amateur ramblings

As the House of Representatives passed its delusional resolution condemning the Goldstone Report last week, Congressman Kucinich forcefully objected: “Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist. Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking….“

Today marks the one year anniversary of November 13 2008. On this evening one year ago, a group of three Palestinian students holding flags in silent protest were violently confronted by a group of three concert organizers for the right-wing anti-Arab organization, Tikvah Students for Israel. Unsurprisingly, the assailants quickly tried to discredit their victims by reporting the story backwards, claiming they were the victims. Conflicting narratives do not a dispute of fact make, however, and while many were inclined to put faith in one group or another, it takes nothing less than a deliberate suspension of reason to refuse to acknowledge the bruises that appeared the next morning.

Rather than focus on the attack and the attackers, I wish to extend Congressman Kucinich’s claim to this situation: that almost as serious as committing a hate crime is covering it up and denying it had ever happened. In this latter task the attackers have many friends to thank, including the Daily Californian, the Student Action party of the student government, and UC Berkeley administrators on all levels, from the Office of Student Life to the Office of the Chancellor.

All public shaming aside, the burden remains to understand why the discussion shifted from one about the issues (the attack, the victims, the events) to one about the sides (various different perceived groups perceived to be in conflict with one another). In this vein I want to look at the lack of institutional support for the victims, the coverage of the incidents by the Daily Californian, and the way that campus Jewish institutions shifted their discourse after the attacks. All three tend to disclose a disturbing pattern about the way Palestinian issues are commonly approached, a pattern all the more disturbing given the ultimately weak institutional response to a campus hate crime.

Lack of institutional support

Immediately after the attacks transpired, University officials failed to offer any support to the victims or to hold the attackers accountable. Worse, they were unable to report on the event accurately. On November 17th, four days later, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and Vice Chancellor Gibor Basri issued a joint letter to the campus community, claiming that “a dispute between students with differing views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict led to a physical altercation.”  In news articles covering the attacks, other UC administrators made comments shamelessly reflecting their ideological approach to the incident. Police Chief Mitch Celaya, who at the time was Assistant Chief, said that “clearly these two groups have some conflict.” An incident involving six distinct individuals was thus abstracted as a vague “conflict” between “two groups.” UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande also explained that the incident was a case of “ideological and ethnic conflict,” the Daily Californian curiously reporting that Le Grande “said he believed national issues, including what he called the media’s racial negativity in the presidential race and the economic crisis, aggravated tensions.”

While it is true that the students involved had differing views and were of different backgrounds, this characterization actually distorts the dramatically racist and violent context of the attacks. Were a queer student attacked for holding a “No on 8″ sign, it would not have made sense for the campus to say that “a dispute between students with differing views on same sex marriage led to a physical altercation.” While in any other context it would have been easy to identify the hateful motivations of the attackers, in this one the administration did its best to vaguely condemn violence without identifying any motives. Administrators spoke of the attack as if it were the natural outcome of a difference of opinion. They were unable to speak of the victims as identifiable students, but rather only as members of two amorphous groups involved in an abstract conflict. No attacker, no victim, no issues of fact. It was as if we could learn all we needed to know based only on the backgrounds of the students.

That is how the University takes a hands-off approach to an issue it clearly wants nothing to do with–injured students notwithstanding. Though the University claimed it was “taking vigorous steps to address the current situation,” neither the University nor the District Attorney ever conducted credible proceedings to hold anyone accountable. Instead they opted to punt the issue, opting not to pursue disciplinary action against the only person in the attacking group that was actually a student, even though the UC Police Department’s investigation recommended hate crime charges for assault and battery.

The Daily Californian’s Treatment of Palestinians

Given the apparent inability and unwillingness of any University officials to seek justice, a group of Berkeley Law students initiated a recall campaign against a student senator who accompanied the attacking group. Amassing 1,000 signatures in less than two days, the petition triggered a recall election that was finally conducted months later, ejecting the senator with a 72% affirmative vote.  Despite its enormous success, the campaign and the victims were met with no shortage of obstacles. The campus paper, the Daily Cal, took editorial positions in strong opposition on at least 4 different occasions. Furthermore, the events and the victims were repeatedly characterized in unflattering and offensive ways.

Though the recall petition explained its basis clearly, the Daily Cal’s Senior Editorial Board quickly adopted the position that the campaign was “unfounded,” “unspecific,” and “politically motivated.” It would have been one thing for the Daily Cal to say that it disagreed with the recall, but it was entirely another for it to strike the position that no reasonable set of claims existed that supported the recall. Neither a police report nor medically documented injuries were enough to convince the editors, who immediately dismissed and distrusted anything any proponent of the recall ever said. Having concluded–based on no investigation whatsoever–that the claims were “unfounded,” the Daily Cal then accused the victims and other recall supporters of being “politically motivated.” The claim was apparently based solely on the fact that the victims were Palestinian. Reflecting a highly problematic attitude towards Palestinians, the Daily Cal never offered an explanation for this interpretation.

To jump from the victims’ identity to the conclusion of political motivation relies on the circular claim that if a Palestinian accuses any Israel or Jewish person of a wrong, that the accusation is inherently illegitimate because it must have ulterior motives. It assumes racism and bad faith on the part of Palestinians and eternal innocence and immunity for Israelis and Jews. Rather than address the merits of the victims’ accusations, or the documented evidence of their injuries, the editors saw only that the were Palestinian. The logical fallacy that explains the Daily Cal’s mistake is the use of the victims’ ethnic and national background to evaluate their motivations; the lay term is racism. In fact, Jewish and Palestinian students are equally trapped by the Daily Cal’s coverage of these issues, as it stifles their ability to say anything except on the authority of their identities.

