Brooklyn College has been the target of fierce criticism since its political science department co-sponsored a Feb. 7 conference supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
During the Vietnam War protests at the University of Wisconsin, students were said to have gathered on the front lawn of noted historian George Mosse, imploring him to stop supporting the university’s policy of allowing the ROTC on campus. To some students, this alignment with the machinery of war was a “fascist policy,” and they charged their teacher with the same label.
“A fascist,” he was said to have mused. “Which kind?”
Classic Mosse: He engaged his students with wit, turning questions back to them, sending them back to books to examine their claims with “critical thinking.”
Twenty years later, when I was a student and protests against Israel were taking place on campus, Mosse was equally engaged. He did not talk policy, but he made us think about context, perspective and cogency of argument. He also was fascinated by the personalities leading the debates on both sides. What historical forces made them into the students they had come to be?
This arose one winter when the infamous anti-Semitic leader Louis Farrakhan came to campus. Someone wanted an apology from the university for hosting the speech in the field house. As a student leader, I argued that one should attend the talk, and hear what he has to say. That way, I figured, it would make the argument over his words more interesting and earn some respect from the other side for listening, however misguided or hateful the speech.
Watching the boycott, divestment and sanctions debate rear its head at Brooklyn College, a year after successfully beating it back at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, brings to mind these experiences. As someone who takes it as axiomatic that the BDS movement doesn’t have a leg to stand on, I could have predicted the sandstorm that would ensue when the Brooklyn College political science department co-sponsored a forum on BDS.
There are legitimate educational reasons to debate Israeli policy with regard to the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, but BDS and Brooklyn College became yet another occasion to trudge out the cottage industry of American Jewish politics and all its requisite claims and questions: Is criticism of Israel anti-Semitic? Is opposing Zionism anti-Semitic? Does the strongest nation in the Middle East even care what goes on in Brooklyn while dealing with a nuclear threat from Iran, unstable borders with Syria, an elected government not yet formed, and an unresolved conflict with the Palestinians?
Seltzer makers? Hand lotion? Please.
Some say that Brooklyn College never should have allowed the program in the first place; that a city-funded university ought not spend taxpayer dollars on a program about a movement that seeks the demographic dissolution of the Jewish state; and that since BDS advocates a binational state and seeks to delegitimize Jewish national aspirations, it’s an inherently bigoted if not anti-Semitic front.
I don’t agree.
Rather, I take issue with the political science department’s tactics. The department should have insisted that the program take place with a serious scholarly approach rather than the show trial that went on, complete with competing claims about intimidation and students being removed from the premises. The teachers should have taught, questioned, prodded and used the lecture hall to lift the discussion to a higher plane. The objection should not be about a university sponsoring a forum on whether boycott is an effective practice for political change. The objection should be that under the guise of “academic freedom,” the agenda for a reasonable debate about difficult issues was hijacked by intellectually weak and tendentious arguments.
BDS is insidious and stupid. It’s also wildly ineffective. The university shouldn’t censor it by not addressing it; it should expose it for what it is: an attempt by the weak to bring down the strongest nation in the Middle East that, besides being surrounded by enemies, controls a population that is yearning for a state of its own. When one-sided programming becomes a spectacle, all we learn is how to shout louder.
The Israel and BDS debate needs more candor, more argument and more exposure. Brooklyn College only got it half right. The students lost out. Israelis and Palestinians hardly noticed. — jta
Rabbi Andy Bachman is the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn.