Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Cynicism: A case study (with five postscripts)

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Last week, I wrote a post about the murder of my Felician College student, Tyeshia Obie. It’s an unutterably sad event, and I hesitate to use it to make a philosophical point. But I can’t think of a better way of making the point I want to make.

Imagine that, on learning of the event, I went to the Obies’ home to offer my condolences. Having done so, imagine that I offered this reflection for the benefit of family and friends:

Black women like Tyeshia have been murdered over and over again here in the New York Metro Area. Of course, they deserve protection here as anywhere else, but I think the best option for our black sisters would be: go back to Africa. You’ll be safer there. Africa is your home.

I suspect that this suggestion would not go over well among the Obies, their friends, their family, or anyone else within hearing. At best, I think I’d be shown the door, and asked never to return. And I’d deserve it. The event is sad enough. One doesn’t use such an event, exploiting the victims’ pain, to make a polemical point about nationalist identity. One exacerbates the offense if the point you’re making is itself offensively nonsensical.

With this in mind, consider the recent remarks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the occasion of the recent shootings in Copenhagen, which reiterate what he said after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Sunday that his government was encouraging a “mass immigration” of Jews from Europe, reopening a contentious debate about Israel’s role at a challenging time for European Jews and a month before Israel’s national elections.

Speaking the morning after a Jewish guard was fatally shot outside a synagogue in Copenhagen in one of two attacks there, the remarks echoed a similar call by the prime minister inviting France’s Jews to move to Israel after last month’s attacks in Paris. Critics said then that the expression of such sentiments so soon after the Paris shootings was insensitive and divisive. Such sentiments also go to the heart of the complexity of Israel’s identity and its relationship with the Jewish communities of the diaspora, whose support has been vital.

“Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews,” Mr. Netanyahu said Sunday in Jerusalem. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home,” he added.

There are some differences between my hypothetical statement and Netanyahu’s, but I think the similarities outweigh the differences.

Differences: (1) The Jewish victims of the terrorist attacks in Europe were murdered because they were Jewish; Tyeshia Obie was probably not murdered because she was black, though it’s possible that she was murdered because she was a woman. (2) Israel is a country; Africa is continent. (3) There is a tradition of European Jewish immigration to Israel; there is much less of one of African American women from New Jersey to Africa.

Similarities: (1) European Jews are being urged to flee their homes in the face of victimization; so, in my example, are black women. (2) It’s assumed that because European Jews are Jews, they would necessarily feel at home in Israel, and ought to regard it as their home, even if (a) they don’t speak the language, (b) have never been there, (c) have never previously wanted to go, (d) would be totally alienated by the place if they got there, and (e) are being given no incentive to immigrate but naked fear. The same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, of my thought-experiment. (3) Despite appealing to the fear of European Jews, Netanyahu makes no attempt to offer even a semi-rational account of the comparative levels of risk for Jews in Europe versus those in Israel. The implicit suggestion is that Israel is safer for European Jews than Western Europe. The same thing is true (mutatis mutandis) of my thought-experiment.

Let’s reflect a bit on similarity (3). Netanyahu is suggesting that European Jews immigrate en masse from Western Europe to Israel because Israel is safer for Jews than Western Europe. Why? Well, as we’ve seen, armed Muslim anti-Semites have taken to murdering Jews in Europe by means of random, unpredictable attacks of the sort we’ve seen in Paris and Copenhagen. Presumably, if such Jews were to move to Israel, they would move to relative safety.

The suggestion only makes sense, of course, if Israel were discernibly safer for Jews than, say, Paris or Copenhagen. But of course, it isn’t discernibly safer, and Netanyahu’s entire career has been predicated on fixating on the insecurity of life in Israel, and exploiting Jewish fears of it.

I happen to subscribe to the State Department’s Travel Advisory Warning System for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. This past Wednesday, I got an update from them. Here are some highlights:

The security environment remains complex in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and U.S. citizens need to be aware of the continuing risks of travel to these areas, particularly to areas described in this Travel Warning where there are heightened tensions and security risks.The security situation can change day to day, depending on the political situation, recent events, and geographic area. A rise in political tensions and violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank has resulted in injuries to and deaths of U.S. citizens. In view of the ongoing security situation, the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority make considerable efforts to police major tourist attractions and ensure security in areas where foreigners frequently travel. …

Travelers should be aware of the risks presented by the potential for military conflict between Hamas and Israel. During the conflict in Gaza in July and August 2014, long-range rockets launched from Gaza reached many locations in Israel and the West Bank – including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities in the north and south. The Government of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system successfully intercepted many rockets. However, missile impacts also caused deaths, injuries, and property damage. There have been additional small arms fire and mortar and rocket launches from Gaza into southern Israel on several occasions between September and December 2014 that resulted in limited property damage.

Visitors to and residents of Israel and the West Bank should familiarize themselves with the location of the nearest bomb shelter or other hardened site.Consult municipality websites, such as those for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, for locations of public bomb shelters and other emergency preparedness information. Visitors should seek information on shelters from hotel staff or building managers. We advise all U.S. citizens to take note of guidance on proper procedures in the event of rocket attacks or other crisis events by visiting the website of the government of Israel’s Home Front Command.

Jerusalem

U.S. citizens visiting and living in Jerusalem should be aware of the numerous political, cultural, and religious tensions that permeate the city. These sensitivities have the potential to fuel protests, civil unrest, acts of terrorism, and retaliatory attacks against groups and individuals. There have been frequent clashes between protesters and Israeli authorities, particularly in East Jerusalem neighborhoods. Travelers should be aware that protest activities and violence have occurred across Jerusalem, including in West Jerusalem, within the Old City, and in East Jerusalem neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah, Shufat, Beit Hanina, Mt. of Olives, As Suwaneh, Abu Deis, Silwan, Shuafat Refugee Camp, Issawiyeh, and Tsur Baher. The intensity and number of these violent events, which have caused the deaths of bystanders, remained at high levels during October and November. Such events often increase following Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif access restrictions, in retaliation for random attacks, or during Israel National Police (INP) operations in predominantly Palestinian neighborhoods. The INP often deploys a heavy presence in many of the neighborhoods that have seen clashes and may restrict vehicular traffic to some of these neighborhoods without notice. U.S. citizens are advised not to enter any neighborhoods while restricted by the INP and to avoid any locations with active clashes.

To date, the clashes and violence have not been anti-American in nature. However, politically motivated violence in Jerusalem claimed the lives of U.S. citizens in October and November 2014, including a terror attack inside a synagogue. Other U.S. citizens have also been injured in such attacks. Travelers are reminded to exercise caution at Muslim religious sites on Fridays and on holy days, particularly during the holy month of Ramadan. The INP often imposes restrictions on visitors to the Old City’s Temple Mount/ Haram al-Sharif. Travelers should be aware that the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif is often closed without warning by the INP. U.S. government employees are prohibited from entering the Old City on Fridays during Ramadan due to congestion and security-related access restrictions.

U.S. citizens are advised to avoid public parks in Jerusalem after dark, due to numerous reports of criminal activity associated with these parks.

I’ll spare you the rest. It goes on for thousands of words.

So European Jews are supposed to leave the Islamist-infested corners of Western Europe on the premise that there are no resentful anti-Zionist Arabs in Israel, and none in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, or Iraq. Even if such things exist, the assumption seems to be that once a European Jew clears customs in Tel Aviv, he gets a special vaccination that immunizes him for the rest of his lifetime from Islamist violence. Other Israelis might be hit by Hamas rockets, killed in Hezbullah raids, or blown up in pizzerias, malls, buses, or discotheques, but if your papers indicate that you made aliyah to Israel from France or Denmark, you’ll be safe. If you believe that, I’ll sell you the Dome of the Rock.

It gets worse, though. The big controversy about Netanyahu in the U.S. is his planned visit here in March to make the case for sanctions against the Iranians. Why is it so important to defy diplomatic protocol–bypassing the White House–to make this speech? Well, because the Iranian nuclear program–along with ISIS–confronts Israel as a nearby nearly-imminent existential threat to its very existence–tantamount to being a nuclearized Arab-Islamic version of the Third Reich. That isn’t my comparison. It’s Netanyahu’s. In fact, he’s said, Iran’s nuclear program looms over Israel like a repetition of the Holocaust.

“A nuclear Iran is an existential threat on the State of Israel and also on the rest of the world,” Netanyahu said. “We have an obligation to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. It’s the world’s obligation, but above all it is our obligation.

“Remembering the Holocaust is not merely a matter of ceremony or historic memory. Remembering the Holocaust is imperative for learning the lessons of the past in order to ensure the foundations of the future. We shall never bury our heads in the sand. …

“The Iranian regime is openly calling for our destruction and working frantically for the development of nuclear weapons as a means to that end.

“I know that some people don’t appreciate me speaking such uncomfortable truths. They would rather we not talk about Iran as a nuclear threat, they claim that, though it may be true, this statement serves to sow panic and fear.”

Here is the latest in the same vein from Netanyahu, from the Jerusalem Post, on Iran’s nuclear program.

In other words, European Jews should escape the terrors of sporadic shootings at the hands of random anti-Semites in Europe for the safety of Israel, where, in addition to a resentful Arab population of second-class citizens within the state, they’ll find an even more resentful population of Arabs under siege (Gaza) or under military occupation (the West Bank), along with hostile Arabs on Israel’s northern borders–and, to crown it all, the Holocaust-level threat of the Iranian nuclear program, under frantic development by the twenty-first century equivalent of the Third Reich. Welcome home!

So I leave you with the following thoughts.

1. Could a politician be any more cynical about human life than Benjamin Netanyahu? This is a man whom defenders of Israel expect us to respect, and whom they hold up as a paragon of civilized virtue–a man who supposedly towers over Mahmoud Abbas & Co for his credentials as an exemplar of “Western civilization.” But if you consider the caliber of his public comments, the question that arises is: is he so stupid that he can’t grasp an obvious contradiction in his claims, or so full of shit that he doesn’t care?

