Global Journal of Human Social Science, G: Linguistics and Education, Volume 21 Issue 14

The first section focuses on terms–indigeneity, colonialism, occupation, terrorism, and apartheid – that claim to disclose new aspects of the Conflict’s history and of the mechanisms deployed to perpetuate it. It is worthwhile to note that utilising these terms as historical paradigms has generated no new data or information that could be the basis for a new or deeper understanding of the Conflict. Rather they have seized attention because they propel a supposed link between Israel and Zionism and an imperialism enlightened scholars are expected to condemn instantly converting a vocabulary of historical explanation into a crude moral idiom. The Special Issue’s second section focuses on terms coopted from the modern Jewish experience – holocaust, refugee, human rights, Zionism, and Israel Lobby – to show how they have been projected on to the experience of Palestinians in order to transfer the imaginative narrative of one beleaguered people to another. Finally, the volume evaluates concepts that are decidedly post-modern inventions – Islamophobia, intersectionality, pink washing. These trendy terms aim to rally allies around a new logic of ethical reasoning and political action. The last essay in the volume addresses the contorted reasoning required to apply the pivotal concept ‘civil society’–taken for granted as expanding democracies in the late twentieth century–to NGOs whose actions are not simply funded but also programmed by foreign governments and whose ties to movements thriving on acts of terror are well-known and well-documented. Such linkages are more likely to deny than preserve the autonomy believed central to civil society and to democracy diminishing not expanding a spirit of active political engagement among Palestinians. This academic jargon now so fully draped in scholarly prestige implies that Israel’s founding in 1948 is not settled history. The intention is not simply to raise ethical questions but also to suggest the possibility of righting what is taken for granted as an historical wrong. Those who subscribe to this approach are not talking about historical facts that continue to weigh heavily on present circumstances which is to say the persistence of Israel’s unresolved conflicts with Palestinians, problems that affect the Jewish state’s politics and complicate the operations of its democracy. The implication that shadows this discourse is that history can be reversed registering a kind of magical thinking more fit for novels than for classrooms. More than 70 years since its founding and more than a half century since the war that reconfigured the Jewish state and not incidentally, the entire Middle East, raising the same questions posed during the first decades of the twentieth century opens a chasm between language and reality. Driving this change, as all others on and off campuses, is the emergence of a new media landscape that has offered scholars new forms of expression. Blogging and tweeting are increasingly important–signs of savvy entrepreneurship bringing publicity most colleges and universities welcome. But they can blur the lines between free speech and the kind of speech possessing academic integrity that expresses the findings of careful research, logical and rational probing, and is made available for rigorous testing. Once there was a clear differentiation between polemics and scholarship; now the two have been fused sometimes by jargon laden theories inaccessible to anyone without years of graduate study. All of this fosters a social pressure that aims to close discussion, not open it, but above all, creates the impression that only a campus generated Intifada against the idea of a Jewish state can bring justice to Palestine and define progressive politics in the twenty-first century. The challenges posed by students and faculty who embrace these notions are considerable, but they constitute a more immediate threat to the academy than to Israel. Faculty need to be reminded that their mission is to teach students how to think not what to think. And students must be given the tools required for confronting ideas they do not like or that make them uncomfortable, always holding them tightly to the principle of engaging respectfully with those with whom they disagree. That surely means more time should be spent in the library than in sessions organising protests. Far better to read about the Dark Ages than to recreate them on campus. Word Crimes offers potent insight into the difference between how language operates as an echo chamber advocating a mission and how it functions when it strives for exactitude and for a reliable assessment of a complex situation. In a sense, Word Crimes functions as a figurative exorcism breaking the spell of a discourse by exposing its scholarly weaknesses. Its essays are motivated by nothing more than the conviction that conclusions must be supported by facts and tested in accordance with the principles long undergirding the academy and the ones primarily responsible for bestowing legitimate praise and power on it. To repeat: this collection is as important for the academy as it is for the study of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict. II. T he U proar The all-too common habit of letting emotions shape campus discourse on this topic produced reactions to Word Crimes far in excess of what is warranted by any measurable intellectual standard. Why scholars whose hold on the academic study of Israel is taken for granted and whose research was praised in the volume allowed their feelings to bury their logic is worth considering since their own careful work has been diminished by a vocabulary now serving a cause rather than the historical record. Let me elaborate. Consider how the provocative discussions of settler colonialism generated by Gershon Shafir’s 1989 Land, Labour, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882– © 2021 Global Journals Volume XXI Issue XIV Version I 38 ( G ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2021 The Gatekeepers