BY JENNIFER RUTH
Portland State University has no quads on which to pitch tents, but running between some of our major buildings, including the library, are park blocks owned by the city. When threatened with trespassing by Portland Police, the students moved their protest from the grass onto the steps of the library. From there, joined by others from the community, they eventually moved inside, barricading themselves in. After some seventy-two hours, some of which were spent in negotiations with the protesters, PSU president Ann Cudd lost nerve or patience and told police to forcibly remove them. New protesters then gathered on campus to protest the presence of police. (Police on campus has been an ongoing issue for PSU, tensions heightened by the shooting death of Jason Washington in 2018.) In an echo of Charlottesville, some of this new set narrowly avoided being mowed down by a driver who then abandoned his car, spraying the crowd with bear spray as he ran.
In faculty senate on Monday, president Ann Cudd spoke about the destruction of the “sacred space” of the library and about “vile messages.” In senate and then again in a subsequent email to the campus at large on May 7, Cudd said, “These words, slogans and epithets, while protected by the First Amendment, will not bring about a ceasefire in Gaza, but they can poison our community,” adding that we should not condone, normalize, or accept them. I don’t know what was written on the library walls but I do know that when powerful figures use very strong language to denounce something about which they remain vague or about which there is real contestation, then we are likely dealing with political repression. When there is a lack of clarity accompanied by a sense of fear or taboo, that is when speech is most effectively chilled — including political speech about oppression and injustice. For example, because some people have claimed that slogans like “From the River to the Sea” or “Free Palestine” are calls for genocide, when the vast majority of the time they are used to call for the end of genocide and for the equal rights and dignity of the Palestinian people, people wonder if the university authorities have these slogans in mind when referring to “hateful” speech. This has the effect of suppressing speech about injustice when speaking out about injustice is a basic human right and being unable to do so without fear of retaliation is a form of oppression.
I feel a rising panic as I witness people—here at PSU, in Washington, in articles and essays—steadily build a narrative that denies the moral impulse organizing the campus protests across the nation by painting them as antisemitic and willfully ignoring their stated intentions. The students make clear that they are protesting to draw attention to the mass deaths and impending starvation in Gaza and to their own country’s and own universities’ complicity in the devastation. The narratives being foisted on the public from people in positions of authority defame students as ignorant at best and evil at worst (“pro-Hamas terrorists”). The generational divide is extreme and only growing more extreme as the “adults” rally behind these condemnations of students. The political repression mounts (the Antisemitism Awareness Act) and the Palestine exception to academic freedom and free speech is enforced with escalating brutality (the violence of counter-protesters while police watch and the violence of the police themselves).
When they moved their tents onto the library steps in compliance with police orders, the students also renamed the library—from the Branford Millar Library to the Refaat Alareer Library. The students—at least a good portion of them—understand that Palestinians are the lower-case victims of the upper-case Victims of history, as Edward Said once wrote, and that this vexed reality makes it exceedingly difficult to speak out on Palestinians’ behalf without making oneself vulnerable to charges of antisemitism. The vast majority of the protesters are not antisemitic. They are doing their best to bring the rest of us into the twenty-first century, when “never again” means stopping an ongoing genocide not of Jews but, this time, of Palestinians.
Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom.
There is no genocide in Gaza, just a brutal war against the genocidal fascist regime of Hamas which started the war by breaking a ceasefire, invading Israel and butchering more than a thousand civilians of all ages. And when vandalizing a library is considered acceptable behavior universities can close down because they have lost their reason for being. If this represents the AAUP now then it has lost its way.
Genocide denial is intellectually and ethically repugnant. There’s a colloquial use of “genocide” and it refers to mass murder of persons based of their being in a particular identity grouping or people. Today, one has to be an unhinged anti-Palestinian bigot not to see this genocide. There’s also a technical legal standard and we will see how the ICJ rules, but let’s take seriously that the ICJ has found it “plausible” that the Israeli state is guilty of the crime of genocide in Gaza. And let’s take seriously that the steadfast Zionist and very sober Senator Elizabeth Warren has said based on studying the evidence, she thinks it likely that Israeli state is guilty of the crime of genocide. The hate speech I am responding to is both fully protected and vile: it should be denounced but not restricted.
Professor Segal,
There are many intelligent, rational, fair-minded, individuals and scholars who believe that the word “genocide” requires an evil intent and that mass killings alone – ones that occur during a defensive and righteous war – do not, ipso facto, constitute “genocide.”
For many, the key requirement to properly use the word “genocide” is the presence of evil and malice. Without it, there is no genocide and the mass killings of civilians are only unfortunate casualties of war.
In law, there is an illustrative example that involves the distinction between a “homicide” and a “murder.”
While both terms involve a killing caused by another human being, the word murder requires an evil intent (malice aforethought). By contrast, the word homicide is a killing that lacks the required evil intent. Such homicides could be accidental, negligent, or justifiable for example.
So, while all murders are homicides; not all homicides are murders.
Likewise, all genocides are mass killings; but not all mass killings are genocides.
Hopefully, that clarifies.
Final thought: Sir, you do yourself a disservice and you sully this blog when you name call. Labeling someone who doesn’t share your opinion on the proper use of the term genocide as an “unhinged anti-Palestinian bigot” and a purveyor of “hate speech” only detracts from the merits of your argument and rarely persuades.
Editorial correction: Homicide is a killing that MAY Lack an evil intent; NOT Lacks an evil intent as written above.
What is happening in Gaza is indeed genocide. I don’t use that term lightly. Over the past 30 years, I have written extensively about genocide, including matters of how it is conceptualized, defined, identified, and denied.
