Author: Martin Kramer

Are Columbia’s Palestinians… Palestinian?

On By Martin Kramer

You will remember the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the anthropologist who last year received tenure at Barnard after a furious controversy over her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Jane Kramer has written a panegyric to her for The New Yorker, simply brushing off serious-minded criticisms of Abu El-Haj’s book.

Kramer (no relation to me) also has given the back story to her piece in a radio interview (from minute 21:00), where she makes a telltale confession: “I felt a deep commitment to write this piece, part of it having to do with being Jewish myself, and I thought to myself, Jewish people also have to stand up for her integrity.” Ah, another Jew working through an identity complex on a Palestinian canvas. “Guilt-saddled New Yorker, Jewish, seeks stylish, well-bred Palestinian-American academic to love, admire, share Darwish and opera. Make me feel chosen again.”

The odd thing is that Kramer goes to great lengths to deny that Nadia Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian at all. “Is Nadia Abu El-Haj a Palestinian?” asks the interviewer. Answer: “No, she’s actually an Episcopalian from the United States, born in Long Island. Her father was Palestinian.” Kramer again: “She [Abu El-Haj] came to this project [of Israeli archaeology] as an American with no particular axe to grind.” (Amazing quote, that.) Kramer even scolds Paula Stern, Barnard alumna and author of the petition against tenure for Abu El-Haj, because Stern “didn’t know Abu El-Haj wasn’t Palestinian.”

Well, by these criteria, (New York-born) Rashid Khalidi and (Champaign, Illinois-born) Lila Abu-Lughod and (Washington-born) Ali Abunimah aren’t Palestinians either. They were born here, not there, and they’re U.S. citizens. (As for being an Episcopalian, so was Edward Said.) Jane Kramer is so clueless that she seems not to have figured out that “Palestinian” can be an identity. To judge from Nadia Abu El-Haj’s choices—from keeping her father’s Arabic name to working exclusively on undermining Israel’s claims—it’s obvious that her Palestinian identity is profoundly meaningful (and useful) to her.

And in fact, Abu El-Haj doesn’t have to chose between being American and Palestinian, any more than Jane Kramer has to choose between being American and Jewish. Kramer’s insistence that Abu El-Haj can’t be Palestinian because she’s American or Episcopalian or from Long Island distorts the context of the controversy. That context was identity politics—not just of Jewish-Americans, but of Palestinian-Americans. Abu El-Haj is deep into her own identity politics, pursued tirelessly through her academic work. She’s engaged full-time in the intellectual fortification of the Palestinian nationalist narrative. If you conceal that, you’ve botched the whole thing.

There’s also a telling contradiction here. In her article, Jane Kramer calls Columbia’s Rashid Khalidi a “Palestinian-American.” It would be interesting to know what, in her mind, makes Khalidi a Palestinian-American, while Abu El-Haj is an American, period. Khalidi, like Abu El-Haj, was born in New York; like her, he had a Palestinian Muslim father and a mother who was neither. As a child, Khalidi sometimes attended Sunday school at the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, where his parents had been married. Khalidi also grew up in the United States, whereas Abu El-Haj spent much of her childhood abroad. So why does Jane Kramer make Khalidi into a hyphenated American, and not Abu El-Haj?

After all, Jewish people have to stand up for Khalidi’s integrity, too.

Appendix: Here are a few sources, some of them supportive of Abu El-Haj, that identify her as a “Palestinian-American”:

  • Chronicle of Higher Education: “Ms. Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian-American assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College…”
  • Columbia Spectator: “Abu El-Haj, a Fulbright Scholar and Palestinian-American…”
  • Ahram Weekly: “…another hate campaign is being waged to deny tenure to Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj.”
  • International Socialist Review: “…the Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj is fighting a well-orchestrated campaign by Zionist groups…”

Furthermore: TigerHawk gets my point. And click here to see how Abu El-Haj will be spending April 28. Of course, she’s there as an American, with no particular axe to grind.

Dr. Esposito and the seven-percent solution

On By Martin Kramer

“Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

—Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Professor John L. Esposito runs a slick operation at Georgetown with $20 million of funding from Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The shared agenda of these two is to make us all feel guilty for having wondered, after 9/11, about Saudis, Muslims, and the contemporary teaching of Islam. Esposito now has a new book (with co-author Dalia Mogahed, who runs something called the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies), bearing the pretentious title Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. It’s based on gleanings from the Gallup World Poll.

The core argument of the book is that only 7% of Muslims are “politically radicalized,” and that “about 9 in 10 Muslims are moderate.” On what does this factoid rest? The authors explain (pp. 69-70):

According to the Gallup Poll, 7% of respondents think that the 9/11 attacks were “completely” justified and view the United States unfavorably…. the 7%, whom we’ll call “the politically radicalized” because of their radical political orientation… are a potential source for recruitment or support for terrorist groups.

