Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist and a longstanding contributor to Z Word, interviewed Esther Webman, research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, about her new book on Arab responses to the Holocaust.
Karl Pfeifer: In your book From Empathy to Denial / Arab Responses to the Holocaust (Co-author Meir Litvak) you emphasize discussing “as Jews and Israelis” this subject matter, to have “tried to maintain, as much as possible, a dispassionate approach”. Why did you qualify your ethnic origin as “our shortcoming”?
Esther Webman: Unfortunately, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict there is a widespread belief that an Israeli is biased when he deals with Arab issues. And we do understand that as historians, we always have our own subjective position which might be reflected in our writing.
Now this is where tragedy turns to farce. Sari Hanafi is an academic at the American University of Beirut. He recently visited the UK to participate in “Israel Apartheid Week,” which gave him a platform to promote the book he co-authored on the “anatomy of Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.” Halfway through his visit, Hanafi was forced to return to Beirut in order to face a furious gathering of AUB faculty and students who denounced him for collaborating with Israel. The basis for this charge? The co-authors of Hanafi’s book were two Israelis, Michael Givon and Adi Ophir. Because of this heinous act of betrayal, an Arab academic whose book is energetically promoted at a global event which marks the highlight of the boycott movement’s calendar finds himself condemned for breaking the very same boycott through the very same book.
More on this here and here. Most instructive is this statement put out by Hanafi’s supporters - “We strongly sense that a normative and literal application of the rules may sometimes produce paradoxical outcomes” - which is another way of saying that the boycott can make you look extremely silly indeed.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are the Pythons:
Over a year ago, I wrote about an entry on Zionism for an encyclopedia published under a well-known, trusted imprint: the “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism,” which carries the names of both Macmillan Reference USA (now owned by the Michigan-based Gale, Cengage Learning company) and the Macmillan Social Science Library. At the time, there was quite a storm and the publishers resolved to do something about it. Sadly, their compromise formula makes a bad situation worse, as I explain in this op-ed for the Jerusalem Post.
Ed Morgan is a Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. In this fascinating column, he relates two recent experiences which persuaded him that rational, informed debate is not always the norm in the ivory tower.
Via Engage, which has valiantly marshalled both the arguments and the bodies to confront the UCU’s academic boycott, comes news that court action is imminent.
Noel Ignatiev is one the last people you would expect to be authoring an entry on Zionism for an encyclopedia published under a well-known, trusted imprint. But open Volume 3 of the “Encyclopedia of Race and Racism,” which carries the names of both Macmillan Reference USA (now owned by the Michigan-based Gale, Cengage Learning company) and the Macmillan Social Science Library, and you will see that he has done just that.
The triangular debate between Norman Geras, Martin Shaw and Engage over the extent to which attitudinal antisemitism is a factor in the academic boycott campaign has continued. I want to weigh in on one point.
Norman Geras has a response here to this debate between David Hirsh and Martin Shaw on whether the eternally proposed academic boycott of Israel would be antisemitic in nature. I’m not going to quote from it because I think that it should be read in its entirety and citing a paragraph might give readers of this blog the impression that they had got the gist of the argument and could move on elsewhere.
There is an extremely interesting essay by Perry Anderson here about contemporary Turkish history. It deals at length with the similarities and differences between the genocides of the Jews and Armenians and the different degrees of recognition that they have received since they occurred.
Let me begin with a plug: Democratiya is a superb journal and its latest issue is a veritable bounty of enlightened opinion. Particularly recommended are Michael Walzer’s thoughts on how the left can reconstitute its internationalism.
I believe that there is a problem of institutional antisemitism in the UCU. By this I do not mean that significant numbers of people in the union hate Jews. But I do believe that ways of thinking, norms and practices have developed which allow the union to behave in an antisemitic way and to normalize antisemitic expression.
