WHAT IF WE GAVE MANSOUR ABBAS A CHANCE?

On Monday, at Hebrew University, I attended a talk by Dr. Mansour Abbas, the Arab Knesset member who – remarkably – sits in the Zionist government and Knesset while heading the Islamist party RAM. The discussion was smartly moderated by Channel 12 journalist Rina Matzliach and sponsored by the dovish-leaning Truman Institute headed by Prof. Vered Vinisky-Seroussi. Matzliach, who on TV sometimes comes over as a prima donna did not make the event about herself.

Mansour Abbas’s argument, in a nutshell, is that the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and the Zionist enterprise is intractable. We need to live with that and find workarounds to make day-to-day life better for every citizen.

Abbas mentioned the influence the late Rabbi Menachem Froman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menachem_Froman had on him. Rabbi Froman was among the first in the settler movement to articulate the need for coexistence rooted in religious grounds and to reach out to Muslim religious leaders to convince them to embrace the idea of tolerance and coexistence. Now, Abbas works together with the principled and admired Rabbi Michael Melchior https://www.rabbimichaelmelchior.org/welcome a strictly Orthodox Jerusalem rabbi of dovish leanings.

Abbas is an HU alum and expressed his gratitude to the university not only for the opportunity to learn dentistry but for doing so in a Hebrew-speaking environment. He said mastering Hebrew was an essential tool in his campaign to improve conditions for Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens.

To the crux of the matter. I don’t think the message of coexistence and tolerance is much promulgated by Arab leaders to an Arab audience in Arabic. I am unaware of any coexistence group that is not funded by foreigners. So when a home-grown Arab leader who has street creds comes to promulgate coexistence and tolerance I put my cynicism on hold.

There has never been a reformation in Islam. There are no reform mosques. Muslim civilization does not find it easy to play second fiddle to any other civilization. Hence the partition of India, for example. Palestinian Arab society is socially conservative. Arab leaders tend not to come from the world of the humanities and liberal arts. Indeed, Abbas is, as noted, a dentist. His political nemesis is the crafty, charismatic, and uncompromising gynecologist and Knesset Member Ahmed Tibi.

Parenthetically, beyond the Green Line, Hamas was co-founded by the now-departed pediatrician Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. One of its current leaders, Khaled Mashal, studied physics. Granted, Yehiya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh were educated more as Arabists, but I doubt in any liberal arts sense.

The Arab educational emphasis is practical. Naturally, there are social workers and teachers. However, pedagogically, the best and the brightest students tend to gravitate to the hard sciences. These are useful professions but don’t offer much space to inculcate the message of tolerance. The Palestinian Arabs we Israelis generally encounter are on the one hand pharmacists, doctors, nurses, and on the other construction workers, and unskilled laborers.

Something tells me most imams are not preaching acceptance of the other from the minbar.

Thus, having Mansour Abbas preach tolerance – not of the vacuous Kumbaya “why-can’t-we-all-get-along" sort – but a pragmatic self-interested broadmindedness legitimized by his authoritative reading of the Koran is hugely valuable.

“I don’t speak in coexistence jargon,” he granted – but I live coexistence, he implied. 

As for the Islamic Sharia Council that his party supposedly answers to – he said it is elected and that there are term limits. This gives his stance for coexistence unique legitimacy. He characterized the Sharia Council of his Islamist stream as a democratic model for religious politics.

His coexistence impulse came early. Abbas told his HU audience that he grew up in a mixed Arab town with Druze and Christians. This was where he learned real-world broadmindedness — which presumably predisposed him to embrace Froman’s line.

He also reminded us that the Arabs in this Land are deeply fragmented – maybe even more than the Jews. Nonetheless, RAM’s decision to join the Israeli government has substantial popular support.

So, Mansour Abbas’s line is: I have my views, but I am prepared to accept that you don’t share them. And religion just might be a bridge for everyday coexistence where secularism has failed.

He acknowledges that Israelis distrust and suspect him of ulterior motives. Abbas said we all have multiple, maybe even contradictory, identities. He explained that he expresses his loyalty to Israel simply by participating in the system and swearing allegiance to the Knesset and state.

