Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, is a rabid right-winger who has been making his presence felt at recent student protests. He openly refers to the students as terrorists and as members of Hamas.1Many thanks to Kelly Grotke for pointing me to the interview. Today, to his very great surprise, Davidai found out that his key card had been deactivated. This comes in the wake of the deactivation of hundreds of students’ cards, for no good reason. But Davidai has been showing up at the protests and haranguing speakers. Given his politics, so closely matched with the Israeli state, it’s a surprise that he has finally faced this form of censure.
Columbia has been egregious in its harassment and surveillance of pro-Palestine students and faculty, and you can read more about that here, here, and on Twitter (which, like it or not, still works as a source for news that’s not easily or quickly found elsewhere).
But some of the responses to Davidai (and, indeed, to the ongoing genocide) are troubling, even as they seem to criticise his words and actions. These might be summarised as, “He slanders the students by referring to them as terrorists” and “But the students are not Hamas.” Such statements do more harm than good and effectively de-radicalise the present struggle, folding it into a toothless, liberal discourse.
Like many other commentators on the topic, I am not a scholar or an expert on Palestine and the history of the ongoing genocide: I write about the issues as a leftist, a queer radical, and as someone who is critical of liberalism and a broader progressive agenda. Over the last many years, people I respect and admire, including many students and young activists who had so, so much to lose, have placed themselves in danger of losing their livelihoods or even their lives in order to participate in protests, make their politics known, and actually change the course of history. Two decades ago, the Boycott and Divestment Movement (BDS) was considered a strange, fringe entity and today its work is featured prominently on the most mainstream channels.
There is neither time nor space here to discuss the complicated contours of the ongoing activism around Palestine and to dissect the ways in which liberals and liberal Zionists have taken on a “cause” and, consciously or unconsciously, tried to defang it, to render it in anodyne terms like “freedom of expression” or by crying about the killing of children and innocents. But the Davidai incident gives us an opportunity to pause and reconsider why we defend students and activists against the charge of being “terrorists,” and by constantly repeating some version of “Yes, but are you against Hamas or not?” (the latter question has at least, thankfully, been laughed at in dozens of memes)
I take seriously these words from Students for Justice in Palestine, copied directly from Twitter: “for students who want to build encampments, please don’t make your encampments about solidarity with Columbia. this is about solidarity with Gaza & Palestinian Liberation over anything else. Use us as an example to escalate but we should not be the focus, it’s about Palestine.” These words are an important reminder that, yes, Palestine is the issue. It does matter a great deal that students at one of the world’s most elite universities are literally rising up and refusing to be frightened into silence by its administration. And as Jeanne Theoharis and others have pointed out, students at institutions like Brooklyn College (who are not protected by wealthier parents and donors) have long been surveilled, criminalised, and harassed by the NYPD for speaking out on any number of issues.
We can and should think deeply about these power differentials and and we can and should centre Palestine as we consider the massive protests erupting around the country. Liberal Zionists are, I believe, taken aback by constant reminders that their pallid views are now exposed as insufficient for these times, as the world literally marches past them, losing patience with their weak discourse about concepts like “human rights” and “freedom of expression.” (None of that is unimportant, but so drenched in liberal thought as to almost prove useless at this point.) Which is why the outcry against people like Davidai is necessary but futile if it only echoes that kind of liberalism. To counter his words with, “But the students are not terrorists” leaves the term “terrorist” unclouded in its rhetorical clarity; it leaves uncontested the fact that the term “terrorist” has always been weaponized against specific communities, and creates a global order of surveillance and harassment against politically inconvenient people. To counter his words on Hamas by insisting that, no, the students are not members of the organisation erases the massive complexity of nearly a century of political struggles which cannot be defined in terms of the goodies and the baddies, as much as liberals would like that to be the case.
Figures like Davidai exist everywhere and will continue to pop up, like pustules during a plague. The task ahead is neither to ignore them nor allow our responses to be swallowed whole by a defensive, knee-jerk, liberal posturing and claim protestors as not-terrorists and not-Hamas. Instead, we ought to look to the work of the many, many scholars who have, over the years, richly complicated our understanding of Palestine and the ongoing genocide. They include Mohamed Abdou, Joseph Massad, and Steven Salaita, all of whom have been harassed for their political views. While places like the The Guardian and the New York Times can be useful for ongoing (if often deeply pro-Israel) coverage of the news, we are better off also reading (and supporting) The Electronic Intifada, Middle East Eye and The Intercept, along with Democracy Now, and outlets like Currrent Affairs and In These Times: all of these provide perspectives that complicate conventional and simplistic liberal narratives about Israel and Palestine. If we are to support a truly radical, revolutionary discourse and set of political actions around Palestine, we need to dispense with the usual liberal tactic of apologising for radical, revolutionary histories and acts.
Many thanks to Nathan J. Robinson for responding to my last-minute query.
See also:
“On Israel Killing Children.”
“Thomas Friedman Is a Dinosaur, and a New World Is Here.”
“On Titan, Migrants, and Mourning.”
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