Category: Sandbox

The Day the Rabbi Rescued Rashid

On By Martin Kramer

The spotlight in the Columbia crisis has shifted to Professor Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. He’s not a part of the reeking mess over at the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) department, where extremist professors stand accused of browbeating their students. But he’s become more outspoken on their behalf, and he’s been swept into the general controversy surrounding anti-Israel agitation by faculty.

As a result, the New York City Department of Education has dropped him from an outreach program to city teachers. Khalidi’s banishment is the subject of an article in today’s New York Times and a lengthy news piece in the current issue of the weekly Forward. People are asking just what Khalidi stands for.

Or who stands with him. In such confrontations, it’s often better to have someone else explain what you stand for—a prominent champion, preferably from the other side of the aisle, who’ll swear to your scholarship, moderation, and bona fides.

Khalidi has one in Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, former president of the American Jewish Congress, historian of Zionism, and frequent critic of the Jewish establishment and Israeli policies. The Forward aptly titled a review of his autobiography “The Great Gadfly.” As it happens, Hertzberg deems himself a great expert on Khalidi, with whom he co-taught a Columbia course some decades back. On that basis, he’s set out to reassure the Jewish public that Khalidi is a tough but decent adversary, whose views aren’t out of bounds.

He did that back in November, in an article he wrote for New York’s Jewish Week. There he revealed how he once intervened to overcome Jewish faculty opposition to Khalidi’s appointment at the University of Chicago. “I wrote the president of the University of Chicago that I found Khalidi to be a solid and serious academic, and that his personal politics were no more offensive than mine…. That was the end of the furor and Khalidi’s appointment went through.” In this week’s Forward, Hertzberg is quoted as saying that Khalidi “is about as virulently anti-Israel as the Likudniks are anti-Arab. Have we decided that we are going to throw all the Likudniks out of public life?” This evening, he and Khalidi are to appear together at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University, to speak about “Academic Freedom in a Time of Conflict.” It’s quite likely this venue will provide an opportunity for more endorsements and encomiums.

Now Rabbi Hertzberg is a very great authority on many things. I took his course on Zionism at Columbia nearly thirty years ago, and I wouldn’t want to get into a debate with him over Ahad Ha’am. But when it comes to his Palestinians, the rabbi is no maven.

Consider, for example, the late Edward Said. Hertzberg once told this very revealing story about what happened when he appeared together with the Palestinian champion, back in the early 1980s:

When I suggested beforehand that, in this superheated atmosphere, with the Israelis in Lebanon, we should make the most peaceful noises, he agreed absolutely. So, for 45 minutes, I gave my most dovish speech. He then came on the dais and made his most fire-eating speech. Afterward, he came up to me and said, “Arthur, now we must continue our conversation at breakfast when we get back to Columbia.”

On the face of it, this is a story about Said, but it really says more about Hertzberg. I’m guessing that Said didn’t give his most fire-eating speech. He simply gave his usual speech. If Hertzberg was taken aback, it’s because he’d made wishful assumptions about Said. The story isn’t about Said’s duplicity. It’s about Hertzberg’s naivete.

But there’s an even more telling example of his misreading of Said. In 2003, Hertzberg published a short book entitled The Fate of Zionism. In it, he rehashes his various intellectual battles, with himself cast in the role of defender of Israel and critic of Israeli policies. Hertzberg tells of how Said started out as “a proponent for the creation of an Arab Palestine, which he was sure would treat a Jewish minority with generosity of spirit.” Hertzberg then (rightly) denigrates this fantastic idea, and crosses swords with those other (Jewish) champions of the “one-state solution,” Noam Chomsky and Tony Judt. But then he offers this eye-opener (pp.137-38):

The only one who seems to have made some progress in his thinking, with the passing of the years, is Edward Said. He has apparently finally arrived at a rather unhappy acceptance of the partition of Palestine…. Said no longer calls for a unitary state in Palestine. He knows that if the Palestinians are not to lose all of Palestine, they must accept the partition of the land into two states. Said makes no secret of his hatred of Israel—not merely for Sharon and his followers, but for Israel as a whole—but he knows that it will continue to exist.

