Juan Cole on Nationalism and Academic Freedom
I recently noted Bernard Avishai’s book The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy. I’m now reading the section on the early history of labor Zionism, which, as Avishai explains it, was an attempt to meld socialism and nationalism at a time when both competed for the allegiances of young European Jews. I’m reminded again of my own introduction to Zionism in the mid-1960s. Much of the history is familiar to me, but Avishai’s take differs in both details and nuance.
This was on my mind when I read a piece by Juan Cole about the Columbia University/Joseph Massad conflict. Coles took justified exception to a New York Times editorial criticizing a university report which found there was no evidence Columbia professors were intimidating pro-Israel students. Two sections of Cole’ essay struck me in particular. First, his treatment of nationalism in the context of my reading of Avishai makes sense given my own later absorption of an anarchist anti-nationalist perspective:
The real question here is whether it is all right to dispute the Zionist version of history. The David Project, AIPAC, the American Jewish Congress, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, MEMRI, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Zionist Organization of America, etc., etc., maintain that it is not all right. Some of them have even been known to maintain that disputing Zionist historiography is a form of hate speech.
Historians are unkind to nationalism of any sort. Nineteenth century romantic nationalism of the Zionist sort posits eternal “peoples” through history, who have a blood relationship (i.e. are a “race”) and who have a mystical relationship with some particular territory. The Germans, who were very good at this game, called it “blood and soil.” Nationalism casts about for some ancient exemplar of the “nation” to glorify as a predecessor to the modern nation. (Since nations actually did not exist in the modern sense before the late 1700s, the relationship is fictive. To explain what happened between ancient glory and modern nationalism, nationalists often say that the “nation” “fell asleep” or “went into centuries of decline. My colleague Ron Suny calls this the “sleeping beauty” theory of nationalism.)
But there are no eternal nations through history. People get all mixed up genetically over time, except for tiny parts of the genome like the mitochondria or the Y chromosome, on which too much emphasis is now put. Since there are no eternal nations based in “blood,” they cannot have a mystical connection to the “land.” People get moved around. The Turks now in Anatolia once lived in Mongolia (and most Turks anyway are just Greeks who converted to Islam and began speaking Turkish).
The David Project wants Middle East historians to reproduce faithfully in the classroom the Zionist master narrative as the “true” version of history. We aren’t going to do that, and nobody can make us do it, and if anyone did make us do it, it would be destructive of academic, analytical understandings of history. Next the Serbs will be demanding that we explain why the Bosnians had to be suppressed, and the Russians will object to any attempt to understand the roots of Chechen terrorism, and the Chinese will object to our teaching about Taiwan. The American Nazi Party will maintain that the Third Reich is presented unsympathetically in university history classes, etc. etc. Ethnic nationalisms if allowed to dictate the teaching of history would destroy the entire discipline.
And second, this on the broader issue of whether every professor should pretend to be objective about every topic, an issue I confronted in my own teaching in many ways:
Academic teaching is not about balance or “fairness” or presenting “both sides” of an issue. It is about teaching people to reason analytically and synthetically about problems. The NYT approach would ruin our ability to do this and would impose a particular version of history on us all by fiat. It even implies that some committee should sanction anyone critical of Israel.
With attacks on left-leaning academics mounting both in the U. S. and in Israel (see my comment on Ward Churchill), it’s important to support those who prefer critical thinking to comfortable complacency.