2. One often reads that anti-Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism. We’re permitted to criticize “Israeli policy,” but not permitted, on pain of an accusation of anti-Semitism, to trace those policies back to the ideology that motivates it.

But what policy could be more paradigmatically Zionist than the dogmatic assertion that Jews are a priori safer in Israel than they are in, say, France or the United States or Canada–simply because they are in a Jewish State, which is their “home” (regardless of their actual ties to it) and is where they belong (regardless of whom they displace in the process of establishing themselves there)? That is the defining, essential, animating thought of Zionism. Subtract it from “Zionism,” and there is nothing left of the concept. As far as I’m concerned, the incoherence of Netanyahu’s views is evidence for the reasonability of an anti-Zionist stance: if Netanyahu is the personification of Zionism–and he is–then anti-Zionism makes perfect sense. If that thought is “anti-Semitic,” the accusation needs a lot more argument than it usually gets.

3. I wonder if we could get some clarity on a factual question: where, exactly, does Netanyahu think that these in-migrating French Jews are to live? Given the shortage of cheap housing in Israel, an obvious place might be the Arab-free “municipality” of Ma’ale Adumim or some similar location.

After you consider the circumstances under which these places were built, however, you might begin to wonder: is a Jew really safe there? I’ve been to Ma’ale Adumim myself. Yes, there is good security. Yes, there are checkpoints. Yes, it looks like an ordinary suburban town. But from one end of it, you can see the camp of the bedouins that were displaced to make it, and from the other end, you can see the Arab neighborhoods whose residents are permanently excluded from it. How safe would you feel if you paused to consider that your new life was based on expropriation, and that the victims of that expropriation were your neighbors?

I should emphasize that the relation of Palestinians to settlements is different from that of, say, inner-city African Americans to American suburbs, or even that of French Algerians from the banlieues of Paris to metropolitan Parisians–however problematic all that may be. No one today would tell an African American that he can’t upgrade from a slum in East Orange, New Jersey to the suburbs of West Orange, New Jersey even if he has the money to do so, simply because has the wrong ethnicity. But a Jewish settlement is a Jewish settlement: no Palestinians need ever apply for residence, no matter how much money they have. Palestinians can build a Jewish settlement, but they cannot live in one: the whole point of Israel’s being a Jewish state is that what is in Jewish hands must remain in Jewish hands, and what is not is, in one way or another, up for grabs by the state. The point of the settlements is to establish “facts on the ground,” and the essential desired outcome is that Israel monopolize as much land and water as possible for the benefit of Jews and to the exclusion of Arabs.*

The real debate we ought to be having is not whether Benjamin Netanyahu has insulted President Obama by addressing Congress behind his back. The real debate we ought to be having is why Benjamin Netanyahu thinks that he can assert outright nonsense, whether to Congress or in the press, and be taken seriously as a semi-rational, semi-decent human being. As far as I’m concerned, he’s neither. If I were a member of Congress, I’d boycott his speech this March, not out of righteous indignation at his insult to the Presidency, but out of righteous indignation at his insult to the human mind. I’d love to see Congress follow suit, but I somehow doubt it will.

*Last sentence added after posting.

Postscript. Michaelangelo Landgrave has a slightly different take on these issues over at Notes on Liberty. As usual, Bernard Avishai has interesting things to say–here and here. An informative piece by James Fallows at The Atlantic.

PS 2, February 21, 2015: Hussein Ibish has a useful piece on the controversy in The National, but I would take issue with two things he says. He says:

Those outside the United States who believe that Israel somehow controls American politics or policies, or that Israel is the dominant partner in the relationship, are clearly wrong. It’s a silly conspiracy theory that only reflects a profound ignorance about the actual mechanics of American policymaking.

Israel may not “control” American politics or policy, but it wields so disproportionate an influence on American politics that I think it’s a mistake to deride those who assert Israeli “control” as being in the grips of silly conspiracy theorizing or of “profound ignorance.”

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have made a systematic and so-far unrebutted case for the claim that “strategic and moral considerations neither explain nor justify the current level of U.S. support for Israel” (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, p. 335). Strategic-moral considerations do not explain, for example, why the United States offers de facto support of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the settlement enterprise there when doing so flouts our values and interests. The explanation for (the degree and kind of) our support for Israel turns on the ideological power of the Israel lobby to shape American discourse. It may be a misinference, but it is not “silly” or “profoundly” ignorant, to conclude that the lobby “controls” American policy or discourse. There is a fine line between “disproportionate influence” and “outright control,” and it’s an exaggeration to claim that the distinction between them can only be blurred by the “silly” or the “profoundly ignorant.” That’s to underestimate just how bizarre our policies appear to outsiders. It’s to underestimate how bizarre they are.

I can’t accept this way of putting things, either:

There is no need to indulge in clichéd hyperbole such as citing George Washington’s warnings about “excessive partiality” to foreign powers to recognise that this embarrassing dynamic is completely inappropriate for the United States.

I find the derision expressed here totally inappropriate. Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 is, along with the Mayflower Compact and the Federalist Papers, one of the founding documents of the American nation. Far from being cliched, the sad fact is how under-read it is. Instead of deriding it, I’d suggest that Ibish re-read it to see how precisely appropriate to the circumstances its message happens to be. I don’t agree with all of it, but it is, in essence, a defense of the distinctively American conception of “Union” and a criticism of “faction”: “To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a Government for the whole is indispensable.” Try to reconcile that idea with sectarian support for a sectarian state. For that matter, try to reconcile it with American politics today.

As for “excessive partiality,” the relevant passage goes as follows:

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence…the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.

Is that “cliched hyperbole,” or a lesson we have yet to learn? (Ibish tells me in a private email that I’ve misunderstood his argument. I’m left puzzled, but since we agree on the main issue, I’ll leave the matter there.)

PS 3, February 22, 2015: Here’s an interesting, indirectly relevant piece in The New York Times on the work of Mehnaz Afridi, director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College. I’ve blogged it in even-handed pedagogical mode for my International Relations students at the website for my class. No need to be even-handed here, however.

It’s an important article, and I respect what Afridi is doing, but I have to take issue with claims like this:

Dr. Afridi has made these seeming irreconcilables into companions in her life’s work. An assistant professor of religion at Manhattan College, she teaches courses about both Islam and the Holocaust, and she is director of the college’s Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center. Her book “Shoah Through Muslim Eyes,” referring to an alternative term for the Holocaust, will be published in July, and she is a member of the ethics and religion committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin Washington.

Such roles have made Dr. Afridi both a valued intermediary and a visible target in the troubled relations between Muslims and Jews. As her research unflinchingly shows, a strain of Holocaust denial runs deep in the Arab-Muslim world. Holocaust recognition among Arabs and Muslims, less noticed but equally divisive, has also served as a means of delegitimizing Israel and Zionism. By this line of reasoning, which ignores the historical ties of Jews to Israel, the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for which Palestinians paid the price. (my emphasis)

Minor point: the article makes no reference to any prior work done on the subject by Arabs or Muslims, including Gilbert Achcar’s path-breaking 2009 book, The Arabs and the Holocaust. The implication seems to be that Afridi’s work is sui generis. It isn’t.

I’ve italicized the sentences that I regard as an offensive instance of question-begging argumentation and emotional blackmail. The author of the article asserts that Holocaust denial and Holocaust recognition are “equally divisive.” What does this mean?

(a) If his point is to assert a moral equivalence between the two things, the claim is outrageously absurd.

(b) The same might be said if his point is to insinuate moral equivalence while using an ambiguous word that gives him a way of getting off the hook when called out for asserting moral equivalence.

(c) If his point is to suggest that both Holocaust denial and Holocaust recognition create the same amount of conflict in the world, I’d like to see some empirical evidence for the claim.

(d) If his point is to suggest that Holocaust denial and Holocaust recognition involve claims that are equally controversial, I’d ask: like what?

“By this line of reasoning, which ignores the historical ties of Jews to Israel, the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for which Palestinians paid the price.” The “line of reasoning” in question can recognize that Jews had historical ties to Israel and yet still insist that the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for which Palestinians paid the price. There’s no inconsistency there. The same line of reasoning can point out that the phrase “historical ties of Jews to Israel” is an equivocation that illicitly subsumes actual claims to the land and notional ones. In the latter sense, I have a “historical tie” to East Punjab in India–my father’s family was forced out of Amritsar at gunpoint in 1947, and dispossessed of its home and business–but that doesn’t mean that I can displace the current residents of Amritsar and establish a sectarian state in East Punjab, no matter what sentimental attachment I may have to the place.

(e) Finally, the controverted line of reasoning insists on a fact that the author ignores throughout the discussion: Jews immigrated to Mandate Palestine during and after the Holocaust over the objections of the indigenous Palestinians, but they didn’t get to immigrate to the United States over the more politically efficacious objections of “indigenous Americans.” There were immigration restrictions against Jews in both places, but stronger ones in the US. Frankly, Americans unable to deal honestly and straightforwardly with the latter fact lack the moral standing to discuss Zionism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and their relation to the contemporary Arab-Israeli conflict–not that that’s stopped them.

Postscript 4, February 26, 2015: I’ve had my disagreements with David Bernstein about Israel in the past, but I completely agree with his take on this story, about an Israeli journalist’s ten-hour jaunt through Paris, and the frankly disgusting, anti-Semitic reception that he (the journalist, Zvika Klein) encounters in the Muslim neighborhoods he walks through. I agree as well with Bernstein’s criticisms of the newscaster in the interview with Klein on Britain’s Channel 4 news–an “interview” which strikes me (for the reasons Bernstein gives) as a paradigm case of cowardice and evasion.

