March 29, 2024

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Fisking “Scholars” for “Palestine”

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2021/06/18/fisking-scholars-for-palestine/

Early on in the latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, an organization claiming to speak as “scholars” issued a strong statement calling for public commitment. Despite its decidedly unscholarly tone and content, it got picked up by faculty and scholarly associations all over the US at the very highest levels. None of the signers apparently feel any concern that the statement they endorse is the exact opposite of scholarship, pushing a jargon-laden, weaponized “take” on the conflict, whose overlap with a Palestinian “totalizing narrative” (i.e., war propaganda) was close to complete.

As often happens with war incitement literature, the description of the situation with which the “scholar’s statement” opens, offers a lobotomized account where all aggression, all oppression, comes from the “Israeli side” while “the Palestinians” are innocent victims defending themselves. This involves not merely “one-sided” accounts, but, in this case at least, a systemic projection of deeply immoral, dehumanizing, even genocidal attitudes among Palestinians onto the Israelis.

In what follows, then I will offer counter-statements that use their language and phrasing as a starting point for describing other important data and ways to frame the discussion. I’m enough of a post-modernist not to think that the perspectives I bring are the sole truth, but I do claim they are precisely that aspect of empirical and cognitive reality that the “critical theorists” do not want to reach the attention the audiences before whom they perform.

I offer these comments to the independent thinkers who wish to make informed judgments with integrity.

Palestine and Praxis: Open Letter and Call to Action

As scholars, we affirm the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement confronting a settler colonial state.

As “scholars,” we adhere to Soviet cognitive warfare propaganda ploy to package a triumphalist Islamic Jihad on infidels who have invaded Dar al Islam, as a secular, national liberation movement that seeks an alliance with other Western liberation movements. We will systematically suppress any evidence that Palestinians “resistors” are actually religious imperialists, any evidence that Israelis are a national liberation movement resisting this religious imperialism, which has grown genocidal in its frustrated rage. Palestinians: the victims to be saved; Jews: interlopers and land-thieves to be driven out.

The pitched battle in Sheikh Jarrah is the most recent flashpoint in the ongoing Nakba that is the Palestinian condition.

We will ram every event into the procrustean narrative of Palestinian victimhood — the Nakba “as bad as the Holocaust” and the Israelis as the ongoing Nazis. The tensions in Sheikh Jarrah arise from a complex legal contest carried out in the only egalitarian courts of justice in the Middle East today over a period of 40 years, which Palestinians, for whom justice is always-already politicized, have turned into a cogwar flashpoint in the campaign to eliminate their neighbors.

Israel has expanded and entrenched its settler sovereignty through warfare, expulsion, tenuous residency rights, and discriminatory planning policies.

Palestinian leaders have expanded and entrenched their death cult and its glorious worship of mass murder through suicide, through propaganda that incites genocide, through cognitive warfare that exploits Western dupes with its systematic “fake news,” through elimination of internal dissent, through asserting tenuous claims to “human rights” no other group on the planet claims to have, and through racist attitudes they teach their children well, and at a very young age.

The ostensible peace process has perpetuated its land grabs and violent displacement under the fictions of temporality and military necessity.

The admitted war process (Land for War) has perpetrated a death cult in Palestinian controlled areas, and the invasion of a totalizing narrative into international bodies whose foundational principles call for humane and reciprocal relations, honesty and fair judgment (UN, ICC, Academia, journalism).

Together these policies constitute apartheid, bolstered by a brute force that enshrines territorial theft and the racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals. And now, as has been the case for over a century, Palestinians continue to resist their removal and erasure.

Together these policies constitute a policy and ideology closely akin to Nazi exterminationist antisemitism, bolstered by extensive hypocrisy and dishonesty, that enshrines war propaganda as fact, and advances the religious and ethnic supremacy of Palestinian-Caliphator imperialists.

And now, as has been the case for over a century, Palestinians continue to resist their removal and erasure.

And now, as has been the case for over a century, while Israelis continue to resist the genocidal Jihadi assault, the Palestinians continue to promote the removal and erasure of the Israelis, even at the continuous cost of their own people’s suffering.

Palestinian resistance to this eliminatory violence in Sheikh Jarrah and the raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque have catalyzed protests across a violently separated landscape.

We project onto Israel the very “eliminatory violence” they must constantly resist, and no matter how restrained (lengthy legal battles in egalitarian courts) they are about it, they trigger violent protests across a deeply troubled but highly complex landscape. We thereby make any developments in the direction of peaceful coexistence all the more difficult and increase the necessity for eliminatory violence.

