Suchergebnisse

Gaza in the distance I have spent most of my career engaged in the five d's of dodgeball when it comes to the Mideast and especially the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Despite starting my career with the international relations of ethnic conflict, I managed a total of one piece of research on the Mideast, and that was more by accident than by design.  I got asked to join an edited volume project by a terrific Mideast scholar, Shibley Telhami, after one of my very best job talks (which did not produce a job).    Bomb shelter next to a kindergarten if I remember correctlyWhen I turned to doing civil-military relations, I was asked if I was including Israel in my multi-democracy study, and I said nope.  I have a better explanation for that--that as a very militarized society, its' civil-military relations are far less comparable.  Bus stop, shelter in a town that was probably overrun last weekendBut on the ethnic conflict side?  Maybe I refrained because the one time I raised it as an illustration in a job talk, it did not go well.  That lesson was certainly reinforced by the experience of teaching US Foreign Policy the semester the US invaded Iraq. That class quickly divided into pro and anti factions based on how the students identified with one side or the other of the Israel-Palestine conflict.   Perhaps it is because of a conflict between my background/identity and my scholarly work.  I often joked that the three things I learned in Hebrew school were: enough Hebrew (barely) to get through my Bar Mitzvah, much about the Holocaust and the history of oppression of the Jews, and that Israel was empty before the Jews got there and everything Israel does is right.  The last is the most relevant although the second obviously hits hard when more Jews died in one day due to violence this weekend than any other time since the Holocaust apparently.  I definitely was miseducated about the history of Israel.  I was also conflicted about my upbringing since I hated Hebrew school (I never fit in or came close), never believed in the religion, and came to realize my identity as Jew is defined by the reality that Nazis would have included me in their roundups no matter what I believe.  That is, identity is not defined by oneself but by the interaction of oneself with others, and as long as folks saw me as Jewish, it was less relevant what I believed.Open air prison ....So, that ambivalence then hits the stuff I have picked up from the work on ethnic conflict.  I can see via those lenses that ancient hatred is not really what is going here, but political dynamics in Israel and in the Palestinian community.  There is outbidding and pandering to extremists in both, which then feed the outbidding and pandering in the other.  Netanyahu feeds Hamas, and Hamas feeds Netanyahu.  When I visited in 2019, my first visit, as part of a group tour of IR scholars, I got to see how much has been locked in, that bad decisions beget bad decisions.  That Israeli generals told me that the only response to violence is to hit harder than they hit you, as if this were Chicago with the Untouchables fighting Capone.  I could see their point of view, but again, it was a path to more violence.  I left Israel, like many of those on the trip, sad and frustrated--that the future of Israel and of the Palestinians was bleak--that there was no way out and no one in or near power was interested in finding one.  And this happens.So, I see people saying that an unprovoked Israel deserves all of our support.  And I have to recoil a bit, as Israel has done a shit ton of provoking via its empowering of rabid settlers who have encroached on the Mosque and engaged in lots of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.  But I also recoil when I hear folks talk about Hamas being part of anti-colonial struggle, as, yes, the Palestinians do have legitimate grievances, but Hamas is an awful, theocratic, maybe nihilist entity that did truly barbaric things.  Yet, I also know that Israel is going to kill a lot of Palestinian kids in Gaza since, yes, the population of Gaza is about 50% under 18.  War crimes do not justify war crimes.  And more violence is not going cause this conflict to go away.  Pretty sure those towers are now destroyedBoth sides need far better governance, actors who don't benefit from the other side being radicalized.  But the institutions and dynamics of each are perverse and reinforcing.  I hope that Netanyahu pays a high price for letting this happen on his watch, but I seriously doubt that Israeli politics is going to move to the center as a result.  The flavors of the more successful parties in Israel are all variants of far right.  The left/center was broken by the second Intifada, and I doubt that these events will resurrect them.  I know less and understand less the Palestinian side, but I am pretty sure that air strikes are not going to lead to moderates taking power.  So, I have rambled without reaching a clear idea of who should do what. Which is probably fitting.  And also explains why I have been reluctant to discuss this stuff--not just a bad job talk in 1993, but because the reality is so difficult, twisted, and painful.Update:I got into a conversation with my sister during the weekly family zoom, and she pressed me on when have ethnic conflicts ended peacefully rather than through conquest.  I gave the easy answer: South Africa.  But that conversation reminded me of the basic rules of ethnic conflict:Most ethnic groups, no matter their history, are at peace: violence is rare.When there is violence, it ends. No place is constantly at war forever.The past constrains choices but does not determine the present.  It is up to today's politicians to decide what to do, and the incentives the structures/systems provide influence but do not determine.  Agency remains.Which means it didn't have to be this way, it didn't have to happen this weekend, while there are dynamics locking the parties in, those dynamics can be resisted, and, yes, outsiders could play some role in either exacerbating or ameliorating the nasty dynamics.