I’d like to think that nothing comparable could or would happen in the United States, but I’m not entirely sure: just think about the footage from the Arab neighborhoods of Paterson, New Jersey in Marc Levin’s 2005 film, “Protocols of Zion.” Granted, that was a decade ago, and things have changed (things have changed…right?). I’m tempted to put on a Jewish skullcap and fringes and walk down Main Street for a few hours to see what happens. Frankly, I’m less worried about my safety than I am about my dashed expectations. A decade after the notorious Protocols incident there, I’d like to think that things have changed, and that an orthodox Jew could walk through South Paterson without being, say, spat on. But I’m not entirely sure what would happen. I sometimes feel as though if nothing has changed in the last few decades, nothing ever will. But that’s just a counsel of despair–not what you want to hear at “Policy of Truth.”

Postscript 5, March 2, 2015: Sometimes I can’t help shaking my head at the character of American discourse on Israel. This morning’s New York Times tells us that Netanyahu’s visit is bringing uninvited problems for Jewish Democrats in Congress. Here’s an offhand sentence describing the US-Israel political relationship:

Through foreign policy trials as difficult as the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, Israeli settlement policies, Arab terrorism, and the repeated failures of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Jews in Congress — and to a large extent, Jews in the United States — have spoken in a near-monolithic voice, always in support of the government of Israel. (my emphasis)

In other words, until now, Israel’s supporters have–whatever lip service they give to the problematic nature of the settlements–all essentially agreed that Israel is to be supported in its efforts to expropriate, confine, exclude, and harass Palestinians in perpetuity. If the wrong person says that, it becomes an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. If it appears in The New York Times, it becomes uncontroversial common knowledge–“news fit to print.” I’ve repeatedly heard the BDS movement described as anti-Semitic. Isn’t it time to start asking whether those who reflexively oppose BDS do so because they’d like to have the moral luxury of “opposing” settlements in words without having to do anything about them? The uncharitable way of putting this would be to say that they’re covert apologists for a form of Jim Crow or apartheid, whose recourse to accusations of anti-Semitism serves to cover that very fact.

Remember the distinction between criticizing Israeli policy and criticizing Israel? That distinction supposedly distinguishes the anti-Semites from the responsible critics. Who is uncomfortable with it now? Israel’s supporters:

To Mr. Israel, the New York Democrat, that [diversity in opinions about aid to Israel] is not a positive development. Jewish philanthropic organizations can channel donations from American Jews to nongovernmental organizations in Israel, but United States aid will always be predominantly government to government. Mr. Israel said the last thing Israel — or the Democratic Party — needed was political tension over American aid to Israel.

“When you separate Israel from the policies of its government, it complicates the matter for Congress,” Mr. Israel said.

So Israel just is the policies of its government. Since Israel cannot do wrong, its policies can never be wrong. Since Israel’s policies are by definition always right, Israel is always right–and always deserving of our aid, no matter what it does. Once we abolish the usual relation between properties and causal powers, the rest is a piece of cake.

Day by day, my sympathy for BDS increases (at least for the D without the BS). I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there.

Postscript 6, March 23, 2015: A well-written piece by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi on Netanyahu’s uses of the Book of Esther in his speech.

Cops, settlers, and stones in Wadi an-Nasara

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Philosophers–at least contemporary philosophers in the analytic tradition–love thought-experiments. I have no in-principle objection to the use of well-constructed thought-experiments, but on the whole find them mis- and overused in contemporary philosophy. (For a good discussion of what’s wrong with a lot of thought-experiments, I’d recommend reading the first chapter of Kathleen Wilkes’s Real People: Personal Identity without Thought-Experiments.) In any case, there’s something to be said for thinking about ethics and politics from an “ecological,” “in vivo,” or “naturalistic” perspective. And thanks to the wonders of You Tube, that’s now a possibility.

In that spirit, here’s an 8 minute, 42 second video of a street scene–prima facie, a crime, or series of them–in Wadi an-Nasara, near Hebron in the West Bank. It was filmed as part of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s “Camera Project.” Most of the relevant action takes place in the first four minutes of the video. Take a look if you’ve got a few minutes to spare. I’m curious what viewers regard as the right inference to make from what happens in the video.

Here are some candidate inferences, but feel free to supply your own in the combox.

(1) There’s no way to make any morally significant inferences from a video like this, depicting a single out-of-context event. Any inferences would be arbitrary and pointless.

(2) The only morally significant inference to draw is that bad things happen everywhere, including in Hebron.

(3) Nothing of great moral significance happens in this video. Kids act like kids, adults act like kids, and then the cops show up and stand around a bit. Nobody is hurt. Not exactly a man-bites-dog story.

(4) The video is yet more proof that we need to abolish the state, and with it, the state-based institutions of the police and the military. Events like those depicted in the video are distinctive to states. Abolish the relevant states and things would have turned out differently. Private security providers would done better.

(5a) The video is yet more proof of the evils of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. End the occupation, and events like this will stop happening.

(5b) Claim (5a) doesn’t go far enough. It’s all true, but it needs to be conjoined with a determinate plan of action, like BDS.

(6a) The video is yet more proof of the need for a specifically Palestinian state. In a Palestinian state, the settler thugs would have been apprehended, rather than being allowed to drive away.

(6b) Claim (6a) is true, and vindicates the Palestinians’ current drive toward statehood.

(7a) The video is yet more proof of the need for Israel to annex the West Bank and put the Palestinians in their place. The whole thing began when Palestinian youths threw stones at the settlers.

(7b) The video is yet more proof of the need for Israel to annex the West Bank and give the Palestinians some form of citizenship. Palestinians with de jure equality would have better access to justice than Palestinians without it.

(7c) Claim (7b) is true but doesn’t go far enough. What the video shows is that Palestinians and Israelis need a single ethnically integrated security force under the rule of law in a single state where both Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights, and where those rights are enforced under institutions that actively encourage equality.

(8) The video is cause for despair. It shows that the two sides are mired in perpetual conflict, and that nothing can change that. Prepare for more, and prepare for worse.

Go ahead. I’m still mulling over my answer.

P.S., Here’s some explanatory text from the original site to make the action in the video a bit more intelligible:

On 4 Dec. 2014 two settlers were driving near Wadi a-Nasara checkpoint when a Palestinian youth threw stones at them. They got out of the car and attempted pursuit. Footage by a B’Tselem camera volunteer shows that when the pursuit proved unsuccessful, they vandalized nearby Palestinian property. Police and soldiers who arrived at the scene did not detain the two and allowed them to leave unhindered. This incident is part of the reality of live [life] in Hebron, with the military and the police standing by as settlers take the law into their own hands.

December 2014

Filmed by:

Suzan Jabber

The Politics of Voting: Four Suggestions

Posted on November 29, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about voting. I have Jason Brennan to thank for having stimulated me to sustained thought on the subject, via his much-acclaimed book, The Ethics of Voting. As I’ve said before, I agree with Brennan’s thesis in a general way, but the more I think about the details of his argument, the less plausible I find them. (I find his arguments for voter disenfranchisement downright hopeless.) Here’s a link to the 2013 Reason Papers symposium on Brennan’s book, and here’s a link to an earlier critique at PoT of Brennan’s account of character-based voting.

I’ll have more to say about Brennan’s arguments as I find the time to write about them. Meanwhile, here are four quick thoughts on voting, three of them relevant to American elections, the fourth to Israeli elections. In each case, it seems to me that the wrong issues are being discussed–when they’re being discussed at all–and that we ought to change the terms of debate. Only the last of the four topics is relevant to Brennan’s work.

(I) Felon Disenfranchisement
There’s been a lot of talk in the past few years about felon disenfranchisement: felons in the U.S. (perhaps elsewhere, but I don’t know) are deprived of the right to vote. Here’s a fairly typical piece from The New York Times criticizing felon disenfranchisement as racist.

I find discussion of this topic confused. There are at least three different issues involved here; each needs to be distinguished from the others and discussed on its own terms.

(1) A first issue is: given an ideal definition of “felony,” and a well-functioning criminal justice system, should felons be permitted to vote, or should they be deprived of that right as an inherent part of their punishment?

My answer is, “they should be deprived of the right to vote.” I endorse a debt-based conception of punishment according to which, when we interact with someone, we owe him or her (at a minimum) respect for their rights. When someone violates those rights, he incurs a debt to the victim–a debt consisting of compensation for the lost value of the exercise of the victim’s right, among many other things. Punishment, in my view, ought to consist of repayment of that debt. If the debt can’t be paid in full–and for a variety of reasons, it may be impossible to do so–offenders can permissibly be deprived of those goods that would count as ill-gotten gains from crime.

Some simple examples: If you rob me, your voting to dispose of my income without having compensated me for the commission of the crime counts as an ill-gotten gain. Since you’re not entitled to such a gain, you can be disenfranchised. If you kidnap me, what you’ve done is illicitly to try to “govern” my actions by brute force. If I survive, you owe me compensation for your trying to rule me in this way. But voting is a case of ruling me, as well. So ruling me by the ballot counts as an ill-gotten gain (or would) until you’ve paid off the debt you incurred by kidnapping me. And so, once again, you can be disenfranchised until you do.

Suppose that the repayment-requirements on such debts are prohibitively high–high enough that they can’t typically be paid in full by anyone, regardless of how wealthy they are. On my view, government should in such cases have the authority to deprive offenders indefinitely of the right to vote. If you (the offender) can’t compensate me (the victim) for what you’ve done to me, you don’t have the right indirectly (i.e., by voting) to decide the disposition of goods that belong to me. And that, in effect, justifies the disenfranchisement policy we currently have. (For a somewhat similar view of punishment, see the work of Daniel McDermott, who defends what he calls a debt-based conception of retributivism. I’m not sure where McDermott stands on felony disenfranchisement, however.)

Suppose now that we think of government, on Lockean grounds, as a kind of mutual-defense pact for the protection of rights. In that case, any attack on the rights of any member of the pact is an attack on the rights of every party to the pact. By implication, a debt owed to the victim is simultaneously a debt owed to every party to the pact. If the debt in question cannot be discharged in full–and if the crime is serious enough, it probably can’t be–then the parties to the pact can permissibly deny the offender access to ill-gotten goods in lieu of full payment of the debt.

