Dissidents in Action: UC Santa Barbara Professor Challenges Students' Thinking on Gaza

Duke Helfand of The Los Angeles Times reported today that University of California Santa Barbara sociology professor, William I Robinson sent an email to his students containing "more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip."

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw--a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians," wrote Robinson in the email. "We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide."

Two Jewish students dropped the class and filed a complaint with the UC Santa Barbara, on advice from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Both the center and the Anti-Defamation League have characterized Robinson as an anti-Semite. Big surprise: that's how they characterize anyone that expresses disapproval over Israeli policy. The first problem with such an accusation is that it's no more anti-Semitic to critique Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza than it is anti-American to criticize the torture of detainees in Guantanimo. The second problem the accusation is that Robinson is a Jew. A self-loathing Jew, perhaps? Hardly. I don't consider myself to be a self-loathing American, and I speak out on Gitmo constantly. Germans are, of course, expected to speak out against the Holocaust; is that anti-German? Are white South Africans who speak out against Apartheid anti-white?

The charge of anti-semitism is damned silly and those who make it against Robinson would do well to remember the words of Hermann Goering, who used the same tool on an unsuspecting Germany:

"[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Although I am not a Jew, I reject the notion that my criticisms of the Israeli policy on the Palestinians is in any way anti-Semitic. It's not even anti-Israel. Like Robinson, I have compared the ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza right now with the Nazis marginalizing and terrorizing the Jewish people, first in Germany, and then later througout Europe. And while the truth is that the current Israeli Gaza policy is nearer to South African Apartheid than the Holocaust, it seems to be escalating rapidly. Having corralled 1.5 million people in an area that's about 139 square miles (less than 15% the size of California's bustling Orange County, home to just over 3 million people), the Israel has gone beyond its historic treatment of the Palestinians, which more closely paralleled South African Apartheid (Olmert referred to treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank as a "pogrom"), thus justifying Robinson's characterization of Gaza as "Israel's Warsaw." And while Israel has yet to begin a program of rapid extermination, its slow, relentless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the population of Israel has been going on for far too long to be dismissed as unintentional or accidental.

This post is written in defense of a Jew; a man of conscience who has the courage to ask his students, Jew and non-Jew alike, to distinguish between what governments claim they do in the name of their people and what a free people must do when polities lead an otherwise well-intentioned people astray. There is a reason Professor Robinson mentions Nazis in the context of the Gaza offensive, written in the blood of his own people: NEVER AGAIN. Not just for Jews. Not just for Russians or Poles or Gypsies or homosexuals who were imprisoned and enslaved and even exterminated by the same hate-fueled Nazi war machine that killed Jews, but for any ethnic group whose culture, religion or very existence presents a challenge to those who hold power.

Professor Robinson is in no wise anti-Semitic, and is, in fact completely innocent of such a baseless and foolish charge. On the contrary, William I. Robinson represents what is best and most admirable about Jewish people: he is a critical thinker and a conscientious individual, one that clearly thinks highly of Israel, else why would he expect better of it? Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, wasn't a bully, but he hunted them, caught them and brought them back to Israel for something they'd never given their victims: a trial. It is, therefore, a sad accident of history that his name is used to bully a man whose criticisms seek to pull a nation back from the precipice, poised on the edge of the abyss1.

1. "Whoever battles with monsters had better see that it does not turn him into a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you" (Friedrich Nietzche).