Just a reminder for those in the area: I’ll be giving a talk on “The Israeli Occupation and Settlement Enterprise: What It Is, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It,” this Saturday, May 21, at 11 am at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Princeton, located at 50 Cherry Hill Rd, Princeton, New Jersey, 08540. (I incorrectly described the start time in a previous post as 1 pm, but that’s when it ends.) The talk is sponsored by String of Pearls Reconstructionist Jewish Congregation of Princeton, and is open to the public. Thanks to Hilary Persky, String of Pearls’s Secretary, for the invitation. The talk takes place immediately after the Congregation’s Saturday morning sabbath celebration. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Israel
Another Day, Another Assault: Everyday Life in Hebron
I’m practically counting the days until I can get on a plane and head back into stuff like this. It sure beats grading! Of course, the problem is that I’ll have a lot of grading to do, too. I just hope my pedagogical responsibilities don’t interfere with my tourist activities (NB: tourist, not terrorist).
Yes, don’t worry: I’ll have a camera, so I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures, maybe even do some filming! A PoT exclusive: you can watch me get beat up by young men who really ought to be doing something more productive with their free time than assaulting people for fun. Instead of doing that, why not register for my political philosophy seminar at Al Quds U? You have permission to audit the class if you behave. But leave the dog at home.
Moral of the story: the Israel Defense Forces aren’t occupying Hebron’s H2 zone to protect wogs. The’re in Hebron to protect thugs. Just so that we’re clear on that. Continue reading
Felician Conference Postscripts (1): Blake Wilson on Private Property
This is the first in a series of posts on the Tenth Annual Felician Institute Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs. For the introduction to the series, read this.
The first of the sessions I attended (and chaired) was one on (private) property rights, featuring two papers–one an essentially Hegelian justification of private property rights by Blake Wilson (SUNY Binghamton), the other a Lacanian account of a dilemma about private property by Chris Ketcham (University of Houston, Downtown). I’m going to discuss Blake’s paper rather than Chris’s, in part because Chris’s paper was aporetic rather than thesis-driven, and also because the aporia in Chris’s paper arises from the idiosyncrasies of Lacan’s conception of our obligations to others, a topic I’m not qualified to discuss, having read very little Lacan.
Political Philosophy Amidst the Ruins
Well, spring term is winding down at Felician U., so I guess I’m (riot)-gearing up for summer term at Al Quds U. Let’s hear it for the beneficence of the Israeli “Civil Administration” (which is what the military occupation calls itself), its undying respect for “purity of arms,” and the pinpoint accuracy of its “civilian” strikes (against noncombatant civilian targets). Learning Objective 1: try not to get tear gassed, shot, or arrested.
Philip Weiss’s “The World the Settlers Made”
When I was in Palestine last summer, I mentioned that I was going to be spending some time visiting Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I ended up doing less of that than I had planned. And though I did some, I never got the chance to write about it here. Since then, I’ve just let the experience fester in some dark corner of my brain, watching the “third intifada” from afar with that experience in mind. Part of the reason for failing to write was, as usual, lack of time. But part of it was that I met people out there who knew more than me, had spent more time there than me, and were likely to do a better job than me at saying what needed to be said.
Contingency, Irony, and Brutality: Richard Rorty in Israel
As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick’s turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Constructing Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, cruelty, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion.
Problems from Locke
I can’t be the first one to have spotted this, but I’m teaching Locke tomorrow, and on my nth reading of Second Treatise chapter 5, it suddenly occurs to me that the assumption commonly attributed to Locke as the starting point of his discussion of property in the Second Treatise is much more puzzling than I had previously realized. Locke says that revelation makes clear that God gave the world “to mankind in common.” But how can that be, if God gave the Promised Land to Israel?
A Teenager Shall Lead Them
I’ve written before about the resort to force and intimidation in discussions of Palestinian-Israeli issues, but here’s an outrageous case– and one that hits close to home. From The New York Times, “Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office“:
A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.
She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.
The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.
New Jersey has some of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the nation. After the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, in 2010, it passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, a far-reaching law with stiff penalties for educators who do not sufficiently respond to complaints of harassment or intimidation.
Read the whole thing for a fuller account of the story. Here’s a January 7 story from the Bergen Record, and here’s a January 8 story from the same place. Muftah reproduces some of the tweets involved. (Unfortunately, Koval’s Twitter feed is no longer operating in the public domain.) Fair Lawn, by the way, is just a few towns west of Lodi, where I teach.
Setting aside whatever narrowly legalistic insanities may reside within the various “anti-bullying” statutes, this is not a morally complex matter. A high school student tweets her political views about Israel. Some of what she says contains profanity. Some is sympathetic to, or appeasing of, Hamas. Some of her peers don’t like what she says. She gets some verbal flak from some of them. One “unfollows” her Twitter account. She doesn’t reveal the “unfollower’s” name in public, but reveals it to someone privately.
I Swear, I Saw a Video of Dozens of Them Celebrating the Tragedy
A celebration “rumor” that turns out to be undeniable for a change. Here’s The New York Times, if you prefer getting the story from the mainstream media.
For the record, I regard what’s depicted in the video as free speech, and reject the idea that it involves (or should be regarded as involving) “incitement” in any legally actionable sense. Let them dance.
I guess this gives new meaning to that old line from Billy Idol: “Hey little sister–what have you done?” It’s a nice day to start again.
Fernando Teson on the Palestinian State
Fernando Teson’s opening gambit on a discussion of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute:
Almost everyone has by now accepted the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
I wasn’t aware of that. Evidence, please?
While we wait for Teson’s response, feel free to read the Wikipedia entry on the One-state Solution at your leisure. It doesn’t seem to cohere with his claim.
If the wait is long enough, you can also read through Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari Nusseibeh’s version of the one state solution from his book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Note: The RP link goes to a long PDF that requires lots of scrolling down. You can also access the symposium this way, if you find it more convenient.)
As PoT readers know, I spent two months in Palestine this summer teaching at Al Quds University. My experience doesn’t cohere with Teson’s off-the-cuff claim any more than the Wikipedia entry does. And don’t make me haul out back issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies, please. Because you know what will happen if I do?
Postscript, 10 pm: I wonder whether Professor Teson could explain in mathematical terms how majorities of 63% of Israelis and 53% of Palestinians amount to “almost everyone.” Do 37% of Israelis and 47% of Palestinians = no one? Feel free, Professor, to use scratch paper and show your work.
If Israelis and Palestinians don’t count, what about retired American diplomats in far-out radical publications like U.S. News and World Report? I mean, the one-state solution is so marginal an idea that it’s being discussed at conferences at obscure places like Harvard.
Oh, not pro-Israel enough for you, huh? Well, then, how about the current Israeli administration? Or Caroline Glick?
Oh wait, too far to the right for you, huh? Well, then, let’s make a left turn. Wrong part of the left? You could always talk to the nice folks at Dissent. They were “rethinking” things five years ago.
While we’re turning left, why not talk to some Arabs along the way? Like this one.
You want a cross-section of ethnicities? Try this. Not that I want to overdo things….
