The grand academic con job that brands Israelis as "settler colonialists"
Or how California is considering aligning its K-12 curriculum with the pedagogy of the Third Reich
“What’s past is prologue,” declared William Shakespeare in his play The Tempest.
But if Shakespeare were a scholar in the humanities or social sciences today these days, he probably would have spoken the contrary – “what’s past is postscript”.
Allow me to explain.
A prologue is something you compose to introduce, frame, or tease with samples of certain concepts you will later develop more fully and in detail (a “preview of coming attractions”) in the main body of text that follows.
A postscript is per contra what you append to the main body in order to reflect further on what you’ve already written or or perhaps lay out entire new trajectories of thinking that may happen to be the topic of your next book.
The trouble with construing the past as postscript is that you end up distorting, or even self-consciously lying about, what has gone before in order to map crudely on to history your own preconceived agendas, deeply felt social prejudices, or fantasies about changing the world by convincing your readers your are far more holier than “thou”, when the “thou” turns out to be dead people who cannot rebut you or speak for themselves, or we can easily ignore anyway.
Reading history backwards has its analogy in the interpretation of important texts, whether they be sacred or secular. It’s called eisegesis, where instead allowing yourself to be challenged by what you’re reading, you assume it means what you prefer it to mean.
The opposite is exegesis, which connotes permitting the text to communicate to you on its own terms.
So why is this distinction important, other than as a cautionary tale for academics engaged in their familiar solemn and plodding academic business in a way that has nothing to do with the “real: world?
Well, it has everything to do with the very real and all-too-present contemporary world, namely, in shaping our efforts to understand as well as take policy positions on (which may influence profoundly how we vote in national elections) what is occurring right now in the forever volatile Middle East.
Since the massive and unspeakable terrorist attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent ghastly war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza (the exact number remains murky), how each one of us should in a proper manner politically, morally, or emotionally respond becomes its own kind of “existential” challenge.
If we don’t get it right, chiefly because we adopt and cling to simplistic positions while refusing to educate ourselves on the origins, the backstory, and the complexity of the conflict, we will stand condemned as accomplices in the future slaughter of many peoples – some innocent, others not so innocent.
The high stakes implicit in what to the casual observer might seem to be an esoteric issue were brought out with stark coloration in a recent article from The New York Times entitled “California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs into the Israel-Hamas War”.
The article reports on the political fracas that has ensued in California from the legislature’s effort to mandate ethnic studies for all students graduating from high school by 2030. It focuses largely on the pressure from the political and academic left to make the mandated K-12 curriculum conform to what is usually taught in colleges and universities as opposed to the current design, which one scholarly critic of the existing project dismisses out of hand as “a bland form of multi-culturalism”.
Under normal circumstances an insistence on aligning the fine points of current academic research with the highlights of what is taught to young children and adolescents would be a noble and uncontroversial move.
Who wouldn’t want your third-grader, for example, to learn that Pluto is not a planet, a factoid that contradicts the orthodox scientific view only a generation ago?
But when it comes to “ethnic studies,” a new and for the most part fledgling initiative within the ivory tower that languished for years until the protests and social upheaval over the killing of George Floyd in 2020 juiced its prestige and visibility, does not derive from some sort of expert consensus based on neutral inquiry and “objective” analysis.
As virtually all its spokespersons quoted in the Times article stressed, ethnic studies is essentially and irremediably “activist”, meaning that the truth of its assertions do not so much reflect reality on the ground – or even reasonable interpretations of such reality - as they are intended to goose people, or their leaders and representatives, to mobilize in ways that will clear unprecedented pathways for social change.
According to Dylan Rodriguez, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Irvine quoted in the article, ethnic studies happens not to be “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences”, but rather “is a critical analysis of the way power works in societies”.
Various sources interviewed for the article referred to this notion as “liberated ethnic studies”.
Aside from the dubious and intellectually hollow latter half of the statement, which has become an way-too-familiar mantra without meaning among many academic ideologues without the theoretical heft sophistication to use such language responsibly, its invidious implications for real-life issues involving actual people are staggering.
The article investigates how such an approach, from the standpoint of its critics, not merely fosters, but goes so far as to authorize antisemitism among our academic elites as well as those other professionals who take their pronouncements seriously.
Of course, if these elites have the final say in configuring the K-12 curriculum, the upshot is that antisemitism and tacit Jew-hatred will be baked into what is routinely taught in public schools for a state with a population of over 30 million.
