Category: Sandbox

In the air

On By Martin Kramer

I’m heading out for three weeks of travel tomorrow. I’m not one of those people who blogs from internet cafes, so this site will slow down until mid-April.

This is some of what I’ll be up to during my travels:

:: I’m participating in the 30th anniversary symposium of Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The theme of the symposium: “Arab Studies: A Critical Review.” Here are the schedules for the first and second days. I’ve been included in a panel entitled “Arab Studies in the Cross-hairs.” (“This panel is dedicated to the current debates, critiques and attacks on Arab studies. It will consider the purposes, accomplishments, and shortcomings of Arab studies as a field of study.”) I commend the organizers for extending this interesting invitation to me. I hope to learn much and generate a few sparks.

:: I’ll also be participating in the inaugural conference of the new Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. The center is envisioned as an alternative to the usual run of Middle East centers. It’s directed by a friend and former colleague, Shai Feldman, who’s just assumed his duties. I’ll be speaking at the opening panel, on “Middle Eastern Studies in the U.S.: What is the Debate About?” (Joining me on that panel: Steven Caton, director of the Middle East center at Harvard, and Malik Mufti, director of the program at Tufts.) Here’s the full program (pdf). I have great hopes for the Brandeis initiative.

:: Finally, I’ll be off to Doha, Qatar, to participate in the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a joint project of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and the state of Qatar. (I attended last year as well.) This is a see-and-be-seen event, this year featuring Henry Kissinger, Joschka Fischer, Charlie Rose, and Samuel Huntington, and Arab luminaries such as Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Abuol Gheit, activist Tariq Ramadan, and Al-Jazeera host Faisal al-Qasim. Participants also get a warm greeting from the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad. Fun and educational.

I can’t promise to make any postings on any of this before I return home in mid-April. But my impressions of all these gatherings will eventually find their place right here. Check back.

Will Princeton Intercept the Palestine Football?

On By Martin Kramer

On March 31, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor, will deliver what the New York Sun has called a “job talk” at Princeton. Earlier this month, the paper reported that “Khalidi has thrown his hat into the ring for the Niehaus chair in contemporary Muslim studies at Princeton and to take charge of that university’s Transregional Institute, according to the sources, who are at the New Jersey school.”

At Columbia, Khalidi directs the Middle East Institute, and its scope is fairly obvious from its name. But what is the Transregional Institute? It’s short for the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia—the most pretentious and overblown name in the field. It’s also quite meaningless. The Transregional Institute has rather narrower interests, and it devotes an inordinate amount of time to one country: Palestine.

I first wrote about the Transregional Institute’s Palestine obsession back in 2002, when it sponsored a lopsided lecture series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This past winter, the Institute caused yet another stir, in announcing that its theme for the next academic year would be “Society under Occupation: Contemporary Palestinian Politics, Culture and Identity.” The announcement had a propagandistic tone, and complaints began to reach Nassau Hall. On February 4, the Transregional Institute and the university issued a joint statement, claiming that “our focus will be on the society and culture, not on the politics. We will be approaching our study from a variety of perspectives, aided by speakers who will represent a variety of viewpoints.”

Maybe, maybe not. It remains to be seen. But beyond this indication of intent, the statement also made an assertion of fact. It sought to justify the choice of the Palestinians as a theme of study, by making this claim:

There are close relationships between the United States and Israel and there is considerable study in this country of Israeli society and culture, but little is known about contemporary Palestinian culture, society, political thinking, and identity.

This immediately rang false to me. I have a pretty good sense of what’s being done, and in what quantities, and it has long seemed to me that the study of the Palestinians is a virtual industry in American academe. To provide some empirical evidence for this anecdotal impression, I consulted the members’ directory of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

Members of MESA are asked to indicate their “areas of interest” by country when they join the organization, and with a click you can bring up all the members who’ve declared an interest in a particular country. These are the results for some of the more important countries:

  • Egypt: 504
  • Iran: 429
  • Turkey: 338
  • Palestine: 297
  • Israel: 181
  • Iraq: 122
  • Morocco: 105
  • Saudi Arabia: 57

Now look at these numbers, and tell me that the Palestinians are neglected. To judge from MESA’s membership rolls, the opposite is true: there are more American academics per Palestinian than there are for any other nationality in the region. Even if you could somehow rustle up another one hundred academics specializing in Israel—people who’ve forgone the pleasures of MESA membership—the score would only be even. The Palestinians are right up there behind Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, the cultural and strategic heavyweights of the Middle East, each of which has a population of close to 70 million. And the fact that so many more people work on the Palestinians than on Iraq and Saudi Arabia combined leaves one wondering (again) just what taxpayers are getting for their subsidies to the field.

All this is evidence of a simple truth. For at least twenty years, the Palestinians have been the chosen people of Middle Eastern studies. Start with institutions. You’ve got the Institute for Palestine Studies (with offices in Beirut, London, and Washington), and the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC). There’s the Journal of Palestine Studies, a highly partisan periodical nevertheless published by the University of California Press. There’s even an Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, 700 pages in two columns, already in a revised edition. And there’s a never-ending parade of books, articles, conferences, and film festivals.

