Berkeley
Prof: Race in America Is Like 'Occupation' in Israel
A
Glimpse Inside the Twisted World of of 'Ethnic Studies' Prof Keith
Feldman
by Cinnamon Stillwell
FrontPage Magazine
October 14, 2015
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Can an accurate analogy be drawn between American race relations and
the Arab-Israeli conflict? UC Berkeley ethnic studies assistant professor
Keith
Feldman advocates this particular "special relationship" in
his 2015 book,
A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, the
subject of a recent lecture
sponsored by the University's Center for Race & Gender (CRG).
CRG is home to the notoriously politicized
Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) whose 2012 annual conference
featured a jargon-riddled talk from Feldman. He was in similar form for
CRG's September 24 Thursday Forum Series,
which included "commentary" by Judith Butler, a UC
Berkeley comparative literature professor best known for her virulent
anti-Israel activism.
Feldman, a fellow endorser
of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,
stood at the podium, while Butler was seated at a front table. An
audience of approximately sixty comprised mostly of students filled the
large classroom in Dwinelle Hall.
Feldman, whose manner was humble and, at times, apologetic, began by
thanking Butler for being his "interlocutor" and CRG for its
"Islamophobia project," which he described as "unique
globally" and a "community" that he had "been able to
engage . . . in the construction of this book."
Turning to his book, he explained that it covers the period from 1960 to
1985 and draws connections between "the post-civil rights
movement" in the U.S. and "Israel's post-1967 occupation of
Palestinian lands." Signaling the largely incomprehensible rhetoric
and post-colonialist jargon that would dominate the rest of the talk,
Feldman declared that:
This coupling . . . drew on material linkages to Israel as a military,
economic, and geopolitical partner for the U.S. state to Zionism as a
symbolic storehouse for the hegemonic articulation of liberal freedom and
colonial violence.
Accusing both nations of being warmongers, Feldman, ignoring the
unrelenting Arab aggression at its root, pointed out that "Israel
since 1948 [its founding] has been in a state of perpetual war,"
while the U.S. has been "animated by a seemingly permanent war
making structure." He chalked both up to what he called the
"racialized practices of threat production adhering in the enduring
violence of white supremacy and settler sovereignty."
While discussing Zionism in the wake of the Holocaust and "the
Nazi project," Feldman launched into a bizarre stream of
consciousness that drifted back and forth between Israel and the U.S.:
American ghettos are like . . . Warsaws, Palestinian refugee camps, or
like prison, or like occupied territory. Israeli sovereigns are like
Western Europeans or American pioneers, while Palestinians are like
African-Americans. . . . Jews are like white people or African-Americans.
African-Americans are like Jews.
If the audience had no idea what he was talking about, they did a good
job of hiding it, as heads nodded and brows furrowed approvingly.
Referencing the "artists, intellectuals, state agents, [and]
scholars" who have "written through Palestine solidarity,"
Feldman made a revealing admission about how Palestinians have successfully
adopted
the "politics of black liberation" for their own purposes:
In the early 1960s, race was already a well-developed heuristic
through which the project of Palestinian liberation advanced its analysis
of power and history.
Although "U.S. imperialism" was a frequent target, Feldman
omitted the Soviet
Union's role in the Arab-Israeli conflict and particularly its
influence in casting Israel and Jews as the oppressor and
Palestinians as the oppressed in the popular imagination. This narrative of
Israeli "settler-colonialism"—a term Feldman repeated ad
nauseam—forms the basis for his own work and that of far too many of
today's Middle East studies academics.
Butler followed with a series of "questions" that, in
reality, constituted a short, rather critical lecture. Although she
described the book as "a gift and a provocation in many ways,"
she pointed out that by omitting Arab nations' "isolation" of
the Palestinians, "Palestine is not given a regional
existence." Butler also chided him for not consulting Arabic
archives for his research, to which he responded lamely, "My Arabic
is horrible." Afterwards, Feldman conceded that, "I'm realizing
this might have been a conversation that I wanted to have when this [the
book] was in manuscript form," which was met with laughter from the
audience.
Feldman's analogizing of African Americans and Palestinians draws more
on 1960s radical ideology, buttressed by Soviet and contemporary
anti-Israel propaganda, than on historical reality. A more rigorous and
truthful effort to elucidate the plight of Palestinians today would call
out the Arab states for their repeated wars on Israel, their failure to
accept Palestinians as citizens, and the billions of dollars they spend
to keep Palestinians in a state of constant upheaval and misery. Then
again, a jargon-laden, morally relativistic, historically blind approach
to a complex reality might be just the ticket to a position at an elite
university.
Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project
of the Middle East Forum.
She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
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