This resolves the old problem of the “missing beneficiary.” For example: if you murder me, you incur a debt to me for having done so. Of course, being dead, I’m not around to collect the debt. In that case, you owe a debt to the rights-respecting members of my society–via their agent, government. Now suppose that you can’t pay the debt in full. In that case, they can deprive you of certain categories of goods on my behalf as well as theirs. One good they can deprive you of is the right to vote: after all, your having that right would give you the right to dispose of the income that they have earned while you still owe them compensation for the right you’ve violated. And you’re not entitled to that. (Incidentally, even if I’m physically unavailable to collect a debt for having been murdered or wrongfully killed, I could during my lifetime have set up an escrow account as an insurance policy in the event of my murder/wrongful death. In that case, an offender might still be obliged to compensate me posthumously, with the proceeds going to my heirs or to the state, as my will or lack of one implies.)

Something similar would apply to rape, to assault and battery, to drunk driving, and to plenty of other recognizable felonies. In short, I don’t see why, as long as we define “felony” properly, felons should be allowed to vote. The debts they’ve incurred to the rest of us are sufficiently high that we needn’t worry so much about whether they have the right to govern us, or dispose of our income. They don’t. I don’t mean to suggest that we have no obligations toward them. I just means that access to the ballot isn’t one of them.

(2) Second issue: is the operative definition of “felony” in the U.S. a good one? Does it, on moral grounds, include and exclude the appropriate items?

I’d say: “no” and “no.” This issue is the one that, in my view, actually gives rise to the felon disenfranchisement controversy. The real problem, it seems to me, is that we’ve made felons of people who shouldn’t be felons, and in consequence of that, have deprived people of the right to vote who should have it. If doing so has adverse racial consequences, my suggestion is: redefine “felon” more narrowly, so as to exclude certain categories of crimes from the list of felonies. If we do, I suspect that the “felon disenfranchisement” problem (insofar as it is a problem) either disappears or is greatly reduced in scope.

(3) Third issue: regardless of the definition of “felony,” is the U.S. criminal justice system systematically and unjustifiably biased against certain populations or sub-populations?

My answer: “probably.” No matter how we define “felon,” there will probably be residual problems in our criminal justice system, some of them with adverse racial consequences–some of them just plain old unjust–and those problems need to be addressed. But the resolution of those problems is not facilitated by the enfranchisement of felons. Convicted murderers, rapists, batterers, and drunk drivers have no distinctive insight into the rights and wrongs of criminal procedure. Nor does it make much sense to bank on the possibility that some small fraction of those convicted felons might be innocent (I’m sure some are), and might impart the wisdom of innocence to us via the ballot. The probabilities of that happening are tiny enough to render the venture as a whole quixotic.

The bottom line is that instead of crusading for voting rights for murderers, kidnappers, rapists, robbers, etc., we ought to be redefining “felony” and actively reforming the defects of our criminal justice system. Felon enfranchisement is just a distraction from those far more important tasks.

(II) Voter ID laws
Now consider voter ID laws. Here’s a usefully balanced article, also from the Times, suggesting that voter ID laws, while problematic, do not have the large-scale effects that some have alleged of them.

The standard argument for voter ID laws is that they pre-empt or minimize voter fraud. The standard argument against them asserts that there is little evidence of voter fraud in the U.S., that voter ID laws have racist effects, and that contrary to their proponents’ rhetoric, voter ID laws are covertly there to produce racist effects.

Once again, however, all this seems to me a distraction from the real issue. To see why, consider the tacit implication of the arguments against voter ID laws. Why, according to those arguments, are voter ID laws unfair? Spelled out, the answer is that large numbers of Americans lack the means to obtain photo IDs for themselves. Lacking access to photo IDs, they can’t meet the requirements of voter ID laws, and are de facto disenfranchised by them.

Suppose ex hypothesi that that’s true, and pause on it for a moment. Voting aside, isn’t that precisely the problem in need of discussion and rectification? How is it that large numbers of people in a first world country do not have access to the means of self-identification? Even if we do away with voter ID laws, the underlying problem remains in place. In other words, even if you don’t need an ID to vote, you need it for other things. How are people without IDs expected to open bank accounts, visit the doctor, or travel by plane–or get driver’s licenses, library cards, discount cards, or government benefits, etc.? Either they’re to do without these things because they lack ID, or they need access to these things, and must therefore obtain access to IDs. I would opt for the latter option, but no matter how you slice it, the issue is not voter IDs, but access to IDs as such.

The scarce-access-to-IDs situation seems to me a good argument for having some equivalent of a national identity card in just the way and for just the same reasons that so many other countries have them. Here’s a case for them, from the Washington Post.

I agree with the reasons the Post gives for having them, but I’d give one more. It’s been argued by critics of social contract theory since Hume* that express consent theories of consent to government do not or cannot work because we never in fact consent expressly to government. I suppose that that’s partly true, at least for natural-born citizens; we don’t consent to government in the way that we consent, say, to the terms of a credit card. But I see national ID laws as a chance to respond to that problem. Why not structure the task of getting a national ID so that the act of getting one either requires express consent to the government issuing the card, or requires explicit non-consent? If you consent, you get an ID card, and with it, the benefits and burdens of “membership” in the polity. If you refuse consent, you don’t get a card, and can be denied the benefits of membership while being spared the burdens.

There are, to be sure, lots of complications here, many of them entangled in debates about immigration and immigration policy. I can’t settle those here. I would just say that it seems to me that the mechanism I describe is possible, and that its existence would rebut Hume-type arguments against consent, and solve some other practical problems as well. At the very least, focusing on our ID problem–which has significant adverse effects on people’s living their lives–beats focusing on a voter ID problem that seems not to have any significant effects on voting.

(III) Low voter turnout
Now consider the low voter turnout issue. The problem here is supposed to be that relatively few voters show up to vote. In partisan terms, that means that Democrats fare badly in the elections (which, of course, matters more to Democrats than to others). In more general terms, it means that our democracy is not as “robust” as it could be. Personally, I happen to think it means that the ballot choices we’re typically offered aren’t worth voting for, whether for or against. Here’s a website, FairVote.org, devoted to discussion of the issue. Once again, however, it seems to me that much of the discussion there and elsewhere is focused on the wrong things.

Suppose that we want to increase voter participation. (There are reasons not to want to, having to do with wrongful voting and voter incompetence, but set them aside.) In that case, I’d offer two proposals:

(1) Put a “None of the Above” option on the ballot, so that voters can vote against all the (other) options on the ballot. As things currently stand, you can write “NOTA” as a “write in” on the ballot (I regularly do), but few people realize this, and most people surmise, correctly, that write-ins are meaningless. (I’ve encountered poll workers unaware of the fact that NOTA is a write-in possibility.) But if “NOTA” were on the ballot, it would be at least as significant as any other option on the ballot, and all those disgruntled voters who don’t vote because they dislike all the options might now vote in order to express that view.

(2) Move Election Day from Tuesday to the weekend. Yes, a small minority of mostly religious voters might be inconvenienced by that move (if so, they can use absentee ballots), but as it stands, huge numbers of working people are inconvenienced by Election Day’s having to compete with the workday. Change the day, and I suspect you’d increase voter turnout.

(IV) Voting and the right to complain
Let me move now from American to Israeli elections, or more precisely, elections in Jerusalem. When I visited Israel/Palestine in 2013, I was both surprised and dismayed to discover that while East Jerusalemite Palestinians have the right to vote in Jerusalem’s municipal elections (though not in Israeli national elections), they almost unanimously refuse to exercise that right, even though their exercising it would substantially change the political landscape of Jerusalem, and benefit them. The argument I heard from Palestinians was that voting would legitimize Israel, which they refuse to do. Sadly, the few Palestinians who offered to run for municipal office, or to vote for pro-Palestinian candidates or causes, were widely regarded by other Palestinians as traitors to the Palestinian cause.

I find that a self-defeating and incoherent set of attitudes. East Jerusalemite Palestinians widely accept–and demand–government benefits from Israel, so it makes no sense for them to refuse to exercise political rights that are on offer from Israel, especially if the refusal to exercise those rights merely disempowers those who refuse to exercise them. The fact is, the budget for government services in East Jerusalem is in the hands of non-Palestinian Israelis, as are decisions bearing on the protection of Palestinian rights. As things currently stand, decisions on both sets of issues are made in ways that ignore or violate Palestinian rights. I would argue that respect for one’s rights is essential to one’s well-being. As it happens, the only efficacious way of ensuring respect for Palestinian rights in Jerusalem is to make changes to the budget and policies of the Jerusalem municipal authority. And the only efficacious way of changing the budget and policies of that authority is to vote to change them. So the options are: vote to defend your rights, or acquiesce in their violation and the consequent diminution of your well-being.

Suppose that we each have a self-regarding moral obligation to promote our well-being (insofar as doing so is open to us). If so, give the preceding facts, Palestinians ought to vote. If “ought-hood” is sufficient for “duty” or “obligation,” then eligible Palestinian voters have a moral obligation to vote. Contrary to a recent argument of Jason Brennan’s, then, the case of East Jerusalemite Palestinians seems a picture-perfect example of the old saw that if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain–or more precisely, if you don’t vote, you shouldn’t complain about the things that voting would have improved, and that only voting can improve, at least for the foreseeable future. If you’re going to be taxed, and you’re going to be regulated, it makes no sense to stand by as your tax money is spent by everyone but you on everything but what matters to you. It likewise makes no sense to stand by as you are regulated to death by the people who are spending your money, as your rights go violated or ignored. Voting is in effect an act of self-defense, and self-defense is a moral obligation.

The obstacle here is supposed to be that it is not instrumentally rational for individual voters to vote, because individual votes cannot change the outcome of an election (or more precisely, cannot change the outcome of a sufficiently large election–a qualification that is sometimes relevant but often ignored in discussions of “voting,” as though all voting were large-scale voting). But if you know anything about Palestinian political culture, I think you’ll see that this objection is spurious. There is no need to worry about the efficacy or utility of individual votes qua individual if the voters in question don’t conceive of their votes in those terms in the first place. If voters naturally conceive of themselves as members of a solidaristic group, and can coordinate their efforts in a given direction as a group–and have a strong reason to do so, and might well be inclined to do so–then the unit of concern is not the utility of individual votes, but the the votes of voting blocs qua blocs whose members self-consciously act in concert.