The nub of the controversy, so far as the Times piece is concerned, is the claim pushed forth by the majority of ethnic studies representatives that the present day conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which includes Hamas, must be taught simply as one in which the former has always “oppressed” the latter.
The template for their position is the theory of “settler colonialism”, according to the Times. “If someone is going to teach that conflict from a true ethnic studies perspective, it’s going to be critiquing settler colonialism in Palestine,” the article cites high school teacher Guadalupe Cardona as saying.
In other words, if you’re going to teach ethnic studies in a proper manner to kids in the public schools from this perspective, you’re obligated to start from the premise it’s all the Jews’ fault, and expelling them from Palestine so that the land “from the river to the sea” is Judenrein (“cleansed of Jews”), as the Nazis put it in Germany during the 1930s, is not only necessary but laudatory.
To put it bluntly, California may be seriously contemplating the “alignment” of its K-12 curriculum with the pedagogy of the Third Reich!
The foregoing wording may be hyperbolic, but it is not off base.
The proposition that the very existence of the state of Israel, recognized by the United Nations in 1948, should be called into question because it is somehow an egregious instance of “settler colonialism”.
Thus, according to this fulsome and genocidal reasoning, Hamas was completely justified in sadistically murdering over a thousand Israelis because they were involved in a war of “liberation” against the Jewish presence on the land, which goes back three millennia.
And the same actions could be justified again and again.
Such a prospect is unfortunately guaranteed by the slippery and insidious logic of the theory of “settler colonialism”.
We wrote back in early November about the profoundly fraught and generally false historical analysis that applies the academic paradigm of “settler colonialism” to the modern state of Israel.
Since then numerous thoughtful as well as polemical essays have appeared in the international media criticizing the effort to “shoehorn”, as the Atlantic puts it, vastly disparate historical trends and phenomena into an overly naive and unselfconsciously hyper-moralistic take on how history truly works.
The targeting of the Jews in Palestine to give heft to what is in itself a rather shady and largely incoherent theory amounts, as Times columnist Bret Stephens has opined, to a totally hypocritical and insincere manipulation of abstract ideas serving to mask its unvarnished anti-semitic agenda.
The legacy of the conflict between Jews and Palestinians in the Levant is strictly one of two warring nationalisms with strong religious overtones – or at minimum quasi-religious aspirations – that followed upon the collapse of a succession of previous colonial empires that included the Macedonians, the Romans, the Islamic Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans, and the British.
It has nothing to do with “settler colonialism”, unless the connotations of that term can be cherry-picked at will to demonize whatever immigrant population one chooses mainly to fortify one’s own vainglorious presumptions concerning their imagined ethno-nationalist, religious, or racial superiority.
The phrase “settler colonialism” was coined by anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in a book by the very same title published in 1999.
But Wolfe’s thesis – strangely - had almost nothing to do with the manner in which it is routinely employed nowadays by professorial ideologues to divide the grand pageant of historical actors between “colonialists” and the “colonized”, or between “oppressors” and “oppressed”.
It was by and large a systemic and probing critique of how the field of anthropology and related academic disciplines were shot through with “colonialist” presuppositions – a stance that is no longer controversial but relatively commonplace.
The exploitation of such suggestive wording, however, for the sole purpose of perverting history – that is, consciously rewriting the past to conform to current ideological dogma – is reprehensible only because it consists in prima facie academic fraud.
It has grave consequences.
In a damning article entitled “Reaping What We Have Taught” one distinguished Harvard faculty member has asserted that the outbursts of vicious anti-semitism on campus last fall can be traced directly to his school’s adulteration of its common curriculum over time in keeping with these sorts of trends.
He writes:
Merchants of hate are repurposing these intellectual goods that universities are producing. When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.
Just as the slick subterfuge of “scientific race theory” was deployed in Nazi Germany to dehumanize Jews while anesthetizing the already weak consciences of the average academic hanger-on, so the pseudo-theory of “settler colonialism” is spreading among the West’s cognoscenti to achieve many of the same ends.
It is not simply a matter of finding a balance in the classroom from kindergarten through graduate school between “right” and “left” perspectives.
It all comes down to whether anyone of decent character should acquiesce to the biggest and most vicious intellectual con game since the end of World War II, one which is designed to bring about its own “final solution” to the millennia-old plight of Judaism, while the well-intentioned and unsuspecting are easily distracted from what is really happening.
Or whether we should finally point out that the emperor has no clothes, even if it shakes the rotting pillars of higher education at its foundations.
The choice is not a casual, but a civilizational one.