Said accepted the partition of Palestine? On what planet was Rabbi Hertzberg living, where he could have missed Edward Said’s celebrated migration from a two-state solution back to a one-state solution? At what point did he stop reading the New York Times Magazine, where Edward Said published an article entitled “The One-State Solution” in 1999? (Said: “Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable.”) At what point did he stop reading the weekend Haaretz, where Said made the case for one state directly to the Israeli public, in an interview in 2000? (Said: “The two-state solution can no longer be implemented.”) “For all his sloganizing abilities,” Herztberg announced, “Said is capable of being realistic.” You might have reached that conclusion, had you become too blind to read Said’s words or too deaf to hear them. Hertzberg obviously gave Said his blessing much like Isaac gave his to Jacob—thinking he was someone else altogether.

And that brings us back to Rashid Khalidi. There was a time when Khalidi, too, was a clear supporter of a two-state solution. It won him a reputation as a moderate among liberal Jews who were quick to embrace him. That reputation, maintained through the 1990s, also eased his transition from Chicago back to Columbia. On learning of Khalidi’s appointment, Columbia’s Hillel rabbi at the time called him “a reputable scholar with a balanced reputation who advocates a two-state solution.”

Well, maybe not. Khalidi often takes equivocal positions. He supports the Palestinian right to resist occupation, but he opposes terrorism. He denounces Israeli policies as racist, but won’t label Israel itself as racist. The same equivocation now clouds his approach to a solution. Khalidi, when asked, now says that it may be too late for two states—exactly the argument Said made when he became a one-stater. At a recent Columbia panel, Khalidi had an ideal opportunity to reaffirm his support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He didn’t take it, and he left the impression that he thought two states had become impractical. It seems that since coming to Columbia, Khalidi has moved along the same trajectory as Said, gradually closing the gap between his past positions and the positions of the man whose name now figures in his title.

And have no doubt what the “one-state solution” means: it is a “final solution” for Israel, a denial of the national aspirations and right to self-determination of nearly six million Israeli Jews. Indeed, support for a “one-state solution” is a more clear-cut marker of extremism than support for terrorism. The list of terrorists who’ve become statesmen is long, and it includes Israelis and Palestinians. But adoption of the “one-state solution” is a call for the elimination of the state of Israel in its entirety—a kind of mass destruction that goes way beyond the tactic of terrorism. For that reason, one-staters have nothing to contribute to any form of dialogue, and no interest in it either, since they have only non-negotiable demands: the unilateral and unconditional surrender of Israel, the complete dismantlement of its institutions, and the final submersion of the remaining Jews beneath a wave of Palestinian “refugees” claiming their inalienable “right of return.”

This is where Edward Said ended up, and this is where Rashid Khalidi is headed, if he isn’t there already. That’s not the Palestinian equivalent of the “Likudnik” position, which today is predicated on disengagement and the road-map to a two-state solution. And that’s why Rabbi Hertzberg should look again before blessing Khalidi again, lest he appear (again) like an out-of-touch fool. Sure, Khalidi is entitled to the full protections of academic freedom (and they aren’t endangered). But is he entitled to the full sympathies of the people who will fill NYU’s Center for Jewish Student Life, as someone who’s part of the solution to the MEALAC problem? Or is he now part of the problem—a glib version of a MEALAC extremist (without the abuse), and someone whose views desperately need to be balanced at Columbia?

Hertzberg (in The Fate of Zionism, p.120) makes this promise: “Even Jews like me who have been opposed to the creeping annexation of the West Bank since it began in the late 1960s, will never make common cause with those who want to put an end to the Zionist state.” Well, rabbi, you’ll wind up doing just that if you don’t pay closer attention to what your Palestinian intellectual friends are saying, or if you deliberately look the other way. That means asking tough questions and insisting on clear answers. When might that start? How about tonight?

Update: Here is a morning-after report on the panel. A bit sketchy.