I realize I’m describing an idealized case, but my point is, it’s a possible case. In fact, it’s more possible and plausible than half of the thought-experiments that clog the philosophical literature. (By the way, there is no contradiction between seeing yourself as an individual with an individual obligation to promote your well-being, and seeing yourself, qua voter, as part of a voting bloc. Membership in the bloc could precisely be what promotes your individual well-being, so that your individual well-being is what dictates membership and a solidaristic self-conception in the first place.)

Now suppose that Palestinians** get their act together, ditching the nationalist and Islamist rhetoric that has retarded their progress for decades. They come to see voting as an act of both collective and individual self-defense. They also see the defense of their rights as a contribution to the common good (which includes Israelis). Suppose (perhaps improbably but not impossibly) that the Israelis do not interfere significantly with Palestinians’ voting en masse.

Suppose further that Palestinians think of voting by analogy with having an intifada. In other words, as with the first intifada in the 1980s, they organize their efforts to vote strategically*** as a single unified voting bloc: they caucus, organize, and promise one another to vote for pro-Palestinian policies. Suppose that it is relatively obvious what these policies should be, and what the votes for these policies should be. Suppose, further, that voters are well-informed. Now suppose that a large number of Palestinians enter these caucuses voluntarily, and through caucusing, manage to ascertain (by mechanisms internal to the caucuses) that there are enough Palestinian votes among them to tip the scales of a given Jerusalem election. If so, each Palestinian voter could regard himself or herself as part of an assurance contract with all other Palestinian voters. And if so, each voter would have an obligation (to the others and to him or herself) to vote in the way he or she had promised in the contract.

My argument here is essentially that if you can organize a mass uprising–an intifada–you can organize a mass voter campaign. Further, if an intifada involves the implicit equivalent of an assurance contract (as it does), you can in principle model a mass voter campaign on an intifada, and turn the campaign into an activity that involves an actual assurance contract. But if contracts bind, an electoral assurance contract yields a duty to vote. So under certain nomologically possible conditions, there can be a duty to vote, and given this duty, it can be irrational to complain about unfair or harmful political policies if you don’t vote.

I can’t work through all the details here, but take a look at Brennan’s argument in light of the preceding. Either my East Jerusalem case is a counter-example to his thesis, or it’s a defeater for it. In the first case, it refutes the thesis as stated. In the second case, it suggests that the thesis is highly misleading as stated. Given that, my argument requires that Brennan qualify his claims about the ethics of voting in ways that take more explicit stock of cases like the East Jerusalem one–something that would substantially change the “flavor” of his theory.

I realize that Brennan has an explicit discussion of strategic voting in his book (Ethics of Voting, pp. 129-33), and that the discussion includes a “strategic voting clause” (p. 131), but I think almost all of what he says talks past what I’m saying here. What he doesn’t discuss either in the book or in the article I’ve linked to, is the possibility that you could have a duty to vote in cases like the East Jerusalem one, that your vote would matter in those cases, and that you’d have no right to complain if you didn’t vote. (See the notes below for a comment on “strategic voting.”)

While you’re looking at Brennan’s arguments, read his discussion of “the moral disenfranchisement of poor minorities” in The Ethics of Voting, pp. 105-7. I find the discussion very inadequate even on its own terms, but for present purposes it’s worth noting how narrow it is. Like so many American writers, in writing about “minorities,” Brennan structures his discussion around black-white relations in the U.S., assuming somehow that what he says about that will generalize elsewhere–everywhere. It doesn’t. In particular, he assumes that “poor minorities [will] overwhelmingly qualify as bad voters” by his criteria, and offers some rather handwaving suggestions about how they’re to handle–or how he would think about handling–their disenfranchisement.

What he doesn’t consider is the possibility that the issues in contention in a given election may sometimes be entirely straightforward and require nothing in the way of the social scientific “credentials” he regards as necessary conditions for eligibility to vote. Putting aside the American case, I think this is patently obvious in non-American ones, like that of East Jerusalem. It takes no special social scientific wisdom to figure out that your interests, your rights, and the common good are better promoted by someone who stands for fairness than by someone who makes no secret of wanting to subvert your interests, violate your rights and exclude you from the common good. If Brennan’s epistemic elite hasn’t figured that out, frankly, they have a lot to learn.

I’m hoping to spend the summer of 2015 in East Jerusalem teaching at Al Quds University. While I’m there, I intend to make the case for what I call rights-based strategic voting by Palestinians in Israeli elections. Feel free to hit me with objections in the combox if you disagree with the sketch I’ve just given of it. I may well be hit with more than that while I’m there, and I’d like to start my preparations now.

*Actually, Hume concedes, almost parenthetically, that consent is a possible basis for political legitimacy: “I only pretend [aver] that it has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent” (paragraph 20). But that claim is entirely compatible with consent’s coming to be the basis of political legitimacy in the future by concerted effort aiming to bring it about. Considered as an argument against Locke on consent, what Hume says in “Of the Original Contract” strikes me as a series of ignoratios elenchi.

**For brevity, I use the word “Palestinian” throughout, but I don’t really mean to be restricting that to ethnic Palestinians. I’m using “Palestinian” as short-hand for those who would actively organize for and act on behalf of Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem. The bulk of those people would most likely be ethnic Palestinians, but not all of them would. It’s just too cumbersome to be explicit about this in every sentence.

***I’m using the term “strategic” in its colloquial, not its technical sense. In its technical sense, “strategic voting” is voting for candidates or policies that are contrary to one’s sincere preference, in the hopes that doing so will realize some preferred outcome. In the colloquial sense, “strategic” voting is simply voting to bring about some end by means of a collectively-adopted political strategy for bringing the end about. I happen to think that the technical concept of “strategic voting” is a confused and equivocal one, but that doesn’t matter. My scenario makes no reference to insincerity on voters’ part.

Postscript, Nov. 30, 2014 (relevant to proposal I, felon disenfranchisement): This blog post, at Slate Star Codex, is well worth reading on the race and criminal justice in the United States. It complicates the picture, but I don’t think it changes anything I said about felon disenfranchisement. Hat-tip: Kate Herrick.

Postscript, April 5, 2015 (relevant to proposal IV, voting and the right to complain): Useful background on the political situation in East Jerusalem, from the London Review of Books.

Postscript, December 25, 2015 (relevant to proposal II, voter ID laws): An interesting article in The New York Times about Mayor DeBlasio’s “New York ID” program and the obstacles to success it’s facing at area banks. All things considered, the program seems a step in the right direction.

L’affair Klinghoffer

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve updated a September post on the response to John Adams’s opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer.”

Evidentialism: Who Needs It? L’affair Klinghoffer

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I’ve been blogging, teaching, and thinking, about evidentialism lately, so this item caught my eye:

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the Met before the performance of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” for a noisy demonstration calling for the company to cancel its production of John Adams’s 1991 opera, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” which is to have its Met premiere next month. That opera depicts a 1985 cruise ship hijacking by members of the Palestine Liberation Front, and the killing of a disabled Jewish American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer. …

On Monday morning, Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, in the Bronx, led a small group in prayers for Mr. Klinghoffer on Monday morning in a small park across from Lincoln Center. He said that he “absolutely” hoped that the Met would cancel the production. Like many opponents, he said he had not heard “Klinghoffer”: “I’ve not seen it, but I’ve heard enough about it and I don’t want to see it, frankly.”

P.S., October 22, 2014: Another classic contribution to the literature of obscurantism and fallacious argumentation by would-be opponents of “The Death of Klinghoffer.” This one is from a letter in today’s New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Protests Greet Met’s Premiere of ‘Klinghoffer’ ” (front page, Oct. 21):

It has been widely reported that many of those who protest “The Death of Klinghoffer” have never seen the opera, as if that disqualifies them from passing judgment.

To me, whether John Adams’s opera is great art or not is irrelevant. To those who disagree, I ask: How would you feel about an opera about 9/11, sympathetically describing the motivations of the terrorists who brought down New York’s twin towers, as well as the almost 3,000 innocent victims whose lives they ended so brutally?

Certainly, the Metropolitan Opera has a right to stage the opera, but for what purpose?

And why now? Some events are too raw, too sensitive, too wrenching, too immoral to be depicted evenhandedly and without judgment.

And if this opera seeks to communicate some larger truth, some cosmic message for our times that justifies its being performed now, trumping the pain that it causes, what is it?

MARK R. ARNOLD
Gloucester, Mass., Oct. 21, 2014

So not having seen an opera doesn’t disqualify you from passing judgment on it, because whether you’ve seen it or not, nothing stops you from confabulating a tendentious and question-begging description of what it must a priori contain: a “sympathetic” description of the motivation of the terrorists. It seems pointless to point out that a depiction is not a description, that neither a depiction nor a description is an endorsement, and that there is no conceivable way of knowing whether the opera is sympathetic if you haven’t seen it, and don’t intend to. We seem to have gotten to a point in the Klinghoffer debate in which willful, culpable ignorance has become a virtue, while the desire to know the facts first-hand has become a vice.

As for Mr Arnold’s rhetorical questions:

1. I would feel very badly about an opera about 9/11 that “described” the motivations of the terrorists: operas should be sung, not narrated.

2. The most obvious reason for staging an opera is that the opera company staging it thinks that it’s a good opera, which is what the leadership of the Met Opera happens to think (not that I can judge one way or another, not having seen it).