So an essential precondition for being “politically radicalized” is to believe that 9/11 was “completely” justified. The pool of support is only 7%. Don’t you feel relieved?

Yet a year and a half ago, Esposito and Mogahed used a different definition of “radical,” in interpreting respondents’ answers to Gallup’s 9/11 question. In November 2006, they gave this definition:

Respondents who said 9/11 was unjustified (1 or 2 on a 5-point scale, where 1 is totally unjustified and 5 is completely justified) are classified as moderates. Respondents who said 9/11 was justified (4 or 5 on the same scale) are classified as radicals.

Wait a minute…. In 2006, then, these same authors defined “radicals” not only as Muslims who thought 9/11 was “completely justified” (5 on their scale), but those who thought it was largely justified (4 on their scale).

So for their new book, they’ve drastically narrowed their own definition of “radical,” to get to that 7% figure. And they’ve also spread the impression in the media that the other 93% are “moderates.” In 2006, their “moderates” included only Muslims who thought 9/11 was “totally” or largely unjustified (who answered 1 or 2 on a 5-point scale, where 1 is “totally unjustified”). But what about Muslims who answered with 3 or 4? Well, they weren’t “moderates” by 2006 standards. The 3’s were neither “moderates” nor “radicals,” and the 4’s were “radicals.” But this year, they’ve all been upgraded to “moderate” class, because they didn’t “completely justify” 9/11. Whether they largely justified it, or half-justified it, they’re all “moderates” now.

That’s certainly how the press has interpreted it. Here, for example, is the Agence France-Presse report on Esposito’s “findings”:

About 93 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are moderates and only seven percent are politically radical, according to the poll, based on more than 50,000 interviews.

Can there be a more distorted interpretation than that? Sure. Here’s the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, reporting the same “findings”:

The overwhelming majority of Muslims—93 percent—condemned the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Ah. So anyone who didn’t “completely justify” 9/11 is now thought to have somehow condemned it.

Because there’s no hard data in their book, just these percentages, the authors are directly responsible for the confusion they’ve created. Do they care? The “9 in 10 Muslims are moderates” mantra (p. 97) is precisely the “statistic” the authors want to stick in your head. To get it there, Esposito and Mogahed simply jiggled their own definition of “radical”—not my definition, mind you, but theirs. In the introduction to the book, the authors write: “Let the data lead the discourse.” What they’ve done is let their discourse dice the data.

So Esposito and Mogahed believe that a Muslim who thinks that 9/11 was three-quarters justified or half-justified (perhaps that’s bringing down just one of the Twin Towers?) is still a “moderate.” This allows them to leap to the conclusion that terrorism in the name of Islam is just… well, an aberration, like violent crime in America. Here it is, perhaps the most absurd passage ever written about terrorism:

Many continue to ask: If Muslims truly reject terrorism, why does it continue to flourish in Muslim lands? What these results indicate is that terrorism is as much an “out group” activity as any other violent crime. Just as the fact that violent crimes continue to occur throughout U.S. cities does not indicate Americans’ silent acquiescence to them, the continued terrorist violence is not proof that Muslims tolerate it. An abundance of statistical evidence indicates the opposite. (p. 95)

Of course, in America we don’t have vast numbers of people who completely or largely or half-justify violent crime. We don’t have bishops and journalists extolling its virtues. We don’t teach our children that they’ll go to paradise for killing a night attendant at a 7-11. And we don’t wait for someone else to fight our crime; we police ourselves. Terrorism continues to flourish in the Muslim world precisely because many of Esposito’s newly redefined “moderates” justify, excuse, and tolerate it—enough to allow it to burrow into the culture. This is why Who Speaks for Islam? is such a dangerous compendium of misinformation. Its purpose is to persuade us that Muslims don’t have to do much of anything, and that the onus is on us—to banish “Islamophobia,” or change our policies, or address the “grievances” of the “radicals.” The book is a slick version of 9/11 denial. Its message is that the terrorists did what they did despite being Arabs and Muslims.

Nowhere in the book, by the way, do the authors say just what percentage of Muslims think that 9/11 wasn’t done by Arabs, which you would imagine should preface any question about whether or not they think it was justified. Gallup, in its first major poll of world Muslim opinion after 9/11, reported that 61 percent of Muslims believed Arabs weren’t responsible for the attacks, and 21 percent said they didn’t know. A very large Pew poll of Muslim world opinion in 2006 reported the following:

In one of the survey’s most striking findings, majorities in Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan say that they do not believe groups of Arabs carried out the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The percentage of Turks expressing disbelief that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks has increased from 43% in a 2002 Gallup survey to 59% currently. And this attitude is not limited to Muslims in predominantly Muslim countries—56% of British Muslims say they do not believe Arabs carried out the terror attacks against the U.S., compared with just 17% who do.

