Unprofessional Professor

My Right Word

In the New York Review of Books, that bastion of liberal progressivism and intellectualized book reviews, David Shulman - the Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an activist in Ta’ayush and someone I've noted previously - starts off his piece on Jerusalem, Two Marches, Two Futures for Jerusalem, with that smug phrase "everyone knows" when actually, no one really does. Here:

One of the oddities of life in Jerusalem is that everyone knows where the future border will run between the Palestinian East and the Israeli West—despite the tiresome insistence of the Israeli government that the city will never again be divided. For example, north of the Old City the line will correspond more or less to what is now called Road Number One, a four-lane road that runs roughly north to south until it reaches the Walls of the Old City, where it turns sharply west just before the Damascus Gate. I drive this road several times a week on the way up to my office at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, and the dividing line between Palestinian and Israeli neighborhoods couldn’t be more clear. On the left side of the road, heading north, are the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods Me’a Shearim and Beit Yisra’el; across the street, on the right side of the road, is the well-known Palestinian neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah and the principal Palestinian shopping street, Salah ed-Din.



As anyone can tell you, Shulman's borders are ridiculous. If Road Number One becomes a border, which it won't, no more Hebrew University or Hadassah Hospital.

Commenting on the ugly shouts by a few dozen hooligans, he concludes:

...sadly, it looks very much as if the current wave of racist hysteria is only gaining strength in Israel. Moreover, as is usually the case with modern nationalism, the political center and the more moderate right show no signs of attempting to hold back the tide [that is a lie]. Indeed, a number of members of the government, which is in any case dominated by settler parties, regularly contribute to the inflammatory rhetoric. What’s left of the old Israeli left is fragmented, diminished, and politically ineffectual.



He even assumes that

Something quite new is under way in Palestine...



And even purports that:

A Mediterranean variant of Gandhian-style mass protest has by now taken root among Palestinian communities in several parts of the West Bank: Ma’asara, Nabi Saleh, Dir Kadis, Na’alin, and Bil’in, to mention only a few. There is by now a clear awareness among many that non-violent resistance is far more likely to be effective against the Israeli occupation than violence; and these days the humane principles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King are frequently and clearly articulated in Arabic by grass-roots Palestinian leaders.

and

Non-violent resistance is also the official policy of the Palestinian government in Ramallah.


But backtracks quickly:

No one would claim that all Palestinian factions have renounced violence, but spokesmen for the government in Ramallah have argued, with some justice, that the recent Fatah-Hamas rapprochement reflects a recognition by Hamas that they have failed and that the non-violent strategy of the moderates is working.


And sums up:

Here, then, is the other future for Jerusalem, the alternative to the settlers’ program. On one side, we have a violent, mystically charged racism with its vision of brute domination of one people by another, and of an endgame of perpetual disenfranchisement and dispossession. On the other side, we have the prospect of a free Palestine, with its capital in East Jerusalem, the end of the Occupation, and the realistic hope of an agreement based on compromise and mutuality, an agreement whose details are by now common knowledge and broadly acceptable to a majority on both sides of the Green Line (it is one of the paradoxes of Israeli politics that Israelis consistently elect governments far to the right of their own positions, while polls continue to show that about two-thirds of Israelis support an agreement along the lines everyone knows are feasible). You’d think it would be an easy choice.


You'd think a professor was more intelligent and more ethical in his political commentary. At least more professional.