A Useful and Ironic Analogy for the Encampments: Israel Itself
Post 1 of a series on lessons learned since October on campus
(This is the first of a series of short posts I’ll do on lessons learned from the campus crisis since October. I will refrain from sharing confidential information, but I think lessons learned can be shared at a general level. I’m hoping to do one post per day for a week or two)
What follows is a response I wrote to a colleague shortly after the closing of the “Pro Palestine” encampment at MIT, which adopted the label "Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (SAGE).” This colleague did as good a job as anyone I’ve seen of articulating the positive case for the encampment. Unfortunately, I’m not authorized to share this colleague’s case here (they tell me they may post some version of it soon; I hope so). Instead, I will try to paraphrase it. I think that will serve adequately for present purposes of sharing my response and drawing lessons from it. Here’s my paraphrase of this colleague’s take on the encampment:
Whereas the encampment was described by critics as nothing but a flagrant violation of campus rules (for time, space, and manner of protest), marked by hatred and exclusion, anyone who spent serious time at the encampment would in fact have found that it was marked by:
A remarkable degree of inclusion and openness, as highly diverse community members from erstwhile marginalized groups created an environment fostering a much higher degree of improvisation and spontaneity, openness and the sharing of ideas, which together a remarkable degree of visible creativity, marked by the production of artifacts of various kinds (posters, food, clothing), and by inspiring music and dance
Perhaps most notably, it also featured diverse religious expression, including regular Muslim and Jewish prayer events
A sense of togetherness, community, and anchoring not readily available elsewhere and rarely experienced by young people lately, perhaps especially post-COVID (Note: I’m hearing this from many people)
It was a social attractor, drawing others from around the Boston era who identified with the cause and who also freely shared food, ideas, moral support, and needed resources for living outdoors.
The sheltered, yet open-air environment provided made it more welcoming than the forbidding, institutional environment of the campus
Although “Pro-Israel” counter-protesters repeatedly and aggressively invaded the camp, and tried to provoke the encampment dwellers with graphic imagery, the latter didn’t take the bait.
This may be a good moment to share a short video I took of the encampment. This clip is from 6 PM on Monday, May 6. This is a few hours after MIT’s first attempt to close the encampment (by offering the encampment dwellers amnesty should they leave by 2:30 PM) failed, when a large group of outsiders arrived and overwhelmed the MIT police, leading to the overrunning of the fence and a re-encampment.
One thing that you might have noticed is that (as was true since that first invasion noted by the colleague above), the encampment sported a remarkable mix of “Pro Palestine” and “Pro Israel” symbols. This was apparently because the encampment dwellers realized that since they had no formal right to the space, their attempts to remove the “Pro-Israel” symbols once they’d been placed there would likely be treated as an additional violation. In the end, it was the desecration of an Israeli flag by a Pro-Palestine protester (by covering it with red handprints that seemed designed to provoke Israelis and Jews by recalling one of the infamous Palestinian atrocities of the Second Intifada) on Thursday, May 9 that led to the ultimate closure of the encampment in the early hours of Friday, May 10.
With that in mind, let’s now turn to my response to the colleague’s positive take on the encampment. There are many people I know who share my view that the encampments were highly problematic and indeed quite dangerous and who would be tempted to reject this colleague’s characterization of the encampment out of hand. In particular, although this encampment did not exhibit the extreme forms of ostracism of non-antiZionist Jews as was on display at campuses like my alma mater Columbia or UCLA, such messages certainly were visible at the MIT encampment too; and local Jewish community members (unless they were anti-Zionist) certainly experienced the encampment to be sending a strong denunciatory message of Israel’s right to exist (e.g., “From water to water, Palestine will be Arab”). Other non-antiZionist Jewish colleagues offered rebuttals along these lines to the colleague paraphrased above.
But I took a different tack, in part because I know that liberals (and certainly leftists) are generally not able to hear the illiberalism and indeed bigotry that I hear in the denunciation of “Zionists” and the vilification of Israel (you’d think it’d be obvious to them that it’s no more OK to denounce Zionists than it is to denounce liberals or Marxists, especially when members of a religion or ethnicity are presumed to be Zionists until evidence to the contrary is supplied) and in part because I actually don’t doubt a word that this colleague was saying. That is, I actually do not doubt for a minute that the encampment was indeed highly inclusive, egalitarian, open, welcoming, creative, and warm. But of course, pretty much any community can have a dark side, and this colleague had my mind missed that.
