California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War

2024/02/16 Leave a comment

Not surprisingly, as would any history program:

California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state’s public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won’t be able to graduate high school without it.

For policymakers, a goal is to give California students, 80 percent of whom are nonwhite, the opportunity to study a diverse array of cultures. Research has shown that ethnic studies classes can raise grades and attendance for teenagers at risk of dropping out.

But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the name “ethnic studies” might bring to mind a broad exploration of how ethnicity and race shape the human experience, the discipline, as taught in universities, is narrower — and more ideological.

Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise, and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.

In reworking ethnic studies for high school, California came up with a 700-page model curriculum that captures much of the discipline’s leftist, activist spirit. But it added the stories of other ethnic groups, including Jewish Americans, while eliminating discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It said lessons should include “multiple perspectives” on political issues.

The state’s model ethnic studies curriculum does not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but does include an optional sample lesson that emphasizes Jewish roots on the land that is now Israel.Credit…California Department of Education
The state’s model ethnic studies curriculum does not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but does include an optional sample lesson that emphasizes Jewish roots on the land that is now Israel.

Now some prominent ethnic studies scholars and educators say the state has bowed to political critics and censored their field. They are promoting a competing vision, which they call “liberated ethnic studies.” It is truer to how the subject is taught in colleges, but more politically fraught. It largely excludes the histories of ethnic groups, including Jews, who are typically understood as white within the discipline’s context. (Arab American studies is defined as fitting into Asian American studies.) And it offers lessons that are critical of Israel — and, some argue, antisemitic.

A number of California school districts are working with curriculum consultants who embrace liberated ethnic studies, while other districts are drawing upon these materials in creating their own classes.

The dueling approaches have prompted several lawsuits and sparked a heated debate: How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?

Resolutions to this question may shape education across the country. States including Oregon, Vermont and Minnesota plan to introduce K-12 ethnic studies in the coming years.

Source: California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War

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Israel and the International Community

2024/02/06 Leave a comment

A reminder to those who casually label Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide of what the court actually ruled:

A critical takeaway from all of this should be that the international community, no matter how much Israelis find it vexing, can serve as an important shield and corroborator for Israel. Leftist protestors were not slowed down one bit by Israel dismissing their overreaching claims of genocide, but those claims are now harder to sustain—even if they will continue apace anyway—in the wake of international law’s highest body declining to order Israel’s operations in Gaza to stop. It was easy to dismiss Israeli gripes about UNRWA as hasbara in the service of a battle against Palestinian refugeehood, but that no longer carries the same weight after UNRWA fired its own employees and many of its largest donors halted its funding. While it is absolutely true that hostility to Israel permeates the U.N. and many international institutions and NGOs always have Israel in their crosshairs, that same international community can vindicate Israel in ways that nobody else can.

On the other side, those who have been screaming about genocide and referencing international law and Israel’s allegedly manifest violations of it at every opportunity should have the decency to revisit their prebaked assertions. I don’t expect that most of the protestors who deploy the genocide charge as if they are noting a fact as straightforward as the sun rising in the east will be swayed by the ICJ or any other evidence that contradicts their convictions, but they should acknowledge that the rug has been pulled out from under them. Israel’s war conduct is not perfect, and there are likely plenty of violations of international law and much objectionable conduct that people can find. But that does not make it genocide, and based on the ICJ’s provisional orders, Israel’s war is both ungenocidal and a legitimate defensive response to Hamas’ illegitimate and indefensible actions. If you want to rely on international law to tar Israel, you need to respect that same international law when it tells you that you are wrong.

Source: Israel and the International Community

Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

John Ivison: University instructor fights back after being suspended for daring to denounce Hamas

2024/02/03 Leave a comment

Contrast:

….I wrote about Finlayson late last year. He has been teaching at Guelph-Humber for 13 years, has no disciplinary record and no history as a political activist.

In a social media post that he admits may have been a little too blistering, he said that an academic in Pakistan calling for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea” was a “pro-Nazi zealot.” Finlayson said he stands with Israel, against antisemitism and against Hamas, which he said takes millions meant for health and education and uses the money to make war. “You stand with Palestine means you stand with Hitler.”

Hitler references aside, it was all fairly standard stuff.

…[complainant] Surely this could not be Dr. Wael Ramadan, professor of project management at Sheridan College’s Pilon School of Business?

I’m told it is. I wrote about Ramadan a week or so after Finlayson. He had called Israel “an apartheid state committing genocide” but he was not suspended by Sheridan — in my opinion, quite rightly, since it is not the college’s place to protect the delicate ears of generation Z from opinions with which it may disagree.

