PrintIt may be safe to say that we love the concept of “dialogue” here at Columbia. Catchphrases like “creating dialogue” and “opening up the conversation” are thrown around casually in class discussions. Once we leave classes, we pick up the Spectator and read an opinion column about how more “dialogue” needs to happen between X and Y party, and we then turn around and see a flyer advertising the latest debate between the Democrats and Republicans. Thus I was rather surprised when I learned that a student group on campus, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, refuses to engage in dialogue with Hillel, Columbia/Barnard’s umbrella organization for Jewish life.
Two weeks ago, CSJP hosted a mock demonstration of checkpoints in the West Bank that consisted of students, dressed as Israeli soldiers, lining up other students, blind-folding them and forcing them to kneel. The demonstration intended to highlight, according to CSJP, Israel’s violations of human rights. No more than 30 feet away were students from Hillel distributing flyers titled “It’s Complicated, Let’s Talk,” which acknowledged the problems of checkpoints but also pointed out that since checkpoints have been implemented, terrorist attacks in Israel have generally decreased.
More curious, however, was the large cardboard poster that Hillel put up which, quoting from the “anti-normalization” policy of CSJP, stated CSJP’s opposition to participation in any project designed to “bring together … Palestinian and/or Arab youth with Israelis and is not explicitly designed to resist or expose the occupation and all forms of discrimination and oppression inflicted upon the Palestinian people.”
Next to that posters were petitions filled with signatures requesting CSJP to dialogue with Hillel. I would later learn from members in Hillel and confirm with CSJP that they have turned down all invitations to cosponsor with Hillel since the anti-normaization policy because they see Hillel as a Zionist organization.
This event is two weeks old, but the media is still buzzing about it, the most recent article coming in from Eric Schorr, vice president of LionPAC, a student group under Hillel, just this Tuesday. However, while media coverage of this event has highlighted the anti-normalization policy, there has been little mention of exactly why this policy exists nor any explanation of its curious name (Why not “anti-dialogue?” Why “anti-normalization”?). It has become easy, then, for CSJP to be caricatured as a group that is “resorting to extremism to polarize Jewish students” in order to avoid difficult questions, as one commentator on Spectator put it. So why exactly does this policy exist?
I approached the CSJP camp during the demonstrations and watched a loud argument, complete with vigorous hand gestures going on. Matthew Swagler, a GSAS student and member of CSJP approached me. I asked him what he thought of Hillel’s “It’s Complicated, Let’s Talk” flyer.
“We don’t actually think it’s complicated. There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of information, but … there is a very clear-cut pattern of unjustified discrimination,” he says.
Midway through our conversation, I realized my source of confusion about CSJP’s resistance to dialogue was that I had understood the relationship between CJSP and Hillel as one similar to the relationship between the Democrats and Republicans. But CJSP does not perceive their relationship with Hillel that way. To ask them to, say, hold a debate with Hillel over whether or not Israel’s human rights violations are justified would be similar to asking Everyone Allied Against Homophobia to hold a debate on whether or not violence against homosexuals is justified. What Israel’s treatment of Palestinians needs, in CSJP’s eyes, is more exposure and not debate, more time spent on mobilizing the masses to act and not on convincing CSJP’s opponents.
Of course, the injustice of homophobic violence is virtually accepted by the Columbia community, whereas the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is a source of great controversy. While CSJP does acknowledge that fact, they believe that with increased publicity of the violations and sustained boycotts, divestment, and sanctions of Israel, the two main goals of the organization, in time it will become clear that it is a simple issue of injustice. The analogy with EAAH is my own; CSJP chooses instead to compare themselves to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa during in the 1960s.
“There was a time when people said there were two sides to South African apartheid … but we strongly believe in time people will look back on the boycott movement—the BDS movement to boycott Israel—the way people look back on the movement to boycott South African apartheid,” Yasmeen Ar-Rayani, a junior at Columbia College, one of the founding members of CSJP, says.
The favored approach to ending apartheid by the Reagan administration was “constructive engagement,” a combination of limited sanctions and quiet dialogue with South Africa’s white leaders. This moderate approach was a compromise between the “two sides,” which in this case was “the twin dangers of abetting violence in the Republic and aligning ourselves with the cause of white rule,” as argued by Chester Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the Reagan administration. Needless to say, this approach failed and was swiftly denounced for not being forceful enough.
In short, contexts do exist in which dialogue is unnecessary and even counterproductive, given alternate options of activism. The question is whether dialogue in the context of our campus would be productive. This is where the “anti-normalization” policy comes into play. It is important to bear in mind that the anti-normalization policy is not something that CSJP created: it was created by a coalition of students in Palestine with whom CSJP, along with other organizations around the world, acts in solidarity. The policy is not, as I’ve mentioned, called the “anti-dialogue” policy. CSJP is not necessarily against dialogue in and of itself, but of the normalizing effects of dialogue between opposing sides.
