From
BDS to Ferguson: Columbia U. Panel Takes Aim at Israel
by Mara Schiffren
FrontPage Magazine
January 13, 2016
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 The nexus between
boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and Black Lives Matter activists
that began with the 2014
protests
following
the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri culminated in
a recent panel
discussion at Columbia University. The second in an annual BDS series
sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies, "The Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions Movement: Struggle and Solidarity" took
place at Columbia Law School. Students, faculty, BDS activists, and community
members socialized prior to the event as the capacious, semi-circular
lecture hall began to fill with about 100 people.
In her introductory talk, Nadia Abu El-Haj, professor of anthropology
and co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia
University/Barnard College, set a repugnant tone by implying that Zionism
is a direct development of Nazi racial science. Author of the book, The
Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of
Epistemology, El-Haj employed a clinical, academic tone to feign
scientific objectivity, but her contempt was obvious:
Jews could not be merely a religion in the language of the day if they
were going to make claims for a nation state. . . . Jewish scholars
turned to race science in order to produce their own understanding of
what they referred to as the Jewish Question. . . . That version of
racial thought, of Jewish self-racialization . . . was one powerful
strand of Zionist thinking.
El-Haj dismissed the study of Jewish genetics as the purest form of
European racism, a euphemism for Nazism:
In practice, the deep European racial vision stood at the
center of this project of Israeli population genetics, one that drove the
desire to find a shared biological substance among all Jews, and yet, at
the same time, one that sowed fundamental doubt into whether European and
Oriental Jews were really born of the same race [emphasis added].
She then established that her academic research is aligned with the
goals of the BDS movement:
It is the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement which has framed
its political struggle around the apartheid political struggle and in
speaking of Israel as an apartheid state has been a key player in
bringing the question of Israel as a racial state back into the open and
onto the Euro-American stage.
El-Haj introduced the next speaker, Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash
Professor of American History at the University of California, Los
Angeles, with the ludicrous rhetorical question, "Is Gaza more like
Ferguson or more like Falluja?"
In an affectionate reference to Center for Palestine Studies director
and former PLO spokesman Rashid
Khalidi, Kelley extolled the proceedings as "Rashid's house." A
specialist in African-American history, he conceded that the BDS movement
was not his area of expertise, "but it's something I care deeply
about." He then outlined the spiritual marriage between BDS and
Black Lives Matter based on the incidental overlap in time between
Israel's Operation Protective Edge in Gaza and the protests in Ferguson
in 2014:
Activists in the streets of Ferguson, in New York City, in L.A. . . .
drew connections between Israeli racialized violence in the name of
security and the U.S. . . . It wasn't simply Ferguson to Gaza; it was
also drawing connections to drone strikes abroad, and the killing of
black men and women and transgendered people at the hands of police.
In other words, every injustice he holds near and dear converges in
Gaza.
At one point, Kelley made the preposterous claim that the academic
boycott is also a fight for Israeli academics, which will usher in an age
where there is a "flourishing of intellectual thought . . . rich,
varied and exciting." In his mind, the many Nobel Prizes awarded to
Israel's scientists, economists, mathematicians, and writers and its
extremely robust technology
sector indicate that the country is in need of an intellectual
reboot.
To audience laughter, Kelley reported derisively that critics at his
lectures question him from a list of talking points. Meanwhile, he
proceeded to recite a predictable litany of grievances he deemed
essential for a "a truly free Palestine": "ending the
occupation"; "all settlers" moving "back inside the
pre 1967 borders"; "dismantling all vestiges of
apartheid"; giving all Palestinians a right to return"; and "fair
compensation for one of the greatest colonial crimes of the 20th
century."
In this projected "utopia," Palestine will be noticeably Judenrein.
One must assume the vestiges of statehood under the morally repulsive
Hamas and the corrupt agents of Fatah will simply wither away in
revolutionary fervor once every Palestinian demand is met and the world
is remade in a more just mold.
The final talk was given by Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh, a philosophy and
cultural studies professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank and a
visiting scholar at Columbia's Center for Palestine Studies, who took a
philosophical turn.
For al-Shaikh, the formative event of "modern" Palestinian
history was the "Nakba" (the Arabic word for
"catastrophe," used to describe Israel's founding in 1948),
which, he claimed, has "deformed" Palestinian history with
"Kafkaesque events":
[T]he Nakba was the mother of all events in modern Palestinian
history; its impact went beyond being a mere master event. The
Palestinians [in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem] have been living
their ongoing Nakba for nearly seventy years. The Nakba in
each and every geography became a structure of oppression, suffering, and
despair.
Conveniently, al-Shaikh rendered the Nakba, and thus, Israel
responsible for every negative consequence that followed, absolving
Palestinians of responsibility for their own actions.
Throughout al-Shaikh's lecture, he attempted to disenfranchise Jews
from their historical homeland by falsely equating Palestinians with
"aboriginals" and alleging that, "Zionists constructed a
fabricated history and a culture to replace that of the natives
[emphasis added]."
Towards the end, he offered an apologia for Palestinian terrorism by
asking, "What is more cruel? The occupation or the fight to end the
occupation?" He then concluded ominously:
The slogan of all war crimes committed by Israel throughout the
history was: Israel's existence is more valuable than Israel's image.
It's about the time for the Palestinians to reverse this slogan.
This precisely describes the ongoing project of the BDS movement: to
destroy Israel's image by any means, including conflating the Palestinian
cause with that of various minority struggles, however dissimilar, in
order to attract sympathizers. Once utterly delegitimized, its adherents
expect Israel's destruction to follow forthwith.
During the question and answer period, Robin D.G. Kelley explicitly
stated this goal. "There's no future for a Jewish state in that
region," he announced, adding that, "he might get in trouble
for saying this," an assumption belied by the aggressive presence of
BDS activism throughout his own California state university system.
Indeed, it was the audience of BDS supporters who demonstrated its
intolerance by hissing loudly following a question that challenged the
panel to address Israel's history of concessions in the face of mounting
Palestinian aggression, including the recent "stabbing
intifada." Al-Shaikh's equivocating response, "Israelis have
the right to live, but they do not have the right to colonize," was
met with loud, sustained applause.
Thus, the panel "discussion" consisted of little more than
BDS advocacy via the ahistorical equation of Palestinians with
African-Americans. Willing to exploit any grievance in the cause of
Israel's delegitimization and to wreak havoc in a region already suffering
from bloodshed, such academics offer no solutions, only further violence.
Mara Schiffren, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard University in the
Study of Religion, is currently working on a book about historical
Israel. She wrote this essay for Campus Watch,
a project of the Middle
East Forum.
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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