Tag Archives: Sari Nusseibeh

Disruptions on Campus: There’s Always an Excuse for Israel

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A passage from a blog post by Steve Horwitz at BHL:

Here are a few thoughts for college libertarians who are able to invite speakers to campus and how they might do so in the most productive ways.

Let me start by saying that the sort of interruptions we’ve seen this week with Yaron Brook and Christina Hoff Sommers are utterly unacceptable. Those who disrupt planned presentations with official permission to use space and students expecting a talk should be forcibly removed from the room and subject to the relevant disciplinary consequences. There should be no negotiating with anti-intellectual terrorists. They should feel free to ask questions when the time comes or protest outside the building in ways that do not prevent those who wish to attend from attending. No excuses.

A question for Horwitz et al: what if “those who disrupt planned presentations with official permission to use space” on campus call themselves “the Israel Defense Forces” (IDF) and are sent by something that calls itself the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria? Should they be “forcibly removed”? Forcibly removing them is what a policy of “no excuses” would really entail. Continue reading →

Fernando Teson on the Palestinian State

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Fernando Teson’s opening gambit on a discussion of the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine dispute:

Almost everyone has by now accepted the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

I wasn’t aware of that. Evidence, please?

While we wait for Teson’s response, feel free to read the Wikipedia entry on the One-state Solution at your leisure. It doesn’t seem to cohere with his claim.

If the wait is long enough, you can also read through Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari Nusseibeh’s version of the one state solution from his book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Note: The RP link goes to a long PDF that requires lots of scrolling down. You can also access the symposium this way, if you find it more convenient.)

As PoT readers know, I spent two months in Palestine this summer teaching at Al Quds University. My experience doesn’t cohere with Teson’s off-the-cuff claim any more than the Wikipedia entry does. And don’t make me haul out back issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies, please. Because you know what will happen if I do?

Postscript, 10 pm: I wonder whether Professor Teson could explain in mathematical terms how majorities of 63% of Israelis and 53% of Palestinians amount to “almost everyone.” Do 37% of Israelis and 47% of Palestinians = no one? Feel free, Professor, to use scratch paper and show your work.

If Israelis and Palestinians don’t count, what about retired American diplomats in far-out radical publications like U.S. News and World Report? I mean, the one-state solution is so marginal an idea that it’s being discussed at conferences at obscure places like Harvard.

Oh, not pro-Israel enough for you, huh? Well, then, how about the current Israeli administration? Or Caroline Glick?

Oh wait, too far to the right for you, huh? Well, then, let’s make a left turn. Wrong part of the left? You could always talk to the nice folks at Dissent. They were “rethinking” things five years ago.

While we’re turning left, why not talk to some Arabs along the way? Like this one.

You want a cross-section of ethnicities? Try this. Not that I want to overdo things….

Sari Nusseibeh’s Retirement at Al Quds University

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My friend and colleague Sari Nusseibeh recently announced his retirement as President of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. (He was also one of the University’s co-founders, and teaches in the Department of Philosophy.) I was Sari’s guest at Al Quds last summer, where I was invited to give three lectures on topics in political philosophy of relevance to the Arab-Israeli dispute. With Sari’s help, I also got comprehensive political tours of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, did some sightseeing, went swimming in the hottest swimming pool I’ve ever experienced, and drank some of the best tea I’ve ever tasted. It was the experience of a lifetime for me, and I owe Sari (and his colleagues) a debt of gratitude for it that I can’t imagine ever being able to repay. (I also owe my Felician College colleague Fahmi Abboushi for putting me in touch with Sari on the occasion of Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari’s book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth?)

It’s remarkable that while here in North America, academics are bemoaning the death of the humanities and of the malaise of academia generally, Sari managed in a few decades to build a major university essentially from scratch–in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Booker T. Washington’s founding the Tuskegee Institute–I actually gifted Sari a copy of Up from Slavery–but on a grander scale. When I’m tempted to complain about academic life at home, I find myself thinking about what Sari has managed to do at Al Quds, and stop. Times may be tough for small liberal arts colleges in the US, but at least we don’t operate under the conditions of a military-bureaucratic occupation (or for that matter, the relentless anti-intellectual pressures exerted by religious fundamentalists).

Sari has narrated his own story better than anyone can, but I didn’t want to let the moment go by without offering a (non-alcoholic) toast in tribute to what he’s accomplished so far. The next time you confront someone who derides philosophy as a pie-in-the-sky endeavor, direct them to the life and work of Sari Nusseibeh. Like Socrates, he’s managed in theory and practice to bring philosophy down to earth–and at the center of life, where it belongs.