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The gatekeepers
Donna Robinson Divine
ABSTRACT
āThe Gatekeepersā describes the reaction of a handful of well established Israel Studies scholars to a special issue of the journal Israel Studies called āWord Crimes: Reclaining the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflictā. These professors preferred to denounce rather than engage with the arguments and analyses presented in the special issue deploying their authority to try to silence this challenge to the conventional discourse on the Middle East Conflict.
Published in April 2019, the Special Issue of Israel Studies hit a nerve so raw it still tingles online journals and newspapers. As one of the co-editors who conceived the project which has come to be known as Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, I am flattered by the attention but troubled that the argument it advances has been ignored by so many.1 Because a handful of established scholars seemingly preferred to denounce rather than engage with the issues raised in this volume, they effectively ended up grafting a level of legitimacy on the highly flawed discourse the Special Issue examined. One might well ask why an exploration and deconstruction of a discourse would elicit such blasts of hostility against the project and so unabashedly mete out savage insults to its contributors.
Word Crimes is meant to examine the linkage between language and thought ā long a staple of philosophical inquiry2āand to ask whether deploying terms like genocide or apartheid offers a genuine understanding of the complexities of the Conflict. It aims to call attention to how certain words and ideas have begun to settle into a public discourse and to take the measure of the consequences for the academic study of Israel, of Palestinians, of the Conflict and not incidentally, of politics. The politics propagated by this discourse is binaryāfit into good or bad rubrics that appeal to feelings not into categories that show the way power is actually wielded. Identifying the words that have become the central elements in this discourse, the volume shows how a lexical transformation has acquired a totemic standing in the academy and is spreading beyond campus perimeters with a momentum augmented in an increasingly networked world. Word Crimes focuses on terms because they function much like oracles coaxing judgements in the absence of evidence so long as Israel is assigned to a rhetorical zone once reserved for brutal regimes committing ghastly crimes. Events are pigeonholed into moral absolutes that appeal to emotions or to a larger ideological agenda and not to an accurate depiction of the issues and of the reasons for the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Word Crimes stirred up a powerful anger provoking a sense of righteousness but not a clarity of thought. From the moment it was posted online, alarm was sounded when people saw only the title and table of contents. One person expressed shock at āthe inflammatory and demonizing titleā while another asked āwho are exactly the criminals and what should their punishment be?ā3 ā all on open access listservs where rage accumulated and quickly catalysed into charges that the Special Issue compromised the intellectual status of the Journal and of the Association for Israel Studies because of the Journalās loose relationship with it. In fact, this one Special Issue was said to have the potential to wreak havoc with the entire field of Israel Studies.
Much of the anger was directed at me because at the time, I served as both President of the Association for Israel Studies and one of the editors of Word Crimes. Every comment I issued, as one of the volumeās editors, was construed as an official statement of the Association inevitably restraining them. I completed my term of office in June 2019, and for that reason, I am no longer constrained in what I can say. Moreover, I am convinced that there is more to say particularly about the factors promoting, if not causing, the uproar. Ironically, the reactions, with their remarkably formulaic denunciations, were filtered through the very template Word Crimes interrogated. Critics dismissed Word Crimes characterising it as a species of Israeli government propaganda. Rating a project as failing to meet minimal academic standards without offering credible evidence is, itself, so transgressive of academic norms that it ought to be the focus for close examination particular since the project was clearly intended to open not close down discussion. But before scrutinising the reaction, let me review the reasons we ā the editors and contributors ā decided to subject what is becoming a common discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to sustained analysis and to do so, by examining its linguistic parts.
The special issue
As much as the essays in the collection are about words, they are also about history and politics. The first section focuses on termsāindigeneity, colonialism, occupation, terrorism, and apartheid ā that claim to disclose new aspects of the Conflictās history and of the mechanisms deployed to perpetuate it. It is worthwhile to note that utilising these terms as historical paradigms has generated no new data or information that could be the basis for a new or deeper understanding of the Conflict. Rather they have seized attention because they propel a supposed link between Israel and Zionism and an imperialism enlightened scholars are expected to condemn instantly converting a vocabulary of historical explanation into a crude moral idiom. The Special Issueās second section focuses on terms coopted from the modern Jewish experience ā holocaust, refugee, human rights, Zionism, and Israel Lobby ā to show how they have been projected on to the experience of Palestinians in order to transfer the imaginative narrative of one beleaguered people to another. Finally, the volume evaluates concepts that are decidedly post-modern inventions ā Islamophobia, intersectionality, pink washing. These trendy terms aim to rally allies around a new logic of ethical reasoning and political action. The last essay in the volume addresses the contorted reasoning required to apply the pivotal concept ācivil societyāātaken for granted as expanding democracies in the late twentieth centuryāto NGOs whose actions are not simply funded but also programmed by foreign governments and whose ties to movements thriving on acts of terror are well-known and well-documented. Such linkages are more likely to deny than preserve the autonomy believed central to civil society and to democracy diminishing not expanding a spirit of active political engagement among Palestinians.