 Troll is a fairly entertaining movie (but that is not what this post is about)To repeat something I have said before, if,  as it has often been claimed, philosophy begins with Socrates then it also begins with its particular antagonism, its particular anti-philosophy in the sophist and sophistry. It seems to me that if one wanted to read the history of philosophy in this way, with a founding event and founding antagonism, then one might want to consider who is our anti-philosopher today, who is the contemporary equivalent of the sophist? The answer would seem to have to be the troll. This is my preamble to what is now becoming an ongoing discussion of Florida's vanguard fight against knowledge and reason; or more to the point, destruction of knowledge and truth in order to preserve whiteness.  As it was revealed recently, the new curriculum of black history in Florida teaches middle schoolers that "slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." There is so much to unpack about this claim, as they say in grad school. First, there is the assumption that the people captured from Africa had no skills, no knowledge, no history, nothing but their bodies and skin. Such a claim not only follows from the mythology of a Dark Continent, outside of civilization and history, it confuses an effect from a cause. The people who became slaves were stripped of their knowledge, culture, and social relations. What Orlando Patterson calls a social death was also the reduction of a person to pure labor power, to a capacity to work and nothing else, an animate tool, as Aristotle put it. Second, as the architects of this change doubled down on this claim, since that is what trolls do, providing a list of individuals who gained "valuable job skills" during their "unpaid internship" on a plantation, they provided a list of mostly false claims, listing individuals who were never enslaved, or, in the case of Booker T. Washington, learned literacy and other skills after their emancipation. This "feel good" story about slavery is, like so many feel good stories about history, just not true. Of course there might be a case, or even a few, of people who learned a valuable skill during slavery--it could have happened. That does not defend the claim, or, more importantly does not defend its inclusion in a curriculum. It is, I would argue, an example of exception trolling, in which an isolated case or incident is used to obscure or confuse a general or structural tendency. Focusing on these isolated or unique cases, which often appeal to an anecdotal way of thinking that is predominant in our culture, is used to obscure what is generally the case. I would argue that part of gaining knowledge, part of thinking, is understanding the difference between an exception and a rule. Once, when I was in sixth grade, I think, I had the job of feeding the school's snake, a python or boa constrictor. I dropped the live rat in the tank with the snake, watched the snake coil and strike, and saw the rat bite the snake in the eye, blood spurting everywhere, eventually killing it. (This is probably why feeding live animals to snakes is no longer recommended. Not only is it cruel; It is also potential risky). This happened, I saw it with my own eyes, but I would still say that snakes kill and eat rats, and not the other way around. Exceptions exist as do rules, and the former does not negate the latter. Exception trolling is a persistent strategy of trolling, in which exceptions are made to obscure or conceal rules.I should say, as something of an aside, that this exception trolling has one of its conditions the transformation of all knowledge into discrete bits of information, facts, that can be found, cited and circulated independent of context, conditions, and larger implications. Joseph Vogl's book Capitalism and Ressentiment does an interesting job of charting the history of the current regime of contextless and thoughtless information, but that is for another time. (I just finished a review of that book.) In this reduction of all knowledge to isolated facts and bits of information any discussion of meaning or significance of this or that fact, its place within history or a system of values is impossible. As the clip below makes clear, anyone arguing against the claim that slaves learned skills is either an idiot or lying. Meaning, significance, and importance disappear in the absolute binary of facts. One exception is all that it takes to disprove any claim about systemic discrimination, exploitation, or marginalization. This is why the exception troll has a well stocked set of links and tabs of these exceptions, "reverse racism," false claims of sexual harassment,  happy slaves, etc., It is not facts and logic, as is often claimed, but the logic of the (singular and isolated) fact. This raises the question, what goal does this trolling serve? I think that trolling has to be understood as not just a failure to think, to distinguish exceptions from rules, but as itself the articulation of its own logic. In other words, trolling must be read symptomatically. It is necessary to see what is being said in what is not being said, or what is not being said by being said. In some sense these remarks about the virtues of slavery, and, if you watch the clip above, the holocaust could be understood as the culmination of "negative solidarity." Even the slave, the denizen of the concentration camp, cannot complain, they are gaining valuable job training, they just have to make themselves useful and everything will turn out fine. There is nothing to criticize, nothing to complain about. (I see culmination because I cannot imagine something worse than someone saying "slavery was not that bad, they were gaining job skills," but what I can imagine and what monstrosities history can produce are two different things). As such it also can be considered the culmination of "right workerism." Work is the ultimate meaning and justification of existence, those who do not work not only do not eat, but do not have a right to exist. The arguments about slavery and the holocaust are not just horrible distortions of a horrible past, they are alibis for a darker future. One in which the worst possible jobs, or unpaid internships, are seen as building valuable skills, or, if there are no skills involved, developing a solid work ethic. Anyone who praises slavery is preparing for you to become a slave. 

