As a member of the University of Michigan faculty, I write to support the solidarity encampment on the Diag and to demand that the university respect the free speech rights of these resourceful and well organized students.1 In particular, I plead that the university not bring upon itself the kind of shame that the administration of Columbia University has lately brought upon that institution by suspending, expelling, and even arresting students. Columbia’s President has done lasting damage to her university; similar results would attend any disciplinary measures directed at the peaceful solidarity encampment on the Diag.
I had the pleasure of spending some time at the encampment this past Friday afternoon.2 I generally do not enjoy protests, but I was blown away by the calm, friendly, but serious atmosphere that the students had created and maintained here. I had several exchanges with fellow faculty who were present whom I had not seen in years, and we discussed both current events and our recent work in a free and comradely atmosphere. It was what I often hope for in my daily work at the University — a chance to talk with interesting people who are thinking hard about what matters. The crowd that I saw was diverse, representing many religions. Jewish students formed a key part of the encampment, as they have of the entire movement, throughout the world, to spare Gazan lives in these past several terrible months.3 There were young families present with children. Zionist counter-protestors were present as well, doing their thing, and were politely ignored. Many of the students I saw, possibly a majority, were young women. I dread the thought of policeman being invited to harass or arrest these vulnerable young women, our students. Doesn’t this university already have enough of a reputation as an unsafe space for precisely these students?4
I recognize and appreciate the university’s thus far sensible and calm approach to the encampment, especially in the context created by the absurd repression – we have all seen the footage – of similar demonstrations at other universities. I hope the university will continue to seize this opportunity to draw a contrast between itself and other comparable institutions.5
Sincerely,
Phil Christman
I sent a version of this note to my university’s President, Provost, and Board of Regents on Friday evening. In the original version, I did not include the lengthy footnotes, although I did include, regrettably, the adjective “lasting” twice in the same paragraph. Today I woke up at approximately 4:15AM still thinking about all of it, and made these additions. Even with today’s additions and deletions, it retains the somewhat purple quality and the off-putting how-dare-you-sir style of an open letter, written quickly and for impact by a worried person. But I think the things I’m saying are true and that it’s urgent that many people say them loudly and quickly. To borrow a phrase from Barbara McClay, “Sorry to post about news but sometimes it’s important.”
At least one writer I like and respect has made the argument that the Columbia encampment, and presumably by extension the solidarity encampments, is anti-Semitic. This will not wash, for several reasons. The United States’s government and its powerful institutions routinely brag about their enabling role in everything Israel does; at least, they did until very recently. Joe Biden personally has gone so far in justifying IDF violence that Menachem Begin, of all people, once told him to calm down a little. Our country’s government has a special relationship to that country’s government, full stop. An even semi-serious threat of divestment from a major US university would, at the very least, significantly alter the Israeli government’s calculus.
It is true that if you criticize Israel’s government, anti-Semites will tend to come out of the woodwork to agree with you. It is also true that if you criticize almost anything at all — capitalism, Communism, unrestricted immigration, universities themselves — anti-Semites will tend to come out of the woodwork to agree with you. Anti-Semitism is not worse than other kinds of racism, but it is uniquely stupid, in that it tends to stigmatize Jewish people both with the worst human qualities — as any form of racism does — and, paradoxically, also with the best ones. Anti-Semites hate Jewish people both for qualities like greed, cowardliness, sneakiness, etc. — universal human faults that they falsely imagine are especially Jewish — and also for openness, liberality, ethical universalism, abstract thought, and the like, excellent qualities which anti-Semites imagine are both bad and somehow especially Jewish. Thus you find anti-Semites hanging on to movements on the left, the right, and the center, to movements against bad, good, and neutral things. But a political calculus that says “I must not oppose a war that is killing thousand of people every day because a bad person somewhere might agree with me for the wrong reasons” is unworkable, unless one means to swear off politics entirely. And if you just want to advocate political quietism, there are better arguments.
It is unfair, in my opinion, that many Jewish leftists seem to feel especially on-the-hook to condemn and protest against the current war. Unlike many people, I do not believe in race; I do not think a Jewish citizen of the US has some magical blood connection to Israel that requires some special make-up effort on their part when Israel’s government does something terrible. Any special effort owed is owed by citizens of Israel and the US, of all ethnicities and religions, in our capacity as taxpayers in the country that is doing the genocide or in the country that is arming it. Still, I am moved by these young activists. Nietzsche once accused the Jewish people, and Jewish religion, of hobbling the entire world with the burdensome idea that we are morally obligated to those people in a weaker position than ourselves. Whatever his intentions, this was a great compliment, and these kids are working to deserve it.
It is also true that there are people involved in the current movement who have spoken in too exculpatory a fashion of the 10-7 attacks. Paul Berman makes much of this point in an extraordinary recent Washington Post op-ed. He concedes that the treatment of Columbia protestors has been far too harsh, and then proposes instead a kind of McCarthyist campaign against Columbia’s left-wing faculty instead. He thinks these tenured radicals ought to be made to answer for the consequences of their ideas. He — Paul Berman! One of the men most responsible for selling the disastrous Iraq War to the center-left of the American public! That Paul Berman! — argues this. Mr. Berman is, perhaps, not thinking far enough ahead. Still, let’s take the argument seriously for a moment. I am a pretty easy sell for the idea that intellectuals in general talk too freely, too abstractly, about matters of life and death, and that leftists in particular are often guilty of romanticizing war (if it’s “revolutionary”) and terror (if it’s “anticolonial”). I have found some of the statements made by some of my comrades in the last several months a little bone-chilling. Nobody should get murdered just for attending a rave, even if that rave is next to a massive open-air prison. I find Hamas far more horrifying than does Bibi Netanyahu, who has long supported and strengthened them so as to marginalize more moderate Palestinian alternatives. I think that governments should, at a minimum, recognize the basic human rights of all people living in, or passing through, the area they oversee, and the leadership of Hamas clearly refuses this basic decency toward Jewish people living in Israel. In the same way, every mainstream Israeli political party takes the exact same position toward Palestinians. When you make the argument “Let’s just give everybody a vote,” they accuse you of not recognizing Israel’s right to exist. One is tempted to say that these parties deserve each other. But I live in the United States, under Republicans and Democrats, so I absolutely cannot say that. Humanity — Israeli humanity, Palestinian humanity — deserves more, even as it continually settles for less.
I am not above appealing to people’s instinct for good PR if I think it’ll keep the truncheons at bay for a little while