This lengthy essay by two leading US professors challenges the world of academic publishing. They identify the symptoms of a ‘widespread institutional corruption that extends far beyond the debates over the Middle East’: the move of disciplines and journals from textual interpretation and scholarship to politics and polemic; the fundamental breakdown in the peer review process in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, as publishers with a strong anti-Zionist bias submit manuscripts to highly sympathetic anti-Zionist readers who laud the manuscript’s ‘courage’ and recommend publication, creating an anti-Zionist echo chamber increasingly free from some traditional scholarly controls, including fact-checking; and, not least, the spread of the terminology of a body of theory ‘marshalled in the service of preexisting political convictions’ and taking on ‘the character of sacred incantation’, the mere ‘deployment of its vocabulary’ taken as ‘sufficiently proving the case being made’. Their particular focus is the work of Saree Makdisi, but their target is contemporary academic culture itself.
INTRODUCTION[1]
Much debate by proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in academic and public spheres is not genuine debate but rather the promotion of accusations and slogans directed against the state of Israel. Efforts at making a detailed, fact-based case are far less common, even full-length books are often largely polemical. When arguments masquerade as fact-based, the facts are often in error. Examples of the latter include the detailed reports that investigative teams of established BDS advocates issued in 2016, the first on behalf of the American Anthropological Association, the second as part of the BDS advocacy group within the Modern Language Association.[2] In one respect at least, the effort to marshal evidence, rather than resort only to polemics, these reports were welcome. But they both actually marshalled misleading or false statements in support of a preconceived polemical mission. As representative examples, respectively, of political interventions by major interpretive social science and humanities organisations, they were deeply problematic—agenda-driven polemics masquerading as objective scholarship.
Fundamental questions for scholars are at stake: What should be the standards of evidence for political propositions for disciplines in which those standards are poorly understood, rarely consensual, and even non-existent? What standards should guide the differences between citing factual evidence and citing opinion? Should there be an obligation to examine counter-evidence and opposing views? Humanities faculty, certainly, are not well educated in interpreting, evaluating, or countering political interventions, or in how to counter confirmation bias.
A case in point is Saree Makdisi’s December 2017 Critical Inquiry (CI) essay ‘Apartheid / Apartheid / [ ],’ which is his most up-to-date and comprehensive statement on Israel and Zionism. We will focus on that essay but draw in arguments from Makdisi’s other publications from the last dozen years.[3] Makdisi’s three full-length essays in Critical Inquiry are part of the journal’s recent dedication to making anti-Zionism part of its mission and identity. When W.J.T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry, wrote to Russell Berman inviting a response to Makdisi’s essay, an invitation that led to this more extensive analysis, he described it as ‘a serious, well documented scholarly essay,’ by which one can only conclude he meant ‘It has lots of footnotes.’ But whether either those footnotes or the essay itself, which is rife with undocumented assertion, actually proves anything is another matter. It is also clear that CI, like most humanities journals, apparently has no tradition of fact checking, since a substantial number of Makdisi’s claims cannot survive such a review. Makdisi himself criticises ‘the ability to cherry-pick what one wants to see and to steer well clear of inconvenient data’ (27). That principle should have led him to interrogate his own practices more rigorously; as we show below, while he often tells such a selective story, he is also often simply in error. Put bluntly, he gets facts wrong. As it happened, Mitchell restricted us to 5,000 words, a word limit we could not accept, feeling that we needed to provide a response about the same length as Makdisi’s own essay.[4]
CI willingly published a wide array of his flawed evidence. It seems obvious thatCI did so because its editor W. J. T. Mitchell agrees with Makdisi’s conclusions. Mitchell only publicly endorsed an academic boycott of Israel in 2016, but he has been a vehement public opponent of the Jewish state since 1999, when he published ‘Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness’ in Critical Inquiry.[5] Had Makdisi’s essay appeared in a less prestigious venue, it might reasonably have been ignored. But Critical Inquiry retains its reputation as the most prestigious vehicle of the professional age of theory that came to the fore in the 1970s. Whether it deserves to retain that reputation is another matter: it has become a vehicle for BDS advocacy and rationalisation, including making its blog a site where people could announce their resignation from the Modern Language Association in protest of the organisation’s vote to reject an academic boycott of Israel.
We are focusing on Makdisi here, but we not addressing those of his arguments that are widespread in the pro-BDS literature and that we have addressed in detail elsewhere. Those include the decisively disproven claim that the BDS movement targets only institutions, not individuals, and the long-running dispute over whether Jews or Arabs are the true indigenous people of the area. It should be clear to most observers that the Jewish people have both an ancient and a modern claim to the land, but we believe both peoples have valid historical and psychological investments in the Holy Land and that both should see their national ambitions fulfilled.[6] Several of Makdisi’s key arguments here, as we will note when appropriate, appear in much briefer form in his 2010 Critical Inquiry essay ‘The Architecture of Erasure.’[7]
We are replying at length to Makdisi in what follows not only to address those of his central arguments to which he gives a distinctive twist, namely the claim that Israel is an apartheid and racist state not only comparable to but worse in its practices than South Africa, but also because this reply may serve as a timely challenge to disciplines and journals that are increasingly moving from textual interpretation to politics. Whatever Critical Inquiry’s practices may be, there is also a fundamental breakdown in the peer review process in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. A publisher — the University of California Press and the University of Minnesota Press are telling examples — with a strong anti-Zionist bias submits a manuscript to a highly sympathetic reader who lauds the manuscript’s ‘courage’ and recommends publication. This is symptomatic of a widespread institutional corruption that extends far beyond the debates over the Middle East.
The other major pattern in humanities debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that they divide starkly into attacks on or defenses of Israel. Disinterested reviews of evidence are difficult to find in some disciplines. Makdisi’s essay unfortunately falls without reservation into the attack category. That leads to yet another fundamental question: what purpose do either polemical essays or polemical essays dressed up with footnotes actually serve? Makdisi seeks unreservedly to demonise Israel. The only way his absolute rejectionism could enhance the peace process is if it were to lead Jews to abandon their homeland or cede it to Arab rule. Since neither will happen, a delegitimisation project simply enhances the frozen or deteriorating status quo.
We should make clear that we are certainly not claiming disinterestedness ourselves. We both believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state whose founding principles rest on justice and equality for Jews, Arabs, and other peoples. But we also work hard to be factually correct, something that publication venues with area expertise facilitate with their own fact checking. In texts as dense with factual references as both our and Makdisi’s essays, errors creep in easily. Checking and rechecking and questioning all evidence that says what you want it to say is the only corrective strategy. Makdisi however claims to speak with the voice of unquestioning infallibility. How the consistent refusal of self-interrogation comports with a notional program of critical inquiry is a matter the journal’s editorial board might consider.
