Boston College SC367? I wonder if any funding comes from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Hezzebolah, Fatah, or Hamas?

Israel is not occupying Gaza. No Israelis are living in Gaza. Very few Israelis are living in the West Bank. Remember Israelis have lived in the West Bank for over 45 years.

I hope the course spends time on how the Arabs treat Palestinians and deny rights to them. rights such as citizenship, right to own land, right to work, etc.

BC sucks at football and basketball, now they can teaching to the list.

"Narratives trump facts"?????

What the h*** kind of education is this? This is ridiculous.

I'll bet it isn't cheap either.

Man oh man -

You know a FACTUAL course in modern Middle Eastern and Jewish history - including the decline and destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the Cold War, the Shoah, the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism and the creation of Saudi Arabia, as well as the fate of Middle Eastern Jewry and all the wars against Israel, ought to be a prerequisite for this - otherwise it's outright brainwashing or ignorant children - unreal.

#1 RWG

No Israelis are living in Gaza. Very few Israelis are living in the West Bank. Remember Israelis have lived in the West Bank for over 45 years.

"West Bank" is a neologism coined by the Hashemite regime the Brits imposed on the East Bank after they conquered Judea and Samaria in the 1948, but Jews lived in Judea and Samaria for millennia. (For those who deny the Jewish claim to the land of Israel, the nice thing about calling that part of it the "West Bank" is that it shifts attention away from the historical names. When you use the historical call names you clearly recognizing the Jewish connection to that land.

Martin, I wonder which book by Benny Morris our mistress of agitprop, Prof Ms Spangler, wants her subjects to use. After all, Morris put out a book more recently that reverses much of his earlier argument. He is said to have returned to more traditional views of the Israeli War of Independence of 1947-49. I think that the book is called "1948."

of course Sophia is right. This is outrageous. It reminds of the kinds of agitprop seminars that the American Friends Service Committee used to [still?] put on.

It ought to be stressed that Prof Ms Spangler indicates that she does not want her charges to use any books but the ones that she approves and specifiies. Hardly an academic, marketplace of ideas, freedom of thought approach.

"What would a healthy economy and a healthy state in Israel/Palestine look like?"

Leftist often start by pushing people into a dream world that is better than the present. After that "we" will have to change so that "we" don't block that wonderful dream. It is up to the "others" to do the same for "them". That is not "our" business.

Also it does not matter that dream world ideas do not obey real world rules - that they are doomed to fail. It does not even matter if that had already happened again and again.

It also seems to be irrelevant that the real world is not that bad.
Of cause not!

How could the real world ever compete with a socialist's dream?

There is no check on what professor's teach in the classroom ... rarely is a professor's course material even reviewed by another faculty member or the department. This is the strength and weakness of academic freedom.

Ultimately, it is the university that must be held responsible for the faculty it hires. If you don't like who BC is hiring, make sure that their next public waiver request is held to especially careful scrutiny ... and, of course, don't send your money there.

I assume that "narrative trumps facts" means that people on the ground often ignore the facts for a facile message that leaves out Important Information. I don't think Prof. Spangler condones this, but it's the way most people work. I think if she were a better writer of syllabi she would have been more clear.

I'm a student at BC and was rather annoyed to see an "Israeli Apartheid Week" on campus, organized by Prof. Spangler. But I was very much encouraged that other campus groups were putting up pro-Israel signs and handing out pamphlets stating the case for Israel. They've since gone on and organized another week's worth of event, which provides a much more balanced view of Israel - the Israeli ambassador to the UN visited campus yesterday.I believe Alan Dershowitz is visiting as well.

I am BC student and working with a number of very serious people on campus who are quite concerned about the indoctrinating character of this course and its impact on campus. We are working on addressing the situation WITHIN THE BC COMMUNITY. Please please do not contact the professor or try to tackle the situation yourself from outside the community. If you are a BC alum or have a specific connection to the community and would like to work with us, then by all means get in touch.

