Author: Martin Kramer

Rashid Redux

On By Martin Kramer

Congratulations to Columbia University, for bagging Rashid Khalidi, University of Chicago historian, to fill the new Edward Said Chair of Middle Eastern Studies. The still-anonymous donors must be very pleased. Now that the deal is done, Khalidi has resurfaced, to take a stand on a possible war against Saddam.

As it happened, I spent the last Gulf war, in 1991, at the University of Chicago as a visiting professor, on the same hallway as Khalidi. Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies became a cauldron of agitation against the war, stirred vigorously by the faculty. Khalidi thought even that war was unjust, and he predicted a dire outcome. My favorite Khalidi quote from 1991 assessed the Iraqi army: “They’re in concrete bunkers. And it won’t be easy to force them out without resorting to bloody hand-to-hand combat. It’s my guess they’ll fight and fight hard, even if you bomb them with B-52s.” (This and more in my book Ivory Towers on Sand, p. 66.)

What does Khalidi have to say about another possible war? He’s not so foolish as to predict how the battlefield will look this time. In fact, he anticipates an “overwhelming victory.” But the day after will be a mess. “We will have a long American military occupation that will eventually provoke resistance,” Khalidi predicts. “However much Iraqis loathe their regime, they will soon loathe the American occupation that will follow its demise.” He gives the occupation about two years, the length of time Britain ruled Iraq before it faced a rebellion in 1920. Then it will become “bloody.” And the regional implications? “We will be creating legions of new enemies throughout the Middle East.” His suggestion: “I propose that we withhold our consent and stop this unjustified and unjustifiable war before it begins.”

I’ve always been amazed by Khalidi’s readiness to make unequivocal predictions. I suppose he realizes that it’s very unusual for anyone to remember them years later. In academe, predictions are the equivalent of politicans’ promises. They serve some immediate polemical purpose, and are given on the assumption that people have very short memories. Well, Sandstorm promises to remember them for you—and for Professor Khalidi.

Of course, Israel is never far from Rashid Khalidi’s mind. Now that he’s definitely New York-bound, he can say it out loud: this war is the project of “crackpot” neoconservatives who “dominate the commanding heights of the American bureaucracy.” And (wink) we know who they work for:

This war will be fought because these neoconservatives desire to make the Middle East safe not for democracy, but for Israeli hegemony. They are convinced that the Middle East is irremediably hostile to both the United States and Israel; and they firmly hold the racist view that Middle Easterners understand only force. For these American Likudniks and their Israeli counterparts, sad to say, the tragedy of September 11 was a godsend: It enabled them to draft the United States to help fight Israel’s enemies.

This is about as close as you can get in America today to the charge of dual loyalty, and the claim that Washington is run by a Zionist conspiracy, without coming across as a “crackpot” yourself.

“Khalidi has received praise from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” relates the Columbia Spectator in reporting his decision to take the new chair. “His supporters believe this speaks toward his strengths as a teacher and scholar.” Sorry, but the notion of Khalidi as someone above the fray doesn’t quite ring true to me. He won’t be the worst of the lot at Columbia, but that doesn’t say much. Still, all things considered, Khalidi’s move is for the best. Why?

Khalidi will become the Edward Said Professor of Middle Eastern Studies. That’s a warning label the size of a Times Square billboard.

Math Quiz at Stanford

On By Martin Kramer

Joel Beinin, the Stanford history professor and immediate past president of the Middle East Studies Association, offers an on-line course on the Arab-Israeli conflict, for an e-learning consortium run by Stanford, Yale, and Oxford. In the introduction to the ninth lecture of the fall semester, he told his students that American aid to Israel since its establishment had come to one trillion dollars—a fantastic sum, at least ten times the actual figure. One student, a Yale alumnus named Jonathan Leffell, wrote to Beinin to ask just how he arrived at the trillion-dollar figure. A bristling Beinin added up the aid. “That’s $100 billion or $1 trillion,” he concluded triumphantly. “Since the math wasn’t so hard,” he chided the e-student, “you might ask yourself what it was that prevented you from seeing this.”

Incredibly, Joel Beinin, Stanford’s expert on all matters related to Israel, U.S. policy in the Middle East, and regional political economy, didn’t know that a trillion dollars is $1,000 billion. He thought it was $100 billion. Well, he knows what a trillion is now, thanks to Mr. Leffell. (Leffell suggested to Beinin that he ponder “how you could have made this mistake, which is one of an order of magnitude, in the first place.”)

Beinin apologized, but did no pondering. To the contrary: “Israel has received far more in U.S. aid than any other country in the world.” But this isn’t the point. Far more interesting is what must have gone through Professor Beinin’s mind whenever he heard a trillion or a hundred billion.

For example, the annual U.S. budget is about two trillion dollars. Did he imagine that Israel had gotten something like half of that vast sum over its lifetime? The aggregate GDP of the Arab states is a bit more than $500 billion, a figure every serious student of the Middle East should know, especially since it was highlighted in the Arab Human Development Report. It’s a GDP just under Spain’s. But if Professor Beinin thought the Arab GDP was five trillion—well, that’s about half the GDP of the United States.