…

Ramadan did not respond to requests for comment then or now, but I am told that the man whose right to free speech I defended is at the centre of the effort to shut down Finlayson’s right to the same, and get him fired in the process.

Academia is in a shocking state when the desire to root out anything that a complainant disagrees with, or considers “unsafe” is gratified by academic bureaucrats.

People far beyond Guelph-Humber are starting to take an interest in this case, aware of the chilling effect on academic speech it will have if it is not challenged.

The university has made a mistake. It should admit as much and reinstate Finlayson.

Source: John Ivison: University instructor fights back after being suspended for daring to denounce Hamas

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Rubin: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

Well worth reading:

…

Are Jews “indigenous” or settler colonialists in Palestine? They are both. The Jewish people originated in this land, and after two thousand years of exile, they developed an ideology and a political rather than purely religious movement of “return.” But their historical memory was not shared by the land’s inhabitants. The historical memory of the Jewish people did not create the right or capacity to confiscate or occupy a single dunam of land against the will of its possessors. The historical memory of one people, however tenacious, creates no right to rule over another.

Israeli Jews are settler colonialists with a historical memory of indigenous origin. This includes the Jews who fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries. They were indigenous to the region but not to Palestine, except in their own historical memory. That historical memory distinguishes Israel from other settler colonial states. So does the fact that the nation founded through settler colonialism has no “mother country” to which its members might return, as the French did from Algeria. Today’s settlers in the West Bank and the Golan Heights could indeed return—their “mother country” is Israel—but the same is not true of the citizens of Israel as a whole. They cannot return to the scenes of the Holocaust or to the Arab and Muslim states that expelled them. Great Britain, and then the United States, played the role of mother country by conquering the land, facilitating its settlement, and arming the settlers, but they have assumed no responsibility for the fate of Jewish refugees—whether from Hitler, from the persecution of Jews in Iraq in the early 1950s, or from a future conflagration in Palestine.

Instead, the Zionist movement and the Jewish state succeeded in building a new nation that is now indigenous to the land—though to what parts of the land, and with exactly what rights, is the core of the dispute over whether Israel is an apartheid settler state. The question “does Israel have the right to exist?” could have been meaningfully debated before the state existed, but now the only answer is, “Israel exists.” As a member of the United Nations, it has the right to continue to exist and to exercise the right to self-defense against other states. According to the UN charter, it also has the right to defend its territorial integrity, but implementation of that right requires defining the borders of the State of Israel. This depends on a peace settlement recognizing Palestinian national rights. Only such a settlement can establish Israel’s security as a state.

Genesis is not destiny. Documenting the historical fact that Israel came into existence in part through Zionism’s collaboration with colonialism does not mean that the only solution is a “decolonization” that would destroy the state and expel its inhabitants. What is objectionable about colonialism is not the immigration or settlement of a population of a different ethnic or national origin, or of people that are in some sense non-indigenous, but the domination of one group over another. It is impossible to rewind and rerun history. But it is possible, indeed necessary, to assure a future where Palestinians and Israelis have equal rights. Both peoples must be able to participate in choosing the government that rules them. Palestinians and Israelis must live either in two sovereign, equal states, or in one state as individuals with equal rights. The international consensus (excluding the government of Israel) in favor of the former—and the apparent impossibility of Israelis and Palestinians sharing a common sole polity—make the former the apparent choice….

Barnett R. Rubin is Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation. His books include Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror (2013) and Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict (2002). His writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

Source: False Messiahs, How Zionism’s dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism

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Conford: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

2024/01/08 Leave a comment

One of the best commentaries I have seen, thoughtful and balanced:

… For years, the right-wing in Israel – and Hamas in their way – have promulgated the notion that the peace process was an illusion, a mirage. But what events have shown is that the delusion, the Fata Morgana, was that there could ever be normality without finding a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the issue. Polls back in 1993 – before a cruel wave of Hamas suicide bombings and the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin undermined belief in the possibility – had support for a peace treaty among both Palestinians and Israelis running above 65 per cent.

Since then, the far right in Israel and Hamas have shared the same goal: to put a halt to any possibility of the peaceful division of the land into mutually recognized stable states of Israel and Palestine. Even in the past few weeks, Mr. Netanyahu has boasted how he has stopped a Palestinian state from coming into existence in the past and how he will also in the future, arguing that the Hamas attack shows why he is right to do so.

It is exactly this thinking which has brought us to where we are now.