Building a Home-Land: Zionism as a Regime of Housing 1860-2005by Yael AllweilDoctor of Philosophy in ArchitectureUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Nezar AlSayyad, ChairThe received study of Zionist practices largely disregards a cardinal aspect of Jewish nationalism: the role of housing in producing and inhabiting the home-land. This research identifies housing as the key site for the formation of subjects (Zionists) and place (Zion) and offers a new perspective on the history of Zionism as a massive housing project. It thus offers a complementing historiography to scholarly attempts to understand Israel through the specters of war (Morris, 2008), modernization of the orient (LeVine, 2005), colonization (Gregory, 2005), ethnicity (Yiftachel, 2005), gender (Boyarin, 1996) or the trauma of the holocaust (Wistrich, 1997). The framework I propose for discussing housing addresses it at the same time as an action (to house), scheme of action (set of policies, funding schemes etc), value system (a basic right, identity marker), architectural form (physical houses), and settlement (location and typology). It is thus deeply involved in attempts to form national identity and citizens-subjects. In addition, two cardinal questions involve the actors at hand: Who performs the act of housing, and who benefits from it? The modern nation state (Nairn, 2003) marks a shift of governance from kings supported by divine legitimacy, to rule legitimized "in the name of the people" (Bendix, 1978, Foucault, 1971). Housing of the common citizen is thus the key site for any modern nation-state to base and legitimize its rule (Castells et al, 1990, Goh, 2001), more so than the court or the parliament largely studied as the locus of nation building (Vale, 1992, Morton, 1989). As Foucault showed, the shift from absolutist-state to nation-state required the state to become an institution for governing modern subjects. Zionism's unique task to materialize a national home where none existed for millennia involved in addition connecting subjects and homeland in order to form a sovereign political entity legitimated by these people. This unique task was addressed by associating national home and individual housing (Kallus, 2005) and by the state assuming mediating role for the relationship between citizens and homeland (Nitzan-Shiftan, 2006). This dissertation explores the relationship between nation, citizens and housing by historical examination of Jewish nationalism as a regime of housing. My research unfolds the history of "good housing", used for producing a legitimate claim for the homeland and for designing good citizens. My archival research of texts and planning documents indicates that early Zionist leaders understood housing as the answer for both above challenges (Weiss, 1956, Ruppin, 2001, GenGurion, 1969) and defined the materialization of Jewish nationalism as a housing problem. My research process maps the history of housing phenomena based on previous research, locating pivotal cases serving as laboratories for "good housing": where the ideas and materiality of "good housing" were formed and re-thought. These laboratory case studies, among which are Kibbutz Degania, Ahuzat Bait, the Amidar Shack neighborhood of Ramla and others, are then studied as a housing issue by examining primary sources. Research methods include primarily archival research of texts and planning documents, as well as of visual documentations and textual descriptions of early dwelling environments. These are complemented with interviews with dwellers, planners and policy makers.

