Author: Martin Kramer

MESA jumps in Massad’s trench

On By Martin Kramer

You remember Joseph Massad (how could you not?), the assistant professor who’s been at the heart of Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies scandal. Last spring, a university panel investigated allegations that he intimidated a student over her politics. Massad denied it, but the panel found the student credible, and a cloud hangs over his tenure prospects.

Massad is one of Edward Said’s less successful clones. Once, on a flight, I ended up watching a film called Multiplicity. It’s a light comedy about a man who can’t meet all his responsibilities at work and home, so he allows a mad geneticist to clone him twice. Alas, each clone is a bit like a photocopy–distorted and not quite up to the original. Then one of the clones has himself cloned, producing a total idiot. Massad’s doings, writings, and posturings are like an Edward Said gone really bad. So bad, in fact, that while Said achieved Columbia’s highest rank, of University Professor, Massad strikes me as falling far below the minimal requirements for tenure.

But the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has a stake in Massad. Why? Beyond fealty to Said and collegial solidarity, MESA once gave Massad its award for outstanding doctoral dissertation. Not a single MESA-acclaimed dissertation has made for a lasting and influential book, and Massad’s was no exception. The resulting tome, soaked in the impenetrable prose of postcolonial theory, isn’t on anyone’s must-read list. But MESA’s reputation is now invested in Massad, as he himself emphasized in his response to the findings of Columbia’s panel:

An attack on my scholarship therefore is not only an attack on me and on MEALAC [his department at Columbia] but on Columbia’s political science department [which graduated him], on prestigious academic presses, including Columbia University Press [which published his thesis], and on the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), an opinion expressed by Martin Kramer who also condemns Middle East Studies at Columbia and MESA itself.

Massad couldn’t be more right. All those who have accredited, acclaimed, and published him have scraped bottom, and that applies especially to Columbia University and MESA.

Columbia may redeem itself yet, by spitting him out. But MESA, it’s now clear, is digging itself an even deeper hole. Without fanfare, it has just added Massad to the editorial board of its flagship journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies. That is, it has anointed him formally as an arbiter of quality in scholarship. This effectively destroys whatever credibility the journal still had (after the damage it sustained under the editorship of Juan Cole). Even if this appointment is a mere honorific, Massad’s name on the masthead brings disrepute.

But the mandarins of MESA have gone further. Each fall, MESA’s rank-and-file elect a new president and two members of its six-member board of directors. A nominating committee selects the candidates. Lo and behold, among this year’s candidates for the board is Joseph Massad. He’s a mere assistant professor, with only one book (two more are said to be forthcoming), but he’s being offered to MESA’s members for possible selection as one of the pillars of the field.

Personally, I wish Massad luck in the race. I endorse him. His victory would make the efforts of critics like me even easier. (And I thought it would be hard to surpass Juan Cole’s election last year as MESA’s president. That shows how little I know.) The MESA elections run through October 28. As we get closer to that date, I’ll make my prediction.

Oh, and yes, I’ve also noticed that Zachary Lockman of New York University and Mark Tessler of Michigan are the two candidates for the presidency of MESA. I’ve written about Lockman, and he’s written about me. I intend to come back to that race later in the fall.

Disappointment: Massad’s long-awaited book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, has been announced by its publisher, Routledge, and I’m disappointed. It’s just a collected volume of his essays. “The essays, which have been previously published in a variety of academic journals, are brought together with a new introduction and conclusion.” So this won’t be an integrated sequel to Said’s famous Question of Palestine. Like I said: the clone’s never up to the original.

When I last saw Gaza

On By Martin Kramer

The Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza stirs my memory of my only visit to the place. It was twenty-two years ago, before the words intifada, Hamas, and “Oslo” had entered the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon. I had taken up my appointment at Tel Aviv University a couple of years earlier, and we had a treat that semester: the historian Elie Kedourie and his wife Sylvia left the comforts of London to spend the term with us. One of our tasks was to fill up their time with interesting people and trips. Someone had the idea of taking them to Gaza, and I went along to provide small talk on the way. As Elie had a famous aversion to small talk, it was a daunting assignment.

