Author: Martin Kramer

Geopolítica de los judíos

On By Martin Kramer

A sugerencia de la Conferencia de Presidentes de las Organizaciones Judías Americanas he esbozado una serie de pensamientos sobre la geopolítica de los judíos, que inciden más en los posibles problemas que en las soluciones. En la semana de la conmemoración del Holocausto y del aniversario de la Independencia de Israel, los comparto para una reflexión más amplia.

El título de nuestra regflexión es “Mirando hacia el pasado, mirando hacia el futuro: la situación geopolítica del pueblo judío.” Este es un objetivo móvil: la situación geopolítica de los judíos nunca ha sido tan estable. Como pueblo, nuestra geopolítica la conforman nuestras preferencias y las fuerzas históricas presentes. Estas fuerzas nunca descansan. Hace setenta años, el mundo judío estaba centrado en Europa. Ahora sólo le dedicamos una débil atención. Los Estados Unidos e Israel son hoy los polos del mundo judío, y ello porque algunos judíos detectaron los temblores antes del seísmo. Cuando la tierra se abrió y Europa bajó a los infiernos, parte del pueblo judío ya tenía un Plan B en otro lugar. Vivimos de aquel Plan B.

Hoy el pueblo judío está en una posición geopolítica envidiable. Deposita un pie en un estado judío soberano, y el otro en la sociedad más abierta y poderosa del mundo. Uno esta tentado de asegurar que nunca a lo largo de su longeva historia la situación geopolítica de los judíos fue mejor. Realmente, los judíos, ejercieron su soberanía mucho antes, en la antigüedad, pero entonces no tenían una alianza estratégica con la mayor potencia de la tierra. Y puesto que es difícil imaginar una mejor posición geopolítica, el pueblo judío se ha convertido en un pueblo afecto al status quo. Alguna vez fuimos revolucionarios; ahora no necesitamos cambiar el mundo. Por supuesto, nos gustaría una mejoría tangible en las relaciones entre Israel y algunos de sus vecinos – lo que los soñadores llaman “la paz”. Pero, generalmente, estamos bastante satisfechos y preferimos el status quo a los riesgos de los cambios.

Aún así, deberíamos saber que la historia no se detiene, ni para los hombres, ni para los pueblos. Fui educado como un historiador, y aunque ello no me de ningún poder de profecía, si puedo asegurarles una cosa. Lo que existe ahora, no existirá en el futuro. Los equilibrios de fuerzas cambiarán. Las identidades serán rehechas. Finalmente, también el mapa del Oriente Medio volverá a dibujarse.

Cuando nos preocupamos, tendemos a concentrarnos en escenarios apocalípticos. Pero les invito a pensar durante un momento cinco tendencias a largo plazo que podrían erosionar el status quo, por encima de una nube en forma de hongo. Iré de la más lejana a la más próxima, y me concentraré en el lado israelí de la ecuación.

(1) La influencia estadounidense en el Oriente Medio podría menguar. Quizás ustedes hayan leído el artículo de Richard Haass, presidente del Consejo de Relaciones Exteriores, “El Nuevo Oriente Medio.” Allí escribía: “menos de veinte años después del final de la Guerra Fría, la era americana en el Oriente Medio… se ha terminado…. La segunda guerra de Iraq… ha precipitado su final.” Pienso que esta conclusión es prematura – la era de América en el Oriente Medio terminará algún día, pero no se ha terminado aún, y necesitará algo más que Irak para su final. Pero la declaración de Haass es indicativa de un humor o tendencia cada vez más extendida. Añada a esto al cambio tecnológico que podría reducir la dependencia americana del petróleo del Oriente Medio, y es posible que en veinte años América esté menos interesada y preocupada por el Oriente Medio. ¿Cuál sería nuestro Plan B entonces?