Seit längerem wird heftig darüber diskutiert, ob es in der DDR Antisemitismus gab. Einige VertreterInnen der Debatte weisen dies mit dem Hinweis darauf zurück, dass die DDR vor allem auf ihrem antifaschistischen Mythos fußte. Andere AutorInnen hingegen gehen davon aus, dass Antisemitismus bereits im spezifischen DDR-Antifaschismus, der die Shoah marginalisiere, selbst deutlich werde. Es gebe außerdem eine lange Tradition des antijüdischen Vorbehalts in der Arbeiterbewegung. Beide Sichtweisen sind ahistorisch und vernachlässigen die "deutschen" Kontinuitäten des ostdeutschen Staates. In der vorlegten überarbeiteten Magisterarbeit wird die Frage nach Antisemitismus auf die antizionistische AgitProp der DDR gerichtet; dies geschieht am Beispiel der Nahostberichterstattung des Neuen Deutschland (ND) während des Libanonkrieges 1982 und der "Intifada" 1987/88. Die Ergebnisse der Analyse werden in eine ideengeschichtliche Beziehung mit Lenins und Stalins Positionen hinsichtlich des Zionismus sowie mit den stalinistischen Verfolgungen der 1950er Jahre gesetzt. Die AgitProp wird ebenso vor dem Hintergrund betrachtet, dass die DDR eine der Nachfolgegesellschaften des "Dritten Reiches" war. 1982 erreichte die Radikalität der antizionistischen AgitProp ihren Höhepunkt. Im Rahmen der Leninschen Imperialismustheorie wurde Israel seit 1967 als tendenziell "faschistisch" charakterisiert. Dieses Motiv verradikalisierte sich 1982 zu einer Empörung, in der es zu einer regelrechten Gleichsetzung der israelischen Politik mit dem NS kam. Man warf Israel etwa vor, "einen Vernichtungskrieg" zu führen, der die "Endlösung des Palästinenserproblems" herbeiführen solle. Im Jahre 1988 kam es dagegen, trotz neuerlicher Eskalationen im Nahostkonflikt während der "Intifada", zu einem Wandel in der Berichterstattung. Zeitgleich mit einer ungewohnt positiven Darstellung jüdischer Organisationen entschärfte sich im ND der Ton bezüglich Nahost. Die Analyse, der eine notwendige theoretische Bestimmung des Antisemitismus-Phänomens vorausgeht, zeigt, dass die antizionistische AgitProp im ND vor allem auf die geschichtsrelativierenden Befindlichkeiten der ostdeutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft eingeht und sich z.T. aus dem Stichwortkatalog der Staatslehre des Marxismus-Leninismus bedient. ; In the last two decades there has been an intensive debate concerning the question whether anti-Semitism existed in the German Democratic Republic. Referring to the fact that the GDR was primarily based on their anti-fascist myth, some participants of the debate deny the existence of this phenomenon in East Germany. In opposite to them, there are others who claim that anti-Semitism indeed existed not despite, but because of the East German anti-fascism, which marginalized the Holocaust. This anti-fascism, they say, is a result of a long tradition of anti-Jewish prejudices in the labour movement. Both approaches have proven to be ahistorical because they both ignore the influence of German continuities in the GDR. My research focuses on the anti-Zionism in the newspaper "Neues Deutschland" with its media coverage of the Middle East Conflict during the Lebanon war in 1982 and the "Intifada" in 1987/88. In order to classify the media coverage according to the scientific method of "history of ideas", my research compares it to Leninist and Stalinist approaches towards the idea of a Jewish state. Furthermore I analyse the press content in comparison to the Stalinist cleansings in the 1950s and examine the GDR as one of the successor societies of the "Third Reich". In 1982 the anti-Zionistic propaganda in the GDR reached its highest peak. Following the Leninist Imperialism-Theory, Israel was categorized as a tendencially "fascist" state since 1967. In 1982 this motive led to the identification of Israel with the NS-regime. The press pretended that Israel would fight a "war of extermination" against Palestinians in order to accomplish a so-called "Final Solution of the Palestinian Question". In 1988 - while the Middle East Conflict escalated again as a result of the "Intifada"- the media coverage had gone through a remarkable change. Coinciding with an unusual positive representation of Jewish organizations, the attitude towards the Middle East Conflict was then reduced to a more diplomatic ton. This analysis which is primarily based on a theoretical classification of the term "anti-Semitism" shows in the end that the anti-Zionistic propaganda in "Neues Deutschland" - which used partly the tags and vocabularies of the state official Marxism-Leninism - tried to satisfy the (East) German needs to suppress history.

Book of the Disappeared confronts worldwide human rights violations of enforced disappearance and genocide and explores the global quest for justice with forceful, outstanding contributions by respected scholars, expert practitioners, and provocative contemporary artists. This profoundly humane book spotlights our historic inhumanity while offering insights for survival and transformation.

I. Symbolische Gesten. Reue, Vergebung und Sühne : der Beitrag der symbolischen Gesten zu Verständigung und Versöhnung / Anne Bazin -- "Te Deum" : Konrad Adenauer und Charles de Gaulle in Reims 1962 / Andreas Linsenmann -- Kniefall vor der Geschichte : Willy Brandt in Warschau 1970 / Andreas Wilkens -- "Hand in Hand" : François Mitterand und Helmut Kohl in Verdun 1984 / Reiner Marcowitz -- Bitburg-(k)eine Geste der Versöhnung : zur Ambivalenz von Versöhnen und Erinnern beim Staatsbesuch Ronald Reagans in der Bundesrepublik 1985 / Pia Nordblom -- Friedensgruss von Kreisau 1989 : eine Geste als Versprechen / Annemarie Franke, Dominik Kretschmann -- "Brücken der Freundschaft" zwischen der DDR und Polen : "Völkerfreundschaft" : eine "andere" Geste der Versöhnung? / Ulrich Pfeil

Dr. Ken Hanson, Yad Vashem graduate and associate professor in the Judaic Studies Program of the University of Central Florida, performs as Martin Niemoller, the famous German theologian who was ultimately arrested by the Nazis and who authored the famous quotation:When they came for the communists, I remained silent; because I was not a communist.When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; because I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.