To my mind, this is a big deal. Consider that here in Jerusalem most Palestinian Arabs, 40 percent of the population at least, refuse to vote in municipal elections. So they do not have any representation on the city council. They reject the existence of Israel and its control over the city. In the past municipal election, one Arab slate bucked this trend to compete but Jerusalem Arabs obstinately did not go to the polls.

So I am pleased to take allegiance where I can get it.

Mansour Abbas is also a sociological ambassador – both ways. He instructs Arabs who want to figure out Jewish politics to factor in Jewish existential fears. Unlike PLO and Hamas leaders, Abbas is no Holocaust denier.

Most importantly, his recurrent theme is there is no point in emphasizing our very real – I would add zero-sum – differences since doing so leads to a dead end. His constituents want real services and tangible results. That requires engaging in politics, which necessarily involves compromise.

Speaking of tolerance, as deputy Knesset speaker, Abbas says he has been shocked by the lack of civility – especially between Jewish members. Anyone who watches Channel 99 (Israel’s C-SPAN) knows precisely what he means. 

On a personal level, Abbas is dismayed at being denounced by ultra-right Jews as a Hamasnik and by the anti-Zionist firebrands such as Ayman Odeh (a supposed progressive) and the aforementioned Ahmad Tibi (a nationalist) as a collaborator.

He says we are all changing and evolving.

He even wants Jewish votes if he can get them. The audience at HU was mostly Jewish even though there are loads of Arab students on campus.

I can’t help but think of Abbas in the context of Palestinian Arab history. In the 1930s and 1940s, some Arab clans and leaders grudgingly accepted the Zionist enterprise as an unhappy fait accompli. They thought it best for their people to cooperate, to be practical. They were all silenced or murdered. So when people ask where the Arab moderates are, the answer is – in the cemeteries. See https://www.amazon.com/Army-Shadows-Hillel-Cohen/dp/0520259890   

Abbas’s line also recalled somewhat of the West Bank Village Leagues leaders Menachem Begin sought to cultivate https://www.memri.org/reports/story-palestinian-village-leagues  They might have delivered autonomy to West Bank Arabs had the PLO not bullied them out of existence.

So in a sense, Abbas may just be the inheritor of a Palestinian Arab stream of realpolitik presumed extinct. He is not abandoning any aspect of his identity or political, religious, or cultural beliefs and demands but is open to compartmentalizing them, willing to be nuanced. Ready to find workarounds.

He told us what we already knew: that Netanyahu begged him to throw his support to him and Likud and he would have wanted to, but the ultra-right blocked Netanyahu, and moreover Abu Yair lost all credibility – so Abbas took his chances with Naftali Bennett.

On a human level, Abbas presents as respectful and warm exhibiting a winning self-deprecating humor.

May Allah continue to guide him on the path of coexistence and tolerance and keep him safe.

 

 FOR MORE ON ABBAS see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansour_Abbas

 

 

 

 

Bye-Bye New York Times

I did it. I just canceled my subscription to The New York Times.

I have been a reader of the NYT since high school. Yes, I was aware of the paper’s hostility toward Zionism and its non-coverage of the Holocaust.

And over the years, no matter my distaste for some of its Israel coverage and the tendentious columns by Tom Friedman, Roger Cohen, and Anthony Lewis, I did not want to stop getting the paper.

Overall the scope and breadth, and elegance of its coverage were unsurpassed. Moreover, I wanted to expose myself to views that made me question my positions.

However, in recent years the Times has deteriorated as a serious newspaper/outlet.

I can cope with grossly slanted coverage.

I can even cope with the condescending and relentless “how-to” pieces … of the how-to peel a banana or wipe your ass variety.  

But when the newspaper/outlet presents principally as a viewspaper, when editors dictate that woke rule virtually every facet of coverage from books to soft features – it is time to stop being a chump subscriber.  

At some stage, The Times embarked on a didactic endeavor to program, North Korean-style, a generation of readers to imbibe the propaganda of intolerance and the myopia of woke. Newer readers probably don’t even know they are being manipulated. Veteran readers may be too sluggish to make a move.

