Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Columbia, Trump, and the Palestine Exception w/ Rashid Khalidi | American Prestige

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Columbia, Trump, and the Palestine Exception w/ Rashid Khalidi | American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

0:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello American Priesties listeners, it's Derek.
0:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm joined as always by my friend and com Red Danny Bester.
0:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And we are very, very pleased to welcome back to the program.
0:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Rashid Hality is the Edward Sight Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and author of the best selling the hundred years war on Palestine.
0:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You may have heard him on the show previously.
0:44
[SPEAKER_02]: We did a series with him talking about that book.
0:47
[SPEAKER_02]: If you haven't listened to those episodes, please check those out.
0:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Professor Hality, thank you so much for coming back to the show.
0:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a pleasure to be back.
0:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So we wanted to talk to you primarily about what's been going on in terms of these quote-unquote settlements that your university Columbia and others have been reaching with the Trump administration.
1:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So why don't we start with the open letter?
1:13
[SPEAKER_02]: that you wrote to the president, the acting president of Columbia, Claire Shipman a few days ago as we're recording this.
1:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It will be a couple of weeks by the time people hear this interview.
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But just for people who maybe aren't familiar with the story, who haven't read the open letter, we will put a link to it in the show description.
1:32
[SPEAKER_02]: But for anybody who needs a refresher, can you just sort of go through what's happened here and what prompted you to write the letter?
1:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, I mean, it requires a bit of background.
1:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I retired in twenty twenty four after a three year, you know, a period where I was, where I was slowly cutting down on my teaching.
1:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of that period, I had the, I had the,
2:00
[SPEAKER_00]: ability to teach a course if my department wanted it after I retired and so I did that last fall actually the fall of twenty twenty four after I retired and I asked me again to do it this this fall.
2:11
[SPEAKER_00]: In the interim Columbia was issued an ultimatum by the Trump administration in March early March.
2:18
[SPEAKER_00]: to which I responded with an earlier op-ed in the Guardian, and which I said this Columbia's immediate acceptance of many of the terms and willingness to negotiate was scandalous.
2:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I described why I thought that was the case.
2:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And we all waited for the other shoot-a-drop, which was for the agreement in which Columbia detailed
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: the specific nature of its capitulation to Trump's demands would be laid out.
2:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And we finally got that towards the end of June.
2:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And very soon after that, I wrote my open letter to Claire Shipman, in which I said that the terms that Columbia had accepted in its agreement with the Trump administration, including the appointment of a monitor,
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: with wide authority to look into university matters, including accessing data, including attending meetings, including involvement with departmental affairs.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, the acceptance by Columbia.
3:16
[SPEAKER_00]: as a basis for disciplinary actions of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, Ira, definition of anti-Semitism, which essentially conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
3:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So suddenly what we're talking about is not Jew hatred, which is what episemitism is.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: What we're talking about is criticism of a nation state in the ideology and its policies.
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Those things are now under the IRA definition of anti-Semitic.
3:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Semitism, anti-Semitic, or many of them are.
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was to be the basis, according to the agreement with the Trump administration.
3:45
[SPEAKER_00]: of Columbia's disciplinary procedures going forward.
3:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, two other things were accepted.
3:51
[SPEAKER_00]: One was the appointment of a senior vice provost to look into Middle East studies in other areas studies.
4:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was unclear exactly what that official was to do.
4:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's nothing wrong with Middle East studies at Columbia.
4:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It includes some of the most highly reputed people in the field.
4:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And it has large numbers of happy students.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these things, there were a couple of others.
4:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The new disciplinary procedures, the promise to dismantle the control of the Senate over a variety of internal affairs and handing them over to the Central Administration, which is essentially under the thumb of the Board of Trustees and the donors on one side and the Trump Administration on the other.
4:35
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these things made me feel that I couldn't teach my course, and so I wrote her to that effect.
4:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And I told her what I thought of Columbia's capitulation.
4:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Just today, as it happens, I got a response from her.
4:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the long and the short of it.
4:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there are a lot of quite nauseating details, but that's the broad, those are the broad outlines.
4:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you think it would make sense to talk a little bit about the IRA definition?
5:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it would.
5:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I was just in some detail on what, what it would do to, you outline this in the open letter, but what it would mean for a course that you, for course that you're trying to teach, what's out of bounds under that definition?
5:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has a worthy goal, which is remembrance of the Holocaust.
5:22
[SPEAKER_00]: and presumably related to that, understandably related to that, is combating various forms of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust.
5:31
[SPEAKER_00]: But what the Irish definition does in seven of its element examples is to sing a lot of Israel and criticism of Israel and criticism of aspects of Israeli policy and criticism of Zionism, as prime of Asia and anti-Semitic.
5:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's very clear that what
5:49
[SPEAKER_00]: IHRA, the drafters of this document were doing, or at least the way in which it has been instrumentalized, is to stifle criticism of this state of Israel, which has nothing necessarily, in fact, generally has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, many of the most
6:06
[SPEAKER_00]: of a fervent critics of the State of Israel are themselves Jewish.
6:10
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the large proportion of the faculty at Columbia and the large proportion of the students who were in violent demonstrations were themselves Jewish.
6:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's inconceivable that they were mean.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were anti-Semitic.
6:20
[SPEAKER_00]: They were opposed to the genocidal policies of a nation's state supported by the United States.
6:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That's all they were doing.
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But by this definition, a whole range of things become subject to prosecution under Title VI provisions of the education act.
6:35
[SPEAKER_00]: or prosecution under Columbia's Kangaroo Court star chamber disciplinary system, which has been installed in the last twenty-two months in place of the disciplinary system that was erected in the wake of the nineteen sixty-eight takeovers of buildings at Columbia.
6:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So the Trump administration and the Columbia administration have basically said that a whole range of
7:02
[SPEAKER_00]: statements, actions, and so on are potentially anti-Semitic.
7:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can be brought before these courts, which can drag these cases can drag on for a year and more.
7:13
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my colleagues, an eminent Holocaust scholar, herself, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, decided she would not teach this past spring because some of the material in her course, she was sure, would be treated as anti-Semitic.
7:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Criticism's, for example, by Hanna R. Anthem, the State of Israel.
7:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Hannah are not being one of the great scholars of the Holocaust and of the of the of genocide in general and authoritarian regimes and she she was brought up on on proceedings on the basis of complaint by a student about of course she talked in the fall of twenty twenty three and after going through that she said I'm not going to teach again she's like she's retired as I am and she felt that her courses on Holocaust in genocide were unteachable a Columbia
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: under these strictures because anybody who didn't like what she said if they saw it as affecting Israel could bring a title six complaint or another kind of complaint.
8:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was, I mean, I spent a lot of time talking to Marianne and other people who have suffered similarly when my colleagues was forced to leave the law school and others.
8:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's pretty clear that what is intended by Columbia is to stamp out
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[SPEAKER_00]: any serious activism, any serious criticism, any serious scholarship and teaching, which is perceived by people who are pro-Israel as critical of Israel, under the rubric of this is anti-Semitic.
8:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to say one more thing, which is this was not just an assault by the Trump administration on Columbia University, which it was, of course.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: This was an assault on Columbia University, which was facilitated by a fifth column within the University.
8:55
[SPEAKER_00]: a body of trustees, a body of donors, a body of alumni, a body of senior faculty and the professional schools were not just on board with this.
9:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They drafted some of the terms that the Trump administration later on issued to Columbia.
9:10
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a letter from a bunch of senior faculty mainly at the medical school and the law school and the business school, which was issued before the ultimatum of March of this year to Columbia from the Trump administration.
9:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The Trump demands mirror, in some cases, word for word, what these people were saying.
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is an inside job by people who have, in fact, for over a decade been propagating, propagating a mendacious and false narrative about deep anti-Semitism at Columbia University.
9:41
[SPEAKER_00]: What they meant was there are people critical of Israel at Columbia and we cannot have that.
9:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And they have now gotten their way through the Trump administration's demands.
9:52
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a couple of questions I want to ask, but let's start with the connections between what happened to the Biden administration and the Trump administration, because I think it's important to underline that this didn't start with Trump's most recent election.
10:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk a little bit about how this is a project that really crosses a political spectrum that isn't limited to the Republican Party?
10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
10:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is this is a project which is
10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Dear to the hearts of the American elite and has been since Woodrow Wilson, Americans have been favorable to the idea of Zionism, really ever since its inception.
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That wasn't true within the Jewish community to the same extent, ironically, Jewish community came around once Hitler came to power.
10:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And once the persecution of Jews and later the Holocaust made perfectly clear that some of the things the designers were saying that you're not safe in certain European countries were true.
10:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But American support for Zionism really does go back to Woodrow Wilson.
10:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is a bipartisan project.
10:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, views have changed in the United States.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The latest numbers are astonishing, over sixty percent of Americans do not approve of Israel's war on Gaza.
11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not want the United States to arm Israel.
11:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They may not all agree that this is genocide, but they understand that it's horrific, and they don't want our country to support it.
11:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The elites have not changed, however.
11:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That shift represents mainly younger people, and enlightened older people.
11:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But most older people, and most of the elites in the United States, and the leadership of both political parties are still
11:25
[SPEAKER_00]: are still operating under the illusions that developed in the sixties and the seventies about Israel.
11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And they haven't changed one bit.
11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a bipartisan collective project of support, pretty much for anything Israel does, and a refusal or a fear.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: but refusal to criticize Israel out of conviction or a fear that doing so will end your political career.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And that has happened to a number of politicians in the past.
11:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They dared to cross a certain line.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Senator Percy Jim Aborizic
12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a whole bunch of congressmen and senators who who paid the price for being critical or opposing a policy of support for Israel.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the political class is either convinced or cowed.
12:13
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not true at the base of the Democratic Party.
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not increasingly untrue of large numbers of younger Republicans.
12:20
[SPEAKER_00]: They understand America first is meaning United States first and not not
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States is doing what Israel wants, whether this is an American interest or not.
12:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So, well, coming from different perspectives, young people in both parties, actually, are increasingly critical of Israel, increasingly unhappy about the Americans' early relationship.
12:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But you don't see that reflected in the leaderships of either party.
12:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly not the gerontocracy that dominates the Democratic party, the Pelosi's and the Clinton's and the Biden's and the Schumers.
12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: These are old people.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: These are people older in some cases than me and I'm pretty old.
12:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Who, you know, came to consciousness at a time when there was a fairy tale vision in Israel.
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Israel could do no wrong.
13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Israel was a miraculous response to the Holocaust in someone and so forth.
13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Younger people don't see Israel that way.
13:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And rightly so.
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They have seen what Israel has been doing.
13:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly since the sixties and seventies and eighties.
13:15
[SPEAKER_00]: as they grew up.
13:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And so under forty the age group under forty isn't a completely different place than the people who own our major institutions own our politicians and make up our political class.
13:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, the American elite and that's that's bipartisan.
13:34
[SPEAKER_00]: What did shipment respond if you don't mind my asking?
13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a, it was a, it was a, I don't want to talk about it.
13:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a, it's a private letter to me, but invited, she invited me a conversation.
13:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I love a good conversation every now and then sure a lot will get done.
13:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Can we talk a little bit about the trajectory of Columbia University?
13:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know if you know, but I was an undergraduate there and one of the things that they sold you when you were an undergraduate was at this legacy of
14:02
[SPEAKER_03]: this legacy of protests is like a sea of advocacy and that this is one of the reasons that you go to Columbia and not Harvard or Yale.
14:07
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a place where you could really be political, on one hand, and then it's a place where activism in particular was valued.
14:18
[SPEAKER_03]: But obviously, that's bullshit.
14:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And so how has you seen the university itself at Columbia change over your time there?
14:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Could correct me if wrong, you've been there for quite a couple of decades at this point.
14:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, so, yeah, you know what I'm asking.
14:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
14:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it only changed on October seventh.
14:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Up until October seventh, the events of, in the sixteenth, were celebrated.
14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The people who took over university buildings.
14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: In one case, kidnapped a dean.
14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Were celebrated.
14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They were brought back to Columbia for events.
14:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And every protest up until
15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: October seventh.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And it would mild disciplinary action if any, whether it was about apartheid, whether it was about climate change, whether it was about any other of many, many issues on which Columbia students became involved politically.
15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The university was tolerant.
15:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a disciplinary procedure, which was fair, which was established by the Senate, which has elected faculty, student, and staff representation, as well as administrative representation.
15:30
[SPEAKER_00]: and everything always for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
15:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Opposition to all of these things was okay, was kosher.
15:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Opposition to Israel's war on Gaza was not.
15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And this
15:43
[SPEAKER_00]: meant that the students and the faculty who supported them were running the foul of deep beliefs of a large chunk of the donor class, which supports Columbia, and of the Board of Trustees, which represents not the faculty or the students, but represents the donors.
15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And has increasingly been made up of a group that is on academic hedge fund, folks, lawyers, former government officials, and so on.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Professionals, people who are perfectly respectable and if they're involved in raising money for Columbia all power to them, but what they have increasingly tried to do over many years recently is to move Columbia in a specific direction, to make faculty and students less critical of Israel.