3. As for “why now?”: to paraphrase Hillel, if not now, when?

For decades, we’ve heard sanctimonious lectures from “the West” about the moral insignificance of the “pain” caused to Muslims by artwork like The Satanic Verses and the so-called Muhammad cartoons. Grow up, Muslims were repeatedly told (for decades), and learn a lesson or two about free speech and toleration from us enlightened Western folk. (Don’t forget, incidentally, that the main character of The Satanic Verses was named “Mahound,” i.e., the name for the Prophet Muhammad given him in The Song of Roland, the epic poem of the Crusades. If the death of a single man decades after the fact “causes pain,” should a joking literary allusion to the carnage of the Crusades have elicited joy?) Now that a different ox is being gored (if it is), the double standards leap to the fore. Call it the pseudo-moral triumph of misology.

As for the claim that we ought never, ever to make excuses for force, or place responsibility for it on anyone but its perpetrators, hearken to the words of Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld:

Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, who was the rally’s master of ceremonies, said he did not expect protesters to react inappropriately. “But you can’t be responsible when the Metropolitan Opera advocates terrorism and incites violence — you can’t know what will happen,” he said. “And anything that happens, that has besmirched this Metropolitan Opera, and besmirched Lincoln Center, is to be laid at the foot of Peter Gelb.”

Evidently, you can know what an opera contains without seeing it, but you can’t “know what will happen” when you place responsibility for the disruption of an opera on those suffering the disruption…even as you exculpate the crowds engaged in the disruption. Classic.

Postscript 2, October 23, 2014: More from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, arch critic of the advocacy of terrorism and incitement to violence:

Several hundred protesters, led by City University of New York trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, picketed outside Lincoln Center before the Met’s opening night last month.

“You will be made to destroy that set,” Wiesenfeld said at the protest. “We will demand it. It doesn’t belong in this city. We are going to be back here — everyone here and many, many more — every night of the Klinghoffer opera until the set is burned to the ground.”

Most of those protesters say they’ve never seen Klinghoffer, and don’t want to. They argue the opera is anti-Semitic because it humanizes — and therefore glorifies — the terrorists. But the opera’s defenders say that’s a fundamental misreading of the work.

Considering Wiesenfeld’s disgraceful performance, in this case as well as in the 2011 case of his attack on Tony Kushner, isn’t it time to protest him rather than “The Death of Klinghoffer”? Isn’t the real question how such a thug manages to become a trustee of the City University of New York, and achieve the unearned prominence he’s somehow managed to acquire?

Postscript 3, December 3, 2014: I just happened to notice Paul Berman’s “Klinghoffer at the Met” in The Tablet magazine, by far the most intelligent contribution to the Klinghoffer controversy I’ve so far read. I appreciate Berman’s criticism of the thuggish quality of the protesters, and assuming the accuracy of his descriptions of the opera, his commentary on it seems sensitive and apt. The criticisms made of him on the comment board at The Tablet strike me as contemptibly idiotic. But I have a criticism of my own to make.

Berman mentions, but doesn’t make very much of, the Met’s agreeing, under pressure from the ADL, not to simulcast “Klinghoffer” in the theaters, as it does for all of its other operas. Apparently, in this case, an exception to standard policy was deemed necessary. I would have thought that the implications of the Met’s acquiescence deserved a bit more comment. Americans do not generally accept the idea that Muslim (or Christian) religious sensibilities may permissibly set the terms of secular cultural activity. Why should Jewish or Zionist ones do so? A hundred years ago, readings and performances of The Merchant of Venice were regularly banned in the U.S. because the play was thought anti-Semitic. (And no, I don’t think The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic. Some of its characters are anti-Semitic, but the play is not.) In fact, contemporary critics–if one can call them that–still insist that The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, and insist that performances of it ought to be protested “without whining.” What we’re seeing is the recrudescence of the same attitude in a different context.

I wonder whether Berman has detected the double-standard here. For the last fifteen years, we’ve been conditioned–by intellectuals like Berman himself–to believe that Islam poses the most significant threat to our shared cultural space. To suggest that political Judaism does so is to risk being called an anti-Semite. But when was the last time that Muslims managed to pull off a coup, at least in the U.S., on par with the ADL’s blackmailing the Met over “Klinghoffer”? The truth is that they haven’t. In 2010, Berman published a controversial book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, complaining about American intellectuals’ abdication of their moral responsibility in criticizing Islam, as exemplified (he said) by the widespread adulation they lavished on the media darling of the moment, Tariq Ramadan. Well, Tariq Ramadan has, as far as the American cultural scene is concerned, vanished like breath off a blade (and good riddance)–but Abraham Foxman shows no signs of doing so. Is it perhaps time for a companion volume to Berman’s book, one about a different cultural and intellectual threat?

Actually, such a book appeared in 2007, as a kind of prequel to Flight of the Intellectuals– namely, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book of far greater precision and rigor than Berman’s own (than any of Berman’s own, and I’ve read them all). What did Berman have to say about The Israel Lobby? He certainly didn’t agree with it. He certainly didn’t regard it as an account of the other half of the story he was telling about “the flight of the intellectuals.” No, Berman, who had managed to find a conspiracy in American intellectuals’ failure to condemn Tariq Ramadan, ended up likening The Israel Lobby to the ur-text of psychopathic conspiracy theorizing, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a sophisticated document; but Walt and Mearsheimer’s book “The Israel Lobby” is (in some people’s view) a sophisticated document. And the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it is on to something. By reasoning in this fashion, people end up concluding that Hamas’ doctrines have a purchase on truth – something that quite a few people believe. But they choose not to say it because they don’t want to look unsophisticated or coarse.

Presumably, then, those who agreed with The Israel Lobby were apologists for Hamas and purveyors of blood libels and czarist conspiracy theories. Nothing psychopathic about that set of comparisons. But then, Berman was the guy who had written, in Flight of the Intellectuals, that verbal criticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali was tantamount to Stalinism, anti-Semitism, and mob violence (pp. 263-64). It didn’t seem to occur to Berman, or bother him, that in writing in this drunken, gauzy, irresponsible way, he was cheapening the currency of the phrase “anti-Semitism,” and exploiting the irrationality of those who might want it cheapened.

Here is the problem: an author who indulges in indiscriminate, scattershot defamations of the preceding sort is really not in a position to criticize the know-nothing fools who show up in Lincoln Center and want to burn the Met down over “Klinghoffer.” Whether they’ve read him or not, they’re simply following his lead. And whether he admits it or not, that “lead” leads to a moral abyss via double standards of the sort that he himself has been exemplifying for awhile.

I wrote a long review essay for Reason Papers of Flight of the Intellectuals back in 2011, and invited Berman to respond to it. We had a brief, and on his end, non-committal email exchange over whether he’d do so. It’s been three years since the invitation, and at this point, I think it’s safe to say that he has no intention of responding. But let me renew the invitation: when the issues are timeless, after all, it’s never too late to address them. To paraphrase Victor Hugo, if we wrote only for the moment, we might as well consign our word processors to the flames.

While I’m at it–waiting for a response that will probably never materialize–let me offer some unsolicited advice. If you’re going to make accusations of something as serious as anti-Semitism, then for God’s sake stop making them in the form of coy, half-asserted and half-denied innuendo like the passage I’ve quoted above. Have the courage of your convictions and say what you really mean in sentences with identifiable subjects, identifiable predicates, and identifiable connections between the two. Stop taking refuge in circumlocutions like “the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it’s on to something,” when what you mean is “The Israel Lobby is a sophisticated version, in intention and effect, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Don’t write things like this:

The campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented–at least since the days when lonely refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press (where the dissidents were accused, by the way, of whipping up right-wing fervors, exactly as is Hirsi Ali… (Flight, p. 264).

When what you really mean is: “Those who have criticized Hirsi Ali are Stalinists in a new guise.” Don’t compare mere criticism of Hirsi Ali to “the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003.” Don’t think that having done so, you can extract the sting and the venom of the remark by reducing the supposed similarity of two wildly different phenomena to an indeterminately vacuous property they supposedly have “in common” (namely: “These are developments that, even ten years ago, would have seemed unimaginable” [Flight, p. 264]).

Writing of this kind is corruption of language–the virtual but visible “flight of an intellectual.” Indulge it long enough, and you shouldn’t be surprised when the populist version of your attitudes shows up in Lincoln Center, barring your entry into the Met, ticket in hand or no. It may sound like a cliche, but at that point, you’ve met the enemy–and believe it or not, it’s you.

Postscript 4, December 4, 2014: The New York Times reports this morning that Louis Head, the stepfather of Michael Brown, has–albeit under the pressure of a police investigation–apologized for inciting violence after a grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for having shot Brown. Head had apparently shouted, “Burn this bitch down” at a protest near the Ferguson police station, referring to the police station itself. No comparable apology seems to be forthcoming from Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for comparable remarks about burning down the Met. Granted, Head’s remarks coincided with actual violence (rioting and arson took place shortly after his saying what he said), but then, in mitigation, his remarks were a response to the actual and relatively recent death of his stepson. Wiesenfeld’s remarks led to no actual violence, but were a response to confabulated outrage about the death of a stranger decades ago, and were directed at an institution that had no responsibility either for the death or for adjudicating events connected with it. File it under “Moral Luck and Double Standards.”

Back home; going postal; some news

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I just got back from Nicaragua, and I’m ready to blog.

Now that I’ve recovered a bit from my trip–in other words, now that I’m no longer chained to the bathroom–I’ve been sitting here trying to compare what I observed in Nicaragua with what I’d observed on recent trips to Pakistan and the Palestinian Territories. I haven’t come to any conclusions, but a series of anecdotes about postcards conveys something about the flavor of each place. I swear I’m not making any of it up.

Nicaragua. I had time to kill one day Augusto Sandino International Airport in Managua, so I decided to get some postcards. I went over to a vendor, and asked her, in half-assed Spanish, for five postcards. She gave them to me, I paid for them, and then thought to ask for stamps. She didn’t have any, so I asked my friend and colleague George–who’s Nicaraguan–where I could get some stamps. “What the hell for?” he asked (he speaks American). “To mail some postcards,” I said. “Dude,” he said, “What’s the point? Nicaragua doesn’t have a postal service.” Oh. A revelation. (Not that this made a difference to my postcard issue, but it turns out that Nicaragua doesn’t have any accurate street addresses, either.)

