Truth about conflict: misrepresentation of the middle east
Professor Nicholas Roberts
Visiting Assitant Professor in History
The recent lecture by Dr. Shlomo Aronson at Carroll College addressed a number of topics that students in today’s world need to understand: the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian nuclear threat, and the ideology of political Islam. It is pity then that the talk was one-sided and boiled the complexity of the Middle East region to a series of caricatures.
While Israel was presented as having some problems it was morally and politically above reproach; the Palestinians, the Arabs, or the Muslims (and these terms were often used interchangeably) were peoples afflicted by ignorance, intolerance, and hatred. The use of the term “so-called Palestinians” early in the speech set the tone for a talk that dripped with disdain for the other side.
One would be wrong to assume that Aronson speaks for the general Israeli view or for Zionism, as he claimed to do in this speech. Having lived in Israel for three years, I can attest to the fact that there is a lively debate among politicians, intellectuals, media pundits, and average citizens about the peace process and Palestinian rights. Many Israeli Jews have empathy, if not a sympathy, for their Palestinian counterparts, even as they cherish the idea of a strong Jewish state. Few, certainly, would accept Aronson’s frequent refrain that the peace process “is not our problem,” a mantra that blamed the failure to find peace solely on the corruption and nihilism of Palestinian and Arab society.
Aronson’s attack on Islam was most distressing, for he suggested that the only hope for Arab societies to reform themselves was to discard Islam. There is a debate to be had about whether religion belongs in any political system, whether Arab, European, or American for that matter, but his criticism of Islam went much further than that. By reducing this complex and multifaceted religion to a faith of intolerance and ignorance, he reached the defamatory conclusion that Islam had no place in the modern world.
There is no requirement that an “expert” on the Middle East should be ecumenical, but the danger of presenting such a portrait of Islam on college campuses is that it may harden some of the preexisting prejudices students bring to campus. I’m sure that I was not the only person in the audience to feel that this kind of attack was more suited for a right-wing talk radio show than an academic setting.
I had attended a pleasant dinner held earlier in the night for Dr. Aronson and can report that he is an interesting and engaging dinner companion. It was thus with a feeling of sadness and surprise that I left Main Hall on Monday night. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been totally surprised, the arguments he made reflected much of the frustration that Israelis feel towards the breakdown of the peace process following the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the subsequent Palestinian uprising (the second intifada).
This frustration boiled over in an extraordinary statement made by the then Deputy Defense Minister Ze’ev Boim in 2004: “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.”
To be sure, the language coming from the Islamist extreme of the Palestinian side can be just as racist and incendiary, and one cannot forget that suicide bombers have been attacking Israel for years, but this does not excuse Boim’s comment or Aronson’s less egregious statements.
Needless to say, falling back on stereotyping does little to advance understanding and compromise. As I say to my own students, your job is to push beyond the stereotypes and find out the truth about the Middle East for yourselves.