Tag Archives: Palestine

Postcards from Abu Dis (3): Where is the “there” in Jerusalem?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

A letter published in yesterday’s New York Times makes a bitter complaint about the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding the location of Jerusalem:

To the Editor:

Re “Justices Reject Passport Law on Jerusalem” (front page, June 9):

Jerusalem is where the Knesset, Israel’s legislative body, is. Jerusalem is where Israel’s prime minister, cabinet and president have their offices and meet. Whatever some governments, world organizations or politicians might say, these are facts.

Ignoring these facts harms the prospects for peace in an increasingly violent, destabilized Middle East. Israel’s ancient capital, Jerusalem, is not a negotiating pawn to be offered up by the American president or the State Department as they may see fit.

To treat Jerusalem as other than Israel’s capital throws gasoline on the fires already raging across the Middle East.

JULIA LUTCH

Davis, Calif.

Here’s a prior question: Where is Jerusalem? What are its city limits?

To answer that question, take a look at this map of Jerusalem and environs, from Google Maps. Intuitively, where should the eastern boundary of “Jerusalem, Israel” lie?

Intuitively, it ought to lie on the 1949 Armistice Line, indicated on the map. But it doesn’t. Israel has unilaterally annexed swatches of land to the east of that line in an incremental fashion so that it’s simply unclear where Israeli Jerusalem is supposed to end on its eastern side.

So “Jerusalem” now includes the Old City (Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Western Wall, Al Aqsa Mosque), the Mount of Olives, Silwan, Ma’alot Ir David Street, the uninhabited portions of Nahal Kidron, etc. right up to the separation wall at Abu Dis and Eizariyah, miles into the West Bank, and miles away from what any naive American would have regarded as the eastern border of Jerusalem. (It doesn’t matter what naive Americans think; we don’t think. We just brainlessly foot the bill for others’ sectarian-nationalist projects.) The total arbitrariness of these boundaries doesn’t bother the Israeli government. Nor is it bothered by the fact that its de facto boundary is miles into the territory of the would-be state that it claims to regard as a partner in the so-called “two state solution.” We Americans haven’t quite come to grips with the fact that our favorite ally in the Middle East is a country whose demands are more determinate than its borders.

A look at the map should also reveal how an opportunistic Israeli city planner might decide to take things further still. To the east of the Mount of Olives, south of Hebrew University, and west of the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim lies a planning zone enumerated “E1.” Here is how the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem described the master plan for E1 in 2009. I’ve italicized the key sentence (be sure to click the link to watch the video embedded in it):

Ma’ale Adummim is the largest Israeli settlement in its jurisdictional area (some 4,800 hectares) and the third largest in population size, after the ultra-Orthodox settlements of Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit. Its city limits, which include the city’s neighborhoods and the Mishor Adummim Industrial Zone, encompass a vast swath of land deep in the West Bank. Many Israelis consider Ma’ale Adummim an Israeli city that will remain under Israeli control in any final-status agreement reached with the Palestinians.

In accordance with this conception, Israeli governments have taken measures in recent years to strengthen the spatial and functional ties between Ma’ale Adummim and Jerusalem. The planning authorities have approved an outline plan for residential neighborhoods in E1, an area that lies within Ma’ale Adummim’s city limits and borders Jerusalem’s jurisdictional boundary. Due to objections made by the US Administration, the neighborhoods have not yet been built. However, despite the American opposition to construction in E1, Israel moved the Samaria and Judea Police District headquarters there. While constructing the police headquarters, Israel paved roads and built infrastructure to serve hundreds of housing units planned to be erected nearby.

The route approved by the government for the Separation Barrier in the area will leave more than 6,000 hectares on its “Israeli” side, including not only Ma’ale Adummim’s built-up area (400 hectares), but also extensive swaths of land for future expansion of the settlement. Although construction of the Barrier has stopped – officially due to budgetary constraints – the plans to complete it along the designated route, thus annexing extensive areas of land to Israel, remain in place.

I am not sure what the exact status of E1 is right now. But supposing it’s built according to plan, will the developed areas lie  “in Jerusalem”? Is E1 “in” Jerusalem? Well, strictly speaking, E1 is within the municipal boundary of Ma’ale Adumim. But much of the zone is closer to Jerusalem than it is to Ma’ale Adumim. So it’s part of “Greater Jerusalem,” which is defined (or described) as follows by a pro-Israeli source:

The area known as “Greater” Jerusalem usually refers to an approximately 100 square mile space surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem. This area includes both West and East Jerusalem, including the adjacent neighborhoods outside of the municipal boundaries of the city.

Greater Jerusalem usually refers to an approximately 100 square mile space not limited to east Jerusalem but including unspecified adjacent neighborhoods outside of the municipal boundaries of the city. So don’t assume that if someone says, “Jerusalem ends here,” it ends there. It ends wherever Israel wants it to end, when it wants it to end, whenever that is. Meanwhile, its supporters insist that anyone born “in it” is born in Israel.

Here’s “Greater Jerusalem” circa 2003, getting “greater” with every passing year. (There’s a more recent map online, but I couldn’t get it to reproduce very well. What else would you expect of a CIA map?)

Metropolitan Jerusalem - 1.jpg (1600×1153)

I’ve seen other maps that simply incorporate Ma’ale Adumim into Jerusalem, but they’re hard to reproduce here.

Jerusalem, the letter writer has the audacity to tell us, is not a “negotiating pawn.” No, it’s a moving target conceived in such a way that the Israelis can keep annexing land to its east, putting “facts on the ground,” and subverting the purpose of negotiations altogether. The Palestinians have insisted on a settlement freeze (which wouldn’t really touch any of the above), but that’s been brusquely dismissed. The U.S. was given the opportunity to vote on settlements at the UN in 2011, but cryptically vetoed a draft resolution condemning settlements despite the consistency of the resolution with official U.S. policy.

Given that, I think we should be able to grasp the U.S. State Department’s very mild objection to describing “Jerusalem” as being “in” Israel. Jerusalem is only “in” Israel in the sense that its roving eastern border is “in” the fantasies of Israel’s land-use planning authorities. The status of the city is disputed, and has to be resolved in final status negotiations. (Of course, it’d be nice for State Department spokespersons to be able to explain what the policy is. And though it’s easy to find pro forma references to our Jerusalem policy, I had some trouble finding a formal statement of it via either the State Department’s website, or that of the US Embassy in Israel.)

I’m writing this from the town of Abu Dis in the West Bank, about half a mile from the separation barrier that constitutes what the Israelis regard as the eastern border of “Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, you might say, is a stone’s throw from my daily walk to the university. This so-called “Jerusalem” right next to Abu Dis is an uninhabited waste ground of rocky hills and escarpments. (It’s depicted in one of the header photos I’ve put up.) In other words, it’s not Jerusalem at all, except in the minds of opportunistic city planners and irredentist fanatics. But it’s considered Jerusalem all the same.

The irony, however, is that, according to Google, to get to “Jerusalem”–meaning the actual city of Jerusalem, the place where you find buildings, streets, and people, including the Knesset, and the offices of the cabinet and president–you have to spend 100 minutes on a bus that takes a gigantic U-turn to Maale Adumim and then into “Jerusalem.”* Incidentally, if it weren’t for the wall, this would be a 20 minute ride traversing about two miles, but the wall makes that impossible. As it happens, there’s a road just on the “Jerusalem” side of the wall, but West Bank Palestinians are not permitted to access it, even though it’s in the West Bank. So close and yet so far away! They don’t call it an “apartheid wall” for nothing.

