To the Editor:
In his opinion piece, “The New Campus Fanaticism” (The Chronicle Review, March 12), Robert S. Huddleston proves that neither history nor consistency are his strong suits. As a way of identifying the kind of fanaticism he will address, Huddleston begins with this quote from Amos Oz:
If someone says, “This land, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, is all mine and only mine,” then he is out for blood.
If Huddleston holds true to this principle, then he should declare that the ruling Likud Party of the State of Israel are “fanatics.” Its original party platform in fact begins with these words: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked to the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan will only be Israeli sovereignty.” Lest there be any question: This statement was published in 1977; Hamas was founded a decade later, in 1987.
It should not be surprising then that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the chief figure of the Likud Party, should use Hamas’s attacks of October the 7th to exponentially expand a project of ethnic cleansing that pre-dates Oct 7, 2023, the 1987 founding of Hamas, and even the 1977 Likud Party platform — it can be traced at least as far back as the 1948 Nakba, in which a quarter of a million Palestinians were violently displaced from their homes and lands and prohibited from ever coming back. Indeed, the current genocide in Gaza has been referred to as a second Nakba.
Now, even Israel’s strongest supporters in Congress are registering the dimensions of this horror. In his March 14 speech Senator Chuck Schumer declared:
Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel… He has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.
Here is the point: While Huddleston’s editorial laboriously makes the case that American universities are being torn asunder by “fanatics,” it is clear that in his view such fanaticism comes from only one side: “Colleges have become a proving ground for incendiary left-wing rhetoric and protest tactics unmoored from mainstream political reality and moral norms.” In short, he’s talking about critics of Israel. What Schumer’s speech indicates is that both the “mainstream political reality and moral norms” are shifting, and what Huddleston considers marginal is actually becoming mainstream.
Ultimately, Huddleston’s opinion piece is meant to deflect attention from what we are protesting. Our modes of protesting are commensurate with the task of calling attention to everything that Huddleston obscures in order to paint us as “fanatics” — we are protesting Israel’s killing of over 30,000 Palestinians, including 12,000 Palestinian children, some 8,000 Palestinian women and 10,000 men, by means of bombing, shooting, and starvation, and our universities’ silence with regard to this horror and its silencing of people of conscience. If there is fanaticism, it is best to consider the most egregious consequences of fanaticism.
David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor
Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Stanford, Calif.