How can a book subtitled What a Billion Muslims Really Think not make so much as a single mention of this pervasive 9/11 denial? How many hundreds of millions out of the billion think 9/11 wasn’t justified, because they suspect the CIA or the Mossad did it to smear the Muslims? And how would their believing that make them “moderate”?

On the Gallup website under “consulting,” Esposito is now billed as a “Gallup Senior Scientist.” In fact, there’s nothing “scientific” about the Saudi-fueled advocacy of John Esposito, whose underestimations of deadly trends in Islamism a decade ago contributed to the complacency that made 9/11 possible in the first place. He’s at it again, this time in partnership with the bottom-liners at Gallup. This book should carry a label on its jacket: Warning! Belief in Saudi-backed pseudo-science is dangerous to America’s health.

Update, April 12: Don’t miss Hillel Fradkin’s devastating review of Who Speaks for Islam? at Middle East Strategy at Harvard. “The book is a confidence game or fraud,” Fradkin writes, “of which Esposito should be ashamed. So too should the Gallup Organization, its publisher.”

Disraelia

On By Martin Kramer

Walter Laqueur, at 86, continues in his prolific and provocative ways. In the past couple of years, he’s published a memoir, a book on the new antisemitism, and another on the demise of Europe. It’s been quite a performance by any standard. Now, with a nod to April Fools’ Day and Israel’s 60th anniversary (the two are not to be confused), he’s produced a striking short paper, entitled Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008, for the new Middle East Papers series of Middle East Strategy at Harvard. It’s not so much a narrative history as a collection of “documents,” premised on a “what-if.” What if antisemitism—the modern ideology of hate and the resulting pogroms—had appeared not toward the end of the nineteenth century, but closer to its beginning? What if Disraeli then, rather than Herzl later, had seized the moment and inspired a mass migration of Jews to Ottoman Palestine? What if two million of them had made their way to the country by 1855? I won’t say more so as not to spoil the scenario. You can download the paper here.

Of course, the utility of counterfactual history is much disputed. Niall Ferguson has written the most sustained defense of it, within specific parameters. Whether Laqueur’s essay falls within them is an open question, but his purpose is somewhat different. It isn’t so much to argue that this might have been plausible, but that the position of a Disraelia in a present world order would be vastly superior to that of Israel today, largely by dint of its seniority and size. By the standards of nationalism, Zionism arose late, and the state of Israel—created perhaps at the last moment the West would have permitted it—has been handicapped by this belatedness.

Still, Israel in many respects does resemble Laqueur’s Disraelia. Laqueur writes in his conclusion:

There is much reason to believe that this state [of Disraelia], given a high birth rate, would have some sixty million inhabitants at the beginning of the 21st century. It would have advanced industries, leading the world in fields such as nuclear and computer technologies. It would be the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, economically reasonably healthy with a growth rate of 6-8 percent, competitive with Europe, America and even Asia. It would have powerful armed forces, living in peace with its neighbors, at least to the extent that peaceful relations could be expected in this unquiet part of the world. It would not be a model state, but by the standards of time and place, considered much better that average. No one would dare to question its right to exist, and those who did would not be taken seriously.

In fact, Israel is many of these things. Even with a much smaller population than the imagined Disraelia, Israel is a world leader in a host of technological fields, its economic growth rate has been remarkable, it does have a powerful armed force, and it has won a hard-earned peace with some of its much larger neighbors (“to the extent that peaceful relations could be expected”). As for oil, it is an open question whether it is a boon or a bane, given that large oil wealth correlates very poorly with democracy.

As for legitimacy, Laqueur plays a trick, since his Disraelia isn’t a Jewish state, or even a state of the Jews. It is a kind of binational or trinational state, of Jews, Arabs, and Kurds, in which “intermarriage, much to everyone’s surprise, is fairly high.” Separatist factions are ruthlessly suppressed. In a Middle East where even Kurds and Arabs cannot be kept in one state, there is something utterly utopian at the core of Disraelia. Indeed, it is this fantasy of supra-national coexistence that appeals to today’s “one-state-solution” enthusiasts, precisely those who question Israel’s right to exist.

The problem of legitimacy, then, may not be restricted to the size of the population, but may turn upon the essential character of the state. Laqueur’s Disraelia is perhaps aptly named, precisely because it is de-Israelized. It also might not have lasted into this century. Middle Eastern states that lack a primary nationality are today vulnerable precisely because they are empty of identity at the core. Multi-ethnic, religiously diverse Iraq is a case in point—and had a Disraelia emerged, it is just as easy to imagine it reaching the same tragic impasse, oil and all.

So pardon me, Walter, for preferring Israel as it is. I’ll take my chances. Still, he’s provoked thought as always, and in my role as the co-convener of Middle East Strategy at Harvard, I’m delighted he has done so in the inaugural number of Middle East Papers.