No politics or exclusivist politics?

O P I N I O N

In his opinion piece dated February 18, 2009, written partly in response to my opinion piece dated January 21, 2009, Dr. Yuri Leving stated that politics should be kept off campuses. He also implied that my discussion of the Israeli war on Gaza would lead to the promotion of hate and was associated with anti-Semitic trends on campuses, his disclaimer at the end notwithstanding. But what does it mean to keep politics off campuses? And why should our opinions be mischaracterized in order to undermine our academic freedom?

It is well-known that only totalitarian states attempt to keep politics off campuses. The Soviet Union under Stalin is a good example. As a professor of Middle Eastern Studies, I can point to Iraq under Saddam Hussein and increasingly Egypt under Husni Mubarak. (I stand by my criticism of the Egyptian regime as the most corrupt in the region. Its peace treaty with Israel does not provide it with any impunity. With or without that treaty, the Egyptian regime deserves all the criticism it gets.) In fact, even totalitarian states realize that it is impossible to keep politics off campuses and thus, they resort to repressing all politics on campuses except those that represent the state ideology. 

And politics go well beyond endorsement or rejection of political ideologies or state policies. Politics define our duties as citizens to discuss all matters related to society. Dalhousie University’s interest in environmental studies, for instance, is politics par excellence.  The academic community’s duty is to understand, debate, and discuss every issue related to human societies, not to mention its role in providing answers to the many questions and concerns raised by those societies. Campuses do not and cannot function as assembly factories; they are rather the fields of research, debate and critical thinking.

Thus, the demand to keep politics off campus is the most politicized statement. Moreover, such calls can never be sustained. For example, Dr. Leving himself is unable to endorse what he preaches. While he denies the rest of us the right to be politically engaged, he bestows that right only on those who conform to his ideological commitments. If politics should be kept off campuses, then SPME (Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) should be condemned, not promoted. After all, SPME is an academic community ideologically committed to Zionism and one of its objectives is to monitor academic discourses that criticize Zionism and the state of Israel. SPME’s definition of ‘peace’ is very misleading. While it acknowledges the right of Israel to exist, nowhere does it acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to have their own independent state. It is our duty as an informed community to scrutinize the meaning of ‘peace’ in this context rather than blindly adopting it. This ‘peace’ offers no concrete solutions; it only seeks to perpetuate the status-quo.

While monitoring anti-Semitic discourses, as one of SPME’s objectives, is a need, associating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, while all too common, is dangerous. Every person has the right to criticize a political ideology and a state, and Zionism and Israel are no exception. Anti-Semitism, however, is a completely different story and for this reason, the horizons should be kept clear on it in order for us all to be able to determine who the real anti-Semites are.
However, the reference to SPME and the association of anti-Zionism and any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism raises another important issue. There is no doubt that this has become a tactic to deny us the right to oppose the political ideology of Zionism and Israel’s policies shaped by that ideology. Why should we be denied that right? And what is at stake here, if not our freedom of expression itself? The Jewish community itself is full of anti-Zionist Jews and Israelis themselves engage on a daily basis in debating and criticizing their state’s policies.

Even if Zionism and Israel had no effect but on Zionists and Israelis, we still have every right to engage in a discussion about them, if we wish to do so. But we are talking here about a conflict involving too many parties. Discussing it cannot be a privilege of one particular group only. We assert not only our right to discuss those matters without being subjected to insinuations, innuendos and accusations of anti-Semitism but also our right to oppose Zionism and criticize Israel.

Criticism of exclusivist or radical trends within Islam and of Arab and Muslim regimes does not amount to Islamophobia, the same way anti-Zionism does not amount to anti-Semitism.  All ideologies and states are subject to criticism and opposition regardless of the religious legitimacy they seek. The Arab-Israeli conflict is too serious of an issue to be dealt with in either propagandist terms or an insinuating tone. As an academic, Dr. Leving serves his case better by engaging in a debate rather than attempting to stifle it.