Sincerely
Rebecca

#9 Rebecca Clark

If you are a BC alum or have a specific connection to the community and would like to work with us, then by all means get in touch.

The universality of Justice, Human Rights etc are worth arguing for, which is the basis of the problem with AI recently (see the Hitchens piece linked above).

The problem with "dry, fact-based" Palestinian ideas about justice and injustice is that they leave out certain facts, for example the way Jewish people were and had been treated in the Middle East including during the Mandate Era and especially during the war after the declaration of partition/Israeli independence; but also during the Shoah.

And, justice and injustice are terms that do vary from age to age. As an example, the purchase of land by Zionist Jews was completely legal and is now viewed as an "injustice" and/or "imperialism," regardless of the fact that classical imperialism takes wealth out of a region or society and the Jews were putting it in. Also, they were nobody's colony - if their migration to Judea was unjust then so is every migration across any borders.

For example in the US and in Europe there are people who are outraged that Asians and Africans and Latin Americans are immigrating. They regard this as "injustice." On the other hand, if these immigrants remain in situ they might die.

So - where is the injustice and who is suffering from it? That's not so cut and dried is it?

This is a problem with narratives that look backward and seek to revise history according to the standards of today. In the first place - cut and dried isn't always so cut and dried, if you look at the big picture.

But in many cases, for example in American history, we can look backwards and regard slavery and the treatment of Native Americans with outrage due to present day sensibilities.

Similarly we can project utopian ideals onto the present day and try to move people toward less unjust or bigoted societies.

Over time, such ideals have ultimately led to the abolishment of slavery. But past a certain point, trying to "fix things" often leads to more reactionary politics and creates more victims that we already have - for example, punishing Israel or destroying Israel or forcing her people to flee would only harm several million people who had nothing to do with life in the 1920's, who weren't even born in 1948.

In any case at no time though was Zionist history anywhere near as cut and dried as, say, American history, even by today's standards.

Violence against Jews was common not only in Europe but in the Middle East. And their desperate situation was real, as were their ideals and their attempts to play by the rules.

Land was sold to them - not stolen; there was indeed Arab cooperation at the League of Nations otherwise the Balfour Declaration would never have come into being, and the UN did in fact vote on Israel's creation.

And, the Arabs did in fact attack. And, the attacks on Israel have not ceased, either in military assaults or in political and religious discourse.

Those are cut and dried facts too.

To Sophia:
Thanks for you comments; Of course it's difficult and risky to apply today's standards of justice to past situations. The violence that went into the founding of Israel might very well be "ethnic cleansing" by today's standards, but you are right to remark that the historical context needs to be taken into account. Historical relativism can be a slippery slope, but so can stiffly applied moral absolutes. First, perhaps the violence at the heart of the Zionist project is nothing more than the violence that is part and parcel of EVERY national movement when it is fighting for its survival. But then this would also apply to Palestinian violence, right? If we put into parentheses the obvious moral difference between fighting to defend one's homeland and fighting to obtain one, we might just see two nationalism fighting over the same piece of land through all the means at their disposal. So why then is only one side called "terrorist" and "the enemies of civilization" when they learned every one of their tactics from the other side (everything from bombing cafés and buses to highjacking civilian airliners - you name it, the Zionists did it first, the PLO took notes)? The usual answer is that "historical context" needs to be taken into context; but what is this historical context? Jewish suffering, Jewish statelessness, the special place of Eretz Yisrael in Jewish hearts, etc. But wait - that sounds like NARRATIVE! Like American liberals who justify criminal acts because of the race of the person who committed them ("but they suffered so much in the past!"), a special dispensation is made for Jews when they employ terrorist violence because the end, a secure state, is so overwhelmingly worthy given the exceptional nature of the Jewish experience (i.e.,narrative).

to "a reader" #15:
Anyone who justifies terrorist violence based on the "exceptional experience" - ie, the exceptionally compelling narrative - of a given ethnic group is, in my book, a "PoMo fascist"