The rise and fall of the third-rate

On By Martin Kramer

The Jerusalem Post runs an article today about the new Middle East center at Brandeis University, with a choice quote on Middle Eastern studies from university president Jehuda Reinharz: “My problem is not the anti-Zionism or even that many of them are anti-American, but that they are third-rate. The quality of the people [in Middle Eastern studies] is unlike any of the qualities we expect in any other field.” The head of the new center, Shai Feldman, says that it will “provide objective which means credible scholarship on the region,” something which “does not exist in other places.”

The same article gives a word to Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Edward Said Professor. He denounces what he calls “organized and systematic attacks on the entire field,” part of “an unending witch hunt against people who can be portrayed as ‘extreme’ through selective and out-of-context quotations, innuendo and outright falsification.” In the end, “the only people left in the field will be discredited Uncle Toms and people who never say anything of consequence.”

I wonder who Khalidi means when he speaks of “Uncle Toms.” Would that be Khalil Shikaki, the Ramallah-based analyst and pollster, or Abdel Monem Said Aly, head of Egypt’s Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies? They’ll be the first visiting senior fellows at the new Brandeis center. (I’ll join them, Kanan Makiya, and many others, at the new center’s inauguration in April.)

Or maybe he means Arab scholars who appear on the podium of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy which would include Malik Mufti, who heads Middle Eastern studies at Tufts, and Ibrahim Karawan, who directs the center at the University of Utah. Khalidi once denounced such Arabs (in Arabic) on Al-Jazeera, for collaborating with this “most important Zionist propaganda tool in the United States,” “this Israeli institute in Washington.” (That statement is both false and yes extreme.)

The truth is that when it comes to witch hunts, Khalidi’s crowd are the masters. They’ve been doing it for a quarter of a century, zeroing in on scholars suspected of “Zionist” leanings and denouncing Arab “Uncle Toms,” in a systematic campaign meant to purge all dissenters from the field. Their mistake at Columbia arose from hubris. Having purged the ranks of the faculty and the grad students, they thought they could intimidate the undergrads too. Big mistake: the undergrads are the most diverse part of any campus, they’re the most resistant to thought control, and they rebelled from below.

Khalidi, who is a chaired professor, the head of a Title VI-funded Middle East center (half a million taxpayer dollars annually), and a former president of the Middle East Studies Association, personifies the discredited establishment. Now it’s in decline, its image tarnished by shoddy advocacy “scholarship,” and no amount of Khalidian obfuscation can stop the slide. (He may even accelerate it.) Brandeis is the first challenger. There will be many more.

Mr. Sharansky, ease my doubts

On By Martin Kramer

On February 23, 2005, Tel Aviv University hosted a panel on democratization, featuring Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and political prisoner, who currently serves as the Israeli minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs; Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri; and Martin Kramer. The panel focused on Sharansky’s much-discussed book, The Case for Democracy, which President George Bush has praised as the best argument for his vision of a democratic world order. (Bush also received Sharansky at the White House to discuss the book.)

The following are Martin Kramer’s remarks, made in response to Sharansky’s presentation.

I gather that my function on this occasion is to play the role of the Middle East expert. Theories have been propounded by my fellow panelists, broad generalizations have been made. The question you will ask is whether any of this makes sense to someone who spends most of his time watching the Arab-Muslim world.

Now area experts, on the Middle East or any other area, often suffer from one of two weaknesses (and sometimes from both of them). The first is an attitude to the peoples they study that is colored by emotion, so that expertise is vitiated by bias. The second is an overwhelming knowledge of detail, enough to defeat any generalization, including useful and valid ones. These two weaknesses explain why so many policymakers and generalists have decided that Middle East experts are useless, or even worse than useless. I certainly have contributed my share to that attitude, having written a book with the subtitle “The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies.”

But if experts still have some value, perhaps it is not in the answers they provide, but in the questions they pose. And in that capacity, I am going to pose a few questions to Mr. Sharansky. He does not claim to have made a lifelong study of the Middle East, its peoples, or its cultures. His argument is based on the idea that all peoples share a love for freedom, regardless of history or culture, and that the United States should seize upon this universal yearning and make it the basis of its policy in the Arab-Muslim world. It is said of the Jews that they suffer from this peculiar flaw: they allow the least bit of doubt to be decisive. So let me express a little bit of doubt, in the hope that Mr. Sharansky will ease it.