16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That was strong opposition.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: when students tried to get Columbia to divest from company supporting the Israeli occupation and initiative to that effect failed just before I joined Columbia in two thousand three and another one packs by a very large majority of undergraduate students both at Columbia and at Barnard about four years ago.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was absolutely unacceptable to a large chunk of the Board of Trustees.
16:53
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them said, I will only give Columbia money if it proves that it's not anti-Semitic.
16:58
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you prove it's not anti-Semitic by supporting Israel, by establishing a global center in Tel Aviv?
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the, that's the, what I call the fifth column, the people involved in an inside job.
17:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They have paddled an entirely false narrative in blind defense of Israel.
17:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The Columbia is Columbia.
17:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The institution is anti-Semitic.
17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, this is not true.
17:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The institution, not anti-Semitic.
17:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Twenty percent of the students are doing it.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not anti-Semitic.
17:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Pardon me?
17:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It is just not anti-Semitic.
17:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I spent four years there.
17:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It is not anti-Semitic institution whatsoever.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: My father graduated from Columbia.
17:34
[SPEAKER_00]: My brother graduated from Columbia.
17:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I played on the steps of low library where my father was, my poor father was writing his dissertation.
17:40
[SPEAKER_00]: We lived on the Upper West Side.
17:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I taught at Columbia in the eighties and I had been teaching at Columbia for twenty-one years, starting in nineteen-two thousand and three.
17:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I know perfectly well.
17:51
[SPEAKER_00]: that, well, there's anti-Semitism in every institution of American society that Columbia as an institution was not anti-Semitic.
17:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And the very large number of students, increasingly large number of students and faculty who are critical of Israel, were in many cases of themselves Jewish.
18:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, maybe you're talking about a huge chunk of Jews who are self-hating Jews and anti-Semites.
18:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But in that case, you're talking, you know, Alice in Wonderland.
18:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But Alice in Wonderland is where a lot of these trustees and donors live.
18:17
[SPEAKER_03]: As Larry David said, I may hate myself, but it's not because I'm a Jew.
18:21
[SPEAKER_03]: But one thing that's important also about Columbia, I want to take a little bit of a step back here because there was always something there about Israel.
18:30
[SPEAKER_03]: We must of course recall the Columbia Unbecoming Controversy.
18:33
[SPEAKER_03]: of the mid-auts.
18:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's actually important because that's where Barry Weiss, who now is maybe going to run CBS news, really got her start as a figure.
18:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there was always this thing at Columbia about Israel.
18:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I believe in that controversy she went after, particularly Joseph Mossad.
18:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And you eventually became embroiled in it.
18:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But so it didn't in my mind, in correct me wrong, didn't just start on October
18:58
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no.
18:59
[SPEAKER_03]: This is something that has been percolating for a while, particularly at Columbia and due to Barry's influence is now of national imports.
19:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I was wondering, what is that Barry's?
19:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a truth on this.
19:12
[SPEAKER_03]: You're right.
19:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Barry was kind of teeth on this.
19:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and that's the thing.
19:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Made famous by it.
19:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and no, it wasn't just Barry.
19:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It was other students as well.
19:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I shouldn't just single her out, that's right.
19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It was powerful, well-funded, off-campus institutions that were pushing me tired.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Could we talk about that?
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Could we talk about their film and so on?
19:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so because I think it's important to actually contextualize this within that history.
19:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Because I think that sets this, if you were writing a history of Columbia and anti-Semitism, you could really start there.
19:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So what was going on there and how does it relate to what's happening now?
19:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think that this is related to a broader shift in American society.
19:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a shift away from this wall to wall support for Israel, to a much more critical nuanced stance, which is something that
19:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The partisans of Israel have no response to.
20:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what do you say about three generations of people who have lived under Marshall Law, Jack Boot military dictatorship?
20:07
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a democracy.
20:09
[SPEAKER_00]: If half the people who are subject to Israel have no rights, you are not a democracy.
20:14
[SPEAKER_00]: You are not some miracle in the desert, blooming.
20:17
[SPEAKER_00]: You are a occupying power which is intensely cruel in the statement of half the people under your control.
20:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are no responses to these kinds of critiques.
20:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you cannot respond, you shut it down.
20:33
[SPEAKER_00]: by claiming that people are engaged in one of the most heinous kinds of bigotry in our modern world, which is anti-Semitism.
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So anti-Semitism is a shield for a project that really has no defense.
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Increasingly is defense less in rational terms.
20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you justify killing sixty eighty, we don't know how many, and we won't know how many.
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Many, many, many tens of thousands of people, including eighteen thousand children.
21:00
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you just about?
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't justify it.
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So you say anybody who criticizes it is an anti-Semi.
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not just out of ten.
21:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't listen to them.
21:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't.
21:08
[SPEAKER_00]: We will not allow them to talk.
21:09
[SPEAKER_00]: We will bring them to court.
21:11
[SPEAKER_00]: We will make their lives miserable.
21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We will ruin them.
21:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what has happened to academics and students who have been traumatized for the harsh penalties that were imposed on them for their activism.
21:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the, I mean, it's the, it's the last resort of people with no defense for a position that they hold dear.
21:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's quite reprehensible and the other disgusting aspect of it is the instrumentalization of this by people in the Trump administration who want to attack higher education for much broader reasons than anything to do with anti-Semitism and many of whom are themselves anti-Semites.
21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're playing this anti-Semitism card in order to attack issues around race, issues around gender, issues around the independence of the university, which is one of the American university, is one of the major bastions of criticism of political power.
22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you're moving in the authoritarian direction of this administration, you shut down the law firms, you shut down the media, you sue them, you bring them out of the control of people like Barry Weiss, and billionaires and zillionaires who have the same views.
22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You attack the law firms, and you attack the universities.
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They'll be attacking the unions and they're attacking this Smithsonian and they're attacking museums even as we speak.
22:31
[SPEAKER_00]: They're attacking independent municipalities even as we speak.
22:35
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the authoritarian playbook.
22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Chile.
22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Hungary.
22:38
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Turkey.
22:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I have friends at Boisage, who told me, yeah, boy, that's exactly what happened with us.
22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The government came in and they found somebody from within the university to work with them.
22:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And Boisage no longer is the same kind of free place that once was, the loss for university.
22:55
[SPEAKER_00]: My daughter-in-law, Chilean, Chilean.
22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: She told me the same, this is just what happened in Chile.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You shut down all of the places where a critique of political power can be launched.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And your political power is untrammeled.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the broader agenda, of course.
23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And for these people, for whom anti-Semitism isn't in relevancy.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I say, many of whom are probably or definitely anti-Semites.
23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just a stick with which to beat the university.
23:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to say CBS News wants to buy this program a race.
23:29
[SPEAKER_02]: We are open our more reasonable than in what very ways to do it for fifty million not to.
23:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, really.
23:35
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, let's be real about this.
23:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a couple of kind of broader horizon questions coming out of some of the things you said.
23:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's the first one.
23:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's start with the one that is most relevant to.
23:50
[SPEAKER_02]: is a real Palestine.
23:52
[SPEAKER_02]: As you've just put it, these actions what we're seeing.
23:56
[SPEAKER_02]: are the death throws of an ideology, the death throws of a group of people who realize they're losing the argument.
24:03
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not the questions you do when you know that you control the narrative and you know that people are on your side.
24:10
[SPEAKER_02]: They're the things you do when there is no more argument to be made and so you just make it, you know, illegal or at least so punishing to even engage in the argument that it can't be, you can't even approach the subject.
24:25
[SPEAKER_02]: given how hegemonic the elite narrative on Israel has been in the U.S.
24:32
[SPEAKER_02]: media and public spaces for the last, you know, I mean, forever really.
24:40
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you, to what do you attribute the fact that young people now are increasingly skeptical of that narrative and increased?
24:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, how is it broken through, I guess, is what I'm asking.
24:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I was that story managed to break through.
24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I would say two things, alternative media and social media, and the decline of mainstream legacy corporate media.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to, I used to mention in class when I taught at Chicago and when I began at Columbia, you know, items I'd seen in the New York Times, or I'd seen on television, news items.
25:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And a proportion of the class in the morning would not their heads.
25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They had seen that news item in the New York Times, or wherever, CNN.
25:23
[SPEAKER_00]: That's no longer the case.
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I still monitor all of these media, but people of that age group, they pay no attention whatsoever to the mainstream legacy media.
25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They get their news from social media and alternative media and alternative media and social media are not subject to the same controls and the same biases and the same manipulation and the same powerful boards
25:49
[SPEAKER_00]: of directors that control the mainstream corporate media, you know, this mogul, this billionaire, this multi-zillionaire.
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Controls, all of them, that group controls the mainstream corporate media.
26:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And they all have the same mindset as far as Israel is concerned.
26:05
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how true with alternative media.
26:06
[SPEAKER_00]: There are people who are fanatically prosignists and there are others.
26:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But this war has just broken things over because people have watched a live streamed genocide.
26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: being filmed by young people who they've come to trust.
26:21
[SPEAKER_00]: They've watched them over weeks and months.
26:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, yeah, this seems to be a really accurate picture of reality.
26:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything these other people are saying are mendacious, disgusting, despicable lies.
26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Then New York Times CNN, President Biden, President Trump.
26:37
[SPEAKER_00]: These are, these are liars.
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: What they're saying is complete falsehoods.
26:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's shattered the consensus.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You look at the age, young Republicans are critical of Israel.
26:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Forty percent of them.
26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is unheard of in the Republican Party.
26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Young evangelicals are critical of history.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a breakdown of the mechanisms of manufactured consent that the corporate media are, you know, the central part of, I would say.
27:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a generational thing.
27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you have many enlightened older people, but the younger population of the United States, and this is true in Europe as well.
27:20
[SPEAKER_00]: is much much more enlightened where these things.
27:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They actually know more.
27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I find the students I teach and the questions I get when I get lectures so much more sophisticated and involving so much deeper background.
27:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also not true that they don't read.
27:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They see stuff in social media and they see stuff in alternative media and they go off and they educate themselves.
27:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They actually do read.
27:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I get questions that are clearly based on why some research from young people.
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: This didn't used to be the case.
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would argue that's one of the major factors.
27:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is that the
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The reality is so overwhelming, it was before this war, but the reality is so overwhelming that the Potemkin village that was the image of Israel just has just crumbled.
28:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Even even in the mainstream media, it's beginning to crumble.
28:15
[SPEAKER_03]: One thing I do want to ask is we've been assuming in this conversation, and I think it's correct, and methodologically, I think it's correct.
28:22
[SPEAKER_03]: That a large driver of the US relationship with Israel's domestic politics and policy and lobbying organizations and things like that.
28:29
[SPEAKER_03]: What you're taking on the geostrategic relationship between the United States and Israel, particularly as the United States changes its geostrategy in the Middle East, or it seeks to, at least, since a quote unquote, pivot to Asia, that is kind of occurred in the last ten years,
28:45
[SPEAKER_03]: because I'm curious if you think that public sentiment can turn it against Israel, but is there a geostrategic logic there?
28:52
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, that might actually override public opinion, or congressional opinion earlier, opinion.
28:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good question.
28:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, thank you.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there's several things to say in response.
29:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The first is that public opinion takes a very long time to turn around elites.
29:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, how long did it take us to stop the Iraq war?
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: How long did it take us on older than you both of you to stop the anomor?
29:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Better part of a decade.
29:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Public opinion shifted within three or four years.
29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The elites took ten years.
29:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And that had to do both with, you know, in trusted and entrenched views, but also geostrategic and economic interests.
29:31
[SPEAKER_00]: In the case of Iraq or even in the case of Southeast Asia.
29:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is an important economic and strategic interest in support of Israel.
29:44
[SPEAKER_00]: There are important sectors of the American economy, which are very closely linked to Israel.
29:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And so people have interests in biomedical, in IT, in high tech, in military tech, in surveillance technology.
29:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in all of these things, the United States economy and the Israeli economy are integrated.
30:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They operate, have them glove.
30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's, as you, that's the economic, and there are other economic interests as well.
30:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's the main one.
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: There are also geostrategic interests.
30:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States has been essentially involved in a cold war with Iran since the Iranian Revolution as forty-six years ago.
30:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a major intense rivalry for two generations of American foreign policy makers.
30:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Two generations of the American elite have been fighting Iran in a cold war, mostly.
30:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we bombed Iran, you know, it's bombed Iran recently, but that's the first overt such action.
30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But covert action against Iran constantly.
30:45
[SPEAKER_00]: opposition to Iran's subversion of Iran and so on and so forth and the Iranians have, you know, given as well as the given, given as a good well as they've got and better maybe.
30:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They've stirred up trouble for the United States all over the world but especially in the Middle East.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a geostrategic interest in which Israel is a vital ally.
31:02
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, to some extent, the United States is capable of cutting deals with Iran which would severely minimize the harm to US interests.
31:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But for Israel,
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Israel is right next to Iran.
31:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's three countries away from Iran.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's directly involved with Iran's proxies.
31:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of Iran's proxies don't give a hoot and hell about the United States directly.
31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Hamas has never attacked the United States.
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The Iraqi militias of attack American troops occupying Iran.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Israel is directly engaged with Iran and its proxies.
31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And Israel has a enormously powerful interest in keeping the United States involved.
31:42
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I would argue that one of Netanyahu's primary objectives, since he first entered politics, was to get the United States to fight Israel's war for it against Iran.