The outrage back home about the Supreme Court decision on Jerusalem is a classic case of wanting to have things all ways at once: When Israel’s defenders want to insist that Jerusalem is “in Israel,” they talk about the part of Jerusalem that is obviously in Israel, the western part. When they want to defend Israel’s expanding Jerusalem to the east, they ignore the fact that that “Jerusalem” is not in Israel–or only “in it” by Israel’s fiat. The point seems to be that our government should equate Israeli fiat with reality, and write it into our laws, our policies, and our passports.

As it happens, the Supreme Court’s decision is only the tiniest gesture in the reverse direction, toward reality. But just as you can lead a horse to drink without making it drink, you can gesture toward reality without making anyone perceive it. The reality is that Israel is encroaching on land that is often private Palestinian property, and was supposed to be part of a Palestinian state. It’s putting up a concrete barrier to make Israeli planning and development easier and Palestinian planning and development impossible, cutting neighborhoods in two, and cutting them off from one another. It’s about time that Americans took the effort to see what’s really going on here.

Gertrude Stein supposedly said of Oakland, California: “There’s no ‘there’ there.” The comment more obviously applies, though in a sense different from the one Stein had in mind, to Jerusalem. There’s no there there because there’s no where for the there to be. It sounds convoluted because it is: it’s a convoluted place ruled by a government which thrives on convolutions. But when you apply a policy of convolution to boundaries, what you get is a recipe for systematic boundary crossings. Welcome to “Jerusalem…Israel.” Or wherever it is.

——————————

*A friend tells me that there are faster ways of getting to Jerusalem from here by bus; I’m just repeating the information I found via Google. Even so, the relevant point stands: the existence of the wall changes the route one takes, and the time it takes, to get to Jerusalem from here.

PS, June 16, 2015: Having taken the bus now, it’s obvious that Google was wrong: it takes about 30-40 minutes to get from Eizariah (just north of Abu Dis) to Jerusalem. But the wall substantially adds to the time it takes to get there, and makes it prohibitively difficult to get there by foot, as I discovered today from hard experience. I can see the Mount of Olives from my kitchen window (the edge of Jerusalem proper), and if the wall weren’t there, it’d be a fifteen minute walk, but there’s no way to walk it without hitting the wall.

Postcards from Abu Dis (2): Pedagogy Under Occupation

Posted on by under Uncategorized

My political philosophy class here at Al Quds University has met either once or twice so far, depending on how you count. I’m told that 19 students are enrolled, but only one showed up on the first day, so I didn’t really teach that much. Four students showed up for class two, so we had a full class. I’m told that this pattern of attendance (or non-attendance) is a bit of a tradition in this neck of the woods: things start slowly at first, and then, little by little, build to a pedagogical crescendo. It’s the reverse of the pattern I’m used to at Felician, where everyone on the roster shows up on the first day of class, but fewer and fewer show up as the term wears on, so that by the last day, you’re lucky if anyone shows up–and at some level, they’re lucky if you do.

There’s a sense in which what I’m doing here at Al Quds is pedagogically controversial and a departure from my usual approach to teaching. Without literally engaging in advocacy in the classroom, I’m taking an overtly political approach to how I’m framing the class. I am, in effect, unapologetically teaching not political philosophy per se, but “Political Philosophy (and the Occupation).” Though it’s not what I would do in the average American classroom, I’d like to think that it could bear scrutiny by observers from back home. So I thought I’d say a bit about it, and invite some scrutiny.

There’s no way to teach political philosophy from a literally neutral perspective. You can’t successfully teach, say, Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’s Leviathan simply by showing up in the classroom, knowing nothing about the interests or psychology of your students, and “covering the material.” That’s a recipe for pedagogical failure. It may work in other disciplines, but it can’t work in philosophy. The problem with it is that philosophical “material” is too open-ended and protean to be approached in this way. There’s no single, standardized “right way” to teach a philosophical text. There are too many choices to be made–regarding translation, selections, questions to be pursued and not pursued–and too many legitimate ways of making them. Choices of that kind are dictated in part by the audience you want to reach, and what you want to achieve with them.

thesea

Suppose you decided to teach Plato’s Republic, and “simply” wanted to “cover the arguments,” whether in the sense of merely summarizing them, or summarizing them, laying them out in deductive fashion, and testing each of them sequentially for validity and soundness. I suppose you could do that, and at some level, anyone would have to do a bit of it. But you couldn’t leave things there. The “material” you’d ideally want to cover is not reducible to a summary of the arguments in “the” text, or even reducible to a summary plus a sequential set of tests of the soundness of each argument (assuming that that’s even possible, and waiving questions about how to individuate the arguments in the text). At a minimum, what you’d need in addition to all of that is analysis of the contested concepts of each of the premises of every major argument–and not just a straight “conceptual analysis” as analytic philosophers often use that phrase, but a sort of dialectical and rhetorical analysis that takes stock of what those concepts mean to your students both cognitively and emotionally.

Putting things slightly differently: if you want the material to sink in—in any sense of “sink in”—you have to ask how it connects with the beliefs, desires, habits, practices, preoccupations, etc. (call it the ‘context’) that the students bring to the text. How do they conceptualize “justice,” “friendship,” “harm,” “advantage,” “promises,” “debt,” and so on? If you ignore that personal context, the class will backfire: the text becomes a series of alien and alienating abstractions without connection to the students’ experiences. That’s what makes teaching both challenging and enjoyable, and somewhat analogous to psychotherapy. Whether you’re teaching philosophy or engaging in therapy, you can’t waltz in, hit your “audience” with a Power Point presentation and waltz out. You have to interact with them, going back and forth between the text and the context they bring to it, until each thing manages actively to illuminate the other. (By the way, this is why online teaching will never become a literal substitute for on-the-ground teaching in philosophy.)

wall1

The issue becomes particularly acute when you’re teaching a dialogue like the Republic: dialogues are stories, and readers either relate or don’t relate to a story.There is no successful way to teach “the arguments” of Plato’s Republic while ignoring how students relate to Socrates, Glaucon, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus as characters. You might as well read The Brothers Karamazov “for the arguments” while ignoring the brothers.

In fact, the dialogue form is what makes Plato’s Republic such a hard but great text to teach. What would make Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Mill easier to teach would be some way of presenting them in dialogue form. But that, of course, is what a class on such texts has to become. What Socrates says to those characters in the Republic is informed by his knowledge of their personalities, and the same thing has to be true of a successful instructor teaching Aristotle and the rest. Absurd and presumptuous as it may sound, once you teach Plato’s Republic, and move on to the rest of the class, you the instructor have to play Socrates to the Glaucons, Adeimantuses, Polemarchuses, and Thrasymachuses in your classroom–but on Aristotelian, Machiavellian, Hobbesian (etc.) material. The classroom has to become an extended dialogue.

wall2

As an American, 99.99% of the teaching I’ve ever done has been done in the United States. Even there, regional and institutional differences have always necessitated adjustments to my pedagogical methods. I saw this with blinding clarity one semester when I happened simultaneously to be adjuncting at Princeton University, The College of New Jersey, and Mercer County Community College—three institutions within a few miles of each other, but that may as well have been located in different galaxies. Princeton is an Ivy League university, TCNJ is a small state college, and MCCC is a two-year county college devoted to remedial work.

