In recent weeks, controversy surrounding Israel and Palestine once again roiled UCLA’s campus. This time, the catalyst was a talk by Noura Erakat, a professor at Rutgers University, on the theme of “Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination.” Campus critics of the event argued that it lacked balance and contributed to a feeling of unsafety for many Jews on campus.
I went to Erakat’s talk and found it forceful in its presentation of the grave offenses Israel has committed against Palestinians, including its monstrous destruction of Gaza.
I did not find the talk antisemitic.
That said, it struck me as one-dimensional in its historical understanding of Zionism, which indeed can be deemed, according to the often-invoked terms of settler colonialism, a project of elimination. A more nuanced perspective would recognize that Zionism was also a project of salvation, intent not only on displacing Palestinians but on saving Jews as well.
I did not go to the counter event organized the same day on the theme “Is Anti-Zionism Racism?” That panel included a lawyer, a physician and an expert on the Holocaust. I heard from a number of people who went that they found it disappointing, in that it presented Zionism in rather superficial terms with little critical reflection.
Zionism began life in the late 19th century as a movement of national liberation that sought to solve the “Jewish Question” – chronic and punishing discrimination against Jews – in Europe. Today, I believe that it is the ideological umbrella for a doctrine of supremacy enshrined in the Nation State Law, using the Knesset version passed by the Israeli parliament in 2018 that privileges Jewish rights over all others.
What happened to Zionism between the late 19th century and the early 21st is a complex topic.
But one key question that arises is whether Israel’s very self-definition as a state of, by and for Jews, together with its dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, made it an exclusionary or racist state.
Can such a self-definition sit alongside a vision of a state that deems all within it as equal, Jews and non-Jews? People have asked similar questions about the United States, where many have noted the profound tension between the Founding Fathers’ embrace of democratic values and the foundational role of slavery and racial discrimination in the country.
Posing these questions makes it clear that academic freedom is not a distant, abstract principle. It is the lifeblood of the university without which it cannot go about its business.
A number of people with whom I’ve spoken have argued that it was inappropriate to hold the “Revisiting Zionism” event on campus.
I beg to differ.
It was legitimate to hold it on the grounds of academic freedom, just as it was to hold the “Is Anti-Zionism Racism?” event.
But academic freedom alone is not enough to sustain an intellectually vibrant campus. We should encourage direct dialogue between people who hold different, even sharply antagonistic, points of view.
At present, it seems impossible to mount a serious conversation about Zionism at UCLA that brings people of divergent perspectives together. This is unfortunate. Precisely at a time when we are resisting external pressure to adopt a narrow vision of intellectual conformity, we should cultivate a willingness to have difficult conversations.
To rebuild the muscle to engage people with different points of view requires developing new habits. We need to avoid the tendency to impute the worst motives to other people’s words; instead, we should ask them what they mean.
All too often, Zionists and anti-Zionists avoid asking the other what they mean when they use phrases such as “Israel as a Jewish state” or “from the river to the sea.”
We must push past this constraint to foster a real, if difficult, exchange of ideas.
Especially at this critical moment in the history of American higher education, we can and must do better.
David N. Myers teaches Jewish history at UCLA and is co-director of the UCLA Dialogue across Difference Initiative.
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