But not this old geezer. Bye-bye, New York Times. 

To the American Political Science Association

The American Political Science Association is now holding its 117th Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington even as woke values continue to permeate not just popular culture and the media but also academia. 

My own field of political science seems to have fallen prey to the woke canon. I am not suggesting that political science is unique. Many university departments in sociology and anthropology, not to mention Middle East Studies, in Israel, the UK, the US, and elsewhere, have been hijacked by anti-Zionist campaigners. Many US campuses have become hostile environments to visibly Jewish and pro-Zionist students.

More and more lecturers seem to be using the classroom to push their opinions and assign readings to promote only one point of view—theirs. When I went to university in the 1970s and 1980s, though most professors were liberal-leaning, dissent and dialogue were tolerated, sometimes even welcomed, and required readings were often balanced.

As old school liberal baby boomers retire from academia, dogmatic wokers fill their places. Yesteryear’s liberal partiality has become today’s rigid progressive convention. As a result, the social sciences and humanities in the US, and Israel too, are often bastions of unabashedly one-sided curricula. Witch-hunts often instigated by woke students against those traduced as racists or gender offenders, are common occurrences on campus.

Academic literature more and more mirrors woke convention. The May 2021 edition of Political Science Today, a magazine of the American Political Science Association, reflected the editors’ obeisance to woke values. Obfuscation is a core element in woke-speak. Nonetheless, I was able to decipher the editors’ intention by scrutinizing this magazine. A theme that comes through is their concern that there are still too many white male political scientists about (40 percent). The editors inventoried all APSA journal authors by “Gender Self-Identification,” Again, white men dominated while non-binary persons were way down in the rankings.

An article about the often chauvinistic Black Lives Matter movement is uncritical except to question whether it fully articulates the interests of “Black LGBTQIA+ individuals.” There is no mention of antisemitism or anti-Zionism.  

Another article bemoans the small numbers of “underrepresented students” in mathematically-oriented political science subfields. Turn the page, and a headline shouts: “Does Your Online Course Perpetuate Institutional Discrimination?”

A piece on “Strategies for Teaching the Insurrection and Impeachment” urges instructors to name “the insurrection for what it was.” I make no secret of my disdain for Donald Trump, nor do I play down the danger posed by the assault on the Capitol. Yet, a political science classroom is not a New York Times op-ed. Teachers should use less loaded terminology and make their lecture halls a safe space even for Trump-supporting students.

The May 2021 edition of Political Science Today also had brief agitprop about anti-Asian violence asserting these crimes were inspired by America’s white colonialist past. Boloney.

In New York City, almost all attacks in the first three months of 2021 against Chinese people were carried out by Blacks or Hispanics. Nationwide, between 1992-2014, hate crimes against Asian Americans were more likely to be committed by Blacks and Hispanics, not whites.

Further along in the magazine, a multi-page spread gives readers biographical sketches of “diversity fellows,” all of whom would appear to be students of color. Diversity? Finally, and I fear indicative of the discipline’s future, skimming the list of 2020 doctoral dissertations, I found only one by a Jewish American scholar on an Israel-related topic, and it was devoted to “settler violence.” An entire generation of students has now grown up oblivious to the fundamental issues of the Palestinian-Israel conflict. All they can do is repeat the “occupation” mantra unthinkingly. What a shame.

 It is even painful to watch parodies of campus woke because they are so…real.

Poli Sci should neither be boringly abstract nor hostage to pop-political-trends. Your students need to know current events -- beyond what they come away with by scrolling through their social media feeds. Courageous teachers of politics need to inculcate tolerance and Madisonian -- not woke -- values. 

#APSA2021

To read more see:

 https://www.voanews.com/usa/anti-asian-hate-crime-crosses-racial-and-ethnic-lines

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7790522/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-teachers-dont-understand-the-classics-11609690239 

https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/bds_on_american_campuses_sjp_and_its_ngo_network/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chair_(2021_TV_series)