Palestinians in Lydd, Nazareth, Acre, Haifa and elsewhere have raised Palestinian flags in mass protest affirming the national and singular character of the Palestinian people and their collective call for liberation.

Some Israeli Arabs have raised Palestinian flags in riots and attacks on Israeli Jews, trying to affirm a “Palestinian people’s collective call for liberation.” As if all Israeli Arabs (or Palestinians for that matter who live under the PA and Hamas’ thumb), thought their liberation would come with Palestinian sovereignty “from the river to the sea.” Other Israeli Arabs and Palestinians were appalled, but when they spoke out, they were threatened by the bullies pushing the phoney “liberation narrative.” The scholarly exploitation of these riots incited by disinformation, furthers that “unifying” cause… arsonists in a gunpowder depot.

Israel is once again conducting a large-scale aerial bombing campaign against the fourteen-year besieged Gaza Strip, killing scores of Palestinians and making thousands more homeless. 

Hamas is once again engaged in provoking an Israeli attack by firing rockets at her cities from behind civilians, maximizing Gazan casualties so they can appeal to dupes in the West to condemn Israeli cruelty and war crimes.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Palestinian death is treated as a byproduct of Israeli vulnerability. 

Meanwhile, in Palestine, the deaths of children are sought after, occasionally inflicted by the Jihadis, always welcome as propaganda tools for winning the hearts and minds of those whose minds are occupied by the “Cult of the Occupation.”

The attempts to transform the conversation on Israeli state violence to a series of stale talking points about Hamas rockets reflect the thorough dehumanization of Palestinians and the abject disregard for Israeli military aggression. 

The attempts to dismiss Israeli concern for Palestinian Jihadi violence against its people, to toss off as “stale talking points” the thousands of rockets aimed at Israel (whose damage is only limited by Iron Dome intercepts) as an explanation for Israeli response, all this radically dehumanizes the Israelis, who are not permitted to worry about their people, not permitted to respond to the violent hostilities of Palestinian political culture, whose dehumanizing racism this statement abjectly disregards.

For decades, Palestinians have been subjects of academic research that scholars use to understand the functions of settler colonial state power. Yet in moments of crisis, we are humbly reminded that research and writing are not enough. 

For decades (since 1980), some scholars have viewed the Palestinians through the lens of a post-colonial paradigm at its most doctrinaire, in which the Israelis embodied “settler colonialism” and the Arabs in the land between the river and the sea, an innocent population with a leadership earnestly fighting for their liberation. Yet that is not enough. In moments of crisis, we urge “scholars” to leave your ivory carrels and take that weaponized post-colonial propaganda to the streets and wage war against the two great Satans, Israel and the US. If this results in mobs beating Jews, it’s the small price one pays for backing a good cause.

As Palestinian scholars write under the threat of settler colonial erasure and imposition of exile, it is understood that their ideas and experiences are inextricably bound to the intellectual project and tradition that is Palestinian studies.

As Palestinian scholars write under the threat of harsh retaliation both professional and personal, including threat of death, from members of their own political culture (PA, Hamas), it is understood that their scapegoating narrative of blaming Zionism for the misery their own authoritarian elites inflict must be taken as “the authoritative” version: to demonize Israel as “colonial imperialists” and to humanize the demons of religious imperialism as “resistance.”

Living within a political context that challenges their very existence, it is imperative that we not enact their replacement and erasure within our own scholarship, as Palestinians are barred from the academy.

Living in a political context that invents their very identity on a claim to victimization, it is imperative that we enact a pretence that they’re barred from the academy.

Approaching Palestine as a field of knowledge, rather than a case study or site of theoretical extraction, demands engaging with the intellectual labor of its people as a genealogy of subjugated knowledge in praxis.

Approaching Palestine as the case study to illustrate/impose a theoretical paradigm on immensely complex empirical reality there, demands that we pretend we’re a “field of knowledge” while we actually reify the labor of Palestinian “intellectuals” fully committed to a cognitive war against Israel.

Resisting their erasure from the historical record requires a citational practice that both names Palestinians as intellectual subjects and challenges the very intellectual discourse that relegates them to the margins.

We must insist on Palestinian intellectual agency, even as their paradigm robs the Palestinian people of of any agency by handing them a victim-identity that treats all their actions as reactions, and justifies their any deed — hate-mongering, targeting civilians, using their own people as shields — as “resistance.”