I could go on, and the mind boggles at the possible permutations, but the bottom line is this: until a few months ago, Joel Beinin could not possibly have had any sense of the relative scale of the U.S. economy, the world economy, or the Middle East’s economy. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for an earlier generation of Marxist political economists. You didn’t agree with them, but at least you had one thing in common: the ability to count.

As for the content of Beinin’s course, I hear it was a model of bias, but that’s not surprising. If you’re curious, take it yourself. It’s being offered again, beginning February 18.

Life imitates art at UCLA

On By Martin Kramer

Back in October, I put together a little parody: a letter from an indignant professor to Campus Watch. In it, the prof rails against the “McCarthyite” website, but winds up begging to be listed on it, so as to boost his tenure prospects.

Now there’s a real-life case of this, with only minor deviations. It takes the form of a memo from Gabriel Piterberg, a professor of Middle Eastern history, to his colleagues in the UCLA history department. After a perfunctionary opening, Piterberg warns of the “intensifying activity of Campus Watch at UCLA and other major campuses.”

Campus Watch is a web site directed by Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, Middle East scholars and activists for the cause of the pro-Israeli lobby in America….The web site itself is a black list of professors whose views are unpalatable to the pro-Israeli lobby and to the current administration. The academic community is advised to be wary of these professors, and students are encouraged to spy and report on what they—and other potential suspects—do in class and publish. As a major academic center with an illustrious tradition in Middle East studies, UCLA is one of the main targets of Campus Watch. [UCLA history professor] Jim Gelvin and I are on its black list.

End of memo. (Incidentally, Piterberg is an Argentine-born Israeli who left the country some years back.)

Now I am not a director of Campus Watch (ten points off right there), and it’s not my place to defend it. I happen not to think the website is a blacklist. Nor do I think the classroom is a clandestine cell or a security agency, whose members are bound by an oath of secrecy. (Professors who treat the classroom as a place of indoctrination and initiation might think differently.) And the notion that there is something wrong when students report what their professors publish—well, it’s been rumored that if you publish something, anyone can read it. Perhaps it’s to keep those “spies” from “reporting” his ideas that Professor Piterberg has been careful to keep his own list of publications short.

But the really comic part comes at the end. Piterberg claims to be on the “blacklist” of Campus Watch. Now for the life of me, I haven’t been able to find his name anywhere on the site. He wasn’t the subject of one of the “dossiers” of the original “egregious eight.” He doesn’t appear on the list of persons who sent in their own names, in “solidarity” with the eight. In fact, Campus Watch hasn’t put out anything about him at all. Same thing with James Gelvin. (I myself have written about Gelvin—not a “listing” but 1,000 reasoned words— and I wrote them not for Campus Watch, but for the journal I edit.)

Finally, as far as UCLA being one of the “major targets” of Campus Watch: until the website posted Piterberg’s memo, it didn’t even have an entry for UCLA under its “Survey of Institutions.”

So what’s going on here? Life is imitating art. Piterberg desperately wants to be “blacklisted” by Campus Watch, because being “blacklisted” by Daniel Pipes is a credential. He wants all his colleagues on the hallway to slap him on the back, to tell him “We’re with you!” He wants the sympathy regularly accorded to a victim. And so he’s completely fabricated his own “blacklisting.” It’s a self-serving fiction, which marvelously brings my little parody to life.

Poor fellow, he really is too small a fry to warrant his own mention at Campus Watch. Yes, he did appear on a plenary panel honoring Edward Said back in 1998. (His bio reports that he looks back on his participation as “one of the proudest and most emotional moments of his career.”) Yes, this winter he teaches a course entitled “Myths, Politics, and Scholarship in Israel,” which promises to reveal the “construction of Israel’s Zionist foundational myths, their impact on politics, and attendant scholarship, collusive as well as critical.” (In case you miss the coding here, “critical” is anti-Zionist and good; “collusive,” defined by the Oxford Concise as based on “a secret understanding, especially for a fraudulent purpose,” is pro-Zionist and bad.) Yes, he parrots Palestinian “foundational myths” made popular by better-known propagandists and “new historians.” Yes, he’s signed the University of California divestment petition. Even the door of his office is reportedly festooned with an “End the Occupation” poster showing Israelis hauling away a Palestinian. (In academe, you don’t wear your politics on your sleeve, you post them on your office door.)

Yes, yes, yes. Still, I don’t think he deserves the full Campus Watch treatment, because he’s not good enough to be bad enough. He doesn’t write much, his students give him a mediocre rating, and he has no presence in the media. Sorry, Gabi, Campus Watch isn’t looking for profs with bad taste, it’s looking for profs who taste bad—real bad.

I’m not Campus Watch, and it’s not really my business, but if they want my opinion, here it is: ignore the guy. It’ll kill him.

ADDENDUM: Piterberg now insists to The Daily Bruin that he was listed at Campus Watch. Gabi, get over it: you never were. Search the Campus Watch site for your name. There ain’t nothin’ here but your own memo and your name at the bottom of a couple of petitions that you signed yourself.