Israel as the N-word

A few years ago an American Indian friend phoned me, absolutely perplexed. He could not reconcile two stories in his morning paper – one in the news section, the other in sports. Both were about major Florida universities.

The first story reported universal outrage at and severe sanctions on a fraternity which had hosted an event where participants dressed in blackface. The leadership of the university spoke in strong language about not tolerating racism, the hurt of stereotypes, the psychological impact of dehumanization, and the incompatibility of such offensive behavior with the standards of a university.

The second noted, without comment, that the leadership of another Florida university (which had an Indian mascot) was encouraging students to show up at a major sporting event in red face.

“How can people get it when it comes to racism against African Americans,” he lamented, “but don’t have a clue when Indian people are victimized by the same outrageous nonsense?”

I had some theories, none of them completely satisfactory. But I recall thinking such a blatant double standard rarely appears regarding bigotry against other groups, including Jews.

Recently I opened the New York Times and saw two articles. One reported that a union of academics in the United Kingdom (The University and College Union) voted to support the principle of a boycott against Israeli academics. The other noted the plight of an Iranian-American academic from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who was being imprisoned by the repressive regime in Iran. I was tempted to call my Indian friend and ask him, how could it be that academics want to demonize their Israeli colleagues simply because they are Israelis, but are absolutely silent when a repressive regime in the same region is actually imprisoning scholars?

Bigotry is at its most troubling when it is invisible or unremarkable, simply a manifestation of how things are. The growing demonization of Israel as an illegitimate state and/or an “apartheid” state is becoming such a commonplace.

One of the arguments against the boycott/divestment/sanction movement is that it imposes a double standard on Israel, just as classical anti-Semitism does to the individual Jew. And certainly there is an inevitable charge of bigotry when British Academics focus on Israel as the worst of the worst, but do not even mention the political situation for scholars and everyone else in Sudan, Tibet, and scores of countries around the world where the situation is objectively much worse.

I’m not entirely comfortable with such comparisons because they put Israel – which certainly has its flaws like any other country and deserves criticism on many fronts – with such non-democratic, tyrannical or genocidal states. Not only are the comparisons unfair, they miss the larger point.

It is bad enough that repressive regimes in the Arab and Muslim world (many of which are theocratic and autocratic) demonize Israel and promote dehumanizing views of Jews through their media and religious and education institutions. After all, for many in the part of that world, the notion of non-Muslims having sovereignty over even a thimbleful of what they define as sacred land is inconceivable. But now many in intellectual circles, especially in Europe, are also demonizing Israel with such regularity and glee as to resemble sport.

There is an historic parallel here which, while not applicable in every particular, is becoming increasing apt: the way leading Southern institutions treated blacks fifty years ago. Israel has in effect become the ni**er among the family of states or in the terms of anti-Semitic slur, “the ‘kike’ among the nations.” In the 1950s and 1960s a southern white could get away with murder, literally, while a black was imprisoned for attempting to vote, demonstrating, spitting on the sidewalk or looking at a white woman the wrong way. Today Israel is treated much the same. The Iranian president can deny the Holocaust, threaten to wipe Israel off the map, and yes imprison academics, and little is said. Meanwhile everything Israel does is seen as worthy of condemnation, and the inevitable demerits of its society are approached not as problems to be fixed, but as ammunition to attack the basic right of the state to exist.

What made Southern blacks vulnerable to defamation and physical attack was that they were portrayed as an unlikable group which was causing trouble and instability by attempting to violate the rights of whites. In other words, they were defined by the Southern power structure as people for whom there should be no empathy. And because they were people for whom there should be no empathy, people who dehumanized blacks could paint their own bigotry as not only normal and appropriate, but also required and of higher moral purpose.

That is how Israel is being treated today. Reasonable people debate whether the separation barrier is a good idea, or if it should be placed elsewhere. But the references to it as an “apartheid wall,” made without any recognition that Israeli civilians have been repeatedly victimized by suicide bombers, demonstrates a lack of empathy. Fifty years ago whites refused to allow blacks to exercise basic rights. Today those who support boycotts of Israel refuse to recognize a state’s basic obligation to protect its citizens from terrorism.

Some debate whether the UCU vote was anti-Semitic. But that argument tells us little, just as the debate fifty years ago about whether the oppressors of blacks were racist or simply misguided told us little about what needed to be done.

Jim Crow – the normalization of racism – was overturned when whites and others from outside the South spoke out about the incompatibility of its double standards with basic notions of justice.

Today, the first step must be to emulate the powerful statement made by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who said that the UCU “should add Columbia to its boycott list, for we do not intend to draw distinctions between our mission and that of the universities you are seeking to punish.”

The move to demonize and exclude Israelis will continue as long as other universities remain silent instead of emulating Columbia. And as other institutions (physicians, architects, labor, journalists) are considering boycotting Israel too, their own Lee Bollinger’s need to find the same courage and moral compass to say clearly: If you’re going to treat our Israeli colleagues this way, then treat us the same way too.