I’ll admit that I had a few Stand-and-Deliver-type fantasies about teaching my MCCC students by exactly the same standards and methods as my Princeton students, but mercifully, those plans didn’t get past the fantasy stage. The differences between Princeton and MCCC students, learning philosophy within five miles of one another on different sides of Route 1, are a blog post in themselves, but suffice it to say that they demanded drastically different pedagogical treatment. I didn’t happen to teach the same class at both places, but if I had, they’d have to be taught in radically different sorts of ways. And what applies to two or three different schools in Mercer County a fortiori applies to a school thousands of miles away in the Jerusalem Governorate. It makes no sense to teach Palestinians philosophy the way I teach it to Americans.

wall4

In general, the American students I’ve taught—twenty-one years’ worth of students at seven institutions in three states—are politically disengaged. They’re preoccupied with personal concerns and personal pleasures that push political concerns to the side: clubbing, drinking, drugs, sex, sports, shopping, and parties on the frivolous end; friends, family, romantic relationships, career choices, money, logistical worries (e.g., transportation, child care, etc.), and medical-mental health issues at the more serious end. Military veterans aside, the political world doesn’t interest them, and to put the point somewhat uncharitably, they rarely have anything of interest to say about it, either. The political issues that concern them are hyperlocal issues of direct consequence to them, e.g., the rules and regulations governing student loans. (It seems to me characteristically New Jersey-esque to think that defaulting on one’s college loans is a significant form of political protest. But I’ve complained about this attitude too recently to spend time on it now.)

The sort of issue that consistently makes its way to the front page of The New York Times strikes most of my students as distant, abstract, and ultimately meaningless. Take the headlines above the fold in today’s edition of the Times (meaning the June 9 edition): “Justices Reject Passport Law on Jerusalem”; “A Raid on ISIS Yields a Trove of Intelligence”; “Evangelicals Open Door to Debate on Gay Rights”; “A Rare Gambit Seeking Justice for a Shot Boy.” I can just hear my students asking:  What does any of that have to do with my life?

It’s tempting to respond that while the details of these stories aren’t directly related to their lives, surely justice, rights, intelligence and passports/constitutionalism are relevant. Isn’t that enough to get students engaged with politics? The answer is “no.” The response presupposes a concern with principle and a degree of empathy for others that isn’t always there (=usually isn’t there), and can’t easily be taught, if it can be taught at all, at least in a classroom (cf. Plato’s Meno).

In my experience, not even crime and race relations are an exception to the general rule of political disengagement, at least not in suburban New Jersey. The events of the last year–Ferguson, Cleveland, etc.–haven’t really changed anything. After all, race relations on campus (my campus) are generally good, and a black guy is president: that tends to be good enough to preserve the equilibrium of complacency. As far as my students are concerned, Ferguson, Cleveland, and even Staten Island may as well be foreign countries. So the pedagogical task in the American context is to find a way to make the political personal–to make it matter to students in a personal way.

Here in Palestine, the situation is just the reverse: the political is already personal; the (merely) personal is relatively unimportant. More specifically, for the Palestinian students I’ve met, occupation is their preoccupation. Like anyone, they may well be preoccupied, more remotely, with personal concerns and pleasures (hookahs, cigarettes, coffee, hanging out in cafes), but the burning issue that concerns them is life under Israeli military occupation. What they need (as I see it) is a means of standing back and taking a broader perspective on things than the daily grinding outrage they feel about the situation they’re in. That said, one can’t expect them simply to ditch the outrage and theorize in the abstract.

There’s a balance to be struck here, and it’s a hard balance to find. From experience, I’ve decided this time to push things in the politically engaged direction after having made the mistake last time I was here of pitching things in an overly abstract way. When I lectured here two years ago on Locke, I’d intended to give a relatively uncontroversial overview of themes in Locke’s political philosophy, along with a sketch of Locke’s relevance, at a very high level of abstraction, to the Israel-Palestine dispute. That first lecture (of three) didn’t go well, and its failure was a valuable learning experience for me. (I learned quickly enough to make the second and third lectures more successful, but they were on different topics anyway.) I still don’t think I said anything false, but much of what I said was irrelevant to the audience I was facing. And it’s not that I knew nothing about my audience’s concerns; I knew that they were living under a military occupation and resented it. But I had misjudged the degree and intensity of that resentment. I also knew less than I thought I did about the occupation itself.

Psychologically, I came to realize, my Palestinian audience simply could not focus on Locke qua Locke, abstracting entirely from Locke’s relevance to the occupation. My Locke lecture was, for them, like an outlandish two-hour thought-experiment offered for reflection to people in prison. “You keep talking about rights,” I remember one guy saying. “But we don’t have any of these rights.” And not having them became an insuperable barrier to hearing what I had to say about Locke. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, an objection to anything I had said. I hadn’t after all said that they had the rights Locke says we have. The objection was that in jumping straight into Lockean theory, I had made demands of them that flouted their experience.

wall5

Pedagogically, one has to make a choice here that one doesn’t, I think, have to make back home. If I’m going to get students here to open up psychological space for theorizing, I can either motivate that theorizing as a good thing in general, or as a good thing as a form of resistance to the occupation. And I’ve decided to go with the latter. I don’t see the point in pretending that I’m neutral on that subject, or even that the purpose of the class is neutral with respect to it. I’m not neutral, and neither is the class. The occupation is unjust. The class is a form of resistance to it. Enough divides me from these students as it is, even in the context of that agreement, to justify using the agreement to forge a common bond, and letting it promote classroom rapport. I’m teaching here to help them think their way out of the occupation, insofar as that can be done.

I’m teaching Plato tomorrow, but I think the point can more easily be conveyed by thinking about Locke. In teaching Locke here last time, I realized that one can’t teach Locke in Palestine by putting the text of the Second Treatise at the forefront and keeping the occupation on the backburner. One has to bring Locke to the occupation, and vice versa. To give a sense of what I mean, imagine a hypothetical class or set of classes on the first five chapters of Locke’s Second Treatise, as follows.

The class begins with Locke’s account and definition of “political power” in ST I.3. The definition seems straightforward enough; I don’t recall any of my teachers or interlocutors spending much time on it. But the details of the definition have a certain subtle significance in a Palestinian context, as applied to the Oslo definitions of Areas A, B, and C in the West Bank. Who (it’s worth asking) has Lockean “political power” in each place under that arrangement–Israel or the Palestinian Authority? That way of asking the question turns out to be both illuminating and disorienting. On a conventional view, the Palestinians rule Area A, there’s joint rule in Area B, and the Israelis rule Area C.* But that’s not the question. The question is: Who has Lockean political power over the West Bank? And the answer is that the Israelis do. That’s why the tripartite division of the West Bank doesn’t change the fact that the West Bank remains as occupied as it ever was: it remains occupied by Israeli political power in the specifically Lockean sense, not the conventional one, something worth bearing in mind when one faces someone who insists that the West Bank is “no longer occupied.”

Move to book II of the ST, which discusses Locke’s conception of the State of Nature. Most of PoT’s readers can probably recite some version of an undergraduate lecture on this topic: “A Lockean State of Nature is a hypothetical state of affairs in which persons exist with rights of freedom and equality, but without a common political power.” The sticking point is “hypothetical.” Yes, that’s what the words say, but what is a State of Nature really like? Nozick is somewhat helpful in clarifying this a bit:

To understand precisely what civil government remedies, we must do more than repeat Locke’s list of the inconveniencies of the state of nature. We also must consider what arrangements might be made within a state of nature to deal with these inconveniences…Only after the full resources of the state of nature are brought into play…will we be in a position to see how serious are the inconveniences that yet remain to be remedied by the state, and to estimate whether the remedy is worse than the disease. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 10-11).

At this point, however, Nozick offers a very abstract (some would say implausible, fantastic, and rationalistic) account of protective associations, dominant protective associations, invisible hand explanations, and the task of backing into the state. It’s intended as a just-so story, but it sort of seems like a fairy story.

But there’s another way, a more concrete way, to see how serious are the inconveniences of life without a state. Go to a place that doesn’t have a state and take a look around. For instance, go to Area B in the West Bank and ask: is Area B a Lockean State of Nature? What inconveniences arise from the absence of a state here? What improvements, if any, would be made if a state could be brought into existence? What kind of state would improve things, and how? Your answers may not generalize to every State of Nature, but they may tell you something that you won’t get by reflecting from your armchair (a la Nozick) on Proudhon, Schelling, Rothbard, and Boulding. (Incidentally, go back and re-read p. 4 of Anarchy on this very under-remarked issue–how exactly do we conceptualize the State of Nature–and the question turns out to be both central to Nozick’s conception of political philosophy, and totally unresolved. But that’s a topic for a different post.)