(2) Europa podría ser sustraída del área de Occidente. Las tendencias están ahí, los bajos índices de natalidad, la inmigración musulmana, el multiculturalismo, si no son detenidas o invertidas, podrían tener el efecto de desoccidentalizar a Europa. Europa, hasta sin judíos, forma parte del continuum cultural y estratégico, que une Israel con América. Sin aquel eslabón, Israel se vería todavía más rodeada por la hostilidad del Islam. ¿Cuál sería entonces nuestro Plan B?

(3) Irán podría ganar el status de poder regional. De hecho, la ambición imperial de Irán puede ser una tendencia a largo plazo independiente de la naturaleza de su régimen. Irán podría convertirse en el rival regional de Israel, aun si pospone sus proyectos nucleares y deja caer a Ahmadinejad. Irán usa ya su influencia para establecer su dominio en Irak y su influencia en el Golfo Pérsico. ¿Si Irán surge como un poder regional parejo a Israel – y con la intención de sumergir a Israel en una larga guerra fría de desgaste – cuál sería nuestro Plan B?

(4) Los estados árabes a nuestro alrededor también podrían sucumbir a la misma clase de enfermedad provoca en Irak una hemorragia interna. Esa enfermedad es la carencia de legitimidad. Cuando usted mira un mapa del Oriente Medio, ve una mezcolanza dibujada hace un siglo para servir los intereses de los difuntos imperios de Gran Bretaña y Francia. Si Irak se rompe – y yo creo que es posible – otros estados podrían comenzar a derrumbarse. En algunos sitios, podrían ser chiítas contra sunnitas; en otras partes, islamistas contra nacionalistas. Esto también les podría suceder a los estados vecinos de Israel, e Israel podría encontrarse enfrentado, no a un único Hezbollah, sino a muchos. ¿Entonces, cuál sería nuestro Plan B?

(5) Y el más cercano a nosotros, existe la posibilidad de que la solución de dos estados se vuelva anticuada e inservible, porque los palestinos fracasen como nación. Por fracaso quiero decir que ellos no tendrían la cohesión necesaria para traducir su identidad en una estructura de estado nación. Actualmente, muchos en Israel, hablan como sí la creación de un estado palestino fuera esencial para la propia legitimidad de Israel y hasta para su supervivencia. ¿Pero y si tal estado palestino resulta ser imposible? Un estado binacional, palestino israelí, es un anatema, entonces, ¿cuál sería nuestro Plan B?

Uno tendría que ser un recalcitrante pesimista para creer que todas estas cinco tendencias podrían combinarse en una tormenta perfecta. Pero uno tendría que ser un optimista incurable para creer que no seremos azotados por ninguna de esas tormentas. Y lo que argumento es que deberíamos esperar unas condiciones que harán a las tormentas más frecuentes de lo que han sido en las pasadas décadas.

Hemos tenido un exito notable en estos últimos treinta años. Israel ha prosperado bajo la pax Americana. No hubo ninguna guerra árabe israelí general desde 1973, y la paz prevalece en la mayor parte de las fronteras de Israel. La población del país ha crecido, la inversión extranjera ha manado. Israel tiene relaciones crecientes con los poderes y las potencias con futuro en el mundo. Y el pueblo judío americano ha ganado en estatura e influencia, en parte mediando para Israel. Esta ha sido una paz larga y productiva.

Pero cuando Herzl escribió el Estado judío, Europa también llevaba treinta años de paz. Él sabía que esto no duraría, que sus estructuras eran débiles y planificó en consecuencia. Deberíamos reconocer que el status quo en el Oriente Medio no durará indefinidamente, y tenemos que prepararnos en consecuencia. No he dicho lo que pienso que se tiene que hacer – que alianzas, que objetivos atacar, que fronteras volver a dibujar. Pero sí digo que Israel tendrá que hacer alianzas, planear objetivos, y volver a dibujar fronteras – y ellas no necesariamente deberán ser las familiares.