Here’s my response (with one or two tiny edits):
I would like to alert you to a painful and I think productive irony to contemplate. In particular, there is a well-known precedent for what you describe. I’m thinking of a scenario where:
A motley crew of marginalized people (“refugees”) take brave, rule-breaking and establishment-defying collective action to assert their sovereignty over a space claimed by others— others who had at least equal claim to that space but who are implicitly pushed off of that land to which they feel attached. These rival claimants/displaced people are told by the refugees- now “pioneers” or “occupiers” depending on who you ask— that they should simply move to other spaces; the world is big after all, but of course that breeds resentment among the displaced and reinforces their attachment to the land. The displaced may even assert their rights aggressively.
Meanwhile the pioneers/occupiers create a space that is highly inclusive of the original motley crew (OK there’s actually a hierarchy but they have powerful myths suppressing its acknowledgement) as well as later arrivals who also felt marginalized where they were, who have a strong affinity with the pioneers, and who readily buy into their founding myths— in part because of how strongly those myths resonate with their experience of marginalization, their desire for a homeland, and their longstanding ties to this parcel of land (and its environs) in particular.
Finally in this precedent, this group of “settler colonialists” together create a space that is unusually communal, egalitarian and a source of creativity. Here’s a good book (albeit a bit too uncritical) about this: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Genius-of-Israel/Dan-Senor/9781982115760
This precedent makes me wonder two things:
Did MIT’s settler colonialists have any sense of irony about this? My sense is no; irony isn’t really tolerated easily in such settings because the need to propagate the myth in such contexts is so strong. Same with self-criticism. As with settler colonialist states as the U.S., this can really only happen after the displaced people/rival claimants are gone or so weakened that they can’t really bring their rival claim any more.
Second, all analogies have limits. How about this one?
My own answer is that there are at least three important ones. First, Kresge Lawn (the location of the encampment) isn’t part of a system like the international state system where territory is allocated on the basis of exclusive sovereignty. And so the claim of exclusive sovereignty is novel and problematic on its face. It’s not just excluding rival claimants but it occupies space for an exclusive group in a world that was otherwise absent such claims. Accordingly, the suggestion I heard from some faculty that the “Pro Israel” crowd should set up their own encampment was appropriately brushed aside. Their objection was to the phenomenon of groups claiming sovereignty on erstwhile communal land per se, not just to this particular exclusive claim.
Second, the Zionist movement was an ingathering of a (marginalized, refugee) population whose forebears had been brutally exiled from the land in question. So it’s much harder to say in that case who grabbed whose land. Arabic is an imperial language after all, and Islam an imperial religion. Of course, the Bible too describes the Israelites as occupiers. In the end, it wisely states that land really only belongs to God; we are all refugees and sojourners in God’s land (Leviticus 25:23) and therefore occupiers when we treat the land as ours. Taken to an extreme, indigeneity is a dangerous myth (see https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/aleinu-and-genesis-against-twin-idolatries-of-universalism-ethnonationalism/). The upshot is that unlike the MIT settler colonialists who had no legitimate claim to sovereignty over the land they occupied, the Zionists did. What’s more, the Zionists agreed to share the land, an offer that was rejected. The SAGE settlers made no such offer.
Third, the MIT occupiers used their occupation as a bargaining chip to demand concessions from the larger system that they regarded as doing wrong. By contrast, the Zionists essentially just wanted a space for their fellow members of their people, especially those who were marginalized elsewhere. (It’s then a double irony that these encampments and the larger movement may end up increasing aliyah [i.e., Jewish emigration to Israel). Moreover, the MIT occupiers all have other homes. So then the question is whether they used their temporary occupation of communal land effectively to get what they wanted from the larger system or whether another approach— like civil dialogue— might have worked better. That is highly debatable.
In the end, the loss of a vibrant community of otherwise marginalized people is a tragedy. We should certainly strive to avoid such loss if we can. But we should also strive to uncover the problems with its founding myths, reckon with the injustices the occupation causes, and also reckon with its impact on the larger system especially insofar as it makes demands on that system.
