October 6, 2024 (follow up)
Two events happened in Champaign-Urbana over the past couple of week, rhyming and resonating with each other.
The first meeting was a lecture and a Q&A at the University YMCA by Dr. Mohammad Darawshe.
Dr. Darawshe is a politician (in the past he ran Knesset election campaigns for various Arab political parties) who turned into a political scientist. He spends this semester with the U of I’s Center for Global Studies. Dr. Darawshe is no stranger here on campus: a conversation between him and Yossi Klein Halevi organized in 2021 by the U of I’s DEI office is well worth rewatching.
In his presentation Dr. Darawshe talked about the struggle of Arab minority in a Jewish state for a better future, about its victories and setbacks. He is clearly passionate about the role education can and should play in the closing the gap between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and talked proudly about the successes of his people: the Arab enrollment in Israeli universities (seems that minority enrollment in Israel is way ahead that of Illinois), the share of Arabs in tech startups, the number and quality of Arab doctors in Israel.
Dr. Darawshe is not impartial: his allegiance lies with his people, his focus is on them. Some rhetorical claims he used I found misleading. But in the end that’s what politicians do: they fight for the success of their constituency with the means the political process in a democracy affords: persuasion, political mobilization, election, representation in the government etc.
And this basic function turned out to be an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the self-proclaimed “pro-Palestinian” cult on our campus. The Students for Justice in Palestine (which is no longer recognized by the U of I as a Registered Student Organization) called him a traitor.
The predominantly American nationals of the SJP call Dr. Darawshe, an Arab who lives in Palestine, and actually works for the Arabs there, a “disgrace to Arab people.” They organized a campaign to cancel him, – again, for the sole sin of being a part of the political life in Israel, advancing the interests of the Arab citizens there.
Because who cares about Arab successes if they are achieved within a “Zionist entity”?
The other meeting took place in Channing Murray Foundation, a “campus-community center”, as a part of a series of events dedicated to “A Year of Resistance,” co-organized with the Champaign-Urbana Muslim Action Committee.
I attended the first of these Teach-Ins, as the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction anything Israeli) movement has the potential to affect materially this campus, and universities and colleges in Israel, where I and many of my colleagues here have friends and collaborators (Jews and Arabs, I hasten to say).
Besides, I thought, it would be interesting to see how Prof. Barnes, the lead of the “Teach-In,” would incorporate what she learned in Dr. Darawshe’s lecture which she attended.
Prof. Barnes did start with reciting a formal definition of apartheid adopted somewhere, but immediately abandoned the topic and switched to reading a chapter from a 2015 book about Salaita’s affair (a sad story of academic incompetence and bluster). She then continued with a litany of grievances against the corporate university, the rule of capitalism in the academe and loss of “shared spaces” (as exemplified by the campus discouragement of statements done by the academic departments on general political matters).1There is nothing more that we (the professoriat) love more than to complain about the university administration. Eventually, though, this trough got exhausted, and Dr. Barnes invited the attendees, most of them student age, 20 or so of us altogether, to say some words.
A conversation ensued. Someone opined that the techies lack empathy. An engineering student complained that in their computer science lectures, Chomsky formal language hierarchy was mentioned, but not his social activism2I must add, not once did I hear a mechanircs lecture where they mentioned Newton’s theology, or his contributions at the Roayl Mint.… And so on, and so forth.
Towards the end I decided to steer the conversation back to the topic of the TeachIn, and asked Prof. Barnes directly, whether the harm an academic boycott would do to the ascending Arab middle class in Israel is justified, given what we learned from Dr. Darawshe.
Her answer was verbose (she admitted that the BDS movement is virtually non-existent, questioned Dr. Darawshe’s identity as an Arab and so on), but in the end she firmly concluded, that yes, – it is worth it to hurt Israeli students, Arab and Jews alike, as long as a message is sent.
I think this is an honest statement. At its heart, the allegedly pro-Palestinian cult is not about improving or saving Arab lives in Palestine. It is about hurting the Jewish state there. To them, sacrificing Arab lives or future is a fair price to pay in the struggle to destroy the Jewish state.
Just like it is to the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Hardly a surprise, really.
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