Todo esto va a crear tensión en el mundo, e inclusive dentro del pueblo judío. Entonces las tareas se multiplicarán, y se harán más urgentes. Si usted hubiera entrado en este negocio hace diez años, pensando que todo serían cenas de gala en el camino hacia un nuevo Oriente Medio, pido perdón de parte de la historia. El hombre estaba en lo cierto cuando señaló que el problema en nuestros tiempos consiste en que el futuro no suele ser el que solía ser.

Title VI verdict

On By Martin Kramer

I’m closely reading the new Title VI review prepared by a panel of the National Research Council for the National Academies, at the request of Congress. (Read the press release here.)

I’m not quite done considering the implications of the review for language and area studies, and for Middle Eastern studies in particular. But I’m in broad accord with Stanley Kurtz’s assessment, published yesterday at National Review Online. Kurtz hailed the review as vindication of our critique of Title VI, and I read it the same way. If the area studies establishment thought they’d get a “job-well-done” pat on the back, they’ve certainly been disappointed. The panel did affirm that the job is important and deserves more resources, but also emphasized that no one knows whether the job is being done well or not.

This is largely a problem of the Department of Education, and the recommendations for enhanced oversight, measurement, and reporting far exceed anything Kurtz and I envisioned when we supported a Title VI advisory board. We were never quite sure just how such a board would operate anyway, but we rallied to its defense when it came under attack by an unholy alliance of establishment deans and campus radicals.

The accountability machine now proposed by the National Academies looks more streamlined and effective than an advisory board. In particular, we welcome the proposed Presidential appointment of an arch-overseer for Title VI and related programs in the Department of Education. The panel recommendations specify that this appointee, after Senate confirmation, would strategize over “national needs” with other federal agencies. The National Academies names three departments in particular: State, Defense, and the Directorate of National Intelligence. Our advisory board would have met once a year, at most. A full-time accountability czar, owing his allegiance to the White House, would bear down on Title VI year-round.

Add to this the proposal that all Title VI programs get independent reviews every four or five years, and that the Department of Education prepare biennial progress reports in consultation and cooperation with those other agencies, and you have a formula for revamping Title VI from top to bottom. When I appeared before the panel last fall, I said this:

I propose to you that you consider whether Title VI needs a mechanism to assist in the implementation of your recommendations…. The best way to keep the program aligned with evolving national need in a rapidly changing environment is to create an independent mechanism that will do exactly what you are doing now, year-in-and-year-out.

That’s precisely what the panel has proposed.

The top lobbyist of the American Council on Education pretended to find a silver lining in the review, when he suggested that it exonerated Title VI grantees of bias charges. In fact, the review specifically says that the panel was not charged with investigating bias, and that “the committee considers it beyond our charge to reach any definitive judgment of the issue.” Because this panel didn’t investigate the bias issue, it remains an open one, to be addressed separately should Congress choose to do so. There are important provisions that would do just that, in the Senate version of the Higher Education Act reauthorization.

The crew at the National Academies spent more than a year working on this review, and it deserves more analysis than I’ve just provided. But implementing its recommendations would be an unprecedented step toward revitalizing Title VI. I personally thank the panel for the opportunity to appear before it, to make a critic’s case.

Enough Said

On By Martin Kramer

Review by Martin Kramer of Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2006). The review appeared in Commentary, March 2007. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

THE British historian Robert Irwin is the sort of scholar who, in times past, would have been proud to call himself an Orientalist.

The traditional Orientalist was someone who mastered difficult languages like Arabic and Persian and then spent years bent over manuscripts in heroic efforts of decipherment and interpretation. In Dangerous Knowledge, Irwin relates that the 19th-century English Arabist Edward William Lane, compiler of the great Arabic-English Lexicon, “used to complain that he had become so used to the cursive calligraphy of his Arabic manuscripts that he found Western print a great strain on his eyes.” Orientalism in its heyday was a branch of knowledge as demanding and rigorous as its near cousin, Egyptology. The first International Congress of Orientalists met in 1873; its name was not changed until a full century later.

