Monthly Archives: April 2024

By cracking down on the Gaza protests, US universities are betraying their core mission

This op-ed was published by The National on April 24, 2024

Free speech at American universities is enduring one of its most severe stress tests in decades. Israel’s war of vengeance in Gaza, precipitated by the October 7 killing spree by Hamas-led militants from Gaza, has riveted and appalled the world, even eclipsing the perhaps historically more significant Russian assault on Ukraine.

Huge coalitions of US students have united against Israel’s rampage that has targeted not just Hamas but Gaza society generally, damaged or destroyed the vast majority of buildings, and killed at least 35,000 Palestinians, mainly civilians. The slaughter has been shocking, even given the vicious savagery of the October 7 attack.

Since the end of South African apartheid, Palestine has been the most likely focal point of US student international social justice outrage. This movement was predictable and predicted. Yet pro-Israel constituencies appear taken aback by outrage at the butchery in Gaza and sympathy for Palestinians roiling American campuses, particularly at elite schools. Not since the Vietnam War have university leaders looked this discombobulated, unable to placate any faction or to credibly and creditably defend their institutions from such intense internal and external pressure.

Turmoil over Gaza has already contributed to the downfall of several major university presidents. Others, most recently the Egyptian-American president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, have committed extraordinary miscalculations. Following several other elite university leaders, she was recently grilled by a highly aggressive Republican congressional committee, and told to take tougher action against pro-Palestinian protesters, particularly by Representative Elise Stefanik who is angling to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the coming election.

 

Ms Shafik tried to placate the right-wingers by labelling phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and even just the word “intifada” as “incredibly hurtful”, without any additional context. Upon returning to campus, she ordered police to arrest more than 100 students encamped on a campus lawn. Even the authorities appeared uneasy at the operation, with New York Police Department Chief John Chell noting that “the students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner”.

This unnecessary and chilling crackdown had the inevitable effect of galvanising student protests at Columbia and elsewhere. Ms Shafik is now predictably squeezed between demands for her resignation from dissatisfied pro-Israel Democratic and Republican legislators and a pro-free-speech censure motion filed by outraged faculty in the University Senate.

University leaders find themselves trapped between two competing and crucial values: upholding the protesters’ right of free speech while simultaneously protecting a sense of safety and security for pro-Israel Jewish students.

While the protests have been almost entirely nonviolent, instances of harassment and speech that either is, or is interpreted as, hateful have left many Jewish students – like their Arab and Muslim counterparts, some of whom have even been shot – feeling shaken and unsafe. Both are left wondering if they are truly welcome at their own schools.

Meanwhile, the demonstrators are being systematically and unfairly painted as all or mostly followers of Hamas, proponents of terrorism, and violent anti-Semites. They are being generally conflated with the worst elements of the far left that have, of course, seized a golden opportunity of outbidding everyone with extremist rhetoric that dominates media attention and trying to gain control of a potent fledgling oppositional movement.

The political right, abetted by some liberals, is similarly relishing the chance to paint criticism of Israel as inherently anti-Semitic and claim that liberal-dominated universities have in recent decades created an atmosphere of casual left-wing extremism by not being more conservative. For supporters of Israel’s otherwise indefensible bloodbath in Gaza, pointing to the genuinely extreme, rhetorically violent, or effectively anti-Semitic screeds of the most radical protesters is a desperately needed means of discrediting and delegitimising vigorous opposition to the war.

Panicky universities are not just mishandling a delicate and difficult fissure. They are missing a rare and profound opportunity for academia to demonstrate its unique social role and putative worth.

Rather than arresting students en masse and denouncing them as anti-Semitic because they object to a barbaric war on top of an unjust, predatory occupation, university leaders should be embracing their institutional mission of education. Nothing is going to magically make traumas and bitter divisions evaporate. But everything necessary for universities to foster serious dialogue on a mass and highly sophisticated level is readily available.

There are countless constructive and serious scholars and advocates on both sides who are ready for such a conversation, which should most certainly include students. And the communication technology that all students, and much of society, access daily provides many excellent platforms. These forums should resonate with calm but passionate and principled voices on all sides.