Our guide on that occasion was Zvi Elpeleg. I came to know Zvi quite well in the mid-1990s, when he served as Israeli ambassador to Turkey and opened many doors for me. But back then, I knew him only as a street-smart Arabist who’d served in every war as a military governor. As a young man in the mid-1950s, he had governed a large swath of the Arab-populated “Triangle” in Israel. He later served as a military governor in Gaza in 1956, in the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, in Fayed in Egypt in 1973, and in southern Lebanon in 1982.

In Gaza Elpeleg still knew plenty of people. He had kept up old ties and did some business there. So he was more than happy to plan the day, do the driving, and introduce the Kedouries to some of his friends. In those days, driving an Israeli car through Gaza was a routine exercise, not fraught with any great danger. As we left, Zvi deliberated over whether he should take his sidearm; I don’t even recall whether he did.

During the drive down, I did my best to distract Kedourie, and at one point touched a nerve. Elie had been born and raised in Baghdad; he had left Iraq for Britain in the general Jewish exodus, never to return. Since we were headed into Gaza, I asked him whether he had traveled anywhere else in the Arab world—perhaps to Egypt, about which he had written a great deal. He answered that he hadn’t, and then pointedly added that he didn’t feel any need to do so. I was taken aback, but it reminded me of an old Jewish-American joke. Irv wants to impress his Old-World Jewish mother with his success. “Mama!” he announces triumphantly, “Sheila and I are going to Europe!” “Nice for you,” the old lady mutters dismissively, “I’ve been already.”

Here and there, as we drove through Gaza City, older men waved to Elpeleg or shouted out greetings. He’d obviously left an impression all those years ago. And our prime destination was one of his old interlocutors: Haj Rashad ash-Shawwa, a former mayor of Gaza (twice appointed and twice deposed by Israel) and a big landowner and citrus merchant, who had a long history of shifting to and fro among Israel, Jordan, and Fatah. He also enjoyed the exclusive franchise for issuing travel permits for Gazans who wanted to visit Jordan—the so-called “Shawwa passports”—and applicants formed a crowd outside his offices. Haj Rashad was nearing eighty, which made him the grand old man of Gazan politics.

I can’t say I remember exactly what Haj Rashad and Elie Kedourie said to one another about the issues of the day. Back then, “peace” diplomacy focused on getting Palestinian notables to come out for King Hussein in favor of a Jordanian-Palestinian federation. Haj Rashad was all for it, and so were many Israelis and Americans, but the “Jordanian option” never gelled. I do remember Haj Rashad and Elie hitting it off nicely. Here were two men who shared a memory of British order in the Middle East, who distrusted nationalist passion, and who exchanged views with meticulous civility. So we drank our coffee and mulled over various proposals, unaware that the pressure outside was building toward an explosion. They lived through its beginning, but not to its end: Haj Rashad died of a heart attack in 1988, and Elie died of the same in 1992.

Given the little history I’ve just described, I’ve wondered what Elie would have thought of the Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza. In 1978, he published an article entitled “The Retreat from Algeria” in the Times Literary Supplement. It was of a piece with his reproach of Britain for “abandoning” its responsibilities in the Middle East. “France and Frenchmen were guilty of a wrong no greater than that committed by the conquerors whom they supplanted,” he wrote. “What seems exorbitant and monstrous is for a state deliberately, suddenly and precipitately to withdraw its protection from those who look to it for the defense of their lives and possessions.” Algeria, he once told an interviewer, “was abandoned in the most lamentable and pitiless fashion, from one day to the next. Abandoned without any regard to the interest of those for whom France had taken responsibility for 130 years. That much can be said. In Algeria the French had a great responsibility and they fell down on it.”