31:51
[SPEAKER_00]: United States prefers a cold war with Iran, rivalry and for that Israel is a useful ally.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that the United States could cut a deal with Iran terrifies Israel as
32:02
[SPEAKER_00]: because that might not include their interests.
32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: If you really had an American first president, that's what they would do.
32:08
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what Obama tried to do with the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal.
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's an important, really, an important factor.
32:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an important factor during the Cold War.
32:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Israel became a vital American proxy against what were perceived as Soviet proxies.
32:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So from the sixties, right up to the end of the demise of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety-one, Israel was actually a vital American ally in terms of this Cold War obsession of the United States.
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was the Cold War and not Israel that drove this.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: When the United States wanted to win over Egypt, forced Israel to make concessions in order to win over Egypt from the Soviets.
32:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And these rallies were dragged kicking and streaming into agreement after agreement under Nixon and Ford and later under President Carter.
33:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to take a step back and talk about the university and something you mentioned a little bit earlier, which is the extent to which what happened at Columbia and what happened, I think, in the deals that the Trump administration is reached with other universities.
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: have been inside jobs.
33:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They've been laid out by boards of trustees in particular, business schools by people inside the university who have been agitating for changes to the American University for a long time.
33:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
33:41
[SPEAKER_02]: These agreements go beyond
33:46
[SPEAKER_02]: is repolist.
33:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's demands for, you know, conservative faculty or, you know, having to do with admissions, admissions, all kinds of, you know, fundamental, fundamental things.
33:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm reminded of
34:02
[SPEAKER_02]: When I was in Chicago, there was this controversy because these touch on so many other areas besides this particular one.
34:11
[SPEAKER_02]: There was the controversy over the creation of the Milton Friedman Institute.
34:17
[SPEAKER_02]: The mission was basically to talk about the glories of free market capitalism and how it was the perfect system, pre-supposing that it was the perfect system for organizing societies.
34:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was a big pushback from faculty, but it went ahead.
34:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, because this was what the money people wanted.
34:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So I want to get your analysis of basically the changing American university from an institution whose primary focus is the education to a holding company for hedge fund managers and what that's done to academia.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, this goes back to the changing nature of American capitalism.
34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You had a look arcs before.
34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You had, you know, railway magnets, the Rockefeller's Carnegie's and so on.
35:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Melons.
35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But they saw two things.
35:03
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, they saw this interested philanthropy in which they gave the money and then they stepped back as their role, firstly.
35:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, they believed in the liberal arts.
35:14
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed in education.
35:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed in open-mindedness.
35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They were capitalists.
35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed in the capitalist system.
35:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were
35:24
[SPEAKER_00]: very eager to support not just scientific research and not just what I call vocational training, that post undergraduate training in law school, training in medical school, training in business school, to do professional jobs.
35:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But in broadening people's minds and in teaching them across a range of disciplines in the arts and sciences.
35:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The current generation of oligarchs, the musks, the people who own all of these huge corporations, Apple and so on.
36:01
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, they have the attitude of a child who owns a model railway set.
36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, kids don't have those anymore.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It does what I want.
36:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's mine.
36:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It belongs to me.
36:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I will tell it what to do.
36:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I want this train to go this way, not that way.
36:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So they do not have the sort of hands-off attitude of your carnities, your melons, your Rockefellers, of your.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They will put their finger into this system and change it as they will.
36:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Firstly, secondly, they don't believe in the liberal arts.
36:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You sort of suggested this.
36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: When you talked about the Milton Friedman Institute, they believe that preparing
36:42
[SPEAKER_00]: people to be properly trained robots for their economy is the job of the university.
36:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And it should do that.
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We see trustees.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a trustee who's been arguing this.
36:57
[SPEAKER_00]: She's very influential at Columbia.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's been arguing this.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: She's also very pro-ist.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But her, her, her, her, she's arguing.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't need these, that some of these liberal arts.
37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The things people should be doing is economics.
37:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They should be learning about technology.
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They should be doing science.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's all they should be doing.
37:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And as far as, you know, your hedge fund managers in salt and so forth, that's what they want.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They want people who will step into the either the businesses they own and run or the economy as they see it.
37:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And they don't really believe in the kind of things that are taught at Chicago in the core or taught at Chicago, which I want to ask about in a second.
37:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, well, did you?
37:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
37:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So I wanted to ask, okay, I'm sorry, but since I had
37:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Chicago is getting rid of all those humanities programs.
37:41
[SPEAKER_03]: You're a historian.
37:42
[SPEAKER_03]: You've seen the decline of the profession so many in my cohort and I graduated in twenty thirteen with my PhD, most of my cohort didn't get tenure track jobs, who are just worse and worse and worse.
37:53
[SPEAKER_03]: In this emergent new Cold War with China, whatever you want to call it, I always joke, we're going to get the second Cold War, but without the National Defense Education Act.
38:02
[SPEAKER_03]: where they're not going to fund the languages, they're not going to fund the humanities, even if they fund them for purposes of imperial management, at least they funded them.
38:11
[SPEAKER_03]: So why do you think that the humanities itself are basically tying as a project?
38:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, the Cold War universities clearly not
38:21
[SPEAKER_03]: around that need longer.
38:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Whatever the twenty first century universe is going to be, it's going to be with a lot.
38:26
[SPEAKER_03]: There's going to be a lot less humanities education, a lot less, let's even social scientific education.
38:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And as a historian in particular, I'd like to get your thoughts on that and then we could talk for a little bit about the AHA.
38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, let me start with a self critique.
38:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that enough academics in the humanities have
38:52
[SPEAKER_00]: been able to make a case for what they do and have spoken in a language which is understandable by ordinary educated people, let alone less educated people.
39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And I frankly think that's absolutely necessary.
39:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have to speak to people.
39:08
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a time and there is a place for technical language, you know, for historiography, for certain kind of philosophical analysis and so on and so forth.
39:19
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk to each other within our disciplines, in that language.
39:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to speak to your students and you have to speak to the world.
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: In a language that everybody can understand, they're not historians or they're not philosophers.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And so many of my colleagues don't seem to realize that.
39:33
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, we've talked ourselves and written ourselves.
39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: out of being able to communicate with the broad mass of even educated people.
39:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the first thing.
39:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's, nobody is to blame for that, but the humanities themselves.
39:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there's, I find there's nothing more valuable than reading the Odyssey or reading the Quran.
39:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you just learn if you know how to teach it and make it accessible, which many, many of my colleagues do brilliantly.
40:04
[SPEAKER_00]: People will realize this is valuable to my life, but you have to be able to do that in and dry non-academic way.
40:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Many people do not enough to.
40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And not enough to address the general public.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you've got to be able to write up ends defending what you do.
40:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to be able to argue before people in the Senate and state assemblies before Congress in public for a for the value of what you do.
40:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have technocrats running the universities, most of whom are not themselves from the liberal arts or many of whom are not.
40:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And who in any case can't make that defense.
40:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the first thing.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing is, students actually like this stuff.
40:47
[SPEAKER_00]: They like this stuff, but they're under enormous pressure.
40:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I know how many students love history.
40:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them don't become history majors, because they're under pressure from an unrelenting economy, which is driving people down and writing.
41:01
[SPEAKER_03]: That's changed just very quickly.
41:03
[SPEAKER_03]: When I was in undergrad, you could still be a history major and then go work for McKinsey.
41:07
[SPEAKER_03]: That's different.
41:08
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of my friends were fun, quote unquote, fun majors, and then they went into the horrible capitalist system.
41:14
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a transformation too, yeah.
41:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not just what you're saying is true.
41:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's that the outlook for these people is harder.
41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Irrespective of what their training is, if they have training in IT, they're having difficulty finding jobs.
41:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's become a gig economy.
41:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, labor unions have been destroyed, permanent employment is being destroyed.
41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And in that situation, people are desperate.
41:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They know they will never have the advantages that my generation had, that the baby boomer generation, the post-war generation generation after us,
41:50
[SPEAKER_00]: because they're living in a different economy.
41:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is forcing them to do things.
41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And in some cases, they don't really want to do.
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And to not take subjects.
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they come to me and my colleagues.
42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we have managed many history departments have lost students, lost majors.
42:05
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a lot of majors.
42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a lot of students.
42:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But we had, I'm not in the department anymore, every tire.
42:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I was chair, we had an or vice chair.
42:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We were following trends in some of the departments in the humanities.
42:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were losing students.
42:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We were not losing students.
42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: because our faculty are good communicators and because students really love this stuff and they realize that they could perhaps manage to be a major in economics and have a history mind or whatever may have been or a science major or a pre-med or whatever.
42:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's decreasingly the case.
42:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's the economy, it's the economy stupid that's forcing young people to move away from the things that in many cases they love and would like would prefer to do.
42:48
[SPEAKER_00]: There are, I think, other factors.
42:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the, the, the, the technocratic, it's not technocratic, the neoliberal nature of the modern American university is pushing things in that direction.
42:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we have people running universities who should not be, they should be running factories.
43:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They should be running businesses.
43:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I love the bottom line.
43:08
[SPEAKER_00]: If I were capable of doing the kinds of things that business does and making money, maybe I would have done it.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not what I want to do.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But instead, I have as deans and as vice presidents and as provosts and as presidents of universities of Columbia in particular, people for whom the only value is the bottom line.
43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean I decided to retire essentially because of that years before this latest issue set of issues came up because I saw what they were doing to our lecture courses to our teaching assistants to our PhD programs in the interest of a bottom line and I we would say to them I mean the whole value of this education is the way in which we've structured
43:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to go into the details as boring for a non-expert.
43:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But the way in which we've structured this is the students get one-on-one interaction with professors in lectures and then they get one-on-one interaction with highly educated trained expert graduate students in discussion sections.
44:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And they basically jettison that model and not given us any idea of what to do.
44:06
[SPEAKER_03]: to replace it.
44:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And they've gotten rid of it from what I've seen recently.
44:10
[SPEAKER_03]: They just basically unhired everyone to teach like C.C.
44:14
[SPEAKER_03]: or whatever it was.
44:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's very clearly really a transformation.
44:17
[SPEAKER_03]: There, please.
44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The university's being run by union breakers.
44:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we've gone back to the era of the coal mines in the nineteenth century where we bring in people to shoot strikers.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're not shooting strikers.
44:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They're firing strikers.
44:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
44:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The head of the Union at Columbia, the graduate student union, was suspended and they won't let her head lead the negotiations.
44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they bring in union-breaking lawyers and union-breaking consultants because that's what they are.
44:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They are capitalists without a soul, essentially running the university and capitalists without any liberal education apparently because they don't understand or appreciate.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: What the core values of these owners, the core value is not to teach people to be lawyers or business people or doctors.
44:57
[SPEAKER_00]: That is an immensely important value.
44:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The core of the university is the undergraduate education.
45:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't seem to appreciate or understand that the bottom line, the bottom line, the bottom line.
45:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, really really a tourist just just a couple more questions.
45:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we would be remiss not to talk about about the American Historical Association.
45:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
45:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I think six or seven years ago at this point, which was criticizing, yeah, a while ago criticizing the AHA for this alt act nonsense that not even uniting as a discipline to try to
45:30
[SPEAKER_03]: basically defend tender track positions, which is what graduate history training is.
45:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've long been a critic of the organization, but I think it's important to talk about this scholasticide resolution that was vetoed by the AHA leadership.
45:44
[SPEAKER_03]: People listen to the show.
45:45
[SPEAKER_03]: We've done a few episodes on it.
45:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So we don't need to go into the details, but I'd like to get your take as a scholar of Palestine on the fact that so many AHA elites basically veto democracy vetoed.
45:57
[SPEAKER_03]: A resolution that is essentially just common sense.
46:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is another example of what the dear friend of mine, Michael Ratner, who was one of the founders of the Center for Constitutional Rights and helped to Palestine legal, called the Palestine exception.
46:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're liberal on everything but Israel.
46:19
[SPEAKER_00]: We are critical and we are open-minded on everything but Israel.
46:23
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an exception around Palestine.
46:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And the HA, which passed a resolution on the Ukraine, is not willing to pass a resolution on the world.
46:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So let me put it differently.
46:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The HA membership at the HA meeting passed a resolution, which the board accepted on Ukraine.
46:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the HA membership at a general meeting passed a resolution on Scholasticide and Gaza, every single university in Gaza has been systematically destroyed.
46:49
[SPEAKER_00]: A dozen universities have been levelled.
46:52
[SPEAKER_00]: demolished demolition charges in most cases.
46:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not, you know, destroyed during fighting.
46:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They were systematically, consciously, purposely destroyed archives to documents every single university in Gaza.
47:06
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a dozen of them.
47:08
[SPEAKER_00]: dozens and dozens of faculty, deans, presidents, vice presidents, proists have been murdered.
47:15
[SPEAKER_00]: These are not terrorists.
47:17
[SPEAKER_00]: These are not activists.
47:18
[SPEAKER_00]: These are not militants.
47:20
[SPEAKER_00]: These are highly credentialed academics murdered by the dozens by the scores.
47:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The resolution called this, what it is, school has to decide.
47:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The membership in the annual meeting approved and the leadership refused.
47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is not just, as you said, an attack on democracy by the leadership of the AHA.