While many Jewish students hear the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as an exclusionary call to get rid of Jews, surveys demonstrate that most Arab and Muslim students hear merely a call for freedom. No one is asking the demonstrators what they mean by such slogans. Instead, malign sentiments are being inferred or presumed. A dialogue is therefore urgently required. What would freedom from the river to the sea entail? Is anyone against freedom? Can everyone have it equally? Must an area be under a single sovereign or system to be free? Is this really anti-Semitism?

Rather than fostering such a novel and broad conversation, many universities are instead trying to limit speech, not just by arresting or otherwise punishing and maligning protesters, but also, as in the shocking and shameful case of the University of Southern California, silencing it outright.

USC cancelled the graduation ceremony speech by valedictorian Asna Tabassum because of her criticism of Israel, citing highly credible and numerous violent threats. This yet again confirms that extreme harassment and intimidation are coming from both sides. Worse, assuming its rationale is sincere, USC is effectively pioneering a preemptive and presumptive heckler’s veto.

Like Columbia and others, USC is charging headlong in the wrong direction. Rather than finding creative ways of tapping into a huge appetite, and the vast intellectual and other resources at hand, for serious, albeit difficult and potentially painful, dialogue – and thereby fulfilling academia’s socially indispensable educational mission – these schools are turning to suppression, marginalisation and demonisation of speech that offends some students, reactionary politicians and pro-Israel donors.

It’s a betrayal of the core mission of academia, a cowardly and short-sighted blunder, and a missed opportunity of epic and historic proportions.

 

 

Iran-Israel conflict poses an existential risk for Lebanon, unless Biden can intervene

This op-ed was published by The National on April 16, 2024

Iran’s failed attack on Israel may have sealed Lebanon’s fate. Israel undoubtedly has come out the winner in the latest exchange, having killed several key commanders who are said to have played a role in directing Iran’s regional network of Arab militias to help Hamas fight Israel in Gaza and help Hezbollah prepare for a potential Israeli attack.

Israel suffered no fatalities, few injuries and very little damage in the Iranian barrage of over 300 projectiles aimed at military facilities. The US estimates about 140 of the drones and missiles failed due to malfunctions. US forces downed most of the remaining 160 projectiles, with the UK, France, Jordan and Israel’s own Iron Dome antimissile system also involved.

Iranian chest beating – and misleading news reports depicting fires from Chile and Texas as damage in Israel – aside, Iran seems to have been effectively thwarted.

Yet Iran does not appear to have intended to cause significant damage and fatalities in its attack, despite its size. Tehran telegraphed both the timing and the nature of the attack to Arab and European diplomats close to Washington well in advance. This explains warnings to Iran from US President Joe Biden, in his now-standard diplomatic catchphrase, “don’t”. Moreover, by using mainly slow, cheap drones, Iran actually may have pulled its punch. These missiles were fairly easily, and almost completely successfully, defeated.

Yet there can be little doubt that Iran could have done a great deal of damage, had that really been its intention. Not only do the Iranians have much greater capabilities than were on display in the attack on Israel, they also held back their biggest weapon, which is Hezbollah in Lebanon and its massive arsenal of over 150,000 missiles and rockets, many with precision guidance. Hezbollah’s stockpile is, if nothing else, capable of overwhelming the Iron Dome, and would have posed a huge challenge even to the US forces that did most of the important work.

So, what did Iran think it was doing? Clearly, Tehran believed that a direct strike on Israel in retaliation for the stinging assassination of its senior operatives in Syria was necessary. But it’s likely that domestic politics and political pressure from hardliners was the main factor, rather than a desire to escalate unduly with Israel. This is reflected in the failure of the Iranian attack, which is rather predictable given its structure and handling, and the obvious alternatives Iran could have used and still holds in reserve.

