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Friday Zoom Call

This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Abdul El-Sayed, a child of Egyptian immigrants to the US, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Columbia University Medical School and currently a Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan. I’m not endorsing Abdul’s candidacy (or anyone else’s), but I’m keen to talk to him about being an Arab and Muslim American politician in the age of Trump and about the political debate over Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

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Cited in Today’s Video

Harvard’s decision to shut down programs that study Palestinians at the School of Public Health and Divinity School.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Columbia historian Rashid Khalidi’s warning that enforcing the IHRA definition would make honest teaching and scholarship about Israel and Zionism impossible.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane details the role of the Department of Health and Human Services in Trump’s assault on free speech on campus.

Mosab Abu Toha on the kinds of planes you see in Gaza.

Trita Parsi on why Israel and Iran may soon be at war again.

Adam Sticklor on Gaza as a Jewish story.

A new poll shows Zohran Mamdani with a huge lead among young Jewish voters.

Gaza’s average life expectancy has fallen by 35 years since October 7.

I talked about Being Jewish After the Destruction with Piers Morgan

See you Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, there are reports that Harvard may soon settle with the Trump administration and reportedly pay $500 million and agree to some set of terms. This would follow, you know, deals by Colombia and Brown, and probably set in motion a whole series of additional kind of agreements by universities with the Trump administration. Harvard says that this agreement will not violate academic freedom.

The harsh reality is that Harvard has already seriously infringed upon academic freedom. There’s already been a very serious imprint in violation of academic freedom, even before this agreement. It’s just that it doesn’t get noticed so much because it has to do with the rights of Palestinian scholars and Palestinian students, and people who want to study the fate of Palestinians. And there’s so little attention to the academic freedom and rights of Palestinian students and scholars, as opposed to Jewish students.

And so, Harvard is already shut down two programs it had that worked on the question of the rights and livelihood of Palestinians: one at the School of Public Health, which was done in partnership with Birzeit University and the West Bank. The other at the Harvard Divinity School, which, led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, used Israel and Palestine as a kind of case study in questions of religion, conflict, and oppression. Those have already both been shut down by Harvard, under pressure from Republican lawmakers, donors, establishment Jewish. Organizations. So, there’s already been a very serious infringement. There was no kind of real academic due process that led to the shutdown of this program. It was done nakedly in response to political pressure.

But the deal would be much, much more dangerous because Harvard has already, to some degree, adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. But if it’s only adopted in name, the dangers are relatively limited. But if you make a deal with the Trump administration for some kind of enforcement mechanism in which the IHRE definition of antisemitism, which, by the way, has very little support from actual scholars of antisemitism. It’s been pushed for years, not by academics who study antisemitism, but by the Israeli government and pro-Israel organizations. If you enforce that definition, you make the teaching of Israel and Palestine basically an absurdity. You make genuine teaching and scholarship on the question of Israel-Palestine essentially impossible.

Let me try to explain why. Two of the examples of antisemitism that are listed in the IHRA definition are first, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor. And secondly, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. So, let’s look at both of these. First of all, the language denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination is itself profoundly dishonest, right? Because Israel is not simply an exercise in Jewish self-determination. Self-determination is determination of the self. What Israel is doing is that it is determining, it is controlling the lives of millions of Palestinians, another people who lack individual and collective rights. So, that is not self-determination when you are controlling and denying basic rights to members of another people, right?

But to say that you can’t claim that Israel is a racist endeavor on a college campus in your scholarship or teaching, or in a seminar, when Israel’s own leading human rights organizations, B’Tselem, and Yesh Din, have said Israel is practicing apartheid. That Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have said Israel is practicing apartheid. That Amnesty International has said that Israel is committing genocide, and B’Tselem, Israel’s human rights organization, has said it’s committing genocide, right?

Given those circumstances, you can’t say that Israel is racist, and you can’t make any comparison between the actions of Israel, and the actions of the Nazis, even though one sees these comparisons in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz literally every day. This makes teaching on Israel and Palestine an absolute absurdity, right? Think about how could you teach about the United States in the era of Trump, right, without raising questions about comparisons of America to the Nazis and other periods in which liberal democracy slept, you know, fell into authoritarianism and into fascism.

If Israel is classified as an apartheid state, right, can we imagine a situation in which you were not allowed to teach about apartheid South Africa, and call it racist, or make comparisons to the Nazis? That you couldn’t teach about the Jim Crow South if you made comparisons with the Nazis, given that the Nazis learned from the white supremacy of the segregated Jim Crow South? Or that you couldn’t call the Jim Crow South apartheid? Or that you couldn’t teach about China if you were to call China a racist system against non-Han Chinese? Or if you couldn’t teach about Myanmar, or country after country after country?

Under these parameters, it makes an absolute absurdity of the idea of trying to teach honestly about the realities in Israel and Palestine. And this is happening because of this really unholy alliance of a Trump administration that couldn’t care less about Jews, and in fact is in league with all kinds of antisemitic white nationalists, but is just using antisemitism like it’s using trans, like it’s using crime, like it’s using whatever, to basically try to cripple independent institutions. And a set of establishment American Jewish actors, organizations, and also individual donors and others, who basically are desperate to try to prevent an open conversation in the United States about what’s actually happening on the ground to Palestinians.

And this is a very good way of doing that, because you literally make it impossible to actually think about Israel in a comparative context. And you make it impossible to ask fundamental questions about the moral legitimacy of an enterprise, even though the moral legitimacy of the enterprise has been questioned profoundly by the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s leading human rights organizations, and many, many scholars around the world.

But those scholars literally now could not do that work at Harvard University, the most famous, prestigious university in America if the IHRA definition of antisemitism is enforced as part of a deal with the Trump administration. These are the stakes. This is the threat. And it is truly, truly appalling, appalling to see mainstream American Jewish leaders who claim to represent a community that has benefited so profoundly from independent, vibrant universities as a building block of American liberal democracy. So many of our own Jewish families, our life story is bound up with our ability to have upward mobility. And through these universities, that these mainstream Jewish organizations, whether they want to admit it or not, by pushing the IHRA definition for year after year after year will be complicit in the crippling, maybe even the destruction, of these universities.

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