Earlier last month, I attended the “Deconstructing Pinkwashing” panel, which I found to engage in “the new rape denialism,” a phenomenon where reports of sexual violence on Oct. 7 have been met with broad skepticism and denialism. Since the panel, I have been asking myself how discourse on Israel-Palestine at this College has descended to this level.
From the beginning of 2022 until the end of last year, I co-led the student organization Students for Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue (SIPD), whose goal was to encourage deeper understanding and empathy in discourse surrounding Israel-Palestine, without endorsing any particular political model.
For a variety of reasons, including SIPD’s own shortcomings in articulating its goals and in engaging in meaningful outreach, SIPD programming often had poor engagement. With my co-leaders having graduated and my failure to find new leaders, I was on the fence about continuing SIPD at the start of this academic year.
However, after Oct. 7, I expected that there would be renewed interest in Israel-Palestine, and I wanted to try to reinvigorate dialogue on campus in some form or another. I expected that the College would make this task easier by immediately throwing its full weight behind promoting deeper understanding and empathy through initiatives like those taken by Dartmouth College, where faculty have held joint public forums since the outbreak of the war.
I have been disappointed that some faculty and staff have instead chosen to partake in the programming of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group that staunchly supports the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). BDS takes a complete anti-normalization approach, meaning that it seeks to undermine anything that could be considered dialogue on Israel-Palestine; for example, in January, a wing of BDS targeted “the most prominent organizational voice within Israel calling for a cease-fire,” the Israeli Arab-Jewish led activist movement, Standing Together, to the deep frustration of its Palestinian leaders.
Looking for answers, I revisited some of the works of the late Palestinian-American academic and political activist, Edward Said, given his centrality to discourse on Palestine, his transformative influence on academia, and his canonization by SJP activists — who on other campuses have described themselves as “students of Edward Said.” In the seminal Orientalism, in which Said establishes the term, Said argues that the Western tradition constructed the image of the monolithic, stagnant, and backwards Orient as a foil to the image of the civilized West.
Rather than taking the message of Orientalism and recognizing the limits of generalization and dichotomization, I believe that some faculty and staff members are doubling down on binary characterization of the East and West, both on Israel-Palestine and on other matters. For example, I found the “Deconstructing Pinkwashing” event to not simply “unpack the usage of Pinkwashing” by deconstructing Israeli propaganda as advertised, but also make oversimplifications that homophobia is simply a white European phenomenon that was exported to the Arab and Muslim worlds through European colonialism. On advertising materials, the Arabic Department; Global Studies Department; Lecture Committee; and Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion helped “make this event possible.”
This approach may be a well-meaning attempt at countering harmful narratives in academia and in the media, but I do not believe that it is reflective of the approach that Said took. In the article “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Said expresses his desire to move beyond binary thinking, taking “the extreme position of entirely refusing designations like ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident.’”
Said supported efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. In The End of the Peace Process, Said calls on Palestinians “to express their case directly to Israelis in public forums” by adopting “a strategy with like-minded Israelis.” One of the projects that Said undertook in his final years was the founding of the West-Eastern Divan orchestra with Daniel Barenboim in order to promote intercultural dialogue between Arab, Israeli, and Palestinian musicians, alongside musicians of other origins.
In “Music at the Limits,” Said expresses his opposition to complete anti-normalization, writing, “It has been a stupid and wasteful policy for so many years to use phrases like ‘the Zionist entity’ and completely refuse to understand and analyze Israel and Israelis.”
“The point is not simply to belong to one side or the other because one is told to be, but to choose carefully and to make judgements that render what is just and due to every aspect of the situation,” Said wrote. “The purpose of education is not to accumulate facts or memorize the ‘correct’ answer, but rather to learn how to think critically for oneself and to understand the meaning of things for oneself,” Said continues, echoing the College’s stated mission of encouraging students “to seek out criticism of their own ideas, and to appreciate the virtues of personal and intellectual humility.”
SJP has every right to express its opinions on this campus. But, I believe that faculty and staff engagement in the programming of SJP, a group that fundamentally opposes dialogue, is undermining the College’s stated mission “to open minds and deepen human empathy,” recognizing that “so many of the world’s problems — from racism, to sectarian and nationalistic violence, to everyday forms of disrespect — stem from a failure to imagine our way into the lives of other people, a failure to understand the beliefs and contingencies that shape their lives, a failure to hear the stories that other people are trying to tell us.”
I commend the faculty and staff who continue to live up to the College’s stated mission at all times, and I look forward to seeing the College recommit itself to its values.
Jonathan Breibart ’24 is a political science, classics, and Arabic studies triple major and is from London, U.K.