But there are no self-declared Orientalists today. The reason is that the late Edward Said turned the word into a pejorative. In his 1978 book Orientalism, the Palestinian-born Said, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, claimed that an endemic Western prejudice against the East had congealed into a modern ideology of racist supremacy—a kind of anti-Semitism directed against Arabs and Muslims. Throughout Europe’s history, announced Said, “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

In a semantic sleight of hand, Said appropriated the term “Orientalism” as a label for the ideological prejudice he described, thereby neatly implicating the scholars who called themselves Orientalists. At best, charged Said, the work of these scholars was biased so as to confirm the inferiority of Islam. At worst, Orientalists had directly served European empires, showing proconsuls how best to conquer and control Muslims. To substantiate his indictment, Said cherry-picked evidence, ignored whatever contradicted his thesis, and filled the gaps with conspiracy theories.

Said’s Orientalism, Irwin writes, “seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations.” Dangerous Knowledge is its refutation. An Arabist by training, Irwin artfully weaves together brief profiles of great Orientalist scholars, generously spiced with telling anecdotes. From his narrative, Said’s straw men emerge as complex individuals touched by genius, ambition—and no little sympathy for the subjects of their study.

SOME of the Orientalist pioneers were quintessential insiders. Thus, Silvestre de Sacy founded the great 19th-century school of Arabic studies in Paris; Bonaparte made him a baron, and he became a peer of France under the monarchy. Carl Heinrich Becker, who brought sociology into Islamic studies, served as a cabinet minister in the Weimar government. But it was marginal men who made the most astonishing advances. Ignaz Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew, revolutionized Islamic studies a century ago by applying the methods of higher criticism to the Muslim oral tradition. Slaving away as the secretary of the reformist Neolog Jewish community in Budapest, Goldziher made his breakthroughs at the end of long workdays.

Some great scholars were quite mad. In the 16th century, Guillaume Postel, a prodigy who occupied the first chair of Arabic at the Collège de France, produced Europe’s first grammar of classical Arabic. Irwin describes him as “a complete lunatic”—an enthusiast of all things esoteric and Eastern who believed himself to be possessed by a female divinity. Four centuries later, Louis Massignon, another French great at the Collège, claimed to have experienced a visitation by God and plunged into the cult of a Sufi mystic. When lucid, Massignon commanded a vast knowledge of Islam and Arabic, but he held an unshakable belief in unseen forces, including Jewish plots of world domination.

Above all, many Orientalists became fervent advocates for Arab and Islamic political causes, long before notions like third-worldism and post-colonialism entered the political lexicon. Goldziher backed the Urabi revolt against foreign control of Egypt. The Cambridge Iranologist Edward Granville Browne became a one-man lobby for Persian liberty during Iran’s constitutional revolution in the early 20th century. Prince Leone Caetani, an Italian Islamicist, opposed his country’s occupation of Libya, for which he was denounced as a “Turk.” And Massignon may have been the first Frenchman to take up the Palestinian Arab cause.

Two truths emerge from a stroll through Irwin’s gallery. First, Orientalist scholars, far from mystifying Islam, freed Europe from medieval myths about it through their translations and studies of original Islamic texts. Second, most Orientalists, far from being agents of empire, were bookish dons and quirky eccentrics. When they did venture opinions on mundane matters, it was usually to criticize Western imperialism and defend something Islamic or Arab. In fact, it would be easy to write a contrary indictment of the Orientalists, showing them to be wooly-minded Islamophiles who suffered from what the late historian Elie Kedourie once called “the romantic belief that exquisite mosques and beautiful carpets are proof of political virtue.”

IN other words, Edward Said got it exactly wrong. Other scholars said as much in the years after his book came out; Irwin’s critique echoes those made by Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Bernard Lewis, and Maxime Rodinson. These doyens of Islamic and Arab studies came from radically different points on the political compass, but they all found the same flaws in Said’s presentation. Even Albert Hourani, the Middle East historian closest to Said personally, thought that Orientalism had gone “too far” and regretted that its most lasting effect was to turn “a perfectly respected discipline” into “a dirty word.”

