BY ERNST BENJAMIN

Just as Kenneth S. Stern was completing his new book, The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate, he discovered that President Trump had signed an executive order adopting the “working definition of anti-semitism” and making it applicable to enforcement of the Civil Rights Act Title VI. Stern warns that the executive order has the effect of enabling Israeli partisans to chill campus expression by threatening the federal funding of universities and colleges that permit speech that criticizes Zionism or promotes the Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. So, even as the pandemic has turned our attention away from the divisive campus controversies regarding Israel and Palestine, Trump has planted a land mine that clearly threatens student and faculty academic freedom when students and student activists return to campus. And, just when I had finished my first draft of this review, the August 31 Forward informed me that the Israel Allies Foundation, which receives Israeli funding and has successfully backed state anti-BDS laws, is now backing a bill that “has already passed in South Carolina and Florida and been introduced in six more states, which would change civil-rights codes to define antisemitism to include anti-Zionism.”

Stern, who served for many years as an American Jewish Committee staff expert on antisemitism, participated in the development of a working definition of antisemitism for purposes of international data collection, not regulation. He has long resisted the efforts of others to use it as a weapon to restrict criticism of Israel. These others particularly include Kenneth L. Marcus, who recently served in the Trump administration and authored the executive order Trump issued when his efforts to achieve congressional legislation failed. On a personal note, I should add that back in 2012 Stern invited me to present the AAUP position on efforts to constrain speech on Israel and Palestine at a national meeting of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, which the AJC did not authorize Stern to attend. There I found myself paired with and debating Marcus to an audience which, somewhat to my surprise, proved more receptive to the AAUP position than to Marcus’s effort to promote the very speech restraints that he has now successfully incorporated in the executive order. Stern and I have also cooperated on a letter to the South Carolina state legislature warning that the adoption of proposed legislation similar to the recent executive order would constitute an unacceptable hate-speech code.

Stern subsequently left the AJC and is now on the faculty of Bard College, where he directs the Center for the Study of Hate. His combined specialized expertise and academic experience make his work especially useful to those who seek to resist efforts to use the AJC’s working definition of antisemitism to suppress campus debate. He emphasizes that many statements, even some reasonably viewed as antisemitic, are nonetheless protected under the First Amendment as well as by student and faculty academic freedom. Conversely, and in accord with AAUP policy, he explains that although advocacy of the academic boycott is clearly protected by academic freedom, the practice of academic boycotts is not. He is careful to apply this to Israel as well as to its opponents: “Israel has announced a list of twenty organizations whose members are to be kept out. This is a blacklist. The academic boycott is a blacklist. You don’t make the case that blacklists (especially of academics) are proper if your goal is to oppose blacklists. You are conceding the argument.”

Throughout his book Stern strives to present a similarly evenhanded respect for the positions of both sides. He writes, for example, “While Jewish settlers saw Palestine as a return to their ancestral homeland, Arabs in Palestine, only saw European settlers.” Similarly, he cites the disrespect for academic freedom on both sides. He critiques the “anti-normalization” perspective that leads pro-Palestinian spokespersons to oppose any participation by Palestinian partisans in events or discussions with pro-Israeli students or Zionists and, conversely, observes, “You’d think that the largest Jewish campus organization—Hillel International—would be against an anti-normalization rationale, and it is. Except it isn’t—it engages in a near mirror image policy, refusing to work with those with ideas it defines as detestable.”

I have emphasized Stern’s exploration of the implications of the Israeli-Palestinian controversies for academic freedom because they pertain most directly to AAUP policy. But I do not wish to slight the central academic argument and larger purpose of the book. The book’s purpose is not to try to resolve or to reconcile these sharply opposed perspectives. Nor is it simply to protect the right of each side to express its views. It is rather, in keeping with Stern’s academic work as the founder and director of a center for the study of hate, to try to understand and explain why the argument over Israel and Palestine, and other similar debates, are so contentious. Stern is careful not to overstate the significance of this particular debate. Indeed Stern usefully documents that, despite the wide publicity it has received, the BDS debate has been confined to a relatively small number of campuses and disciplinary associations. The larger question for Stern is how this issue and similarly contentious issues can be discussed in a more constructive manner.

His analysis begins with a brief account of the field of hate studies and a summary of socio-psychological explanations for the extreme contentiousness of some group conflicts. Of course, precisely because this particular conflict is so contentious, I would not expect the partisans to be receptive to psychological explanations and would expect rather that they would dismiss them as efforts to minimize their just grievances. Nonetheless, since one purpose of the university is to assist students to study and learn about such controversies—and, to the greatest extent possible, to assess and appreciate the merits of conflicting perspectives, data, and arguments—many faculty may find Stern’s concluding chapter, “Blueprint for a Rational Campus Discussion on Israel and Palestine,” useful for pedagogical purposes. I particularly appreciate the suggestion that students study and, if possible, learn to argue the case for each side, as I learned to do in my undergraduate debate class and through participation on my university debate team.

Stern concludes by reminding us of the larger implications of the need for students to engage in, not to suppress, free speech: “I’m troubled as I write this—in early fall of 2019—how students who are insisting on “no platforming” of ideas they find reprehensible are not seeing the especial danger to free speech in an environment in which the President of the United States refers to the free press as ‘the enemy of the people,’ bans reporters from covering the news, talk about withdrawing the licenses from television networks and regulating search engines that don’t prioritize articles that are favorable to him.” He then follows this challenge to students with an equally difficult challenge to scholars of Israel and Palestine,  urging those faculty members, whose areas of study and even scholarly reading and research often overlap, to establish a joint field of Israel and Palestine Studies. This welcome proposal may, unfortunately, be a bridge too far. But it is at minimum a useful reminder that faculty would do well to model the respect for and effort to understand conflicting points of view that we often encourage in our students.

Guest blogger Ernst Benjamin, now retired, served the AAUP as general secretary twice and as director of research. Prior to joining the AAUP staff, he taught for almost two decades at Wayne State University.