But this responsibility—and this was Kedourie’s point—was owed by France to all the inhabitants of Algeria, not only the settlers. The French army had quelled the Algerian insurrection by 1959, he wrote. “This could have been the opportunity for the French state to assume its historic responsibilities, and at least to institute a public order which was not the plaything of the pieds noirs [the Europeans settled in Algeria], which would treat Frenchmen and Muslims as equals, and protect the life, property and livelihood of all without exception.” De Gaulle’s retreat not only betrayed the pieds noirs (who had seen him as their savior); above all it betrayed the Muslims, who were left to the terror and vengeance of the FLN.

This passage, more than any other, makes it impossible to infer anything about Gaza from what Kedourie wrote about Algeria. In leaving Algeria, Kedourie argued, France failed to live up to its universalist ideal. But Israel claims no “civilizing mission,” it has never annexed territory that would compel it to assume full responsibility for large numbers of Palestinians, and its long-standing objective has been to find someone credible to assume that responsibility. In leaving Gaza and putting up a high barrier there and in the West Bank, Israel has spurned the messianism of the far right and the universalism of the far left. It is still inspired by the model of the classic nation-state, in which the dominant nationality enjoys a clear majority and lives behind impermeable borders. Today Israel is reaffirming its faith in that model.

The problem is the weakness of Palestinians who share that faith. In leaving Gaza to the Gazans, Israel hopes to compel the Palestinians to mirror Israel. It’s a gamble: people like Haj Rashad don’t call the shots. Israel will soon find out whether, in the person of Abu Mazen, it has found someone who does.

Those other Orientalists

On By Martin Kramer

A few months back, art historian Kristian Davies sent me a copy of his new book The Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India. This is more than a lavishly illustrated decoration for a coffee table. It’s a provocative dissent from the Saidian take on nineteenth-century Orientalist art. I’ll let Davies say it himself:

In the 1980s, the great age of deconstructionism, Orientalist paintings were thoroughly deconstructed and dismantled from every angle: the questionable authenticity of what the paintings depicted, the subliminal intentions of the artist, the genre’s ties to imperialism, the supposedly unavoidable corruption of an artist’s perception of the East before even traveling abroad, the way in which artists portrayed women, violence, commerce, the streets, poverty, and architecture, and what the Orient even was. Everything was implicated, every brushstroke, until as is often the final outcome of deconstructionism, one was left with the feeling that one should believe nothing and suspect everything.

“Fortunately,” Davies adds, “in the twenty-plus years since Said’s Orientalism was published, many of his theories have been sufficiently and successfully refuted.” And he goes on to quote Bernard Lewis, John MacKenzie, and myself–very gratifying.

Davies is plainly moved by these paintings. He describes the moment he succumbed to their allure: he turned a corner in the Musée d’Orsay, “and there I saw it: a painting of a camel procession coming directly at me.” It was Léon Belly’s Pilgrims Going to Mecca (1861) and Davies “felt a very potent sensation brewing.” (A detail from that painting is on the book jacket, and an entire chapter is devoted to analyzing it.) The Orientalists is potent, too, written in an accessible style for non-specialists, and the quality of the reproductions is outstanding. (For more, see this review.)

Of course, what keeps the interest in nineteenth-century Orientalist art in an upward trajectory is the fact that, pace Said, today’s “Orientals” are enamored of it. It’s a market that was pioneered by a London dealer in the 1980s, and today some of the most impressive collections are held by private enthusiasts in the Gulf countries. When Christie’s opened shop in Dubai earlier this year, it sent over some outstanding examples of the genre for a showing, in advance of a June auction in London. At that sale, John Frederick Lewis’s A Mid-day Meal, Cairo (1875), which had been shown in Dubai, fetched $4.5 million. It’s mind-boggling.

If you’re in New York City, make a point of seeing the very respectable collection of Orientalist art at the Dahesh Museum, which is now showing off its best pieces in a tenth-anniversary exhibition. (The one I personally most appreciate is Gustav Bauernfeind’s vast and dramatic 1888 depiction of Ottoman forced conscription in the port of Jaffa. Davies devotes a chapter to Bauernfeind as well, and includes two spendid details from this painting.) The best time to visit the Dahesh? The evening of Thursday, September 1: Kristian Davies will be lecturing in the auditorium.