Friday October 13

Last night it wasn’t air raid sirens or thunderstorms that kept me awake nor was it the indescribably horrifying photos of blood-stained beds in children’s rooms in southern Israel that I couldn't help seeing all over the media. (I have been doing my best to avoid looking at these, though I know that's cowardly; I just already have enough of a vivid imagination of what could have happened to my daughter and I Saturday morning had we been just 20 km further west.) Last night what kept me awake was thinking about how I ended my nightly call with my son in New York with an admonition to be careful tomorrow, maybe even to postpone his trip to the laundromat for another day. Having been in class all day and away from the latest news he needed to ask why, and I needed to explain that supporters of Islamist jihad have sworn to show their support for a free Palestine by attacking Jews wherever they may be found. (This afternoon my cousin wrote and told me that thousands of Jewish kids in Toronto are staying home today out of fear for their safety.) How has it come to be that I'm here, warning him there, to be safe?!

So I’m wondering how many people out there are still arguing that anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism? Do my Jewish colleagues still think that it matters one iota whether or not they appear to be as woke as their students? And if this turns into the kind of uprising and riots and regularized routine antisemitic violence that have caused Jews to leave France for example, where do they think they're going to be able to go to escape from it?

And I'm wondering -- the student groups and union leaders taking up the call for this Day of Resistance, or Day of Rage, calling for violence against Jews in a show of solidarity with “Palestine” – do they even know what Palestine is? Do they know anything beyond the fact that this rallying cry is intended to bring Hamas’ terror to Jewish homes and communities around the world? Such a call for “Rage” would be bad enough if it was just coming from the terrorist organization itself. But the fact that it has been carried and repeated across the world, and that forces have been mustered to answer the call everywhere Jews live, becomes one more thing I can’t wrap my head around. Being in danger from Hamas terrorism because I’m a Jew in Israel right now is one thing. Being in danger from Hamas terrorism because you’re a Jew in New York or Ottawa or even Beijing, is entirely another.

This sleeplessness, worry, and anger manifested, as you may have already noticed, in a pretty intense 7-hour writing stint that became a post on a “brief” history of Palestine and Palestinians (you’ve probably figured out by now that for me “brief history” is a bit of an oxymoron, but I’m trying). The only way I can continue to not sit here feeling like a helpless victim is to try to offer some background like this to those of you who are interested in learning about what’s actually going on, and why. Again, I’m not an expert but I tried to do my due diligence, check primary texts, and offer you the data that I think is most relevant in order to have a sense of how we got where we’re at (i.e. to produce history).

This is kind of what I’m paid to do, albeit for a different era of history. My job as an historian consists of reading and synthesizing a lot of information, deciding what counts as data for the purpose at hand – depending on the specifics of what I’m writing about and for whom – and stringing it together in a narrative that makes the best sense of the data, and often that challenges pre-existing narratives on small or large points in order to refine the state of our knowledge and better understand the past, in order to best understand the present.

In the university when I teach about religion, history, and the humanities in general, I make it a point to provide counter-narratives to the ones that I assume my students are coming in with. In my experience as a student the best part of my education was being exposed to viewpoints I didn't even know existed. Being challenged to consider them in contrast often with my own, forced me to consider where mine came from and where theirs came from, and ultimately what the best explanation was given the evidence at hand. In my own research I push the envelope further and raise questions about what even counts as evidence, and by whom, in order to construct any given argument. I have long been aware that not everyone does this in my disciplines or in others (like political science and sociology for example). Beyond disappointment with the type and quality of education that their students might be getting, and disappointment with those particular colleagues for perpetuating half truths, omitting important context and corollaries, and for taking the easy way out by not challenging their students and perhaps themselves with what it means to really learn about something, I’m disappointed in a system that lets this happen, and often even rewards it. I don’t promote a critical humanities education (only) because I think learning about what people have thought, and done, and written, and painted for the past 6000 years is fascinating. I promote it because it is crucial for any citizen of a modern society – especially one in which everyone’s opinion about everything is thrust into people’s online feeds 24/7 – to really understand how knowledge is constructed. Any educator who doesn’t do this abdicates their responsibility and contributes to an overall lack of critical thought in a society in which understanding of a particular subject in all of its complexity has been reduced to fast facts and bite-sized information that even the most basic mind can regurgitate on an exam.

While I have often lamented what this has done to society as a whole in a kind of abstract sense both privately and publicly, this endemic dumbing down of what it means to know and to understand something and to be able to think about it and not just recite fast facts has manifested in some scary trends over the past decade, from the election of ill-qualified populist leaders across the free world to the banning of books that challenge the preferred status quo of complacency. Days of Rage and other calls to violence both outside and inside of Canada that are becoming more and more common are the dire consequences of an unwillingness to teach and to learn basic history (e.g. of a region that you read about every single day) as well as of a general inability to engage the complicated matters of human existence from multiple perspectives. Not everyone has the time, the energy, or the ability – I get it. But those of us in a position to know better and those of us in a position to do better too often do nothing, myself included. I'm trying to make up for it a little bit here.

