed immediately’, and demanded that ‘no police be taken against student protestors without due process’. Tomorrow, faculty will demonstrate on the steps of Low Library in support of ‘the fundamental norms of liberal education’.

In some corners, discussion has turned towards a call for the removal of President Minouche Shafik. It is perhaps deserved. But as at least one student protestor was led to insist, this response misses the forest for the trees. The focus on the University’s authoritarian mishandling of student expression risks displacing attention and momentum that ought to be directed to the substantive demands of student protest: divestment from the Israeli occupation. Turning Palestine into a debate about free speech is a way of not having a debate about Palestine.

This is an ongoing and deeper problem with liberalism in education: many faculty believe that it is their responsibility to express no politics except on matters of freedom of expression. I tend to read this approach as cowardly. Rather, they ought to be great supporters of free expression and be ready to act decisively on substantive moral-political issues. Sooner or later someone must say something of political content. Leaving that responsibility to the students is an abrogation of responsibility.

The lesson generalises to the rest of us. It is always easier, more comfortable, and better for your career to be on the safe ground of “I don’t care what you say, but I protect your right to say it.” It is almost always easier, when subjects are particularly fraught, to disengage and let others bear the burden. The subject at our hands is perhaps the most sensitive subject in our culture. That makes it very scary for many of us to express an opinion. Many powers-that-be depend on that discomfort to ensure silence; they depend on that silence to maintain the status quo.

My last two dispatches have not expressed a particular view on the substantive question of Palestine, but have instead aimed for a sympathetic and curious reporting on the protests themselves. But even that has been too much for some people—I’ve observed a significant drop in subscribers. I’m disappointed, and therefore particularly appreciative of those who have written letters of thanks. I think what is happening at Columbia right now deserves to be reported and discussed, and the demands on the students taken seriously. I am of the view that if a situation is hard to discuss, that is good evidence that discussion is needed. What is called for now is not silence but clarity of thought.