We recognize our role and responsibility as scholars to theorize, read, and write on the very issues unfolding in Palestine and among all oppressed nations today. Scholarship without action normalizes the status quo and reinforces Israel’s impunity. 

We recognize our role and responsibility as scholars to propagandize, read and write our weaponized, dualistic morality onto the world wherever we think it’s a case of innocent oppressed nations (except, of course, Tibet, or Kurdistan, of Uyghuristan). Scholarship engaged in action normalizes revolutionary propaganda and may destroy scholarship, but at least it makes it possible to punish Israel as it so richly deserves.

Scholarship must also be ethical by centering decolonization and raising the voices of Palestinian scholars, as well as other interlocutors, so that they remain sources of authority and not merely objects of study.

Scholarship must also align itself with this weaponized morality tale, raising the voices of Palestinian scholars spouting this propaganda as authoritative, and not “merely” subject to criticism. They must be free from any query or doubt about their statements and judgements lest their claims prove false.

We believe that the critical theory we generate in our literature and in our classrooms must be backed in deed. Therefore, we affirm that it is no longer acceptable to conduct research in Palestine or on Palestinians without a clear component of political commitment. It is no longer acceptable to study one fragment of Palestine, and claim knowledge of the whole. It is no longer acceptable to speak over Palestinians, or publish without citation of Palestinians scholars. Simply put, it is no longer acceptable to treat Palestine as a playground for intellectual curiosity while its fragmented nation continues to struggle for liberation. 

Simply put, we believe that the Palestinian version of post-colonialism (“critical theory”) is both so moral and so accurate, that no one should research the field, who is not fully committed to confirming and extending that now fully-weaponized paradigm that wages a war against a people whom we deny exists. (After all, everyone but the Zionists know that Judaism is just a religion.)

Therefore, we affirm our commitment to the following actions, and we call on our colleagues to join us in our affirmation of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people and foundational principles of academic integrity. 

Therefore, in complete violation of the foundational principles of academic integrity, we affirm the Palestinian grievance narrative in all its particulars, no matter how divorced from reality, no matter how ludicrously one-sided, no matter how violently vindictive and hate-filled it might be.

In the classroom and on campus, we commit to 

  • Pressuring our academic institutions and organizations to respect the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel by instating measures that remove complicity and partnership with military, academic, and legal institutions involved in entrenching Israel’s policies. 

Converting institutions of higher learning into pawns in the Caliphator cogwar against the Israeli Dajjal.

  • Supporting student activism on campus, including, but not limited to sponsoring joint events and holding our universities’ accountable for violations of academic freedom. 

Importing Middle-Eastern style politicization of academia and enforcing that “orthodoxy” through the very channels created to prevent this take-over.

  • Highlighting Palestinian scholarship on Palestine in syllabi, our writing, and through invitation of  Palestinian scholars and community members to speak at departmental and university events. 

Promoting advocates and canceling contradictors.

  • Extending the above approach to any and all indigenous scholars within the university, and any Indigenous communities within the vicinity.

Making alliances with progressive movements that don’t realize what our ultimate goal.

  • Centering Indigenous analyses in teaching and drawing links to intersectional oppression and transnational liberation movements. 

Making the newspeak universal in academia.

  • In our research, we will actively Include Palestine as a space and place worthy of substantive and historical integration into critical theory, not only as a case in a list of colonial examples. 

Make Palestine [the least appropriate subject for post-colonial theory], the keystone of a weaponized version aimed at taking over the university.

  • Work to engage methods which highlight and elevate the voices and experiences of the places and moments we study over our own positions. 

[Not clear] Probably: be as creative as possible in the job of presenting only our understanding of our subject (innocent post-colonial indigenes and guilty post-colonialists). Or: take voices that silence all others with their totalistic narrative and elevate them to the status of “true” representatives of the lived experience of Palestinians and other suffering victims (whom we identify as worthy).

Blinded by “Palestinian” Victim-Narrative
  • In places where we reside, we will Support community efforts and legislation to pressure our governments to end funding Israeli military aggression.  

Give every town and student government a foreign policy that will up the hatred of Jews and attacks on them.

In a recent podcast with Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss talked about “grieving the dying institutions of the 20th century, and the need to build new ones.” In context, she was specifically discussing the New York Times. Given that this statement fisked above, which inspired so many echoes in the current academic world – including a 93% Soviet-style vote among Anthropologists of the Middle East -, I’d say the same holds for the academic study of the Middle East, at the very least.

What a catastrophic time to be blinded by our own scholars.

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