Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/10/15/divestment_petition_spurs_charges_of_antisemitism.php
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
Academics often understand the world of current affairs in historical terms. The 583 signers of a joint petition of students, faculty and alumni of Harvard and MIT all too predictably have sought to christen their efforts with the moral authority of petitions directed toward South African Apartheid in the 1980s. The petition demands, in protest of abuses of Palestinian human rights, official divestment from companies conducting business in Israel. 'Israel clearly practices apartheid,' said Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois Francis A. Boyle, whose speech at Illinois State University on November 30 of 2000 began the movement for divestment.
Opponents of the petition see it in terms of history as well. 'Professors have a singular responsibility to their students to avoid demonizing one particular community or country,' said Lewis Glinert, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures at Dartmouth. 'European history provides a salutary warning: Fascism and Stalinism drew valuable support from university faculty and their students.'
The religious undertones of the political conflict on the West Bank, as well as the historical origins of the Israeli state, have complicated the issue of divestment, especially since President of Harvard University Lawrence H. Summers delivered a speech at morning prayer on September 17 cautioning that 'serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.'
Summers, speaking 'not as President of the University but as a concerned member of our community,' directed his words at the seventy-one professorial signatories at Harvard and the fifty-six at MIT. Citing recent burnings of synagogues in Europe, the success of Western European populist candidates denying the significance of the Holocaust, and the racist tone of the World Summit on Racism sponsored by the United Nations and protested by the delegation of the United States, Summers expressed anxiety over 'the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.'
By speaking of 'actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent,' Summers did not necessarily characterize the motivations of all behind the petition as sinister, but rather criticized its content for targeting a Jewish nation for sanctions while ignoring comparable or worse abuses performed by leaders of other countries across the globe.
Alan Dershowitz has taken this line in supporting the remarks of President Summers in an editorial in the Crimson, in the Boston Globe and in a debate with Boyle on Boston WBUR Radio. In the debate the moderator repeatedly addressed Boyle as 'Francis Bacon.'
Asked to respond to accusations of anti-Semitism, Boyle provided his resume. 'After graduating from Harvard law school, I continued working on a Ph. D. in political science at Harvard,' he said. 'I was a teaching fellow in the Harvard College for two years. I believe I was the first ever to have taught international human rights in the Harvard College, while Lawrence Summers was studying economics.'
'Are you really saying that President Summers is not educated enough to recognize anti-Semitism when he sees it?' asked the moderator.
Dershowitz maintained that the petition is anti-Semitic 'in effect if not in intent' for choosing only one country, a Jewish country, 'for economic capital punishment.'
'Every country deserves to be criticized,' he said, 'but when you single out one country for economic capital punishment, you are sending a message to college students and others around the country that this is the worst human rights violator in the world, that it deserves a greater sanction than Libya, and Iraq, and many of the people who signed this petition would favor investment in Cuba, investment in China, investment in Libya, investment in Iraq, and divestment from Israel.'
Asked how the petition does not unfairly pinpoint Israel, Boyle said, 'In the case of Israel we have foreign occupation of Palestinian lands going back to 1967. This is, I believe, the longest case of foreign occupation in the contemporary world.' Wrong. The Chinese People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet on September 9, 1951.
The speech of President Summers has sparked more debate over the drive for divestment than did the first appearances of the petitions last spring. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal praised Summers for 'clarity, precision, and force' in addressing the issue.
Professor of English at Columbia University Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, a work that greets many a current freshman upon matriculation at Dartmouth, however, responded to the speech with suspicion. 'It's the classic Zionist ploy to defame people by identifying criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism,' he said.
Advocates of free speech have charged President Summers with using the politically explosive topic of anti-Semitism to silence a debate in its infancy. His supporters in return accuse their opponents of employing the language of intellectual freedom to confer legitimacy upon bad academics at best and hateful ideas at worst.
The petition, posted at www.harvardmitdivest.org, has seen counterparts arise at Berkeley, the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan since it appeared last spring, modeled after an earlier petition at Princeton. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that similar petitions currently circulate at about fifty colleges. In response, another petition of students, faculty, and alumni of Harvard and MIT has collected 5,831 signatures, far outnumbering the 583 of the petition for divestment. Faculty and students at Dartmouth, however, do not anticipate anything similar to make its way here soon.
Professor of Religion Ehud Benor said, 'quite a few of our faculty are sympathetic to the content and views expressed in the petition,' but added, 'It seems like what we have happening here is a much more serious attempt to understand the very complex situation going on in the Middle East.' He characterized the petition as framed by individuals 'seeking to score political points in the cultural clash and political discussion,' acting 'in a politically and morally irresponsible manner,' who led many to sign it 'with good intentions, unaware that it reflects, but does not state, the belief of the authors that the state of Israel is an illegitimate state, whose current actions reflect its reprehensible nature, just like Apartheid South Africa.'
The movement for divestment, however, seems to have found better reception among members of the Muslim community at Dartmouth. Adil Ahmad '05, President of Al-Nur, the group for Muslim students on campus, said that Dartmouth should not invest 'if money is being used to build any Israeli establishment in occupied territories,' though he did not agree that the College should divest from the entire nation of Israel or from corporations that conduct business outside of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
'Israel is the only nation today in flagrant violation of human rights,' Ahmad said. When asked for particular examples of such violations, he declined to comment: 'They are too numerous to enumerate right now.'
For many the negative reaction to the petition has raised the question of whether or not one can criticize Israel without eliciting accusations of anti-Semitism. 'There are many ways to attempt to change Israeli policy without being anti-Israeli, and certainly without being anti-Zionist,' Benor said.
He urged an approach that would not target one member of the conflict. 'Palestinian terror and the Likud government symbiotically support one another,' he said. 'This is a very oppressive occupation. The Palestinian people are living with a boot at their throat. It is impossible to live like that, but Sharon never would have come to power had it not been for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their campaign of terror.'
He stressed the difficulty of attempting to resolve the conflict in terms of human rights and international law. 'People committed to dying cannot be frightened into not killing themselves, so the military must find a way to prevent suicide bombing, and at that point the military conflict becomes completely inhuman, beyond anything that international law imagines or provides for,' he said.