Ezra
Concluding Comments
My exchange with this colleague took place by email last Thursday morning, at a moment of high tension among MIT faculty. After several days’ reflection, I would like to reinforce one point and add two additional notes.
The point I would reinforce is the absence of irony in the encampment. This, to me, is one of the unheralded downsides of protest movements— essentially, a culture that seems to outsiders to be “cult-like” and which makes them such easy prey for parodists such as Eretz Nehederet. This is also part of what made movements like Occupy so hard to take for outsiders: they’re insufferably earnest. And if the MIT encampment were more ironic and self-critical (and wow were Occupy people unable to take criticism too), they might’ve been alert to two other delicious ironies from the MIT encampment:
The first irony is that the encampment didn’t just echo Israel itself, it actually echoed the aspect of Israeli policy that is the most worthy of criticism, the most settler-colonial in nature— i.e., West Bank settlements. What do I mean? Well, if you go back to the video at the top of this post, you’ll see an electric cord running from the Kresge Auditorium to the encampment. This became a hugely contentious issue, especially during the re-encampment after the initial attempt to end the encampment had failed. Various observers noted how this was akin to West Bank settlers’ attempts to co-opt the Israeli state’s implicit support by getting infrastructural support. See e.g., here. Indeed, just as '“Pro Palestine” critics of the Israeli occupation blame Israel for implicitly supporting ‘illegal’ settlements by allowing them to tap Israeli infrastructure, “Pro Israel” critics of the SAGE occupation rightly blamed MIT for the same.
Another delicious irony— one that has nothing to do with Israel/Palestine but about MIT— is embedded in the first word of the encampment’s name, “scientists.” This is ironic because the supporters of the encampment were disproportionately drawn (at least among the faculty) from the humanities. Moreover, in committees and other cross-MIT conversations, these faculty are often quite zealous in reminding the rest of us that the humanities (and social scientists) are central to MIT. But in this case, they went along with the dominant MIT myth that it’s primarily a STEM school. This is one of the implicit hierarchies I was hinting at above, lurking below the reputedly inclusive, egalitarian culture. Another one is the priority given to Muslims and Arabs and especially Palestinians for certain purposes, and to [anti-Zionist] Jews for other purposes.
And now for two concluding observations:
As noted above, I think that Israel is in the first instance much more justifiable than the encampment was— given that a) it introduced no new types of claims to land; b) the claimants had as good a claim as the rival claimants, who were given an opportunity to share; and c) the MIT settler-colonialists were using their claim to pressure others to bend to their will (rather than engage in dialogue, which is what universities are supposed to be about). At the same time, some of my critique of the encampment certainly applies to Israel as well. In particular, the Jewish nationalism embedded into Israel’s identity means that it necessarily struggles with the second-class citizen status of Palestinians; and mutatis mutandis, various other minorities (non-Jewish as well as Jewish) have struggled to gain full inclusion and equity. Israel needs to be self-critical too, and it is at its best when it is.
But as reflected in the example of the hilltop settlement above, the flip side of the best of Israel is how Israel conducts itself on the West Bank. This has been going on for a long time and is, I would argue as many others have as well, built into the logic of occupation. I have been worried about this for a very long time. Here’s an op/ed I wrote on this in 1992, when I was a graduating senior from Columbia College. During the 1990s, I was hopeful that the Oslo process was addressing this problem. But the Second Intifada (now celebrated by woefully naïve young protesters) and the dynamic that ensued in the subsequent years (on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides) has led to an even greater problem than was visible in the early 1990s. It is a tragic dynamic that now threatens to spill into Israel proper and which needs to be a high priority for anyone who truly loves Israel and the Jewish people as I do— and anyone who truly loves Palestinians should be working towards political reform and against the forces undermining accommodation towards Jewish sovereignty in any part of the land). Put differently, the factors I wrote about seven+ years ago that make this conflict so intractable only seem worse now.
And this is the real problem, one neither SAGE nor the protest movement generally does anything to help. To the contrary, whether they are a source of fiery rhetoric or warm community, they are a source of heat, not light.