That racist framework undermines the possibility of having a reasonable discussion based on facts about the world. Instead, the Israeli-Palestinian issue more generally is covered and understood as purely relativistic, with multiple perspectives but no facts and no right or wrong. In recent coverage of Palestine-related events, stories tended to follow a script: a Palestine solidarity activist would say something, followed by a pro-Israel student, and finally, a random uninvolved bystander who is unaware of the issues would say something to the effect of, “they just need to learn to get along with each other.” Under this analysis, the debate about Israel has few factual matters that can be resolved, and calls for no clear moral judgments against oppression. Rather, it is a discussion in which only partisans speak, suggesting that everyone else simply remain neutral. The neutrality suggested, though, is not one that recommends approaching the situation objectively and empirically to determine factual matters (a mission the journalists writing these articles really should be charged with), but rather one that refuses to penetrate the issue or to treat it as anything more than a difference of opinion. A discussion about sides, not issues. Daily Californian stories on March 5 2009, January 22 2009, and November 17 2008 are a few examples that follow this script.

Campus Jewish Institutions Change Tune on Hate Crime

Despite the inaction of the University administration and the ineptness of the Daily Californian, there was a brief moment when campus Jewish institutions recognized the wrongs of Tikvah and the attacking students, even before the November 13th hate crime. The Jewish Student Union placed the group Tikvah on probation following an October 15th 2008 incident where two of the same individuals later implicated in the hate crimes disrupted a lecture and yelled slurs at Professors John Dugard and Norman Finkelstein. Later the group ended its affiliation completely. Anonymous Hillel staff members quoted in the same article said that one of the activists had “instigated” the incident, describing him as “confrontational and an agitator.” Following the attacks on November 13, another Hillel member said, “We condemn all acts of violence and violations of university policy. These stories brought about by the action of two or three students represent a very small minority of Jewish students on campus.” Leaders of the pro-Israel student group the Israel Action Committee also published an op-ed calling one of the attackers’ statements to the press “radical and blatantly racist,” and condemned Tikvah members for “repeated harassment and provocation of” students in Students for Justice in Palestine.

Despite these organizations’ early attempts to distance themselves from the attackers and Tikvah, in a shocking about-face, months later they actively took strong positions in opposition to the recall election. Berkeley Hillel sent an e-mail to students calling the student senator “an active member of the UC Berkeley Jewish community and a valued voice in our Berkeley family,” urging students to vote no because “the active pursuit of justice is a central Jewish value.” The Jewish Student Union passed a resolution similarly urging students to vote no, falsely claiming “there is no evidence to either support or to refute” the accusation of criminal wrongdoing, notwithstanding witness statements, medical documentation of injuries, or the police investigation’s conclusions. The Israel Action Committee sent an e-mail to its members calling the recall a “baseless and pathetic attempt by anti-Israel groups to silence the strongest pro-Israel senator. Protect our voice in the senate.”

The same groups that, in the wake of the November 13th had rushed to distance themselves and condemn the attackers, their racism, and their violence, slowly began to embrace them, calling the senator “our voice” or a “valued voice,” despite serious allegations surrounding his involvement in a hate crime. As the violence of the attacks was slowly forgotten, the strategic importance of having an unabashedly anti-Palestinian senator in the Senate outweighed the importance of justice. Cynical considerations and myopic views on campus issues shamefully backgrounded the hate crime while foregrounding other community issues.

Sides But No Issues: Deprivation of Fair Treatment

That the University ignored injured students and racism on campus should shock the conscience. That the campus paper consistently judged Palestinian students and their claims on the basis of their background, and that campus Jewish institutions slowly abandoned their condemnation of hate crimes, should merit scrutiny and arouse wonder. If this admittedly incomplete overview of the aftermath of UC Berkeley’s November 13th hate crimes should make anything clear, it is that almost everything imaginable–from campus rivalries to organizational face-saving to bureaucratic maneuvering–played a role in the discourse and activity following the attacks, except what actually happened on November 13th.

It would seem that, in trying to learn the truth of the event, the opposite would be true: we would want to focus on its specifics and on the people involved rather than generalities. But it is this curious black hole into which Palestinians tend to disappear in many discussions regarding Israel. The illogic of the matter is not merely problematic. It is dangerous and, as Congressman Kucinich argued about the House’s response to Goldstone, it is almost worse than the attacks themselves. The unsound frame creates, and in Berkeley’s case perhaps created, the conditions necessary to whitewash the crimes. Actual racism, violence, and hate slowly became less important than a litany of unrelated issues and other considerations.

The ensuing recall campaign at Cal was ultimately successful, but doubt about what transpired and ambivalence about who to blame continue to characterize the University’s line as well as that taken by the Daily Cal and others at Berkeley. In both cases, tragically insufficient responses have had little to do with what actually happened (indeed, there has been little interest in what actually happened) and more to do with inventing, identifying, and taking “sides.” When everything but truth plays a role, it remains to be seen what opportunities, if any, Palestinians are left with to remedy the injustices to which they have been subjected in these stilted, surreal, and often infuriating circumstances.