In 1989, Donna Robinson Divine found herself being interrogated by a diversity officer at Smith College—then a brand-new position—for asking a final-exam question about the role of Islam in Middle Eastern politics and, as Robinson puts it, “mentioning slavery in the Muslim world without comparing it (favorably) to the system in America.” At the time, Divine, as a tenured professor, was able to avoid punishment, but since then she has witnessed academic freedom narrowed, while the scope of what ideas are deemed offensive grows ever wider. She observes the key place discussions of the Israel-Palestinians conflict have played in this trend:

Social justice came to the campus wrapped around a proclaimed sensitivity to the downtrodden and oppressed, sufferings supposedly wrought by the twin evils of colonialism and racism. Masquerading as a moral imperative, social-justice activism aimed to convert the curriculum into an instrument to erase evil and pain wherever they were located. And when found nearby—for example, if speech in the classroom “triggered” trauma or discomfort—it had to be regulated. No longer were nuanced conversations or the exchange of diverse views and engagement with different ideas the point of education. Rather it was the mobilization of feelings—and that necessarily placed limits on reasoning and thinking.

On many campuses, the fault line dividing the old oppressive order from the new progressive world quickly began to run decisively and deeply through Palestine. Coiled around a narrative of catastrophic defeat (nakba) Palestinians became the enduring image of the victim, and in the social-justice lexicon, an open wound and unfinished history. [The war of] 1948 came to be understood less in terms of its military outcome than as a first cause of suffering, a dislocation stalking politics in Arab lands while stamping Palestinian identity indelibly by its national trauma as a symbol of displacement, alienation, and indignity.

Palestinians became caught in the crossfire of conflicting imperatives, and none more discordant from the need to build state institutions than the need for the passion to remain a cause. For the idea of Palestine as a territory for two states for two peoples threatened to dissolve the very notion of Palestinian identity.

Echoes of pain and loss carried the Palestinian narrative across oceans and continents drawing false analogies between disparate groups or movements or histories that expanded alliances but did nothing to deepen understanding of what caused their suffering and dislocation. An acrobatic logic interweaving fact and fiction and spinning elaborate metaphors falsely fashioned linkages between people, politics, and history with nothing in common except their calls for a reckoning with the powers presumably denying them justice.

After several weeks of passionate political conflict in Israel over judical reform, the tensions seem to be defused, or at least dialed down, for the time being. In light of this, and in anticipation of the Passover holiday soon upon us, Eric Cohen considers the way forward for both the Jewish state and the Jewish people. (Video, 8 minutes. A text is available at the link below.)