Professor rebukes Hasso

To the Editors:

In a principled action that seems to have attracted little attention at Oberlin, President Nancy Dye joined several hundred other college and university presidents in signing a public statement denouncing anti-Zionism and intimidation of Jews on American campuses (New York Times, October 7, 2002). The statement was unequivocal and uncompromising, and I commend President Dye for her actions in upholding civility, faithfulness to the historical record and the best traditions of our College. She and her colleagues were motivated by the alarming increase in campus anti-Semitic activity, of which “Zionism is Racism” is but one example. At the General Faculty Meeting of March 18, President Dye, in allusion to “Zionism is Racism” expressed her concern that Jewish students at Oberlin are feeling unwelcome and uncomfortable. The U.N.’s rescission of the “Zionism is Racism” calumny is very old news, yet it has shamefully reappeared at Oberlin as vandalism in our buildings and now, as a position legitimated by Frances Hasso’s lengthy letter to the Review.
Tendentious in the most obvious ways, Ms. Hasso’s “intervention” would not withstand a finer reading of history. Here, I wish to address only how her position justifying the statement “Zionism is Racism” diminishes informed public debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while encouraging, without intent, Oberlin’s worst and dumbest to deface our public spaces. Legitimating the claim that “Zionism is Racism” depends on a tortured effort to uncouple Zionism from Judaism, thus enabling the sloganeers to assert that they are not anti-Semitic. “We are not against Jews,” they argue, “just the Jewish state.” Anti-Semitism is thus sanitized, making a place for itself on the political left and enabling its proponents to find common cause with the extreme right. Other letter writers have already criticized the political double standard that deplores the founding of a Jewish state as an effrontery, a thing apart from other national liberation movements.
One also should ask why, if anti-Zionism is distinct from anti-Semitism, armed police protect every Jewish institution in Europe? What did diners in Goldenberg’s restaurant in Paris have to do with Zionism when they were cut down in 1982 by a determined terrorist attack against Jews? What did peaceful Sabbath worshippers in an Istanbul synagogue in 1986 have to do with Zionism when terrorists slaughtered them? Or, more recently, was the attack against the synagogue last April on the Tunisian Island of Djerba anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist? What did centuries-old Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria and Libya do to promote Zionism (“the racialized settler-colonial project”) and therefore to suffer persecution and the displacement of more than a half million Jews from these lands in the 1940s and 50s? Why after the founding of the Zionist state have Jews in other places found themselves vulnerable to attack? Why is the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a vicious anti-Semitic forgery, enjoying a publishing revival in the Middle East? Recently, it was the basis of a popular TV show in Cairo. The Protocols and other medieval anti-Semitic detritus---favorite sources for the Nazis---are now undergoing a renaissance in the Middle East. I think the point is abundantly clear. Assertions that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism are preposterous. Let us acknowledge that neither Israelis nor Palestinians will go away. The prospects for peace and the realization of a two-state solution seem very dim amid an unending cycle of violence, killing and retaliation, and so it will continue until the strongest alliance in the Middle East, that between Sharon and Arafat, gives way. Blame abounds on both sides, and it should be identified. Criticism of Israeli policy is nowhere more overt and heated than in Israel itself. One can only wish for similar public expressions of internal dissent and disagreement among all the antagonists. Efforts to delegitimate the Israeli state with assertions that “Zionism is Racism” debase the public discourse about this tragedy and embolden rejectionists on both sides.

—Jack Glazier
Professor and Chair,
Department of Anthropology