Stereotype 1: Nicaragua, land of postcards but no postal service.

Pakistan. Compare this to Pakistan, which has an exemplary postal service, care of its erstwhile British colonial overlords. One day I had time to kill at Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore, so I went over to a vendor and asked him, in perfectly fluent Urdu, for some postcards. “What are those?” he asked. That’s when my Urdu started to break down.

Irfan: Well, they’re cards with a picture on one side, and blank space on the other, so that you can write on them and mail them to people.

Vendor: What would you want one of those for? Just get a calling card. I have the best prices! Check these out…

I really had no idea how to respond to that, whether in Urdu or in English, so I tried to mumble an excuse and started backing slowly out of the store. The vendor started to panic.

Vendor: I have batteries too! All kinds. You need double A’s? Lithium? Duracell?

Irfan: Thanks, I don’t need batteries.

Vendor: Tea? Coffee? Chicken kebab? When does your flight leave?

Stereotype 2: Pakistan, land of a British-style postal service and pushy vendors, but no postcards.

Israel/Palestine. I ended up having no time to kill at Ben Gurion International Airport. A colleague from Al Quds University Law School had persuaded me to join him and about a dozen people for a jaunt to the Golan Heights the day before my flight was supposed to leave. We left East Jerusalem early in the morning, and headed north to Golan on the understanding that I had to be back in Jerusalem by midnight to catch a taxi to Tel Aviv for a 5 am flight. Security regulations required me to get to the airport by 2 am.

We took a (very) leisurely drive to Golan, spent the day at a water park there (I think it was Kfar Blum), had a (very, very) leisurely six-course barbecue in the park, and then headed (in leisurely fashion) to Lake Tiberias around 8 pm, where we spent a few hours dancing on a very large, loud, DJ-outfitted dance boat full of drunk Russian Jews and hyperactive Israeli Arabs. (Actually, among “us” Palestinians, the men danced. The Arab/Palestinian women sat on the sidelines, clapping, ululating, and urging us on. I’m gratified to say that one of them told me that I “danced like a Palestinian.”) After that, we had a four course dinner on the shores of Lake Tiberias, when around 11 pm–gorged on chicken, fish, watermelon, Turkish coffee, etc.–it began to occur to my hosts that at this rate, I might miss my flight. We then rushed, dangerously and at full speed, down the Tiberias coast. Eventually, we rushed into the West Bank via Jericho (stopping only for ice cream), dropped everyone else off at Abu Dis, then rushed back into Jerusalem past its checkpoint (by this time my tipsy driver was sweating bullets and weaving all over the highway), and got me to my taxi 90 minutes late.

The taxi driver–who was patiently undisturbed about the delay, and either a member of Hamas or a Mossad agent impersonating one–rushed me to Tel Aviv, administering an alarming ideological-theological purity test along the way, but getting me there in record time.

Taxi Driver: Are you Christian or Muslim? [‘Jewish’ or ‘atheist’ were evidently not among the conceivable options.]

Irfan: Muslim. [A bald-faced lie, but the right answer in context.]

Driver: Good.

Driver (after a pause): Are you Shia or Sunni?

Irfan: Sunni.

Driver: Good. The Shia are kaffirun [infidels]. They are fanatics. They will all burn in Hell. I am glad you are a Sunni.

Irfan: So am I.

Driver: Do you know Hassan Nasrallah?

Irfan: Well, I know who he is. [It seemed important here not to equivocate on ‘know’.]

Driver: What is your opinion of him?

Irfan: I don’t like him. He seems like a fanatic.

Driver: Good.

Etc. Repeat for forty-five hair-raising minutes, each ad hoc fatwa condemning more people to death or damnation, and each fatwa getting closer to revealing that I deserved the same fate. By the end of it, I was praying to be detained at an Israeli checkpoint.

Before long, I was detained at an Israeli checkpoint–or, well, a series of them. The first stop was just outside the airport, and took about half an hour. Then I got to the airport itself and was searched yet again. Then I got in line to check my bag, and was approached by an adorable security agent speaking Hebrew-accented English.

Security agent: We have reason to believe that you are bringing a bomb onto this flight.

Irfan (after a long pause): Sorry, what?

Security agent (rolling her eyes, and speaking very slowly, in exasperation): We…have…reaaason…to believe…that you…are bringing a bomb…onto the plane.

Irfan: Well, you might, but I don’t.

I didn’t mean to sound like a smart-ass, but I didn’t know what else to say. I hadn’t put a bomb in my bag (or anywhere else), but I had no way of proving that she had no reason to believe that I was bringing a bomb onto the plane. It just didn’t seem like the time or a place for a critical reasoning lesson on the burden of proof. (Philosophy, I’ve found, is a liability in most situations involving security agents, armed troops, law enforcement officers, or officers of the court.) She didn’t seem to like my answer, so she handed me over to another (very attractive) young lady, who walked me over to Strip Search Guy, who was much less fun than either of them had been.

I won’t bother to summarize the strip search part of my visit to Ben Gurion International Airport. Suffice to say that there was more stripping and searching than dialogue in the Strip Search Room. It also took longer than I thought it would. Who knew that there were that many orifices and surfaces in and on the human body large enough to hide a bomb? I guess by the end of it both Strip Search Guy and I had the answer.

After the strip search, I had to have my bag searched for the fourth or fifth time–once again by a very cute female security agent (a different one). She politely ransacked every millimeter of my bag, asking my permission to undo (and then redo) all of my packages (which I cheerfully gave)–including the bubble wrapped plaques of the Dome of the Rock that I had been cheated into buying by some scam artist in the Arab Quarter named “Ahmad” (what else?) who said that I “owed” it to him, to God, to Palestine, and to my Mom to shell out $200 to buy her (my Mom) a premium Dome of the Rock plaque with a nationalist-approved Quranic verse intended to prove that the Dome of the Rock was and shall forever remain within the exclusive sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority. I can’t believe I fell for it.

Anyway, this whole security process took three hours. By the end of it, the Alitalia airline agent who’d been waiting for me looked both alarmed and relieved when I emerged from security. “We thought you were going to be detained,” she whispered, and ushered me at last onto my plane. I hadn’t changed clothes or taken a shower in almost 24 hours, and was still damp from the Golan water park, with clumps of mud stuck to my socks and shins. I didn’t detonate a bomb, but I stank all the way to Rome, where I finally had the chance to clean up, buy some new clothes, and throw the old ones away. Bottom line: there was no time for postcards at Ben Gurion International Airport.

Stereotype 3: Israel, land of postcards and postal service, both of which are rendered inaccessible for security reasons.

I’m not sure what that all means, but these three anecdotes are the foundation for all of the stereotypes I now have about Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine.

In other, unrelated news:

1. Kate, Carrie-Ann and I are on the final edits of Reason Papers 36.1, which will be coming out on Monday the 18th (it clocks in at 223 pages).

2. Within the next few days, I’ll be turning “Policy of Truth” into a group blog. At some point in the near future, I’ll also be putting as much of my writing as I can find (and as is presentable) under the “Writing” tab of the site. Stay tuned.

A thought on Gaza

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

I haven’t said very much here of a direct nature about Gaza. That’s partly because I know less about Gaza than I do about the West Bank, and partly because I think there’s less to say about what’s been happening lately in Gaza than what’s been happening for awhile in the West Bank. But abstracting from questions of detail, I think there’s something to say, so I might as well say it. If I’m missing something, and being uncharitable to Hamas, someone can explain that to me, but as things stand, I don’t see any reasons for charity toward them.

I was having a conversation about Gaza the other day with my father and one of my cousins. My father and I are Pakistani-American; my cousin is Pakistani. All three of us have a great deal of sympathy for the cause of Palestinian rights, but none of us has any sympathy for Hamas. We’re all fairly argumentative people, but we quickly came to the following consensus about events in Gaza:

1. It makes no sense for Hamas to be officially at war with Israel and then to complain when Israel blockades Gaza. (And sophistry of this variety doesn’t help.)

2. It makes no sense for Hamas to attack Israel and not expect to be attacked in return.

3. It makes no sense for Hamas to attack Israel’s civilians and then complain to the world about its own civilian casualties at Israeli hands. (On the whole, I agree with the Israeli position that Hamas is using its civilian population as innocent shields, but this is a complex issue that requires separate treatment.)

4. Displays of pro-Hamas sympathy of the kind described in this article should elicit our criticism and rejection, not excuses or encouragement.

5. Finally, there’s a good analogy to be made between what Hamas is doing in Gaza and what the Pakistani Taliban is doing in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal agencies in Pakistan. There’s also a good analogy to be made between what the Israeli government has been forced to do in Gaza and what the Pakistani government has been forced to do in Pakistan’s northwest. The preceding analogies are driven by the sad fact that there’s a good analogy to be made between Hamas and the Taliban.

By the way, the consensus view of the three of us—including my Pakistani cousin, who lives in Pakistan—was that military action (ideally in the form of drone strikes) is the only way to deal with, i.e., defeat, the Pakistani Taliban. I’d like to think that Hamas is somewhat more reasonable than the Pakistani Taliban, and can come to a more reasonable settlement with Israel than the Taliban has mustered with Pakistan. But I wouldn’t bet on it. (Incidentally, could I have written the preceding sentence in Taliban- or Hamas-controlled territory without inviting the Islamic police to arrest me for suborning a violation of sharia? “Betting,” after all, is a paradigmatically unIslamic activity, and as its charter makes clear, Hamas believes that Palestine is to be ruled as an Islamic waqf under sharia. Thanks, but no thanks.)

