In a piece at The Hill Jessica Carpenter expresses conviction that young people want dialogue about Israel and Palestine:
We’re seeing a vocal minority on campus take control of the conversation — or lack thereof — around Israel and Palestine. These voices are being aided by “outside agitators” taking advantage of student anger. While universities grapple with how to navigate these protests, they’re missing the fact that students want spaces to talk and be heard.
In fact, these students are the majority. Understanding this will help us navigate this conversation, and other contentious issues, going forward and pave a better path for finding solutions.
I wonder if dialogue is even possible. For dialogue to take place you need a common language and a common basis of understanding. I don’t believe either of those exist. What we have today are little cliques of people, many formed online, who develop their own meanings for words that used to have common meanings and everyone has their own facts. I was shocked today when I did a search for something and received a torrent of propaganda, things I knew not to be true.
To the best of my knowledge the first mention of “Palestine” was by Herodotus in his Histories roughly 450 BC, an area between Egypt and Phoenicia. He makes no mention of either Jews or Arabs there but does write of Syrians. He mentions Arabs as inhabiting the Arab Peninsula and Bedouins in the Sinai. The archaeological and genetic evidence seems to suggest that the Maronites of Lebanon are most closely related to the early inhabitants of Palestine.
The Israelites had a clear presence in Judea (which is what the Romans called it) from about Herodotus’s time and maintained a continuous presence right down to the present day. Today’s Jewish population of Israel has three main components: Mizrahi (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa), Sephardic (Jews from Southern Europe, mostly the Iberian Peninsula), and Ashkenazi (Jews from Central and Eastern Europe). Arabs first show up in numbers in Palestine about the time of the Arab expansion.
In other words it is not true of either the Jews or Arabs that “they have always lived there”. Neither the Old Testament nor the Qur’an says that.
When you can’t agree on that even, possibly, rejecting discussion of it, how can dialogue be possible?
Dialogue is certainly possible and is happening among the large majority of students. Those who are radicalized against Israel and those against Muslims wont be able to talk. At this point, most people dont tknwo the history all that well and even if you do it has only limited relevance. What year do you want to use as your cut off for determining who has a valid claim to the land? mostly an unsolvable mess.
That said, the trend seems to be booting out the Palestinians. There has been a massive increase in settlements and now the extended war in Gaza which will largely leave it in rubble. I think that we will see some combination of Gaza territory reduced with a large “DMZ”zone around it and a lot of Gaza’s leaving. Expect the settlement to continue.
Steve
I would have a lot more respect for the protests if they didn’t adopt the language and many of the demands of Palestinian extremist groups who are not at all interested in dialog.
I think most college students don’t care that much about the Israeli-Palestine issue, the crowd sizes I’ve seen at protests imply a small fraction of the student population is involved. And perhaps the majority just don’t want to talk with the most animated on the topic.
My own epiphany came last year in November or December when I was talking with my daughter about the meaning of the “from the river to the sea” phrase. I said “words have meaning,” and she interrupted to correct me that words don’t have inherent meanings. I was on the wrong foot; I don’t know whether a person chanting this phrase is a Hamas supporter or considers it a human rights slogan or even has given it any thought at all. But if one was trying to persuade another person to your position, you wouldn’t use it. “Tar baby” isn’t a racist slur (read John McWhorter on this), the words have a meaning originating in African folktales, but you will be misunderstood if you use it. I will probably not read anything more about “From the River to the Sea;” that’s just become a field of battle about exerting the power to define the meaning of a thing, not to communicate ideas to others.
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master-that’s all.”
https://www.fecundity.com/pmagnus/humpty.html#:~:text=%22When%20I%20use%20a%20word,be%20master%2Dthat's%20all.%22
I thought David Pozen, law prof at Columbia, went over this well. The two groups just dont have a common language. An awful lot of effort towards “winning the debate” is centered around trying to control defining what words and terms really mean with each side favoring its own definitions. Those outside the active debates also seem to have trouble acknowledging the difference and tend to chose a side assuming that only one definition can be correct.
“Legal standards such as hostile-environment harassment are not well suited to this situation. These standards assume a reasonably stable and widely shared baseline as to what counts as an act of intimidation, on the one hand, and what counts as public-spirited advocacy, on the other. In the current context, however, that baseline is itself fiercely contested. Students have disagreed about the boundaries of acceptable speech many times before. But I cannot think of another instance where one group’s asserted experience of discriminatory harassment corresponds so closely with another group’s asserted expression of political protest—and where both groups contain a substantial share of the student body. This campus speech debate has produced so much more heat than light not only because of the horrifying violence to which it responds, but also because it is taking place in the absence of any consensus on the meaning or morality of core slogans and symbols. Moreover, the debate is inextricably bound up with a higher-order argument about who gets to set the terms of acceptable discourse on Israel-Palestine issues.”
https://balkin.blogspot.com/2024/05/seeing-university-more-clearly.html
Steve
It’s like debating the meaning of the Confederate flag. I’m sure some people sincerely believe it’s about “heritage, not hate,” but one can’t be ignorant of the meaning to others and the symbol it represents.
Same with the “from the river to the sea” and other Hamas-adjacent and related chants and iconography. One can claim they don’t intend it to be genocidal, but I don’t think one can claim ignorance of historic and symbolic meanings of those chants and images.
Well, I think we should never underestimate the ability of people to be ignorant, but you are back to whose history and whose meaning you choose to believe. It’s also clear that from the river to the sea is used in various forms by Jews in Israel. Anyway, I still think the point here is that we are leading to some kind of ethnic cleansing/apartheid state. I think a lot fo reporting from Israel is being sanitized and I dont think we realize how popular sentiments about eradicating/moving Palestinians has become in popular culture and that those who have advocated for more mass killings control part of the Israeli war cabinet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opinion/israeli-palestine-psyche.html?unlocked_article_code=1.s00.yNa_.ZXuJiOV1Ka93&smid=url-share
Steve
Dave Schuler: In other words it is not true of either the Jews or Arabs that “they have always lived there”.
The Bible indicates that Arabs and Jews are descendants of Abraham who was an immigrant from Mesopotamia (Genesis 11-12). Genetics of the Y-chromosome support that Arabs and Jews have a close patrilineal connection.
I’m no longer surprised when parts of the Bible are validated by science.
I’m not of the school of Biblical Literalism, but clearly the Hebrews took good notes.