47:43
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a perfect example of what he rest in peace, Michael Ratner, called the Palestine exception.
47:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You can say anything you want about anything.
47:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You can criticize American foreign policy, but you can't criticize Israel's foreign policy.
47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: You can criticize American's America's wars.
47:59
[SPEAKER_00]: in Iraq, or Vietnam, or in Afghanistan, or the many other wars the United States is fighting, overtly or covertly.
48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't criticize Israel's wars.
48:08
[SPEAKER_00]: You can criticize American racism.
48:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't criticize, you can't talk about Jim Crow.
48:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't talk about apartheid.
48:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You can talk about America committing genocidal acts in the Philippines, and it's conquest of the Philippines during this month.
48:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't say that what is real, I mean,
48:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the Palestine exception and to its disgrace to its shame, to its eternal shame, the leadership of the H.A.
48:33
[SPEAKER_00]: has gone along with this.
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't tell you how outrageous this is.
48:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And one hopes it'll be overturned.
48:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there were elections for a new executive and a large number of people who are highly critical of this approach were elected.
48:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, let's hope they're able to change the course of the HA and and return it from the state of disgrace in which it now resides.
48:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I think maybe as a as a wrap up question to kind of bring things back to what's happening in Gaza and speaking as both a historian and somebody who has observed the way that the United States
49:15
[SPEAKER_02]: acts in the world and what the responses to that in sort of the historical memory once it turns out that we've done terrible things.
49:27
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm curious, there's been a lot of talk, you know, basically some kind of black humor about this, but a lot of talk
49:35
[SPEAKER_02]: about the, you know, in five years and ten years, how many people who have been cheering this on all along are going to say, I was against, you know, I was against what is real dead.
49:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I was always against it.
49:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And just sort of revising history.
49:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's happening even faster than that.
49:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It happened in this discourse over the famine, the starvation, where you now have people who, you know, six months ago when we knew this was coming, it was obvious saying, oh, wow, you know, six months ago there wasn't a famine, but now there is.
50:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm grudgingly acknowledging that now, but if anybody who said there was going to be a famine, six months ago is still wrong.
50:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But look at me, look at what a good person I am.
50:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm acknowledging that it's happening now.
50:19
[SPEAKER_02]: We've seen it there, we're seeing it increasingly in the grudging admission that maybe Israel's gone too far, maybe just recently that the taken things too far.
50:30
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like the same thing that happened with the Iraq where you had a lot of people who supported that war who eight years into a ten years after said, well, I was right for the wrong reasons or I was wrong for the right reasons or whatever it was, whatever bullshit.
50:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And, but it feels like it's happening even faster.
50:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So I, I just basically, you're perspective on how people are gonna talk about this and their own roles in cheering it on or, you know, advocating for it in five years and ten years when we really, you know, understand what an atrocity has been committed here.
51:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's, it's perfectly summed up in the title of Amad Al-Aqqad's bestselling book.
51:14
[SPEAKER_00]: One day, we all will have been against this.
51:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he wrote this book, I don't know, nine, six, eight months ago.
51:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a best seller now.
51:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a top of the Amazon Middle East and Palestine Israelists, a head of my book, and deservedly so.
51:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the best title I've ever seen, and it entirely sums up exactly the mindset that you're talking about, Derek.
51:37
[SPEAKER_00]: These people are like weather veins.
51:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They cheered on and protected and justified genocide for eighteen months or sixteen months.
51:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And now they're turning.
51:49
[SPEAKER_00]: What has changed?
51:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, a lot more people are dying of starvation.
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we're dying of malnutrition or untreated wounds or illness.
52:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But people are being slaughtered and we're being slaughtered at pretty much the same rate.
52:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You had eighteen thousand children dead three months ago and nobody was talking about.
52:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the numbers nothing has really changed.
52:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The starvation has now reached epic proportions.
52:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, so that is a change.
52:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the images have broken through.
52:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the mainstream media is no longer quite as capable of lying and covering up.
52:26
[SPEAKER_00]: though they still do a wonderful job of it.
52:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the New York Times will not list a statistic out of Gaza without saying, the Hamas controlled Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between Soviet and Gaza, Gaza.
52:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, in the same paragraph, they say, twelve hundred Israelis were killed on October seven, which is correct.
52:48
[SPEAKER_00]: A one four hundred were soldiers.
52:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Never mentioned.
52:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Israel doesn't distinguish.
52:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Leave Israel.
52:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The New York Times doesn't distinguish.
52:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But they will qualify and try and thereby discredit the number, which every reputable demographer and scientists who works on this is a huge undercount.
53:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll say that.
53:12
[SPEAKER_00]: tens of thousands more people are dead.
53:14
[SPEAKER_00]: This ministry gives this number.
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And who cares how many are civilians and how many?
53:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the eighteen thousand children are eighteen thousand children, whether they're twenty thousand militants or killed, or twelve or fifteen thousand government bureaucrats who've never picked up a weapon, but who are Hamas terrorists because they work for the Hamas controlled government.
53:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's half of the least of the so-called militants Israel has killed.
53:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They're policemen, they're tax collectors, they're municipal workers, they're garbage men,
53:40
[SPEAKER_00]: their functionaries, their teachers, their bureaucrats, slaughtered, because they work for a government controlled by Hamas.
53:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, these are war crimes.
53:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, the New York Times would never say that.
53:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Nor would CNN.
53:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They are coming around on starvation.
53:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the images.
53:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if it bleeds, it leads.
53:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They cannot not show those pictures.
53:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They tried, but they cannot anymore.
54:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's too vivid.
54:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's too important, especially for the, for the, for Taliban.
54:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And for, you know, your front page picture of an emaciated child.
54:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's symptomatic of a shift that fails to look at the core problem.
54:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The core problem is not Israel overreacted after the massacres of October sept.
54:26
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the core problem.
54:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The core problem is what Israel has been trying to do in an arc over generations, which is to do what Javitenski said in nineteen twenty-three.
54:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Our objective is to transform Palestine into the land of Israel.
54:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You take a no majority Arab country and you transform it into a Jewish country.
54:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And that means you get rid of the population, you subjugated and you expel it or you kill it.
54:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's, and now, those, those, the, jump attention, he was exposing something when he wrote this in nineteen twenty three.
54:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Viceman would never say anything like that, then go in would never say anything like that.
55:01
[SPEAKER_00]: They all said, oh, no, we're not going to harm the indigenous population.
55:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all we're never saying that.
55:05
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all, we, we, we, what we do will be in their best interest.
55:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only because they stubborn, pigheaded people who resist us.
55:13
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
55:14
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it was always, we're going to take over this country.
55:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Always.
55:17
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a whole point.
55:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole point was a Jewish state in an Arab country.
55:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to transform the country by removing the Arabs.