After the 7-hour writing stint (and a late lunch) I needed to take a break and be near the water so I went outside and took a walk. I paced up and down the nearly empty stretch of beach nearby (though the swimming beach had sunbathers and fishermen, and even about a dozen people in the water despite the red flag indicating it was officially closed, and the fact that the water temperature has dropped several degrees from the comfortable 28C that I enjoyed there last month). I was soothed a bit by the deep blue of the water and the rhythmic lapping of the waves, so I took some photos to include below and share.

I sat for a while on a rock as the sun started to set. The thing that bothers me the most about the calls for Rage (aside from the physical threat of danger to my family and community) is the unbelievably widespread student support for it in universities across North America, along with administrators' reluctance to say anything firmly against it. Most 20somethings that I’ve known in my life, including myself, are inclined to root for whoever they see as the underdog, and many of us carry that spirit through the rest of our lives as well. Nothing wrong with that at all. But there’s a fundamental difference between supporting the idea of freedom for an oppressed people with a show of solidarity in a march or a rally, and knowingly justifying and defending genocide and torture while calling for more of it to spread to your own neighborhoods. That’s beyond chilling. And it’s being done by students – those whose education has been entrusted to my care, and the care of my colleagues. The fact that the students don’t, won’t, or can’t discern between justifying genocide and fighting for the cause of freedom and equality is not the fault of the social media feeds and echo chambers in which they live. People who pay to be educated by specialists in their fields should be able to see beyond the ridiculous reductionist simplicities, half-truths and outright falsehoods being perpetuated about entire histories and cultures; they should be able to discern between hard facts and insidious lies. They should be able to recognize history repeating itself because they should have learned about that history in the first place. The blame for the fact that they don’t, ultimately lies at our feet.

History is about telling stories, and everyone loves a good story. But storytellers always make choices; when telling your teenager stories about what you did at her age, you will likely choose to include some details and omit others. The basic history is there, but directed toward making particular points (or not) for a particular audience. Same goes when she tells you stories about what she did last weekend. Often the stories we tell leave out uncomfortable truths – uncomfortable for the storyteller or potentially for the audience – and include only those aspects that people will want to retell, to identify with, and even to celebrate. History-telling is no different; those who tell the stories of the past make choices depending on their audiences and depending on the points they are trying to make; and in these cases, choices of what to keep in or leave out of their stories include choices about whose voices count. History is not about facts or truths. History is comprised of arguments in narrative form that account for the variety of evidence that historians need to consider (textual, artifactual, first-person accounts, etc.) – good history writing accounts for the most evidence in the most compelling way. But what gets counted as evidence is up to the historian.

Sometimes those stories are uncomfortable, and sometimes they make us face things about ourselves, our ancestors, and our worlds that we don’t want to face. But a good education should be disturbing. It should move us out of our comfort zones and force us to see the world differently. We don’t need to agree with each other’s perspectives, but we should be made aware of them if for no other reason than to prevent violence and promote understanding, to avoid wars or at least contain and confine them to the limited spaces in which they flare up. Wars are waged by governments for power or greed or ego; but soldiers – or students – enlist to fight on their behalfs because of ideology, belief, and the stories they hear about what they’re fighting for.

I’m not just trying to glorify the role of an historian because that’s what I am (though it does make me feel important). Providing responsible histories, based on solid arguments bolstered by real evidence, has always been the task of intellectuals who resist the simple narratives spun by power-hungry tyrants to mobilize masses who have not learned to discern fact from fiction. Our students should be the ones who serve as society's moral compass and correct public perception toward accuracy; but too many of us have abdicated our responsibility, and now our students don’t know the difference between history and delusion.

What's worse, in an age in which everyone’s an expert if they have enough followers on Instagram, the stories we tell about the past determine how we think about the present because they become the past, in a sense; if we tell only one story long enough, other stories are forgotten. Prime example: supporters of Hamas and ISIS have been repeating the idea of “Israeli apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” so often and from so many platforms, that the media and even NGOs designed to provide aid to the underdogs just repeat it as though it’s truth. And then professors of history or political science follow suit, and administrators provide wishy-washy non-responses because they're cowards. And then students call for the death of Jews. And history repeats.

On a brighter note, this impressed me and gave me hope that others might follow suit. And even brighter: here are the more pleasant glimpses of my walk on the beach today.