Academe offers powerful incentives and reinforcements for academic recruits into Palestinian studies. If you want to make a name for yourself and get published by a top university press, one of the surest routes is to produce work on the Palestinians. (Even the current president of the Association of Israel Studies is best known not for his work on Israel, but for a book on the Palestinians.) And if you’re a Palestinian working on the Palestinians, you’ll have plenty of allies in building your academic future. The situation at Columbia, where almost every department feels it must have someone in the Edward Said mold, is only the most extreme case.

I’m not blaming Palestinian academics and their sympathizers for this state of affairs—to the contrary. They’ve operated with admirable unity of purpose in their collective self-interest. It’s not just that they’re talented, it’s that they promote one another generously and shamelessly. For a bit of the flavor, read the obituary of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod by Edward Said, or the obituary of Edward Said by Joseph Massad. This is how the Palestinians built an academic empire: by lending one another a hand. Hats off to them.

So knowing all this, I’m genuinely offended when Princeton University, my alma mater, insults my intelligence with the line that “little is known about contemporary Palestinian culture, society, political thinking, and identity,” as if the Palestinians were a remote hill tribe. It’s simply false, and I’m left wondering whether the statement’s authors are just ignorant of reality, or somehow intend to throw the public off the scent.

So let me make it that much harder for Nassau Hall to profess ignorance or practice denial. The Transregional Institute is an outpost of Palestinian advocacy, the Princeton retail outlet of the solidarity industry. Its function is to sew the Princeton label on the Palestinian cause. If the university decides to make the Institute more visible by recruiting a high-profile Palestinian polemicist to run it, let it not be surprised when lightning repeatedly strikes the rod.

I’d hate to see Princeton reduced to the state of Columbia, especially since a righteous few over in Near Eastern Studies have managed to buck the wider trend. And I’m still sentimental about the place. But my pastime is chasing academic tornados, and if one crosses the Hudson and races down the Turnpike—well, I’ll be right behind it.

Columbia Nation-alized

On By Martin Kramer

The Nation weighs in with an editorial and a long piece on the Columbia controversy. The editorial is truly revolting. It shows precisely the same contempt for the students that the offending professors showed. They’re called “foot soldiers” of “right-wing crusaders like Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Charles Jacobs and David Horowitz,” and they’re dismissed as “undergraduate zealots.” The whole story is forced into The Nation‘s standard template: “right-wing Jewish pressure” is exercising mind control.

Anyone who’s gotten close to the Columbia story knows that this is a lie. These are Columbia students, and they’re among the best. They’ve determined their own course. A lot of them are on the liberal-left side of the spectrum, and they seek advice from all sorts of people, on campus and off. In the film Columbia Unbecoming, they sound restrained, moderate, and perfectly credible. The offensive words they attribute to their professors also sound perfectly believable, because they echo those professors’ on-the-record extremism. The profs are the proven zealots. The Nation has exploited the media silence the students imposed on themselves until the university’s ad hoc committee announces its findings. I hope the students reconsider, and zap The Nation right back.

I don’t have the patience to cover all the elisions, omissions, and distortions that mar Scott Sherman’s article. Suffice it to say that the “roots” of the Columbia crisis aren’t in a concerted campaign by Jewish organizations to “take back” campuses. The “roots” lie in the relentless quarter-century campaign by the Saidians to purge departments of all dissenters. If you don’t even allude to that, you don’t get it, period. Instead, Sherman takes readers on long detours, the sole purpose of which is to slip in names like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol. You see, The Nation believes there is a master plan.

Sherman mentions me every few pages, first introducing me as someone who “has taken it upon himself to police and patrol the discipline of Middle East studies.” Where are my police powers? I’m a guy with a website, paid for out of pocket. It’s The Nation, on every newsstand, that takes it upon itself to police debate, by tarring people recklessly with the brush of McCarthyism. I’m “an intellectual architect” of H.R.3077. I like the way that sounds, but I’ve no idea what it means, and I suspect Sherman hasn’t either. I’m an “indefatigable polemicist and critic,” who is “vituperative in his attacks.” Maybe the editors can explain to me why the magazine hasn’t used the term polemicist to describe Joseph Massad (he’s “deliberately provocative and utterly uncompromising,” which sounds principled and deep), or Rashid Khalidi (the editorial calls him “redoubtable,” which suggests defense rather than offense). These two are as indefatigable, polemical, and vituperative as I am on any given day, except they don’t have weblogs. You have to suffer through their classes or watch them on Al-Jazeera or slog through their books to feel their truncheons.

Bottom line: this issue of The Nation should be tossed in the trash. But on second thought, I don’t mind being called indefatigable. I’ll underline that word, and send the article to my folks.