Why the tyranny?

My first doubt has to do with the reason the Middle East remains the last redoubt of tyranny and despotism. (Even before Mr. Sharansky’s intervention, the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya described these regimes as “republics of fear.”) In particular, was this situation created by the West, and has it been sustained by the West (as Mr. Sharansky suggests)? Or does it have an indigenous origin, and is it sustained from within?

Until Mr. Sharansky came along, the argument that the West was to blame figured most prominently on the far left. The far left systematically accused the West, and particularly the United States, of installing and backing dictators, of keeping them in power by trading lethal weapons for their oil, and so on. The most significant chapter in this narrative revolved around the CIA plot to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, in a coup that restored the Shah to power. The anti-imperialist left blamed the United States for the frustration of the freedom-loving peoples of Iran, and indeed the entire Middle East. This theme is pervasive in the writings of Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and the late Edward Said.

I have a hard time accepting this notion that the West, and particularly the United States, is responsible in any significant degree for the fact that the region is ruled by tyrants and despots. If I had to draw up a list of causes, I would start with the patriarchal social order, which venerates strong authority figures and marginalizes women; the primacy of kinship, tribalism, and sectarianism, which blocks the growth of civil society; oil, which concentrates wealth in the hands of rulers and discourages productive work; and bad memories of past attempts at constitutionalism, which ended in failure.

Not only do these regimes not depend for their survival on Western support; they survive even in the face of Western boycott and pressure. Look at the Iranian regime, which remains firmly in power despite a quarter of a century of sanctions and attempts at isolation. Each promised wave of reform breaks on the resolve of its clerical rulers. Look at Saddam Hussein during the long years of sanctions. Everyone hoped the Iraqi people would find a way to get rid of the dictator, but they did not, and the job had to be done with U.S. arms. The longest-ruling dictator in the region is Libya’s Qadhafi. To what Western government does he owe his longevity?

Regimes do not fall for domestic reasons, whether they are pro-Western or anti-Western, whether they trade everything with the West or languish under sanctions. This is because survival does not depend on outside support. It depends on inside support. Some of that is the result of fear, but it is not just fear of the ruler; it is fear of the foreigner, of the neighbor, of the political, social and cultural chaos that might accompany change.

Who wants freedom?

And this brings me to my second doubt: the idea that the peoples of the Middle East all want freedom. Now of course there are liberals who want freedom as we would understand it—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of religion, all belonging to the autonomous individual. These are the “freedom of” people, many of them with direct experience of Western democracy, having visited at length or lived in exile in the West. They have created various associations and NGOs, which Western governments and foundations fund. They are good people. Unfortunately, they are relatively few.

A much larger group is what I would call the “freedom from” people. Their idea of freedom is somewhat different. It is freedom from oppressive government, not so much for the individual, as for the collective—the kinship group, the tribe, the religious sect. The quest for this kind of freedom has existed in the Middle East from time immemorial. The late Elie Kedourie put it best. “The Middle Easterner,” he said, “is very far from thinking that he has a right to have a say in politics. All he wants is to be left alone and not to be oppressed.” Elsewhere he wrote of the Syrians, as archetypes of the Arabs, that “they have never been much accustomed to being asked their opinion about their rulers. For them the happy man has always been he who has a beautiful wife, a comfortable house, a lucrative occupation, who does not know government, and whom government does not know; in short, the private man.”

No doubt this is a desire for freedom, but it is freedom from, not freedom of. What is the difference? You may desire freedom from oppressive government, and still deny your beautiful wife the freedom to drive, or get an education, or go about in public. You may fervently wish not to know government, but still expect blasphemers and adulteresses to be punished by law. You may fight for freedom from oppression for yourself, and not much care if your neighbor is oppressed, especially if he is from a different family, or tribe, or sect.