Move now to book III of the Second Treatise, on the State of War. It might be valuable to apply a similar approach to this topic as to the last one. We can all read Locke’s definition of the State of War without any trouble, but how does it apply to particular cases? For instance: is the Palestinian Authority in a (Lockean) State of War vis-à-vis Hamas and/or Israel right now? Can the Palestinians be in a State of War vis-à-vis the Israelis if Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) has sworn off “armed struggle” as a means of dealing with the occupation? Can a State of War obtain between two parties, like the PA and Hamas, that have formed an alliance with one another, albeit in a state of nature? Questions like that give Locke a poignancy in the Palestinian context he wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Book IV of the Second Treatise discusses slavery: some sensitive topics come up here. On Locke’s view, slavery is “the State of War continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive” (ST IV.24.16ff). Does that mean that the Israeli occupation is a form of slavery in Locke’s sense? Arguably, it does. Though Locke is famous for the view that suicide is morally impermissible (since we’re all God’s property, ST II.6.19), he leaves the door open for suicide under slavery (ST, II.23.13) while “resisting the will of [one’s] master.” But if you can commit suicide under slavery as a form of resistance to your master, can you kill your master while you’re at it? If the occupation turns out to be a form of Lockean slavery, that gives Locke a closer kinship to Hamas and Islamic Jihad than anyone might have expected, a thought that seems to have escaped most academic interpreters of Locke I’ve read.

Finally, consider Locke on property, with an explicit view to the implications of his views on property disputes in Israel and the West Bank (ST V). Here’s a short laundry list of questions that occur within the first few paragraphs of Locke’s discussion:

  • If, as Locke tells us, we’re to rely on reason and revelation for our account of property (ST V.25.5), does that mean that Islamic sharia is a legitimate source of norms regarding property rights? Sectarian prejudices aside, why wouldn’t it be?
  • While we’re on the topic: Is Locke pro-Palestinian or pro-Zionist or neither? Is Locke’s labor-based conception of property an implicit defense of the Palestinians’ natural right to stay on the land in defiance of legal processes that evict them, or is just a set of anachronistic apologetics for Labor Zionism?
  • According to Locke, initial appropriation of land proscribes wasting it, demands its improvement, and requires leaving ‘enough and as good’ for others (ST V.31-33). The model Locke seems to have in mind is agriculture—even more specifically, the English enclosure movement. But how does that relate, if at all, to nomadic Arab Bedouins in Israel/Palestine?
  • According to Locke, God gave the use of the land to “the industrious and rational” (ST V.34.5). Do Bedouins qualify as “industrious and rational” in the relevant sense? Or is Israel right to think that they’re neither: that nomadism wastes land, environmentally degrades it, and uses too much space, so that there’s a justification for expropriating Bedouins by force and putting them in settled and civilized housing projects?

That’s just a hypothetical set of classes on Locke. I doubt even the most proficient instructor could do more than scratch the surface of the issues I’ve mentioned in an actual class. But what’s true of Locke ends up being true across the board. To teach Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli (etc.) in Palestine, you have to ‘Palestinianize’ those texts. I don’t mean, of course, that you read them for things that aren’t in them. I mean that you have read them for what’s in them in relation to the context that surrounds you, where the context picks out features of the text or approaches to the text you might not otherwise have focused on.

The irony is that doing so makes these texts both easier and more difficult to teach at the same time, but in different respects. Easier because it gives them a concentrated focus that they would otherwise lack. More difficult because one rarely reads them in this way back home, and the task of integrating theory and practice is a difficult one where an outsider like me is forced to do a fair share of groping in the dark.

I told my students the other day that life under occupation gave them an advantage that few people have, and that as students of political philosophy, they ought to be grateful for it.

That got their attention. One of them asked me (with all due respect) what the hell I was talking about. I told her (them) that the advantage in question was epistemic: few people in the world live under military occupation, from which it follows that few people know what it’s like to live under one. Arguably, that goes for most philosophers, including most (though not all of) the philosophers we’re about to read in the course. Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Mill didn’t (as far as I know) live under occupation-like conditions, though arguably, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx did.

Since (I suggested) Palestinians can’t wish the occupation away, they might as well capitalize on whatever features of it can be put to their advantage. Political philosophy gives its devotees a perspective on their immediate political situation that facilitates a comprehension that they might not otherwise have had. But it works the other way around as well: ‘naïve’ readers may well have something to teach the giants of philosophy what they would never have thought of on their own.

That, at any rate, is my bet. I’m curious to see if I win it.

*Thanks to Kate Herrick for spotting a typo in the original version of this sentence.

Thinking about BDS (1): Infantilization, ‘Safe Spaces’, and Threats to Discourse

Posted on by under Uncategorized

An angry discussion has broken out about the self-infantilizing character of American university life (and beyond). The basic argument is that contemporary American universities have, in the name of an infantilizing form of pseudo-therapeutic psychobabble, come to stigmatize the very idea of discourse or debate that hurts anyone’s feelings. The criticism comes mostly from the political-academic right (in some sense, however vague) and targets the political-academic left (in the same vague sense). Here’s a piece on the subject in Intercollegiate Review. Here’s an overview from Inside Higher Ed from last year, and a much-discussed one from The New York Times this past March. Here’s a critical commentary from Salon inspired by the Times article. Here’s a more aggressive take on the same from Reason magazine. Here’s the take at the Breitbart site. Here’s the most recent take from BHL.

I basically agree with “the right” on this one, at least in a qualified sort of way. I agree that discourse at American universities is, across the board, irrationally constrained by pseudo-therapeutic rather than truth- or justice-guided norms. We care far too much about how people will feel than how they think, or how they should be thinking. We also care too much about how people will feel than we do about how good our arguments are, how much evidence supports them, or for that matter how rhetorically persuasive they would be to a person of psychologically normal sensibilities.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should be insensitive to people’s feelings or special sensitivities, or to go out of our way to offend them. There’s a balance to be struck between candor and tact. But the balance cannot involve the outright sacrifice of alethic to therapeutic concerns: “sensitivity” can’t dictate that nothing be said out loud that might be construed as insensitive or “triggering” for some person or audience.

I reached the absolute limits of my patience with the “sensitivity” phenomenon when I was obliged last year (along with the rest of the faculty and staff at my institution) to take “sensitivity training” designed to ensure compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws, as follows:

As a Catholic/Franciscan institution of higher education, Felician College unconditionally rejects all forms of discrimination and acknowledges our obligation to safeguard and enhance the dignity of every member of our College community. As part of our commitment  to create and to maintain an environment free of discrimination, intimidation, humiliation and harassment of any kind, and in compliance with both federal and state recommendations, all members of the Felician College faculty and staff are required to complete training on identifying and preventing harassment and discrimination in the workplace. …

It is a legal requirement that we provide harassment training annually.  Since it is very difficult to get everyone together for a lecture format, we have contracted with  Workplace Answers to provide online training for Felician College.  The basic module for faculty/staff should take no more than 40 minutes, the supervisory module (if required) about 20 minutes.  The FSI Corporate Compliance module is self-paced.

Feel free , incidentally, to take a look at the website of Workplace Answers to try to figure out what they’re all about. At best I think you’ll learn that online harassment training is a big and lucrative business involving the marketing of a lot of vacuous cliches.

It sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? It isn’t. If you actually endure the training, you’ll discover that the entire “compliance module” is a systematic assault on the norms of inquiry, discourse, and academic life. Here’s an actual example taken verbatim from the module: it is (we are told) unlawful harassment for a professor to hang a poster inside his office of the word “War” with a red slash through it, because the extremist anti-war message involved could be construed as “threatening” to, “discriminatory” against, or “harassing” of military veterans. (I can’t reproduce the actual graphic, because it’s protected by copyright.) The tacit reasoning seems to be: opposition to a political policy can be construed as “threatening” to those who (presumptively and stereotypically) may be thought to support the policy (e.g., veterans can be presumed to support war); meanwhile, passive acquiescence in the status quo, however unjust, is legally obligatory and “professionally appropriate” behavior.

One implication here seems to be that while combat veterans can handle combat on the battlefield, they cannot be expected to handle ideas like war in a university. Presumably, all returning military veterans suffer from a form of PTSD so intense that they will collapse into a dysfunctional heap at the mere mention of the word “war”–from which it follows that the word must never be spoken in their presence (except, I suppose, to praise it).* A second and more general implication seems to be that  “professionalism” in the “corporate” (=academic) context requires us to avoid discussing anything that might offend anyone’s sensitivities, even if doing so is central to the academic enterprise.

As I said before, most of the criticism of “academic infantilization” has targeted the left from the right, but one group, essentially located on the right, seems to me to have taken the infantilization of academic discourse to a generally undiscussed extreme. The group in question is the anti-BDS movement (or more pedantically, the anti-BDS counter-movement, since it opposes BDS, which precedes it).** In saying this, I don’t mean to be pronouncing on the correctness or incorrectness of BDS as a strategy for dealing with the Israeli occupation. That’s a complicated topic on which I reserve judgment, and which I’d like to think through here over the next few months. What’s clear, however, is that whether BDS is right or wrong–even if it’s entirely wrong–its critics and the movement they represent are a threat to the academy and to political discourse as such.

Two tactics are essential to the anti-BDS repertoire and particularly subversive of rational discourse: (1) gratuitous recourse to the race card, in the form of reflexive accusations of anti-Semitism as a means of discouraging debate; (2) resort to the (literal) use of force through “lawfare” in order to put BDS out of commission by force of law, and thereby put an end to debate that way. Many groups (especially ethno-religious groups) employ one or the other or both of these tactics, but few have done a “better” job of combining them in a single integrated assault on the norms of discourse. In doing so, the anti-BDS movement has, on American university campuses, become the discursive equivalent of the “price tag” movement in Israel: they’re among the vandals of our intellectual life. I find it instructive that right-wing critics of infantilized/trigger-warning discourse have almost nothing to say about this brazenly obvious example of the phenomenon they deplore. But they don’t.

One task on my agenda here in Palestine is to clarify my own views on BDS: I’ve been asking everyone I meet here in Palestine (and will ask anyone I meet in Israel) what they think about BDS. Personally, I’m in favor of divestment on the Princeton model, agnostic about sanctions, skeptical about boycotts, and generally opposed to academic boycotts. I realize that that sentence by itself will cost me friendships across the entire political spectrum. But that’s where I stand, at least for now.

In favor of BDS: I worry about anti-Semitism and about double standards within BDS, but I’m also uncompromisingly opposed to the Israeli occupation/settlement enterprise, and frankly have lost patience with views of a sort that permit opposition to the occupation but proscribe doing anything about it. That’s led to nothing but five decades of occupation, subsidized and supported by the American taxpayer. In a sense, it’s led to something worse: our acquiescence in the idea that it’s our fate or role to support the morally insupportable by insisting that it’s somehow a moral imperative to do so. We’ve become mere means to the end of the Israelis’ making the Palestinians mere means to their ends. And that has to end. BDS looks like the only viable option for hastening the end, or at least doing what’s in our power to hasten the end. So in principle, sign me up.

Skepticism about B and S: Though divestment seems relatively uncontroversial to me, non-targeted boycotts and sanctions potentially seem indiscriminate in their punitive features, and counter-productive in the sense of attacking the very parts of the Israeli public most sympathetic to Palestinian rights. So I can’t sign on the dotted line to the whole package, but am not willing to dismiss BDS out of hand, either. (I can, however, think of both American and Israeli companies and institutions that deserve to be boycotted.)

That said, one can’t even begin to think clearly about any of that in the atmosphere of hysterics generated by the anti-BDS movement. Hence the need for an initial blog-based “ground clearing” operation. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk a bit about the anti-Semitic “race card,” and its effects on discourse about Israel. In a third part, I’ll talk about the attempt to deal with BDS through “lawfare.” I don’t mean either discussion to be comprehensive; it’s a complicated topic, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it periodically after this initial series is over (uncharitable interpretation: “Khawaja has an unhealthy obsession with that topic”). So there will be indefinitely many parts to this series as a whole.

More soon.

 *I teach at a “veteran friendly” institution, and have taught and taken classes with former combat veterans for years. They certainly do have special needs and sensitivities, but they also tend to be among the most mature and engaged students in a given classroom. I find Workplace Answers’s depiction of them frankly stupid, and I suspect that the veterans I know would, too.

**For vehicles of the movement, see The AMCHA Initiative, the BDS section of the Anti-Defamation League’s website, BDS Cookbook, Buycott Israel, Divest This, Divestment Watch, Engage, Israel Action Network, Israel On Campus Coalition, The Israel Project, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. See also Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm’s The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2015). The title of the Nelson-Brahm book is a classic case of falsity in advertising: despite the title, the book is a wholesale critique of BDS as such, not just of academic boycotts. Despite the protests of a single author (Michael Berube), seven authors in the book go out of their way to argue that the BDS movement as a whole is anti-Semitic–a view clearly shared by the editors.

Postcards from Abu Dis (1)*

Posted on by under Uncategorized

So here I am, blogging “live” from Abu Dis. I’ve settled in a bit, the jet lag is starting to wear off, and I’m getting ready for my first class tomorrow, which I’m hoping will be a case of found rather than lost in translation: I’m speaking in English, and a translator is translating into Arabic for the students, and then back into English for me (and so on). We’re working on acquiring and distributing serviceable Arabic translations of Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise, Mill’s “On Liberty,” Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and just maybe, Marx’s “British Rule in India.” With the possible exception of the very last reading, I’m pretty confident that translations are out there and can be found–though I suppose that  you’d want more than a vote of “pretty confident” from a professor whose class starts tomorrow morning.

That said, I do wish I had paid more attention in Arabic 101 (as well as Arabic 102 and Arabic 103) in college, but I clearly didn’t learn enough to understand or carry on an ordinary conversation, much less teach a political philosophy seminar. Let that be a lesson for all students everywhere who ask that ridiculous question, “But when will I ever use this stuff that I’m learning?” How about: “What will you do when the unforeseeable occasion arises that demands knowledge you were supposed to have gotten but didn’t?” You’ll plead ignorance, that’s what you’ll do. And you’ll look and feel like a blithering idiot. How’s that for an answer?

How this translation thing will work is anybody’s guess, but I’m game, and I hope the students are, too. I met three of my students the other day–we exchanged enthusiastic smiles at one another for lack of being able to engage in mutually comprehensible discourse–and I’m told that I’ll have a total of between 12 and 15 students in the class. (A colleague at Felician tells me that they’re running summer classes with enrollments as low as 5. Ha!) We’re scheduled for a nice seminar room with a long rectangular table. A few cups of the Arabic coffee I’ve been having lately, and I think I’ll be ready for anything.

I don’t mean to be minimizing the hardships of life under military occupation–at least for people without an American passport like mine–but you could hardly have dreamt up better conditions for philosophical contemplation than the ones I’m currently in. I’m living in a spare but comfortable dorm room on the eighth floor of a four-tower housing complex. I’m the only human occupant of any of the four buildings: it’s like living in a non-scary version of “The Shining” (if that makes any sense). The other occupants include an unending series of pigeons whom the building manager allows to roost where they will–because “they’re guests, too.” Those bloodthirsty Palestinians!