We didn’t happen to discuss this, but like it or not, there’s a bit of an analogy to be made between Israel and Pakistan. The one is a Jewish state that aspires to be the moral equivalent of a secular republic while insisting, quixotically, on retaining its Jewish character. The other is an Islamic state that aspires to be the moral equivalent of a secular republic while insisting, quixotically, on retaining its Islamic character. Neither state professes to see any contradiction in doing so. Each state found it expedient a few decades back to support the enemy of its enemy—Hamas against Fatah in the case of Israel, and the proto-Taliban mujahidin against the USSR and India in the case of Pakistan. Both now find themselves on the receiving end of the depredations of the theocratic monsters they themselves helped create. Maybe one lesson here is that in the long-run, it doesn’t pay to outsmart oneself like that.

There’s a lesson here for the United States, as well. An interventionist foreign policy has a tendency to induce its practitioners to promote their “interests” abroad by supporting the enemies of their enemies, in the hope that doing so will induce one enemy to destroy the other and enable a kind of defense-in-depth-on-the-cheap. Such policies seem clever until the enemies of one’s enemies become one’s plain old enemies (often in alliance with yesteryear’s enemies, on the premise that those erstwhile enemies can now be treated as friends because they’re the enemies of one’s current enemies). At that point, of course, the policies come to seem irrationally self-defeating. One possible lesson is to stop intervening everywhere, and stop insisting on a conception of one’s “interests” that requires a defense in depth. Perhaps a non-interventionist policy that seems fairly clever in the here and now might, with the passage of time, retain its aura of cleverness in the future, and save us from a lot of trouble.

PS., For good non-mainstream coverage of the Israel/Palestine dispute, I’d recommend Ibishblog, the blog of Hussein Ibish, a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. I don’t always agree with what he has to say (he probably wouldn’t entirely agree with what I’ve just said above), but this article and this one say things that you might not have expected to hear from a partisan of the Palestinian cause, and aren’t likely to hear in the mainstream press.

SFL, Partisanship, and Candor: The Case of the Hertog Foundation

Posted on July 26, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

Students for Liberty has a new blog post up advertising Economic Liberty Seminars in NYC and Jerusalem, “sponsored by the Hertog Foundation, an educational philanthrophy in New York.” Three anomalies should stand out about this post.

The first is that unlike most posts on SFL’s blog, it’s unsigned. The author is listed as “Guest Author,” with no further identifying information.

The second is the sheer vagueness of the subject matter to be discussed at the seminars. The reader is told that the seminars will explore “fundamental questions of capitalism and democracy,” and “the relationship of political and economic liberty.” One obvious application of these topics to the Israeli context would be a discussion of the justifiability of Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank (or for that matter, its blockade of Gaza). But there is no mention whatsoever of those obvious topics. In fact, reading the advertisement, and clicking back through material on the Tikvah Center and Hertog Foundation, one is led to wonder whether the organizers of the seminar believe that Palestinian Arabs exist, and if so, whether their situation matters enough to be named and discussed in any explicit way.

This is a point worth bearing in mind, incidentally, the next time some defender of Israel gets in your face about Israel’s commitment to the equal rights of its Arab and Jewish citizens or denizens. I don’t doubt that many Israelis have some such commitment. The interesting question is whether Israel’s American defenders–and in particular, its supposedly free market defenders–have the relevant commitment. I doubt it, and if you wonder why, I suggest looking through the websites of the Hertog Foundation and Tikvah Center with the following question in mind: is the intellectual agenda expressed by these organizations one that shows active engagement with the need to come to terms with Israel’s Palestinian Arabs, or is it one that demonstrates a desperate desire to ignore their existence?

A third anomaly, related to the second: If you look at the personnel and activities of the Hertog Foundation and Tikvah Center, and you’re at all familiar with how the polemical end of the Arab/Israeli dispute works, you’ll probably infer that the Foundation and Center are academic branches of what Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have described as “the Israel lobby.” But if you look for any candid, explicit acknowledgement of this obvious fact, you will not find it. (Nor will you find any clear indication of how exactly the two organizations are funded, despite the sheer abundance of funding on offer in this, a time of “retrenchment” in post-financial crisis academia.)

What you will find instead is a slick, skillful, disingenuous exercise in plausible deniability. Every activity sponsored by the Foundation and engaged in by the Center has the same political orientation. Virtually every person associated with them is an active partisan on one side of the debate. Few if any Arabs are involved in the organizations’ activities (I didn’t see a single one; I’m just hedging in case I missed any), including its Fellows Program. But if you straightforwardly ask the question, “So are these organizations just the academic expression of a lobbying enterprise for a foreign government?” not only will you not find the answer, but you’ll likely be accused of anti-Semitism. And if you wonder why NYU houses such an outfit, people will accuse you of the conspiratorial belief that “Jews control academia,” and sarcastically start invoking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Before anyone does that, I should hasten to add that the problem here is hardly confined to pro-Israel organizations in American universities. It extends to supposedly academic centers for the study of Islamic civilization funded by Saudi money, and essentially partisan outfits within universities whose purpose is advocacy for various Third World causes under outward cover of academic neutrality or multiculturalism. It’s just that those things don’t typically show up at SFL.

One wonders why not. After all, if pro-Israeli advocacy is an expression of free-market capitalism, why not pro-Egyptian, pro-Tunisian, pro-Qatari, or pro-Islamic? Better yet, why not advertise pro-Arab and pro-Islamic organizations that flaunt their pro-Arab and pro-Islamic credentials, that pretend that there are no non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities in Arab/Muslim countries, and that interpret “freedom” and “capitalism” to mean “freedom for Arabs” or “capitalism for Muslims?” Finally, why not advertise organizations discreetly geared to an Arab/Muslim membership, but that cannot admit out loud that that is their self-conception?

A couple of years ago, I tried to call the bluff of such an organization–the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies–by sending a painstakingly constructed application for their annual Israel program. I didn’t get in, but I made sure to be interviewed, and spoke my mind in the interview. (As I said, I didn’t get in.) That’s my suggestion here, as it is for dealing with any such partisan organization with academic pretensions, be it pro-Israeli, pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, pro-Pakistani, left-wing social justice oriented, libertarian, or Objectivist. Take their rhetoric literally and at face value and insist that they live up to it. The results will be instructive, but don’t expect them to be pleasant.

The power of philosophy: Hamas, Gaza, Human Shields, and Hypocrisy

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

The front page of this morning’s New York Times has a thought-provoking article on Gaza, “Civilians as Human Shields? Gaza War Intensifies Debate.” The issues discussed in it are difficult and complex, and the article as a whole is well worth reading. There’s a vast literature out there on human shields, as well as on Gazans-as-human-shields, and it would be silly to try to discuss any large swatch of it in a single blog post. Just two quick observations, then:

(1) People sometimes cavalierly claim that philosophy is irrelevant to “real life,” but this article is a vivid, if unintentional, refutation of that claim. For better or worse, the language of “human shields” (or innocent shields, or innocent threats, etc.) is now all-but-taken for granted in discussions of the ethics of warfare, as is the presumption of civilian or non-combatant immunity from military attack. That wasn’t always the case. Moral philosophers made it the case by making the relevant arguments in “obscure” books and journals, and lawyers followed their lead and institutionalized the philosophers’ claims. Military commanders eventually made compliance with those philosophical and legal principles a matter of “honor.” But the bottom line is that the terms of today’s debates about the war in Gaza were set by the writings of yesterday’s philosophers– specifically by the writings of the generation of philosophers (Walzer, Nozick, Nagel, Judith Thomson, etc.) who achieved academic prominence during the worst days of the Vietnam War, and turned to philosophy as a means of processing what they observed. If that doesn’t count as evidence of philosophy’s relevance to “the real world,” then questions of evidence are themselves irrelevant to the discussion.

(2) In a related article, an unnamed State Department official is quoted as saying the following:

“What we’re trying to figure out is how we can get to the point where the violence can stop and these bigger key issues can be addressed over the longer term,” said a senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified in keeping with the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters.

The biggest key issue is the Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank. But American credibility on that issue can be gauged by the fact that the last time it was called on publicly to re-affirm its own assessment of Israel’s settlement policies–at the UN, in 2011–it refused to do so. Putting the point less charitably, it couldn’t summon up the integrity or courage to do so. The US has consistently claimed to be opposed to Israel’s settlement policies but has just as consistently refused to condition support for Israel on Israel’s ending that policy. And so the policy has continued, with pro forma American disapproval, and de facto American support. Any intelligent person would have to wonder how long such a charade could go on.

After almost five decades of this pattern, the State Department wants us–and the Palestinians, and the rest of the world–to take the United States’s supposed interest in “bigger issues” on faith. But fideism doesn’t work in politics anymore than it works anywhere else. Fideism, secular and religious, is after all one of the “root causes” of the Arab-Israeli conflict as such. What makes the US a dishonest broker in the dispute–not that it has to be a broker at all–is its equivocal attitude toward faith-based politics. Unfortunately, that attitude has its basis in philosophy as well–yet another confirmation of philosophy’s relevance to “real life” and of its power over people oblivious to the power it has.

“Pairwise”

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Irfan Khawaja under Uncategorized

It belatedly occurs to me that my last post misuses the term “pairwise.” A pairwise comparison is a comparison of one pair of things as against another pair, not a comparison of two items that are paired against one another. I was using “pairwise” to mean the latter, but that’s a mistake.

Incidentally, I haven’t set out a formal list of “policies” for this blog, but one of them will surely have to be that I promise not to make substantive changes to a post after the post has been published. I will, however, correct copy-edit level mistakes, as long as they don’t substantively change the point I was originally making. I guess you might object that any change, even at the level of grammar or punctuation, affects some substantive point somehow, but I’d respond that the changes I regard as “copy-edit level” are too minute to count as substantive in the relevant sense. They improve the clarity of the original argument without changing its content. Anyway, when in doubt (when I’m in doubt), I’ll tell you that I’ve made a change after I hit “Publish.”

I take it that the preceding policy differs from what one finds at some other blogs, where bloggers routinely modify their claims in response to criticisms, don’t inform their readers that they’re doing so, and then proceed as though the criticisms in question were misplaced. That’s obviously dishonest, and I’m surprised that readers are less critical of the practice than one might expect them to be.

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