Anti-Zionism is a hateful ideology. It has no place at UC

April 7, 2016

Originally published on 03/23/2016

Last week, a UC Regents working group released a proposed set of Principles Against Intolerance, created in response to a series of anti-Semitic incidents on UC campuses. On March 23, the Regents will vote on whether to officially adopt those principles. Controversially, the document not only condemns anti-Semitism, but also anti-Zionism.

We asked UC faculty members to argue for and against the statement. Read the opposing view here.

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As a professor at UCLA since 1969 and a witness to the rapid deterioration of our campus climate, I believe the working group’s statement is a genuine attempt to deal with a lingering problem that has caused Jewish students and their allies a great deal of agony, interfered with their studies and severely tarnished the reputation of our university system.

Some critics, including the Los Angeles Times editorial board, object to the statement because “it conflates anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.”

That’s not the case. A careful reading reveals that exactly the opposite is true; the statement explicitly separates the two issues, saying: “Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”

The statement, in other words, condemns anti-Zionism not because it closely mimics anti-Semitism, but on its own terms — and rightly so.

Anti-Semitism targets Jews as individuals; anti-Zionism targets Jews as a people. Anti-Semitism would deny Jews equal standing as human beings; anti-Zionism would ban Israel from equal membership in the family of nations.

If we examine anti-Zionist ideology closely, we see that its aims are: to uproot one people, the Jewish people, from its homeland, to take away its ability to defend itself in sovereignty, and to delegitimize its historical identity. It is racist and fundamentally eliminationist.

Existing UC guidelines opposing anti-Semitism are grossly inadequate in curbing the current wave of anti-Jewish hostilities on campuses, which by and large are directed not against those who practice their religion but against those suspected of supporting Israel.

For instance, the words “Zionists should be sent to the gas chamber” were found on a bathroom wall at UC Berkeley in March 2015.Anti-Jewish factions on UC campuses and elsewhere defend themselves by saying: “I love Jews, it is only the Zionist Jews that I hate.” But that’s a hateful cliche, and a nonsensical one. They’re attempting to separate Jews from the defining symbol of their historical identity, which is impossible.

Another line of attack against the working group’s statement is that it will harm free speech. Again, that’s not the case.

The 1st Amendment protects anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and white supremacist speech; nevertheless, it’s socially unacceptable to vent racist views publicly. Just so, the UC regents have not banned anti-Semitic, Islamophobic or white supremacist speech, and do not propose to ban anti-Zionist speech; rather, the regents rightly want to make it clear that the latter is beyond the pale of civil discourse.

So if the regents adopt the principles against intolerance, they won’t officially restrict free expression. But, and here is an important distinction, they will send a message to the community that anti-Zionism, like Islamophobia and other hateful ideologies, has “no place,” culturally, “at the University of California.”

Some critics object to comparing Zionophobia with Islamophobia, as I have, arguing that Zionism is a political belief while Islam is a religion. In the modern court of ethics, however, religion does not have a monopoly on human sensitivity. That is to say, religions are not entitled to a greater protection from discrimination than other identity-forming narratives, including those based on race, gender, national origin or historical lore.

On UC campuses today we find a glaring imbalance: Islamophobia is considered a great sin, while Zionophobia is considered politically cutting-edge, almost cool, like Maoism in the 1960s.

The regents report now reminds us that Zionism has a moral dimension to it that goes beyond political opinion. Zionism sustains the lives, creativity, dignity and identity of millions of peace-seeking and war-weary human beings. To assert that Israel should not exist is, then, not merely controversial, like asserting that the income tax should not exist; it is also thoroughly annihilating and thoroughly inappropriate on UC campuses.

Judea Pearl is Chancellor’s professor at UCLA, specializing in artificial intelligence and human reasoning. He is the president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son.

AUTHOR

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv and is a graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He came to the United States for postgraduate work in 1960, and the following year he received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering, now New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 1965, he simultaneously received a master’s degree in physics from Rutgers University and a PhD from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, now Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Until 1969, he held research positions at RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey and Electronic Memories, Inc. Hawthorne, California.

Pearl joined the faculty of UCLA in 1969, where he is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. He is the author of more than 350 scientific papers and three landmark books in his fields of interest: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000; 2009).

A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pearl is the recipient of numerous scientific prizes, including three awarded in 2011: the Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning; the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition, and the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Other honors include the 2001 London School of Economics Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science for the best book in the philosophy of science, the 2003 ACM Allen Newell Award for “seminal contributions that extend to philosophy, psychology, medicine, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and social science”, and the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute.

Pearl is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which he co-founded with his family in February 2002 “to continue Daniel’s life-work of dialogue and understanding and to address the root causes of his tragedy.” The Daniel Pearl Foundation sponsors journalism fellowships aimed at promoting honest reporting and East-West understanding, organizes worldwide concerts that promote inter-cultural respect, and sponsors public dialogues between Jews and Muslims to explore common ground and air grievances. The Foundation received Search for Common Ground’s Award For Promoting Cross-Cultural Understanding in 2002 and the 2003 Roger E. Joseph Prize for its “distinctive contribution to humanity.”

Judea Pearl and his wife Ruth Pearl are co-editors of the book “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl,” winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for Anthologies, which provides a panoramic view of how Jews define themselves in the post 9/11 era.

Professors Pearl and Akbar Ahmed (American University), the founders of the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding, were co-winners in 2006 of the Civic Ventures’ inaugural Purpose Prize, which honors individuals 60 or older who have demonstrated uncommon vision in addressing community and national problems.

Pearl lectures throughout the United States on topics including:

1. I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl

2. Being Western, American and Jewish in the Post 9/11 Era

3. Creating Dialogue between Muslims and Jews

4. The Ideological War on Terror

5. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Case for Co-Existence

He has written commentaries about these topics for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jeddah), and the Jerusalem Post. He writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and is frequently interviewed on major TV and radio stations.

Read all stories by Judea Pearl