The essence of the argument behind the policy is that dialogue creates false and harmful impressions. One of them is that the conflict is just “a symptom of psychological barriers that can disappear through dialogue with the other,” according to the anti-normalization policy posted on CSJP’s website last April.“Why can’t we all just find a little Harmony,” the infamous “Harmony Hunter” at Bwog commented on a post reporting on the demonstrations. It is the sentiment behind that comment, which trivializes the conflict, which CSJP seeks to avoid. Having two competing narratives on stage in dialogue also ignores the power dynamics between Israel and Palestine, painting a “false picture of equality between the two parties,” when in fact Israel is by far the stronger nation militarily and economically.
Perhaps the issue, then, is not dialogue, per se, but the type of dialogue. “Would CSJP be open to hosting a formal debate with Hillel?” I ask. Tanya Keilani, a GSAS student, and a member of CSJP, expressed preference for a formal debate over a standard dialogue, but Yasmeen was a bit more cautious.
“I can’t speak as to whether or not we would actually do it; the board will have to discuss it,” she says. “If [media] coverage were already a little bit more balanced, if our narrative were already given a little more weight publicly, then a debate would make a little more sense for us. But when the Palestinian voice isn’t even acknowledged at all … then it becomes our priority to make sure they are presented first.”
CSJP does acknowledge the validity of Israeli suffering at the hands of Palestinians, but they believe that Israeli suffering is over-publicized in mainstream media, leaving groups like theirs to provide the other narrative. Yasmeen calls CSJP’s narrative the “pro-human rights narrative,” saying that rights trump security interests, in contrast to Israel’s “security narrative,” that security interests trump rights. Such language is a little misleading, for security itself is a human right, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“Rights conflict with other rights, so just to declare that something is a human rights violation is no doubt privileging one set of rights. The question in practice is which violation is more significant than the other?” Elazar Barkan, director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, says.
Barkan doesn’t believe, however, that the solution is to weigh different human right violations and see which is the most grievous or which has occurred more often. “Weighing” rights presumes that there is a trade-off between the two, which is not necessarily the case.
This was the argument that John Ging, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, made on Nov. 14 during his lecture at Barnard. Ging argued that, in the case of Israel’s blockade on Gaza, human rights and Israel’s security interests do not come into conflict because promoting the rights of those in Gaza would actually better serve Israel’s security interests.
Although neither of them were at the event, Yasmeen and Tanya agreed with Ging’s de-linking of security interests and rights when I asked them about it. The Ging event was, however, proposed by Just Peace, a student group affiliated with Hillel, one of the more liberal voices in the Jewish umbrella. “Would you have cosponsored that event with Just Peace?” I ask.
“My inclination is probably not because we don’t work with Zionist organizations. … You can have someone who is liberal racist, but at the end of the day their ideology is still a very big problem, and one of the things we want to do is to draw attention to the racist nature of Zionism,” Yasmeen says.
I probe further, “So if you would call Hillel a Zionist organization, how do you define Zionism?”
Tanya answers, “We’re against Zionism in practice … and as practiced today, it is the desire for a Jewish state, which means a state that is racist, because it provides certain privileges to Jewish citizens and not to non-Jewish. ... Right now Hillel supports the Israel that exists for the sole purpose of its Jewish citizens, neglecting Christian, Muslim and other populations. It has nothing to do with being against the right for Israel to exist. … What I am against is the creation of second- and third-class citizenry, which is completely different. They [Hillel] don’t include this caveat when talking about Zionism.”
That characterization of Hillel is a bit of a generalization. Take Just Peace, an organization that is affiliated with J Street U but that is also under the umbrella of Hillel, not just because of cultural and religious ties, but also because it agrees that Israel has the legitimate right to exist. However, according to Abby Backer, president of Just Peace, this doesn’t mean that it is not critical of Israel’s policies.
“We target a specific policy and say, ‘That is fucked. We believe that policy is discriminatory, and not only violates basic human rights, but also Jewish ethics,’” she says, adding that just because she believes that alternatives to the problematic use of checkpoints must be found, doesn’t mean she believes that Israel as a nation-state is racist.
Terms like “Zionism” and “dialogue” are concepts that are, I realized quickly in my interviews, defined in multiple ways, creating gaps of understanding on both sides. When I asked Jonah Liben, Israel director of Hillel, what his understanding of the reason behind the anti-normalization policy was, he replied that it was because CSJP was opposed to working with all Zionist groups, which includes Hillel. But when I informed him of Tanya’s definition of Zionism and perception of Hillel, it became quite clear that there is a disparity between her perception of Hillel and Hillel’s self-perception. Liben acknowledged that a struggle within Israel to be both Jewish and democratic does exist, but that Hillel advocates for both those values—Jewish and democratic—and that its support for a national Jewish homeland does not mean that “one group of people is superior over another.”
Of course, mere “dialogue” is not the panacea to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it would promote deeper understanding of both student groups, mitigating the level of vitriolic emotions and rhetoric I heard on College Walk that day and read later on the comments posted on Bwog and Spectator.
An earlier version of this story, which is also printed in the magazine, incorrectly stated that CSJP's mock demonstration was of checkpoints in Gaza. The checkpoints are in fact in the West Bank. The earlier version of this article also stated that the petitions at the demonstration had been turned down by CSJP when presented to them. In fact, the petitions had not been previously presented to CSJP.