Last month the House of Representatives held a hearing, bearing down on anti-semitism on university campuses. In a news clip that was shown everywhere, Rep Elise Stefanik asks university presidents “Does calling for genocide constitute harassment?” Harvard president Claudine Gay responds: “That depends on context.”
When I saw that clip, I was horrified, as I was meant to be. The hearing was not meant as an inquiry but as a trial, and a show trial at that, with Stefanik as prosecuting attorney. (Later interlocuters spoke more respectfully.) Rep Stefanik has always sought the headlines, but a provocateur can ask important questions. This seemed to be one.
Then I began to wonder. Why was the issue framed as a matter of harassment? Obviously Gay’s answer was correct: Whether calling for a massacre counts as harassment depends on context. If it is meant to upset, or is reasonably interpreted as upsetting, then it’s harassment (or intimidation). Otherwise, it is a different and much deeper form of evil. But the university presidents confined their answers to the narrow question.
Why?
Frustrated with the clip – it was used in every major news site -- I retrieved a transcript of the full hearing. (Full disclosure: It’s 99 pages long. I skimmed.) The clip omitted what had come just before: Rep Stefanik asserting that ‘intifada,’ in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict, is a call for Jewish genocide. With equal confidence she interpreted ‘from the river to the sea’ as a call for the destruction of Israel. She was wrong on both counts.
“Intifada does not mean genocide. Arabic has its own term for that, ibadah jama’iyah, which hasn’t appeared in protests. Instead, it’s used to describe historical events like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide. [Calls for intifada] are not calls for genocide. They are calls for resistance, including armed resistance, to . . . Israeli military occupation.”
The Hill, Dec 14, 2023
As for ‘from the river to the sea,’ the term has been used for 60 years. It means different things to different people. Hamas undoubtedly uses the terms as Stefanik defined them. Most people do not.
The question was loaded.
Yet the hearing proceeded, using ‘genocide,’ ‘intifada,’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ interchangeably. The result was a confusing mess. Genuine issues about the treatment of Jews on campus emerged, but were lost in the shadow of the dramatic, manufactured charges.
Stefanik could have asked “Does your code of conduct qualify ‘intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ as harassment?” Perhaps Gay understood the question that way. If so, her answer made perfect sense: It depends on context. Or Stefanik could have asked “Does language that is sometimes interpreted as a call for genocide count as harassment?” Here, too, the right answer would be, ‘It’s context-dependent.”
But the question Stefanik actually posed was loaded: It assumed the truth of a false translation. The false translation (omitted from the clip) was asserted just before the question that made the headlines. The situation was confusing, and the presidents flailed.
Later in the hearing, genuinely disturbing incidents were described. Jewish students had been pushed and spat upon. Rep. Manning reported that one had been asked to leave class so that other students could “discuss the issues comfortably.” Some were advised to stay in their dorms, for their own safety, during protests. One professor recessed the class so everyone could attend an anti-Israel protest.
The real issues were overshadowed.
It’s clear that Jewish students are harassed and intimidated in many ways. Codes, having been drawn up some years ago, are probably inadequate now. It’s highly likely that they’re enforced unevenly. A better hearing would have treated the presidents with respect and assumed their good faith. (All of them expressed strong support for the rights of Jews, in principle.) Attention should have gone to identifying problems with the codes and with their enforcement, and identified other egregious misconduct. A useful hearing would have worked toward solutions. But the hearing wasn’t intended to be useful. It was intended to destroy. In that aim, it was successful.
Responsible news coverage would have challenged the questions as well as the answers, and focused on the real behaviors that Jewish students and faculty endure. Longer pieces should grapple with solutions.
Personal History: From the river to the sea
In the early 1970s, on a TV comedy/news show, the host reported: “News flash! The Palestinian Israeli conflict has been settled. A new country has been formed. Its name is . . . Israel!” I laughed and cheered with the audience. I was college educated, yet 25 years after the founding of Israel I knew essentially nothing about the Palestinian experience. The same was true, apparently, of most Americans.
Since then I’ve learned a lot about Palestine, its history, and the role of the West in that history. In my next post I’ll share what I’ve learned. But my main subject will be philosophical: principles of just war, including the knotty issue of proportionality.
PS: Two of the three presidents attacked during the hearing have been forced to resign: Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Claudine Gay of Harvard. In Gay’s case there were also allegations of plagiarism.
Fair expose of Stefanik, but lets Gay and the other presidents off the hook far to easily. Presumably university presidents are seasoned professionals used to tough questioning who are are capable of challenging presumptions of their questioners. Whatever Stefanik’s vices, why they failed to respond to her appropriately is not her fault, but theirs. At stake are not only issues related to Israel and Palestine, not only related to antisemitism on campus, but also issues related to the distinction between constitutionally legally protected speech, and the kinds of discursive and behavioral civility that are essential to robust academic life. Gay’s apology acknowledged that admirably, both the general issue, and the fact that her failure —yes her failure,not Stafanik’s—particularly hurt Jewish students in this context.
That was as clear a description of the Stefanik-Gay interchange and the surrounding issues as I have read. And I have read a lot. My husband's profession means I swim in a pond with a lot of historians. My birthplace means I know a lot about the guilt that Britain bears in this whole sorry mess. BUT, I am still frustrated that Gay et al could not have anticipated this questioning and short- circuited it. What is wrong with an answer that says that genocide is abhorrent, as is hate? Deliberately misrepresenting a situation to create more hate, as Stefanik was doing, is also abhorrent. And the answer to all these problems is not kicking people out of countries or universities but educating more people to understand issues from different perspectives. Keep writing. You polish the rust off my brain cells.