It appears Iran’s leaders wanted to score a “win” in the eyes of their people, while simultaneously giving Israel every opportunity to avoid feeling compelled to launch an additional new escalation. Indeed, Israeli leaders, too, can look at the score sheet and conclude that they have achieved a massive “win” over Iran. Neither side, rationally, has a real reason to push the confrontation further.

In addition, the Iranian attack was the antithesis for Israel of October 7. Rather than a shock which took the Israeli state and military completely by surprise and overwhelmed it, at least for a couple of days, this was telegraphed in advance and was easily dealt with by existing forces, even if they involved many other countries. Besides, most Israelis think their own military did the heavy lifting against the barrage. Instead of feeling violated, vulnerable, stateless and abandoned, Israelis can now feel a new sense of security, stability, predictability and that they are under the protection of a powerful and effective government that defends them and their interests against powerful foreign attacks.

The real question is, will Israel see this latest round with Iran as a sufficient “win”? Israeli leaders have been looking for such a victory since October 7, under the rubric of “restoring deterrence” but, really, in order to restore the national morale and sense of security and stability among a traumatized Israeli society. It was obvious from the outset to many, and has surely become clear to everyone by now, that such a “win” isn’t available in Gaza.

The great danger in recent months, not just to the region but to US policy as well, has been the prospect that Israeli leaders were seeking this restorative and cathartic “win” against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The group represents the most powerful immediate threat to Israel and is a much more conventional enemy than Hamas. Such a conflict would provide the Israelis with obvious targets, quantifiable metrics of success or failure, and no quagmire of having to occupy large chunks of Arab land indefinitely. They could simply pummel the group, damage and degrade its arsenal, kill some of its leaders and commanders and attack its infrastructure in relatively short order and then declare a victory that could be clear-cut in a way that no development in Gaza could.

The greatest problem with the Iranian attack on Israel is that it could well stoke, rather than mollify, the passion among some leading Israelis, like Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for a war in Lebanon. Such hawks can point to the Iranian missile attack and claim that Hezbollah’s arsenal represents of much deadlier and intolerably dangerous version of the what Iran ineffectively flung in their direction.

The ball is now in Israel’s court. It could retaliate significantly against Iran, escalating prospects of a regional war. It could employed much more limited, or targeted, reprisals of a kind that has characterized its grey war with Tehran in recent years. Or it can decide to deliver Iran the biggest possible strategic blow by taking on, and, it would hope, taking out, Iran’s strategic trump card: Hezbollah.

If the Israelis decide the Iranian attack justifies an offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, it will be up to Mr. Biden, who has successfully held them back from such a folly on numerous occasions since October 7, to once again successfully restrain them. This will not come naturally or easily to Mr. Biden, even though he has made his opposition crystal clear. Nonetheless, his powers of persuasion with Israel may face their ultimate test in the coming weeks. It may be up to the US President to stop Israel from committing the most dangerous and readily avoidable escalation in recent Middle East history by yet again invading Lebanon.

Biden will have to choose between his left-wing base and the Never Trumpers

This op-ed was published by The National on April 10, 2024

U.S. President Joe Biden finds himself squeezed between competing imperatives in the run-up to the November presidential election.

Neither he nor his presumptive Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, have yet assembled a working coalition that can produce an electoral college majority, delivering either candidate a second presidential term. Mr. Biden is in a far more advantageous position, but he faces a potent conundrum about how best to expand his current base: moving to the right and embracing former Trump voters or tacking to the left and trying to shore up the liberal coalition that secured him victory in 2020.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that Mr. Biden has little to lose by making a concerted push to win over alienated Republicans. But such a move could be very risky.

Traditional assumptions hold that Mr. Biden’s former voters are unlikely to end up supporting Mr. Trump, whose racist, violent and extreme rhetoric is far more radical now than in 2020 or 2016. The overwhelming majority, the thinking goes, will eventually come back to Mr. Biden – even holding their noses – or, at the very least, will stay home.

But how many will really be won over by the current, highly radicalized, version of Mr. Trump currently on offer? Apparently more than most Democrats would have anticipated.

Current polling suggests that Mr. Trump is doing much better among Latinos and non-college-educated African Americans and other minorities, once bastions of the Democratic voter base and core parts of Mr. Biden’s 2020 coalition, than many liberals would’ve thought possible.

Democrats have long suffered from an evident and lazy complacency, with the assumption that Latinos would be impelled by a mixture of immigration and economics, and African Americans by resentment of Republican racism and their own class concerns, to always return to their fold.

Many Latinos are socially conservative, religious Catholics or other Christians, and are therefore responsive to the traditionalist and even reactionary Republican agenda, especially on abortion. Immigration does not trump everything else, and Latinos are by no means united in wanting the US to be more welcoming at the border. Indeed, many working-class Latinos are as resentful of recent migrants using the asylum system to try to bypass formal immigration processes as other Americans.

Non-college-educated African-American men have proved to be particularly receptive to Mr. Trump’s appeals in recent months. The extent to which they are aware of his new rhetoric about immigrants from Asia and Africa “poisoning the bloodstream” of the US population, or if they would care, is unclear. But his populist message, designed to appeal rhetorically to blue-collar constituents outside of the traditional unions, does seem to resonate with many young black men.

Both groups also appear to be receptive to his hyper-nationalism and isolationist rhetoric, wrongly assuming, along with many of their white rural counterparts, that international engagement and leadership are simply a burden on the American people and a boondoggle for wealthy corporations. Finally, both seem responsive to Mr. Trump’s persona as a strongman outsider who can supposedly cut through traditional power structures and impose better and fairer policies on a corrupt and parasitical elite.

So, Mr. Biden needs to be attentive to the drift of these groups away from his constituency, which in some cases could mean tacking to the populist left in order to counteract the populist right.

Moreover, the Gaza war has cast a huge shadow over Mr. Biden’s credibility with progressive left-wing groups, many of them African-American social justice and religious constituencies, who are deeply angered about the carte blanche given to Israel in attacking not just Hamas but the whole of Gazan society. On the US left, there is a conviction that Israel has engaged in an exterminationist, even genocidal, war in Gaza with the strong backing of the President and his administration, and that this has been shameful and morally unacceptable.

Mr. Biden needs to distance himself from this war, and therefore needs an end to major fighting in Gaza before campaigning gets fully under way by the early summer. But there is little sign that Israel views the timeline in a similar manner. Pushback from the progressive left is a key reason that the administration has been slowly ratcheting up pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian crisis and prepare to end the war in the coming weeks.

But if Mr. Biden attends to these groups, it could be at the expense of the most significant “gettable” group of voters, in addition to the suburban constituencies in swing states that are likely to determine the outcome. While Mr. Biden has his Democratic critics, Mr. Trump goes into the election with a striking number of Republicans who clearly don’t want him as their nominee. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley consistently got between 20-40 per cent of primary votes, and there is ample additional evidence that more Republicans than ever are fed up with his extremism and shenanigans.

Mr. Biden has already attempted to reach out to these voters by embracing what amounts to a Republican agenda on border security in legislation that was killed by Republican House members, precisely to thwart such outreach. But there is much more he can and should do to make it clear to disaffected conservatives, especially those who once supported Mr. Trump but no longer can, that he represents an acceptable, even desirable, alternative.

Mr. Trump’s upcoming legal tribulations, especially the trial on hush money payments to an adult film star that is due to start next week, could well offer the President a devastating weapon. A felony conviction could provide a decisive opening to convince former Trump voters and other Republicans to at least stay home in November.

Mr. Biden wouldn’t have to tack very hard to the right to win over many of them, but he’s going to have to do more than he already has. The problem is that if he reaches out to disaffected parts of his 2020 coalition among minorities and on the left, he may lose the opportunity to steal or silence decisive numbers of Republican votes.

Mr. Biden’s conundrum is that he quite possibly cannot have both or simply rely on one group or the other coming back to him in November in despair. He’s probably going to have to choose between these outreach agendas. And, given what’s at stake in the 2024 election, that’s going to be a momentous strategic decision indeed.