The sole way to escape the cycle of violence is to clearheadedly renounce all the maximalist and eliminationist fantasies and the dehumanizing caricatures that have led, and will continue to lead, to the horrifying shedding of the blood of thousands of men, women and children….

M.G. Conford is the writer and director of the documentaries Through The Eyes Of Enemies, Not On Any Map, and Fragments of Jerusalem. He is an associate professor of film at Toronto Metropolitan University

Source: Israelis and Palestinians are both trapped by the dangerous fantasies of history

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Globe editorial: When protests become acts of intimidation

2024/01/06 Leave a comment

Well said:

This cannot stand. Supporters of the Palestinian people have every right to express their views and to protest actions by Israel, but they have no right to intimidate and to threaten people on the street, on campuses, in theatres or in neighbourhoods. To tolerate such misbehaviour is to encourage much worse actions that inevitably follow. Enough.

Source: When protests become acts of intimidation

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Phillips: How Muslim voters are exerting their growing political influence

2023/12/16 Leave a comment

Another number: Canadian Jews from more than 5 percent of the population in 13 ridings compared to Canadian Muslims forming more that 5 percent in 114 ridings:

But the Trudeau government surely didn’t need much encouragement to move in that direction, and it didn’t necessarily have to do with geopolitical calculations. You only have to look at changing demographics in this country and their far-reaching political implications.

This can be touchy territory, so let’s specify a couple of things upfront.

There’s nothing wrong with any community, including Muslims, organizing to maximize their political impact. That’s as Canadian as butter tarts. Virtually every group has done it — from the English and Irish to francophone Quebecers, Ukrainians, Italians, Sikhs, you name it.

And ethnic voting doesn’t explain everything about this or any issue. You don’t have to be Muslim to be appalled at the death toll in Gaza, no more than you have to be Jewish to be sickened by the massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.

But in this case, there’s no ignoring the increase in Muslim voters. A few numbers: the 2001 census showed there were 579,000 Muslims in this country (or 1.95 per cent of the population). The most recent census, in 2021, put that number at 1.77 million (4.9 per cent).

That’s a dramatic rise. By contrast, Muslims are only an estimated 1.1 per cent of the U.S. population, meaning their relative demographic weight in Canada is almost five times as large.

Another relevant comparison: in 2001, Canada’s Jewish population was put at 330,000. The 2021 census measured it at 335,000 — virtually the same. So while the country’s Jewish population flatlined, its Muslim population tripled….

But no party can ignore the new reality. Demographics, they say, are destiny. And right now they’re showing Muslim voters must be taken seriously.

Andrew Phillips is a Toronto-based staff columnist for the Star’s Opinion page. Reach him via email: aphillips@thestar.ca

Source: How Muslim voters are exerting their growing political influence

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Regg Cohn: Who says we need to choose between Palestinians and Israelis?

2023/12/14 1 Comment

Good and needed commentary. Binary over simplifies. Hopefully Gondek can treat this as a learning moment:

…

Put simply, to be anti-Zionist today is to be anti-Israel. To be anti-Israel is to show antipathy to all those Jews who believe Israel is a sanctuary and ought not to be a cemetery for Jews.

As to the larger question of whether or not an anti-Zionist is antisemitic, rest assured it is problematic for most Jews. Slogans matter, just as words matter, countries matter, people matter.

Appearances matter, and so do no-shows. It is telling that Her Worship the mayor of Calgary worships at the altar of indifference to Israel, but another current slogan comes to mind:

Happy Hanukkah

Source: Who says we need to choose between Palestinians and Israelis?

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Globe editorial: Who we are, and must be, as Canadians

2023/11/15 Leave a comment

Same principles, of course, apply to any form of racism, discrimination and hate:

…Solidarity can take many forms. Tearing down posters of those held hostage by Hamas is a hateful act; do not let that happen unopposed. Go out of your way to solicit businesses that have been targeted for being Jewish-owned. Most of all, reach out to your fellow citizens to let them know that they are not alone.

That is who we want to be, who we must be, as Canadians…

source: Who we are, and must be, as Canadians

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John Ivison: Ottawa’s new ‘pragmatic diplomacy’ policy misfires at the UN

2023/11/15 Leave a comment

Embarrassing that the government couldn’t vote in favour of UN resolution condemning the Israeli settlements in the West Bank as obstacles to peace as they clearly are with their ongoing expansion. Good critique by Ivison:

If “pragmatic diplomacy” is a real, breathing strategy, then the vote to censure illegal settlements in the West Bank would have been a pragmatic and diplomatic start.

Source: John Ivison: Ottawa’s new ‘pragmatic diplomacy’ policy misfires at the UN

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