It can well be argued that democracy’s concepts of freedom began with this more basic concept. The concept of “freedom of” begins with the desire for “freedom from.” But this is where there is a blockage in the Arab-Muslim world, an obstacle, and it brings me to my third doubt.

An Arab exception?

It has to do with a certain understanding of Islam, sometimes called Islamism. Muslims who are under its sway uphold divinely-revealed Islamic law as the blueprint for the just society. I will spare you the details, but this law is not compatible with democracy, or even with a plural society. It is predicated on a set of dichotomies, primarily between believer and unbeliever, secondarily between men and women. Some of its provisions are open to interpretation, but it is not infinitely elastic. Most importantly, Islamic law does not recognize the autonomous sovereignty of man, only that of God. And Islamists are largely indifferent to the means by which they would establish Islamic law and the regime to implement it.

To those who want freedom from oppressive government, the Islamists offer as an alternative not the collective will of the people, but the divinely-revealed message of God. And that is the blockage that prevents the transition to democracy. There is a widespread desire for “freedom from” in the Arab-Muslim world, for an end to tyrannical government. But the Islamists warn that “freedom of” is even more dangerous than tyranny, because it will unravel the entire social order. They offer a different alternative, which might be called “submission to”—submission to God. (Islam means submission.) This alternative has great appeal. Every single polity that has opened itself to free and unencumbered elections in this part of the world has seen Islamists make tremendous gains, or even take power.

Is it possible that one part of the world, one unique nexus of history and culture, is an exception to the rule that leads peoples to democracy? If you answered “yes” in Middle Eastern studies over the past thirty years, you were denounced as a heretic, or even worse, as an orientalist. The worst orientalist thought crime was the belief in Islamic or Muslim exceptionalism. Now that same belief has become a thought crime in the neoconservative doctrine.

But to hold the view that there are no exceptions, you have to believe that the passage of power to Islamists is not point final, but an interim phase. To go from “freedom from” to “freedom of,” Arabs have to pass through “submission to.” To get from tyranny to democracy, they need an interim phase of God’s sovereignty—God as a transitional figure, God as Gorbachev.

Alas, to date, there is not a single example of any polity that has followed this path to democracy. Above all, Iran is clearly stuck in the “submission to God” stage. The reason is that the people who exercise power in the name of God do not see themselves as managing a transition to a “freedom of” society. Quite the opposite: they use their power precisely to block the emergence of those freedoms, because they cannot relinquish power exercised in God’s name.

Proceed with caution

So I have expressed my doubts. Having done that, I am not going to follow the Jewish route, and permit them to be decisive. I do not think that democracy is achievable in all of the polities of the region. But it is a diverse region, and the conditions exist in a few settings for progress. And I am not so certain of my own generalizations that I would disparage a determined effort to generate positive change, by an American democracy galvanized by 9/11.

In the promotion of democracy, however, it is important to bear two things in mind. The first is to distinguish between the places where pressing for it might do good from those places where it is more likely to do harm. You need experts for that.

The second is to remember that these are times of war, not times of peace, and that means we may continue to find ourselves in bed with dictators and despots for some time to come. “Of course, a time of war is different,” Mr. Sharansky has told an interviewer. “No one would have expected Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943 to say to Stalin, ‘You are not our ally because you have the gulag.'” Neoconservatives believe that we are now in another world war—that is how Norman Podhoretz described it recently. If this is a world war against jihadism or what some call Islamo-fascism, we need allies, and we will continue to find them in certain dictatorial regimes. We have to be careful not to undermine them, before we have defeated our greater enemies. After all, we do not want to become unwitting agents of Osama bin Laden, destroying the existing order he failed to destroy, merely to open the route to power for his admirers and fellow travellers.

Like Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, Natan Sharansky has given us a vision. Like their vision, his too provokes thought. Unlike theirs, his has been endorsed by the most powerful people on earth. And unlike mere professors, he is also a man of action. He knows that ideas have consequences. This means he has a certain obligation to continue to interpret his own ideas, lest they be misused. I hope I have persuaded him to shift a few emphases. Call it “expert advice,” given at no charge.