The weather has been clear everyday, with temperatures hovering in the upper 70s and low 80s during the day, and upper 60s at night. A Mediterranean breeze riffles through my open window, and my ears are caressed by the twittering of birds, and the melody of children at play (never thought you’d see me write that, did you). I’ve had nowhere to go today, and apart from a quick trip into town, nothing to do but read, write, and look idly out of my eighth-floor window. It’s like a single person’s version of that old Belinda Carlisle song (if that makes any sense).

I’ve had a whirlwind few days. Last night, Rawan Dajani, one of the many hard-working people who work at AQU’s PR office, took me–of all places–to a reception at the U.S. Consulate in West Jerusalem, where I hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of Jerusalem. The food was good (grape leaves, sushi, hors d’ouevres, Jerusalem-style pizza, Palestinian pastries), but the music was even better (a jazz group from Nazareth), and the company was better than either. We got there too late to hear the departing Consul General’s speech–all I heard was the word “terrorists” as I went through security–but here it is.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, I even managed to have a conversation with the Consul General, Michael Ratney. Mr. Ratney and I discussed the complexities of the political situation. It was a productive conversation, and we agreed to re-convene in the near future for further talks. In a highly positive development, he told me–and here I quote directly–that he was “very pleased to meet” me. So I’m happy to report that progress is being made on all fronts, and look forward to continuing conversations with him on matters of mutual concern.

After the reception, Rawan and I visited the controversial Mamilla Cemetary, the opulent Mamilla Mall, and the hard-to-characterize Festival of Light in the Old City of Jerusalem, but I’ll have to save serious discussion of all of that for another post.

Well, except for one thing: I gather from a report on CBS News that there was a protest and some police action in response to the Festival a few days ago, but the only disturbance I managed to encounter that night was sleep disturbance due to jet lag. Incidentally, I find the line of questioning by the interviewer in the CBS video I just linked to rather silly: “Things have been calm in Jerusalem ‘lately,’ so was there anything that precipitated these protests?” The assumption seems to be that protesters are stimulus-response machines who won’t protest unless some proximate event precipitates it. But tensions have been “simmering” here for years, and the underlying problems have gone unresolved, so there’s nothing surprising about protest in East Jerusalem when it does arise.

Anyway, as I said, I’ll save discussion of the politics (and in the case of the Festival, the aesthetics) for later posts. For now, I’ll just say that Rawan and I were there for about an hour last night; it was packed with throngs of Israelis, Arabs, and foreign tourists, but I perceived no tension at all.

So what’s it like here in the West Bank?  I’ve put a photo of my immediate surroundings in the header photos (and I’ll putting more in as I take some), so you’ll see that come round the photo carousel every now and then. I’ve already told you about the weather, and I haven’t had enough meals to tell you about the food, so about sound? What does it sound like in the West Bank?
Here, from a few days’ experience, is what the average evening sounds like in Abu Dis:
7:30 pm: preliminary call to maghrib (evening) prayer followed by call to prayer followed by prayer (VERY LOUD)
8:30 pm: celebratory machine gun fire and fireworks** followed by loud amplified music (yes, every night)
9-10 pm: dog fights and miscellaneous dog howling that echoes throughout the valley
10 pm: night time (isha) call to prayer
11 pm: eerie, reverential silence…until….
12 midnight: roosters crow midnight for half an hour
1 am: cat fights
2 am: dead silence punctuated by random horn blowing and trucks in low gear straining to get up the hill
3 am: cats, roosters, pigeons, donkeys, and occasional dog engage in high volume interspecies call-and-response communication, the cats being the loudest and sounding weirdly human
4 am: morning call to prayer (fajr)
5 am: in direct contradiction of all rooster stereotypes, roosters fail to crow for sunrise
9 am: someone operates a pneumatic drill for an hour
The strangest thing is that I actually slept rather well, and feel totally refreshed.
It’s a rather paradoxical place, this Palestine. More soon.
*I was originally going to call this series “Live from Abu Dis,” but dropped it for two reasons: (a) The blog currently has more Palestinian than American readers, and I’m not sure Palestinian readers would understand the (not all-that-funny) allusion to “Saturday Night Live”; (b) every blog post from anywhere is live, so “Live from Abu Dis” ultimately makes no sense. I almost called it “Postposts from Abu Dis,” but I think you can figure out why I didn’t. So “Postcards” it is. Wish you were here!
**I had originally written “celebratory machine gun fire,” but I discovered last night that they were fireworks. Less dramatic, I realize (June 14).
August 3, 2015: I later discovered that machine gun fire was interspersed with the fireworks (and vice versa).

From Assurance Contracts to “Compulsory” Voting

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Jason Brennan has a series of posts up at BHL on compulsory voting. One of his arguments against compulsory voting is what he calls the Assurance Argument:

The Assurance Argument

  1. Low turnout occurs because citizens lack assurance other similar citizens will vote.

  2. Compulsory voting solves this assurance problem.

  3. If 1 and 2, then compulsory voting is justified.

  4. Therefore, compulsory voting is justified.

I’ve sketched a version of the Assurance Argument here at PoT that’s immune to Brennan’s criticisms. It doesn’t exactly correspond to Brennan’s version of the Assurance Argument above, but I think it’s close enough in form to be worth discussing in the same breath.

I have yet to set it out formally, but my version of the Assurance Argument turns on the idea of an assurance contract to vote. The basic idea is this: Take a context in which low voter turnout is a bad thing you justifiably want to remedy. Find a population apt to vote in a single direction as a unified voting bloc. Make sure that what they’re voting for not only promotes their interests, but in doing so, promotes the common good. Then come up with a mechanism for generating and enforcing an assurance contract that gets that population to vote the relevant way. If you work with the right population, pursue the right aims, and fashion the right contract, my view is that you can generate a binding obligation to vote in the population, and in doing so, solve the assurance problem that Brennan treats as essentially insuperable.

Given the preceding context,  premise (1) of Brennan’s version is fine as is, but the rest has to be modified as follows: In premise (2), substitute “an assurance contract” for “compulsory voting.” In (3) and (4), substitute “enforced contract remedies” for “compulsory voting” (and change the grammar). With that in place, you have a version of the Assurance Argument that comes as close as possible to an argument for “compulsory voting” without quite crossing the line into literal compulsion. 

The general idea is that in any political context in which you can induce people to form an assurance contract to vote, you can “compel” them to vote, or else exact a penalty for failure to vote. That sounds implausible if you’re talking about American elections, but there are other contexts in which it’s feasible.

During the intifadas, Palestinian politics involved mass action where compliance was universally expected, and non-compliance was severely penalized (sometimes by death). The point is that in cases like this, we’re talking about a political culture that involves a strongly solidaristic ethic, where structures are in place for mass collective action.

Imagine that West Bank Palestinians somehow acquired the right to vote in Israeli elections (or East Jerusalemite Palestinians just decided to exercise their pre-existing right to vote), and that the mass action in question turned from coercive uprising-related activity to electoral politics. My claim is: If you can induce near-compliance with the dictates of an uprising (as you can), you can induce explicit consensual compliance with an assurance contract involving a promise to vote in an election. If you can do that, you can compel compliance with the contract.

More specifically: Imagine an electronic caucus–like a MOOC–in which everyone in a given population is expected, due to social pressure, to log on and decide on a course of electoral action. Everyone who logs on then becomes part of a (potential) assurance contract. The numbers are tallied, and if they’re sufficient to tip the election, the contract is considered valid, and people are expected to vote accordingly. If not, the caucus dissolves. (In other words, what I’m calling a caucus really has the function of a caucus plus a census plus an assurance contract.)

