{"id":21428,"date":"2023-12-15T04:51:33","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T10:51:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=21428"},"modified":"2023-12-15T04:51:37","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T10:51:37","slug":"what-a-congressional-hearing-got-wrong-calls-for-intifada-are-not-calls-for-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=21428","title":{"rendered":"What a congressional hearing got wrong: Calls for intifada are not calls for genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last week, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT put on a masterclass in bungling congressional testimony. Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik\u2002<\/u><\/a>(R-N.Y.) whether \u201ccalling for the genocide of Jews\u201d constitutes bullying or harassment, PENN President Liz Magill answered, in part, that this would be \u201ccontext-dependent<\/u><\/a>.\u201d Harvard\u2019s Claudine Gay said the same. MIT\u2019s Sally Kornbluth was clearer, only slightly, when she said such calls would be \u201cinvestigated as harassment if pervasive and severe.\u201d Magill lost her job<\/u><\/a> on Saturday. Gay and Kornbluth are weathering the storm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most commentary surrounding the drama has been about how easy the right answer should have been. In his own resignation announcement<\/u><\/a>, PENN Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok said of Magill what was surely true for all three presidents. \u201cOver prepared and over lawyered given the hostile forum and high stakes, she provided a legalistic answer to a moral question\u2026\u201d This doesn\u2019t mean the presidents\u2019 answers were defensible. But if the question were, \u201cDo you and your institutions condemn antisemitism and calls for the genocide of Jews?\u201d all three would have answered, \u201cYes.\u201d They effectively already had in earlier testimony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the question was clear, and the answers were terrible. But there\u2019s something else about the question that\u2019s eluded commentary. What motivated it? Have there been calls for genocide on university campuses in the United States?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short answer is no. At the center of discussions about Jewish genocide in recent weeks is the word intifada. As Stefanik put it at the hearing<\/u><\/a>, \u201cThis call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally.\u201d If that were true, the word\u2019s use in any context would be alarming, and the congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses would have taken on even greater importance. But intifada does not mean genocide. Arabic has its own term for that, ibadah jama\u2019iyah, which hasn\u2019t appeared in protests. Instead, it\u2019s used to describe historical events like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intifada\u2002means \u201cshaking off.\u201d<\/u><\/a> Though the term occasionally referred to situations in places like Iraq and Western Sahara during the 20th century, it is most associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What Palestinians have sought to \u201cshake off\u201d for generations, both nonviolently and violently, is Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories. In this context, \u201cuprising\u201d is also an appropriate translation. \u201cGenocide\u201d is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first intifada, which began in 1987, was initially marked by civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and graffiti. Protests grew violent and came to include the throwing of stones, Molotov cocktails and stabbings. By the end of the first intifada in 1993, nearly 200 Israelis and more than a thousand Palestinians had been killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second intifada, which lasted from 2000 until 2005, was far more violent than the first. Airstrikes and shelling by Israeli forces met rocket attacks and suicide bombings by Palestinians. More than 1,000 Israelis and between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians were killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no denying that intifada carries a violent connotation, and we should assume those using the word on university campuses understand this. But these are not calls for genocide. They are calls for resistance, including armed resistance, to decades-old Israeli military occupation widely considered illegal under international law. Whether those calls are legitimate is a valid question. Whether they amount to calls for genocide is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a sense, Liz Magill\u2019s resignation is a tragedy. In her testimony, she said she was appalled by antisemitism<\/u><\/a> and that PENN was taking action against it on campus.  Asked whether she supported Israel\u2019s right to exist, she answered \u201cyes\u201d unequivocally. In trying to also honor free speech, she and her colleagues made the mistake of being too careful in response to an easy question. And for that they\u2019ve been tarred. One wonders if knowing the meaning of intifada, and thus having a better understanding of what calls on university campuses actually meant, would have made a difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thehill<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT put on a masterclass in bungling congressional testimony. Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik\u2002(R-N.Y.) whether \u201ccalling for the genocide of Jews\u201d constitutes bullying or harassment, PENN President Liz Magill answered, in part, that this would be \u201ccontext-dependent.\u201d Harvard\u2019s Claudine Gay said the same. MIT\u2019s Sally Kornbluth was clearer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":21429,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7925,1232,5045,2419,1172,25015],"class_list":["post-21428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-appeals","tag-congress","tag-genocide","tag-jews","tag-legislators","tag-uprisings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21428"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21430,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21428\/revisions\/21430"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}