The term “genocide” was introduced by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, following many years of research on historical cases of group destruction. Although the term has since been defined in a variety of ways, its core meaning is the destruction of a national, ethnic, religious, or other group, which can be accomplished by means such as killing members of the group, seriously undermining the biological conditions for life, or severely damaging the group’s cultural integrity.
Since the Hamas mass killing of October 7, Israel has killed about 2% of the population of Gaza, including about 2% of the children, and injured a much larger percentage. It has displaced over 80% of the population and destroyed many or most of their homes. It has created conditions of mass starvation, destroyed agricultural land and greenhouses, and persistently obstructed efforts by others to get food to Gazans. It has killed hundreds of humanitarian workers. It has destroyed most of Gaza’s hospitals, denied access to medical resources, and killed hundreds of medical personnel. It has severely damaged or destroyed myriad cultural and educational institutions, including libraries, museums, archives, over 80% of Gaza’s schools, and all 12 of its universities. At this point I think it is hard to miss a clear pattern of group destruction—a multi-faceted act of genocide.
The full situation is likely much worse than what we know because Israel has done its best to cover it up what is happening in Gaza by denying entry to outside journalists and killing over a hundred of those already there. But the genocidal intent was clear right from the start. Two days after the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant ordered “a complete siege” in Gaza: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” On October 18, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza strip.”
It has been argued that this pattern of violence and destruction cannot be genocide because it is part of a war. But genocides always take place in a larger context of war and/or other group violence. The Armenian genocide took place during World War 1. The Holocaust was planned and perpetrated at the height of World War 2. The 1994 Rwanda genocide took place amidst a civil war and invasion. And so forth. Larger contexts of violence are what make genocide possible, but genocide is conceptually distinct from war and other forms of group violence.
If the Israelis wanted to commit genocide in Gaza they could have killed hundreds of thousands of Gazans by now. Instead we see a civilian to combatant ratio that is in the very lowest range for urban warfare. Urban warfare is brutal and always very hard on civilians, but it doesn’t even begin to approach genocide in this case.
While some of the information presented in Professor Moshman’s post is true, the inference he draws from it – that Israel is guilty of genocide – is false.
By its most accepted definition, the term “genocide” implies – to the average person – a nefarious intent to wipe out an entire population.
The fact that Israel’s urban war against Hamas has resulted in mass casualties and mass destruction of infrastructure, does not – ipso facto – mean that its actions constitute genocide, i.e., an evil intent and desire to eradicate the Gazan population.
Ferreting out and destroying terrorists who hide behind civilians and sneak in and out of tunnels is a daunting task and it comes with a huge casualty price. Yet despite many mistakes (made in every war by every army), the IDF takes extraordinary steps (unlike other armies) to give civilians advance warnings and minimize civilian casualties.
Disgruntled armchair strategists – with zero or limited military experience in fighting urban terrorism – must think there is a better way for the IDF to eradicate terrorists; yet, they offer no such wisdom.
Fair-mined individuals fully recognize that Israel’s goal is to destroy Hamas and not to wipe out Gazans. Professor Moshman attempts to show that Israel has an evil genocidal intent by quoting two brief comments from two Israeli leaders. Those short cherry-picked comments – made soon after Hamas’ unspeakable savagery – in no way allow an inference of genocidal intent. This assumption is nothing more than a fallacy of false inference…perhaps spawned by confirmation bias.
Bottom line: Those with a pre-existing anti-Israel bias no doubt will want to accuse Israel of genocide (name calling) and will want to paint Israel as an evil doer. While those with a neutral or pro-Israel bias, no doubt, will simply see Israel for what it is – a country that has been thrust into a difficult, but righteous war to rid evil.
The claim that “the IDF takes extraordinary steps (unlike other armies) to give civilians advance warnings and minimize civilian casualties” is contradicted by the facts: “Our aggregate analysis of credible reports involving U.S-provided weapons by Israeli forces indicates a context of systematic disregard for fundamental principles of international law, including recurrent attacks launched despite foreseeably disproportionate harm to civilians and civilian objects, wide area attacks without prior warnings in some of the most densely populated residential neighborhoods in the world, direct attacks on civilians or otherwise protected persons (e.g. police and civil defense personnel), and attacks against civilian objects, including those indispensable for the survival of the civilian population.”
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/NSM20-TF-Report-_-Final.pdf
“The claim that ‘the IDF takes extraordinary steps (unlike other armies) to give civilians advance warnings and minimize civilian casualties’ is contradicted by the facts.” Professor Moshman
That claim is not contradicted by the facts. The reality of war – that there are always terrible civilian casualties – does not mean that Israel makes no effort to avoid them. During all wars, bad things happen; some by accident, some by negligence, and some by intention.
Indeed, it is worth noting that the IDF – unlike other armies at war – tries to warn civilians and minimize casualties by sending texts, making phone calls, and dropping leaflets. It also engages in “roof knocking” to warn residents of a building about to be bombed. Still, there is the ever present “fog of war” and mistakes do happen.
The report in the provided link is the product of a committee made up primarily of pro-Palestinian sympathizers and co-chaired by a Palestinian activist.
This group, no doubt, has an anti-Israel agenda and seemingly wants to conclude that every IDF misstep was an intentional one. Their “report” is not only a one-sided indictment (with much conjecture and speculation) of Israel’s prosecution of the war, but more disturbing, it lacks a balanced “due process” rebuttal and defense from the IDF.
“…as Edward Said once wrote…”
And that is how you bury the lede.
Not academic material, again on this blog. Edward Said’s view of history is fundamental here. Academically, intellectually, this should be the point of debate, up front, not stuff for winking adieus. After you’ve torched the place.
I do not find much of this historically real, as if by fiat, we on our campuses declare the way. In 2024? In the US?? The historiographical, sociological, and epistemological material presented here is just grotesque. Why are we in the grotto? Come forth, Lazarus. Please.