Suppose that the numbers are there to tip the election. Then everyone is expected to vote as specified in the contract. Suppose that the contract calls for x votes for a certain candidate/slate/policy. If x votes show up in the election results, fine. But if fewer do, it follows that there were free riders who reneged on the contract. In that case, it becomes a matter of finding out who they are, so as to exact a penalty for non-compliance. Now suppose that the balloting is open, not secret. If so, then if (say) Khawaja failed to vote for the agreed-to candidate, and there’s no secret ballot, someone will squeal on him when the Free Rider Commission makes its inquiry. Under such conditions, I suspect that there will be very few free riders.

If you can pull all that off, you can “compel” votes that tip the scales of the election. The obstacles to pulling it off are psychological rather than conceptual. If the right psychological dispositions were in place–if Palestinians regarded elections the way they regard uprisings, and the Israelis allowed them to organize politically, and allowed them to vote, etc.–you could generate an electoral assurance contract mechanism involving (a) numbers large enough to affect an election but (b) small enough to organize and hold compliant to the terms of the contract. This only seems implausible to Americans because we live in a huge, highly impersonal, individualistic, diverse, and cosmopolitan society where such a contract seems like a mere thought experiment. If you live in a smaller scale society with a different political ethos, however, it’s within the realm of nomological possibility.

The point I’m making isn’t so much about Israelis and Palestinians as about assurance contracts and elections. Even if the preceding doesn’t literally apply to the Palestinian case, my point is, if you can find a case that satisfies the description I’ve just given, you can run some version of an assurance argument on it. It’s an empirical question whether you can generate or discover such a case. I’m not a political scientist, and don’t know the literature very well, but as an armchair consideration, I don’t find my empirical assumptions implausible, and they merely have to be possible to get the argument off the ground. Maybe Brennan discusses the relevant empirical issues somewhere (he’s written a great deal that I haven’t read), but he doesn’t do so in The Ethics of Voting or in “The Right to a Competent Electorate,” which I have read.

There are lots of details to work out here, but once you grasp the principle involved, the sketchiness of the proposal is not an objection to the basic idea. At any rate, my argument is immune to what Brennan calls the Burden of Proof and the Worse Government arguments.

Here’s the Burden of Proof Argument:

The Burden of Proof Argument

  1. Because compulsory voting is compulsory, it is presumed unjust in the absence of a compelling justification.

  2. A large number of purported arguments for compulsory voting fail.

  3. There are no remaining plausible arguments that we know of.

  4. If 1-3, then, probably, compulsory voting is unjust.

  5. Therefore, probably, compulsory voting is unjust.

As a response to my argument, the BP argument fails at premise (1): premise (1) doesn’t apply to my argument because unlike compulsory voting in the literal sense, there’s no initiatory compulsion involved in my assurance contract idea, and no special burden of proof is required to hold someone to a contract to which they’re explicitly a party.

Here’s the Worse Government Argument:

 The Worse Government Argument

  1. The typical and median citizen who abstains (under voluntary voting) is moreignorant, misinformed, and irrational about politics than the typical and median citizen who votes.

  2. If so, then if we force everyone to vote, the electorate as a whole will then become more ignorant, misinformed, and irrational about politics. Both the median and modal voter will be more ignorant, misinformed, and irrational about politics.

  3. If so, in light of the influence voters have on policy, then compulsory voting will lead [to] at least slightly more incompetent and lower quality government,

  4. It is (at least presumptively) unjust to impose more incompetent and lower quality government.

  5. Therefore, compulsory voting is (at least presumptively) unjust.

This argument fails at premise (1) as well. As far as I can tell, premise (1) implicitly makes a claim about the median American voter. But I’m not talking about American voters; I’m talking about non-American ones. Unless the claims of (1) generalize to the voters I have in mind, the WG argument involves an ignoratio elenchi against my proposal.

If anyone can cite studies that show that, say, Israeli Arab voters are misinformed, ignorant, or irrational when they vote for the United Arab List, I’d like to see it. If anyone can cite studies that show that East Jerusalemite Palestinians would be misinformed, ignorant, or irrational to vote for (candidates that favor) more housing permits, I’d like to see that, too. But I’m skeptical.

*I changed the title of the post after posting.

Rights for Peace

Posted on by under Uncategorized

This Op-Ed by Youssef Munayyer in today’s New York Times sounds just the right note on the Netanyahu victory, and convinces me, at last, of the need for some version of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel–or more precisely, what I like to call “D without BS,” divestment from companies that promote the Israeli occupation and settlement enterprise, minus boycotts and sanctions.

Here’s Munayyer’s statement of the problem:

Israelis have grown very comfortable with the status quo. In a country that oversees a military occupation that affects millions of people, the biggest scandals aren’t about settlements, civilian deaths or hate crimes but rather mundane things like the price of cottage cheese and whether the prime minister’s wife embezzled bottle refunds.

For Israelis, there’s currently little cost to maintaining the occupation and re-electing leaders like Mr. Netanyahu. Raising the price of occupation is therefore the only hope of changing Israeli decision making. Economic sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s increased its international isolation and put pressure on the apartheid regime to negotiate. Once Israelis are forced to decide between perpetual occupation and being accepted in the international community, they may choose a more moderate leader who dismantles settlements and pursues peace, or they may choose to annex rather than relinquish land — provoking a confrontation with America and Europe. Either way, change will have to come from the outside.

Here’s his solution:

The old land-for-peace model must now be replaced with a rights-for-peace model. Palestinians must demand the right to live on their land, but also free movement, equal treatment under the law, due process, voting rights and freedom from discrimination.

Mr. Netanyahu’s re-election has convincingly proved that trusting Israeli voters with the fate of Palestinian rights is disastrous and immoral. His government will oppose any constructive change, placing Israel on a collision course with the rest of the world. And this collision has never been more necessary.

The election results will further galvanize the movement seeking to isolate Israel internationally. B.D.S. campaigns will grow, and more countries will move toward imposing sanctions to change Israeli behavior. In the past few years, a major Dutch pension fund divested large sums from Israeli banks active in the West Bank, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been divested from companies, like G4S and SodaStream, that operate in occupied territory.

There won’t be real change on the ground or at the polls without further pressure on Israel. And now, that pressure will increase. For this, we have Mr. Netanyahu to thank.

It’s taken me fifteen years of dithering skepticism about divestment to get to the point of agreeing with an analysis like Munayyer’s–and I think there are legitimate questions to be asked about the criteria to be used to decide questions of divestment–but the election results demonstrate that the time really has come to divest from the occupation. The failure to consider the adoption or promotion of divestment for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism has simply become a way of rewarding the Israelis for their intransigence in the West Bank. I’m sorry, but I can no longer believe in the fairy tale of civility, good will, desire for peace, or respect for rights that we’re all obliged to attribute to the Israelis. It’s not there. This election tells us that the writing is on the wall. We’ve written them blank checks for decades; they’ve rewarded us with contempt. It has to end.

Though I don’t know where he stands on divestment, I recommend Hussein Ibish’s recent essays on similar topics in The National and in Now.

Postscript, March 22, 2015: I missed this piece by William Saletan in Slate a few days ago, but it collects a lot of useful evidence, and seems to me exactly on target. (ht: Qasim Rashid’s FB page)

Postscript, March 24, 2015: Matt Faherty sends along this interesting piece from Harvard Business Review on what the author takes to be the relative inefficacy of divestment as a strategy for change or protest. Without disputing the author’s narrow claim (about investments), I’d say two things: (1) the author himself concedes that divestment played an important role in the devolution of South African apartheid, and (2) part of the case for divestment is “symbolic” rather than “instrumental”; one divests from an immoral enterprise from “clean hands” considerations, to avoid complicity in the immorality involved. But the topic could use further discussion.

