Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
This is the problem, you’re talking about people, not crimes. Talk about the crime. Genocide is a crime. Enabling genocide is less clear. I voted for Biden, does that make me a genocide enabler? The factory worker who builds aluminum shells for bombs? The Israeli school child making care packages for soldiers as a school project?
When you reduce people to a single crime, it’s easier to paint with a wide brush, and it becomes easier to decide that all need to be punished equally. It’s like the people who call Hamas “terrorists” and decide all Hamas supporters deserve death. Treating all “Zionists” the same lends credence to the very argument that Israel is using to justify its own genocide. So are you a genocide enabler?
I’ve been called a Zionist for saying that Israel exists. I don’t support the Israeli government, I don’t support the genocide, I don’t support my country supporting it, and I don’t support the claim over the land. But a professor 20 miles from my house thinks I am the same as a violent racist.
That’s how you lose the high ground. You talk about people as criminals, and say they are bad people. All people have the capacity to be good or bad, but most people are just trying to survive the circumstances of their existence. It is their actions, their choices, that are good or bad, and if we focus on that, we can help people do better. Bad choices can be improved. Bad people can only be killed.
I’m not reducing them to anything. This is what they are. Genocidal colonists and genocide enablers. Just because some of them are more polite or friendly doesn’t change it. Saying anything else is just an insult to Jews like this professor who are from all over the world and have the guts to call them out on it.
Genocide is just about the worst crime we have a name for. So, what should be done with genocide enablers? Do they deserve death? Torture? Do they deserve civil rights? A chance to vote? Should they be denied healthcare? Denied commercial services? Should they be denied an education? Or are they merely deserving of scorn and to be ostracized? What’s the punishment for all the genocide enablers who are as bad as racists and murderers?
Same thing we do to any individual who helps someone else conduct a serious crime. Charge them as an accessory. Mocking and shaming should be a minimum at least.
So a Zionist is convicted as an accessory to genocide. What’s the punishment for the crime?
There’s a historical precedent to convict war criminals. It’s called the Nuremberg trials.
I was asking your opinion. To my knowledge, none of the types of genocide enablers I mentioned were prosecuted in Nuremberg. You think the Jewish coeds from rural PA deserve a trip to the Hague?
The Nuremberg trials established that a person was responsible for their own actions and that if an organization was found to be criminal, then you could bring forward individuals part of the organization to be charged. Now tell me, if someone has all the evidence in the world thrown at them and chooses to ignore it all and advocate for an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing. Would you deem them innocent or guilty?
It’s weird when someone makes my point for me in the form of a question. I’m not sure how to respond to you, because clearly the answer is guilty in the scenario you’ve described. My point is that you think that’s the scenario that exists, and everyone who doesn’t agree with you is equally guilty.
You’re creating a scenario where the school child is as guilty as the school teacher and the politician and the factory worker and the airplane mechanic and the average citizen, all of them are the same amount of guilty to you because none of them threw off the constraints of their circumstances and took up arms against society itself.
And you’re unwilling to answer a simple, straightforward question because you know the answer reveals your prejudice. What should the punishment be? The school child, the laborer, the politician, and the soldier. All of them deserve death, because genocide is the absolute worst crime, and it should be stopped by any means necessary. That’s how “good” people justify bad things. It’s how Netanyahu is justifying the genocide of Palestinians right now, only he calls them terrorists.
Israel is engaged in a genocide, and they should be stopped. But killing all Israelis is not going to end the violence. Demonizing all the people who aren’t protesting the genocide will not end the violence. Labels and insults and demagogeury will only prolong and extend the suffering.
And if you’re a college professor, you really ought to know better.
Let’s throw them a parade.