55:23
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no other way to make a Jewish state in an Arab country.
55:28
[SPEAKER_00]: This government doesn't bother to cover up what it's doing.
55:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And as ministers who say, yes, we're going to kill them.
55:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we're going to starve them.
55:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Now they say, well, how we have to feed.
55:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we're going to expel them.
55:40
[SPEAKER_00]: They're negotiating with Somali land and South Sudan to take Palestinians.
55:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Two of the most devastated hellscapes on Earth are where they want to send people from the devastated hellscape of Gaza.
55:52
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't make any bones about it.
55:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this is the project.
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: This has always been the project.
55:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It's being executed in a particularly brutal, particularly cruel way today.
56:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't do anything as systematic in
56:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The massacres that took place were in the dozens.
56:12
[SPEAKER_00]: This daily massacre in Gaza, over twenty-two months, a daily massacre.
56:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They carried out daily as seen.
56:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You can actually, the names are known.
56:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the way we know this ten, twelve, fourteen, twenty, whatever the number is.
56:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not important.
56:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing like this level of brutality.
56:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And within Israeli society, you have used hards book on their multiple books in which people reflect on how terrible this was, what they had to do, or what they felt they had to do.
56:43
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but you didn't have that for a long time in Israel.
56:46
[SPEAKER_00]: You're beginning to have it now.
56:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilots are beginning to say, wait a minute, they're giving me coordinates that when I see what I'm bomb later on.
56:53
[SPEAKER_00]: These were just children.
56:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You have people who are coming back with PTSD breakdowns suicide because they cannot face up to what they were forced to do.
57:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's beginning in Israeli society.
57:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's beginning with the reservists who cannot stand another call-up to fight a war that has no end for nothing else political survival.
57:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Kissinger said, perfectly clearly, if the, if the insurgent doesn't lose, the insurgent wins, if the conventional army doesn't win, it loses.
57:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, after twenty-two months, what's the conclusion?
57:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The conventional army hasn't won.
57:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they're going to go into Gaza for the eighteenth time.
57:31
[SPEAKER_00]: What's that going to do?
57:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It killed more people, displaced more people, lead to higher Israeli casualties.
57:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're beginning to have an awakening inside Israel.
57:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But until the United States finally wakes up, and I'm not very confident this will happen very soon.
57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Until public opinion, which is very strongly and increasingly strongly against this war, forces our politicians to do the right thing.
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And overwhelms this elite, this wall to wall elite defense of Israel.
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: This genocide will go on.
58:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a political leadership in Israel that is not intent on not stopping.
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have a political leadership in the United States, which is not intent on stopping it.
58:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the two key elements.
58:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very depressing conclusion.
58:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe with any luck by the time this program airs, that will have changed.
58:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm hoping very much that that's the case, but it doesn't look like it right now, this moment in August.
58:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to close, you mentioned in your open letter to bring things completely back to where we started.
58:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned in your open letter that you're going to be teaching a public lecture series this fall.
58:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you give people any more detail about that or where how they'll be able to access that and when that all starts?
58:53
[SPEAKER_00]: What I will be doing is not the course on modern Middle East history, the fourteen week, twenty-eight lecture course on modern Middle East history that I would have taught at Columbia.
59:02
[SPEAKER_00]: What I will do is extract the part of that course on Palestine and Israel and give a series of lectures, six, eight, whatever, which will be free,
59:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And which will be hybrid so they will both be in person at the people's forum in New York City and Chelsea and available to a broader audience.
59:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And I probably call it a short course on Palestine or short course on Palestine, Palestinian history.
59:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm working out the details right now.
59:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm putting together the syllabus as we speak.
59:35
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time this airs, I may actually have more details.
59:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And the people's forum would actually be able to post dates.
59:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But you can follow on their website whenever the details are posted.
59:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The course will be free, but we will solicit donations from the in person and the virtual audience for in support of Gaza and universities.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_00]: all the book sales, all the revenue from the book sales, but the people's forums part and my part and other authors part with their permission will go to helping rebuild Gaza University.
1:00:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Something which no university in the United States has opened its mouth about the destruction of every single university in Gaza, another disgrace for American academia.
1:00:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I'll be doing.
1:00:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The details should be known by certainly by the beginning of September.
1:00:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll probably be either late September or October.
1:00:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be doing other things of this sort.
1:00:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to teach in these universities any.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just go out and do what I can do.
1:00:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't have the kind of technical savvy that would be necessary to put it together as a podcast, but I'll do something that will be available to larger numbers of people than the very few people who get admitted to Columbia or got admitted to Chicago when I taught there.
1:00:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And the objective
1:00:57
[SPEAKER_00]: will be to, you know, give people free education.
1:01:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you'll have to buy the books if they want to buy the books, but otherwise it'll be free.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they want to donate to support the rebuilding of Cousin University, that's there, as they're prerogative.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I also have the recordings of my last last year's last false modern military history.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_00]: lectures.
1:01:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be releasing those at some stage.
1:01:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So people will be able to have access to the last time I taught the course of Columbia.
1:01:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, I'll try and see if I can make that free.
1:01:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't gotten any of the details on that.
1:01:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea will be if anybody wants to contribute again, the money would go to Gaza in the worst years.
1:01:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think we'd be happy to help get the word out about this stuff when there are details available, whether it's by the time this interview airs or beyond that, just let us know.
1:01:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And as always, we are, you haven't open invitation to come back any time you want to do anything.
1:01:57
[SPEAKER_02]: No, I really would.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_02]: We're always happy to have you.
1:01:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm working on another book.
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_00]: As soon as that book is closer to being finished, Britain, Ireland, and Palestine.
1:02:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you'll find an audience for that.
1:02:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Excellent.
1:02:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, definitely.
1:02:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nowhere near being finished.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we're still.
1:02:13
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to keep going.
1:02:14
[SPEAKER_02]: So classic academic story.
1:02:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Less, less Danny makes a makes it as a screenwriter.
1:02:20
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to.
1:02:21
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to keep going.
1:02:23
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what she's having.
1:02:24
[SPEAKER_00]: You can make a good film out of.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, the Britain's energy.
1:02:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I got a couple of stars for you.
1:02:30
[SPEAKER_00]: A couple of real real villains who would, you know, I can I can see the amnesia and I can see couple real couple British actors.
1:02:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice couple of these rally actors now.
1:02:44
[SPEAKER_00]: There you go.
1:02:45
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, well, we will let you go, but thank you so much again, Rashid Khalid for your time and, you know, best of luck with the course and everything that you're planning and the book.
1:02:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I said, we're happy to have you back any time.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The pleasure.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Derek and thanks again.
1:03:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope to be honored.
1:03:25
[UNKNOWN]: you