The two best studies of the South African case that I know are Ronald Segal’s Sanctions Against South Africa, and Robert Kinloch Massie’s Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years. Massie’s book (which covers divestment) is of particularly direct relevance. Segal’s book, though valuable, is more about sanctions than divestment per se.

I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t really kept pace with the BDS literature on Israel/Palestine, but it’s expanding at a pretty rapid rate. The standard pro-BDS text is Omar Barghouti’s (et al) The Case for Sanctions against Israel. A standard anti-BDS text is Cary Nelson’s (et al) The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel.   I haven’t read either book, so I’m not recommending or endorsing, just mentioning them.

Postscript, April 3, 2015: There’s recently been a controversy at Princeton University about divestment from Israel. This letter from John Waterbury (emeritus professor of Politics) is a nice statement of the case for divestment “from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and continued siege of Gaza.”

I agree with the first conjunct but not the second. I think Princeton ought to divest from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation/settlement enterprise in the West Bank, but not from companies that contribute to/profit from the Gaza siege. Waterbury doesn’t mention that if Princeton divests from companies that contribute to and profit from the Israeli siege of Gaza, it ought to do the same for companies that contribute to and profit from the Egyptian blockade of Gaza. It expresses a double standard–and plays into the hands of divestment’s critics–to fail to mention Egypt in the same breath as Israel in this context, when both countries are doing the same thing. (In fairness to Waterbury, the original statement from Princeton Divests does explicitly mention Egypt.)

I’d also explicitly want to stipulate that divestment cannot be construed to involve objections to ventures like this one, as many advocates of divestment would like to assert. The company in question is not profiting from the occupation but profiting despite it. Unfortunately, the distinction between profiting from and profiting despite the occupation seems to be lost on many left-wing advocates of divestment, who seem willing to pounce on any profitable Israeli-Palestinian venture, simply because it is profitable and puts Israelis and Palestinians in cooperation with one another on capitalist or quasi-capitalist lines. I don’t accept that, and don’t want to be associated with it. Here’s an example of the sort of attitude I have in mind (from Electronic Intifada). The review of “Under the Sun” contained in the preceding link is both wrongheaded and egregiously dishonest, and is just one of many reasons why skepticism about the divestment movement is justified even if divestment turns out to be the right thing to do.

Postscript, April 10, 2015: So let me get this straight: A bank can be held liable in federal court for facilitating terrorist attacks when it funds the terrorist organizations behind the attack, even if the bank follows established compliance standards designed to avoid liability.  Meanwhile, it’s anti-Semitic to suggest that we divest from companies that play an active role in the state-sponsored Israeli expropriation of Palestinians, even when that enterprise involves torture and homicide. In other words, facilitation of terrorist attacks (by Muslims) deserves legal sanctions, but divesting from state-sponsored rights violations (under the auspices of a Jewish state) deserves defamation. The “principle” involved here, if you can call it that: Jewish lives matter; Palestinian lives don’t. Palestinian terrorism matters; Israeli rights violations don’t. As a bonus: reckless, well-poisoning ascriptions of “anti-Semitism” are fair game in defense of Israel. Call it what you want, but it isn’t justice.

CFP: Lockean Libertarianism

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Roderick Long has a CFP up at his website for a workshop on Lockean Libertarianism at MANCEPT, to be held this September at the University of Manchester in the UK. I’ve heard great things about MANCEPT, and encourage interested others to submit abstracts to it. Details at Austro-Athenian Empire, via the preceding link.

Here’s the abstract for a paper I have in mind. The title alludes to the story of Jeptha and the Ammonites from the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, which Locke mentions at the end of the third chapter of the Second Treatise. Comments welcome, including bibliographical suggestions, especially comments about work that’s relevant to the project but that I seem to have missed.

Israel and Ammon: Toward a Neo-Lockean Historiography of the Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1929

Locke’s theory of property rights finds its way into four distinct literatures:

(1) Philosophers and political theorists have assessed Locke’s arguments for validity, soundness, and cogency.

(2) Historians have situated Locke’s arguments within the broader, mostly Euro-American contexts in which it fits (e.g., Western political thought, Anglo-American political history, etc.)

(3) Libertarian theorists have tried to integrate neo-Lockean insights into contemporary libertarian theory, and/or tried to apply these insights to relatively contemporary policy issues, typically within a First World context.

(4) A relatively small minority of writers has discussed the bearing of Lockean theories of property on issues of rectificatory justice—some to defend Lockean theory, others to criticize it.

Call (1)-(4) as the Locke literature. Almost none of this literature discusses the topic of contemporary (i.e., twentieth and twenty-first century) land disputes in Israel-Palestine.

The historiography of Zionist-Palestinian land disputes may usefully be divided into three categories:

(5) Zionist partisans hope to produce a historiography of Zionist-Palestinian land disputes that vindicates the Zionist project in historic Palestine.

(6) Anti-Zionist partisans hope to produce a historiography of the same land disputes that de-legitimizes the Zionist project in historic Palestine.

(7) Historiographical neutralists aim to offer what they take to be an ideologically neutral account of the relevant history.

Call (5)-(7) the historiographical literature. For a variety of reasons worth exploring, both Zionist and anti-Zionist partisans regard Lockean theories of property as subversive of their ideological aims. Meanwhile, neutralists regard the adoption of any abstract theory, whether Lockean or otherwise, as subversive of the objectivity required for the historiographical enterprise.

In “Israel and Ammon,” I suggest that a neo-Lockean approach to the history of land disputes in Palestine offers a useful corrective to the problematic assumptions of both the Locke and the historiographical literatures. For purposes of the paper, I rely on the account of Zionist-Palestinian land disputes in Kenneth Stein’s landmark book, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, narrowing my focus to the years 1917 and 1929. Though Stein—in my terminology, a historiographical neutralist–doesn’t mention Locke, Locke’s theory is obviously relevant to the material he very lucidly presents.

Reading Stein via Locke (and vice versa) is therefore a useful dialectical exercise. By doing so, we come to see the extent to which the historiographical literature—including its putatively neutralist practitioners–relies on controversial normative assumptions about property; we’re also forced to confront the ahistoricity and ethnocentricity of the Locke literature as currently written, as well as its relative inapplicability to real-life situations. Both sets of problems, I suggest, need correction.

More generally, I conclude that Lockean ideas are of crucial relevance to historiography, but only in a modified form that facilitates their application to such issues. The abstract, ahistorical, and culturally bound features of the Locke literature need to be revised in the direction of general applicability; the normative (or anti-normative) assumptions of the historiographical literature need to be challenged outright. So conceived, a neo-Lockean historiography affords us a more integrated account of the relation between theory and practice, and yields valuable insights for Locke scholarship, political philosophy, and historiography.

Postscript: Here’s a related conversation taking place at Notes on Liberty, via Matthew Strebe.

Nidaa Badwan: 100 Days of Solitude in Gaza

Posted on by under Uncategorized

I was intrigued and gratified by this stereotype-subverting piece in Saturday’s New York Times about Nidaa Badwan, an artist in Gaza, who’s spent most of the last year in her room, creating art.

Alienated by Gaza’s restrictive religiosity and constant conflict with Israel, Ms. Badwan, 27, has hardly left the room for more than a year. Within its walls she has created her own world, and a striking set of self-portraits that are at once classical and cutting-edge.

“I wait for the light,” said Ms. Badwan, who sometimes takes a week or even a month to construct photographs that look like paintings. “Everything is beautiful, but only in my room, not in Gaza. I’m ready to die in this room unless I find a better place.”

Cops, settlers, and stones in Wadi an-Nasara

Posted on by 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

Back home; going postal; some news

Posted on by 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.