This academic jargon now so fully draped in scholarly prestige implies that Israelās founding in 1948 is not settled history. The intention is not simply to raise ethical questions but also to suggest the possibility of righting what is taken for granted as an historical wrong. Those who subscribe to this approach are not talking about historical facts that continue to weigh heavily on present circumstances which is to say the persistence of Israelās unresolved conflicts with Palestinians, problems that affect the Jewish stateās politics and complicate the operations of its democracy. The implication that shadows this discourse is that history can be reversed registering a kind of magical thinking more fit for novels than for classrooms. More than 70 years since its founding and more than a half century since the war that reconfigured the Jewish state and not incidentally, the entire Middle East, raising the same questions posed during the first decades of the twentieth century opens a chasm between language and reality.
Driving this change, as all others on and off campuses, is the emergence of a new media landscape that has offered scholars new forms of expression. Blogging and tweeting are increasingly importantāsigns of savvy entrepreneurship bringing publicity most colleges and universities welcome. But they can blur the lines between free speech and the kind of speech possessing academic integrity that expresses the findings of careful research, logical and rational probing, and is made available for rigorous testing. Once there was a clear differentiation between polemics and scholarship; now the two have been fused sometimes by jargon laden theories inaccessible to anyone without years of graduate study. All of this fosters a social pressure that aims to close discussion, not open it, but above all, creates the impression that only a campus generated Intifada against the idea of a Jewish state can bring justice to Palestine and define progressive politics in the twenty-first century. The challenges posed by students and faculty who embrace these notions are considerable, but they constitute a more immediate threat to the academy than to Israel. Faculty need to be reminded that their mission is to teach students how to think not what to think. And students must be given the tools required for confronting ideas they do not like or that make them uncomfortable, always holding them tightly to the principle of engaging respectfully with those with whom they disagree. That surely means more time should be spent in the library than in sessions organising protests. Far better to read about the Dark Ages than to recreate them on campus.
Word Crimes offers potent insight into the difference between how language operates as an echo chamber advocating a mission and how it functions when it strives for exactitude and for a reliable assessment of a complex situation. In a sense, Word Crimes functions as a figurative exorcism breaking the spell of a discourse by exposing its scholarly weaknesses. Its essays are motivated by nothing more than the conviction that conclusions must be supported by facts and tested in accordance with the principles long undergirding the academy and the ones primarily responsible for bestowing legitimate praise and power on it. To repeat: this collection is as important for the academy as it is for the study of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict.
The uproar
The all-too common habit of letting emotions shape campus discourse on this topic produced reactions to Word Crimes far in excess of what is warranted by any measurable intellectual standard. Why scholars whose hold on the academic study of Israel is taken for granted and whose research was praised in the volume allowed their feelings to bury their logic is worth considering since their own careful work has been diminished by a vocabulary now serving a cause rather than the historical record. Let me elaborate. Consider how the provocative discussions of settler colonialism generated by Gershon Shafirās 1989 Land, Labour, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882ā19144 advanced discussions of the relationship between land and nationalism even as it sparked investigations of the many contradictions between Zionism and other settler colonial societies.
Then ponder the current branding of Israel as a settler colonial society that has had such a catalytic effect on destroying the idea of a legitimate Jewish state whatever its borders or policies. A settler-colonialist Israel delivers up a Jewish state that presumably developed a rationale adequate to justify the use of force not in order to survive or to place moral restraints on its use but rather to mask its atrocities. Building its claims on the idea that the plough is no less an instrument of violence than the sword, the settler colonial paradigm means that Israel, by its very nature, is a country engaged in an ethnic cleansing with genocidal tendencies, a disciplined criminal action by Jews to wipe out of existence a people whose nationalist ambitions stand in their way.5
That scholars who judged the special issue a badge of shame simply for tackling a discourse so clearly contaminated by politics stoked the rage and drummed it up until it drew media attention and became a matter of public debate suggest how beholden leaders in this field are to a hermetic so-called progressive view of this Conflict. Some resigned from the Israel Studies editorial board to demonstrate the depth of their opposition to Word Crimes calling public attention to their opposition by granting interviews in mainstream media outlets. Some took to social media to weave a tale valorising all sorts of disinformation while pulling no punches or adhering to no recognisable standards. Denouncing the essays rather than engaging with the arguments violated what was once a foundational educational value: that the purpose of scholarship is to investigate that which is taken for granted. Dismissing the essays also allowed people to avoid having to think about where their own academic politics are taking the study of Israel. No surprise that in these overheated reactions, there was more than a hint that the field of Israel Studies has to adopt language acceptable to BDS proponents to prove its bona fides.. Condemning Word Crimes as āOrwellianā may, perhaps, be best understood as an illustration of a collective Freudian projection.
Denunciations so promiscuously pitched over social media limit access and/or insight into the thinking behind these views. But the letter of resignation written and signed by some members of the Journalās editorial advisory board, the unmonitored and open listservs that triggered alarm against Word Crimes, newspaper articles, and petitions all discredited the Special Issue and maligned the people who put it together in remarkably similar language quickly translated into sound bites.6
The letter of resignation listed a series of demands ā they turned out to be ultimatums ā intended to repair what was viewed as a flawed review process responsible for an issue dismissed as advocacy. But the charges forming the reasons for their resignation not only lacked coherence they also, if true, argued for remaining on the Board if only to safeguard its intellectual quality going forward. Word Crimes was the eighteenth special issue of Israel Studies, the first to elicit this kind of opposition and raise questions about the review process. Opponents demanded new procedures that would give the editorial board a well-defined role in determining the content and topic ...