Yet the criticisms did not stick; what stuck was the dirt thrown by Said. Not only did Orientalism sweep the general humanities, where ignorance of the history of Orientalism was (and is) widespread; not only did it help to create the faux-academic discipline now known as post-colonialism; but the book’s thesis also conquered the field of Middle Eastern studies itself, where scholars should have known better. No other discipline has ever surrendered so totally to an external critic.

As it happens, I witnessed a minute that perfectly compressed the results of this process. In 1998, to mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Orientalism, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) invited Said to address a plenary panel at its annual conference. As Said ascended the dais, his admirers leaped to their feet in an enthusiastic ovation. Then, somewhat hesitantly at first, the rest of the audience stood and began to applaud. Fixed in my seat, I surveyed the ballroom, watching scholars whom I had heard privately damn Orientalism for its libel against their field now rising sheepishly and casting sideways glances to see who might behold their gesture of submission.

This may help us understand something in Irwin’s account that might otherwise leave a reader bewildered. Why should Said have singled out for attack a group of scholars who had done so much to increase understanding of Islam, and who had tirelessly explained Muslim views to a self-absorbed West? The answer: for the same reason that radicals usually attack the moderates on their own side. They know they can browbeat them into doing much more.

By exposing and exaggerating a few of the field’s insignificant lapses, Orientalism stunned Middle East academics into a paroxysm of shame. Exploiting those pangs of guilt, Said’s radical followers demanded concession upon concession from the Orientalist establishment: academic appointments and promotions, directorships of Middle East centers and departments, and control of publishing decisions, grants, and honors. Within a startling brief period of time, a small island of liberal sympathy for the Arab and Muslim “other” was transformed into a subsidized, thousand-man lobby for Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian causes.

THE revolution did not stop until Said was universally acclaimed as the savior of Middle Eastern studies and, in that ballroom where I sat in 1998, virtually the entire membership of MESA had been corralled into canonizing him. It did not stop until he was elected an honorary fellow of the association—that is, one of ten select scholars “who have made major contributions to Middle East studies.” (No similar majority could be mustered to accord the same honor to Bernard Lewis.) It would not stop until it achieved the abject abasement of the true heirs of the Orientalist tradition.

This is the missing final chapter of Dangerous Knowledge. The established scholars in Middle Eastern studies never did deliver the crushing blow to Orientalism that it deserved. With the exception of Bernard Lewis, no one went on the warpath against the book (although, according to Irwin, the anthropologist Ernest Gellner was working on a “book-long attack” on Orientalism when he died in 1995). Going up against Said involved too much professional risk. He himself was famous for avenging every perceived slight, and his fiercely loyal followers denounced even the mildest criticism of their hero as evidence of “latent Orientalism”—or, worse yet, Zionism.

Still, the power of Said and his legions did begin to wane somewhat after the attacks of 9/11. Said had systematically soft-pedaled the threat of radical Islam. In a pre-9/11 revised edition of Said’s Covering Islam, a book devoted to exposing the allegedly biased reporting of the Western press, he mocked “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.” After the planes struck the towers, Said declined to answer his phone. Irwin writes that when, unrepentant, he finally responded, “he put the terrorists’ case for them, just as he had put the case for Saddam Hussein.” September 11 broke Said’s spell. “Does this mean I’m throwing my copy of Orientalism out the window?” quipped Richard Bulliet, a professor of Islamic history at Columbia, in the week following the attacks. “Maybe it does.”

Since Said’s death in 2003, more doubters have found the courage to speak out. Some of Columbia’s own students did so in 2005, when they took on a number of Said’s most extreme acolytes, whom he had helped to embed as instructors in the university’s department of Middle East studies. Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge is a challenge to that minority of scholars in the field who still preserve a spark of integrity and some vestige of pride in the tradition of learning that Said defamed. They won’t ever call themselves Orientalists again. But it is high time they denounced the Saidian cult for the fraud that it is, and began to unseat it. Irwin has told the truth; it is their responsibility to act on it.