Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
The Nuremberg trials established that a person was responsible for their own actions and that if an organization was found to be criminal, then you could bring forward individuals part of the organization to be charged. Now tell me, if someone has all the evidence in the world thrown at them and chooses to ignore it all and advocate for an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing. Would you deem them innocent or guilty?
It’s weird when someone makes my point for me in the form of a question. I’m not sure how to respond to you, because clearly the answer is guilty in the scenario you’ve described. My point is that you think that’s the scenario that exists, and everyone who doesn’t agree with you is equally guilty.
You’re creating a scenario where the school child is as guilty as the school teacher and the politician and the factory worker and the airplane mechanic and the average citizen, all of them are the same amount of guilty to you because none of them threw off the constraints of their circumstances and took up arms against society itself.
And you’re unwilling to answer a simple, straightforward question because you know the answer reveals your prejudice. What should the punishment be? The school child, the laborer, the politician, and the soldier. All of them deserve death, because genocide is the absolute worst crime, and it should be stopped by any means necessary. That’s how “good” people justify bad things. It’s how Netanyahu is justifying the genocide of Palestinians right now, only he calls them terrorists.
Israel is engaged in a genocide, and they should be stopped. But killing all Israelis is not going to end the violence. Demonizing all the people who aren’t protesting the genocide will not end the violence. Labels and insults and demagogeury will only prolong and extend the suffering.
And if you’re a college professor, you really ought to know better.
The scenario I presented in my questions is what’s happening. If it’s happening then it exists. Just because you’re not a big fan of the scenario or how it’s presented does not make it non-existent.
I am answering your question, just not in the way you want me to. I neglected to advocate for any kind of specific punishment on purpose for the exact reasons you described. It’s more nuanced than that and it deserves to be reviewed by someone(s) more well-versed in law and accounts for all the nuances and grey we know exists in real life. I refuse to condemn an entire population to a single verdict or punishment simply because that makes me no better than the Zionists who I judge for doing the same thing to Palestinians. Even when they are irrefutable guilty of war crimes and the population they have condemned are more or less blameless.
Neither I nor the professor said anything about all Israeli’s. The point is made regarding Zionists. It’s a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap but also some parts that don’t.
If you want to disagree with me on this point then that’s fine and it’s your right. You’re not saying anything wrong in my opinion. We just have different worldviews. For me, there are certain hard lines I have when it comes to morality and these Zionists and the Israeli government have crossed so far over it that I refuse to entertain even their stupidest of attempts to empathize with them.