Anti-intellectualism as Zionist policy

PALESTINIANS CONFRONT ISRAELI SECURITY FORCES AFTER AN ATTEMPT BY ISRAELI SETTLERS TO REMOVE A PALESTINIAN FLAG, IN EZBET EL-TABIB VILLAGE EAST OF THE CITY OF QALQILYA ON MAY 31, 2022. (PHOTO: APA IMAGES STRINGER)

After 74 years of ongoing Nakba, Palestinians continue to face deprivation upon deprivation, but a shortage of descriptors for the colonization we have suffered so far and continue to suffer presently is not one of them. In fact, this is one area in which Palestinians may be afflicted by a curious over-abundance, as many terms and concepts become mobilized to situate a coherent paradigm for the Zionist entity’s oppression of Palestinians, often outside of our control.  

It’s important here to distinguish between a plethora of terms and concepts and their standardization. Even if there is an abundance of words about Palestinians, that does not mean, first of all, that Palestinians themselves are being granted authorial agency in their creation and/or explication. Maha Nassar effectively captures how this paradox unfolds within the realm of US media. And even in the aftermath of the Unity Intifada, at a moment in which Palestinian representation seems to have increased some, and Palestinians began to be afforded slightly more access to speak back to the hegemonic narrative of the so-called “conflict,” Mohammed El-Kurd has been a tireless analyst of how Western media effectively functions as an additional arm of Zionist entity propaganda, continuing to normalize and obfuscate the callous plurality of the Zionist state’s colonial violence against Palestinians.

All of this is to say that more words about the Palestinian condition does not necessarily translate to an amelioration of that condition. In fact, even when the epistemological embargo against concepts initially used by Palestinians to describe their struggle ends, and these concepts become increasingly entrenched within human rights organizations, this diffusion is not a guarantor that the full spectrum of Palestinian oppression and humanity has been validated.

For example, though the acceptance of the use of “apartheid” to describe the Zionist entity’s treatment of Palestinians by B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International will make Palestinian oppression more legible and actionable in certain contexts, it does so with a dangerous price: as Dayla al Masri argues, the inherently liberal framework of rights these institutions espouse and promote erases the necessity and rightfulness of Palestinian resistance, not to mention the full scope of Zionist oppression, i.e., apartheid as an outgrowth of Zionist settler-colonialism.

And, as Maureen Clare Murphy importantly notes, having been founded within the context of the Cold War ensured that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch opposed anti-colonial liberation movements, opting for false equivalences between militant resistance to colonization and the violence of the colonial state.

All of this is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that an increased number of words, phrases and concepts that seek to capture Palestinian oppression does not necessarily bode positively for the Palestinian condition, and can have unproductive, even if unintended consequences.

Nevertheless, naming can also have a crucial enabling effect. This is important to bear in mind when we consider that the violence of the Zionist entity often takes the character of an all-out assault, a sheer blizzard of brutality whose relentlessly punishing cruelty chills one’s ability to render it in full, preoccupied, as victims rightfully are, with the hefty weight of survival.

The Zionist entity does not just seek to dismember Palestinian life and connectedness in the social sense. It also lowers a surgical scalpel towards the threads of signification that might help Palestinians recognize patterns of history, patterns of culture, patterns of identification that would serve as symbolic tributaries flowing to the various postures of resistance and steadfastness as well as a more generalized (but no less significant) sense of continuity.

This is how I relate to Sherene Seikaly’s focus on considerations of the archive. Though not denuded of this sense by any means, Seikaly also explores how the archive transcends its more traditional materiality, and the point to which Palestinian sites, actions, and moments of resistance and oppression, as in Gaza, themselves become archives of and about Palestine. At the same time, Seikaly writes, Palestinian thinkers create archives that realize their own semi-autonomous status, their own particularities of signification, even as they strive to provide a wider coherence to the Palestinian struggle and condition over the years.

Yet even as it is impossible to distinguish completely between the archival process and the individual act of archiving, I do want to pose an additional possibility for thinking through the Zionist entity’s attack upon Palestinian signification. What I propose here is an umbrella label to signify this very war on signification itself, a label that stretches, web-like, across seemingly significant geographical boundaries to bind what would otherwise be ostensibly disconnected, if not entirely unrelated instances of semantic assault.

I suggest that we think of this attack upon signification as anti-intellectualism, and that we consider the productive possibilities of classifying anti-intellectualism to be a defining component of Zionist policy.

A few clarifications are in order. First, I am well aware that anti-intellectualism seems at first glance to lack the gravitas of terms like scholasticide or epistemicide that have been used to capture, respectively, the Zionist entity’s disruption (if not outright elimination) of the possibilities for Palestinians to receive an education vis-à-vis unmitigated colonial brutality and quotidian ritualization of state-sanctioned racism, as well as the ongoing Zionist preclusion of Palestinian subjectivity even being considered within scholarly inquiry. But I don’t mean to displace either term: rather, I argue we can conceive of anti-intellectualism as a kind of broad nucleus, affording each of these items the energetic signification of being a manifestation of a broader phenomenon.

I further maintain that anti-intellectualism is spatially capacious, allowing us to draw lines between dots as seemingly divergent as Brooklyn councilwoman Inna Vernikov threatening to pull $50,000 in funding to CUNY Law School based on its faculty’s endorsement of a BDS resolution and the introduction of a bill that would ban the flying of the Palestinian flag on university campuses within the Zionist Knesset.   

“But,” some might protest, “this is not even about intellectual activity! It’s activism!”

In the first place, this false distinction is merely a disciplinary form of hegemonic “common sense” that peddles a politically sanitized conception of scholarship and intellectual activity (which are not always the same; indeed, they may be diametrically opposed, depending on the subject in question) as distinct from the social fabric of ongoing political struggle. A scholar can take up BDS as a cause and intellectual text, an ever-expanding archive of resistance, and these can occur simultaneously.

After all, the question of the scholar’s role within the most pressing concerns of one’s day and age is as old as the profession itself, and yet remains unresolved. It doesn’t seem like something reactionary politicians ought to have the right to settle, whether by brutish strong-arming, as in this case, or outright prohibition.

Secondly, the waving of the Palestinian flag needs to be read in relation to the Nakba law, which bans commemoration of the start of the process by which Palestinians continue to be ethnically cleansed from their homes for the founding and fortification of the colonial Zionist state. That is, the flag ban is cut from the same cloth as the Nakba law; both are intended to construct sense-making capabilities of Palestinians, and the means of providing these with symbolic recourse.

I am also aware that the term “intellectual” has an unfortunate connotation of elitism, of stuffy privilege and dyspeptic disinterest. But this notion is itself a symptom of anti-intellectualism rather than its cause. Though he was not exactly a radical, I find some of Richard Hofstadter’s insights about the particularity of anti-intellectualism in the US to be useful in thinking through some of these phenomena. 

Hofstadter  argues that, in the context of the US, anti-intellectualism has an extensive history that predates the Cold War 1950’s, even as it seemed to be most pronounced at that moment in time. Hofstadter proposes distinguishing “intellect” from “intelligence,” with the latter being universal, and the former ultimately a matter of individual disposition rather than vocation—even as these vocations deal with ideas. Hofstadter partly attributes anti-intellectualism within US culture to be a natural outgrowth of a tension between expertise and amateurism within nationalist ethos, as well as liberal specialist mistrust and direct right-wing antagonism. But beyond cartoonish caricatures, Hofstadter notes that anti-intellectualism can assume more dire proportions: “present in some form and degrees in most societies,” he writes, “in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations” (20.)

Thus, intellect, which Hofstadter defines as “the critical, creative, and contemplative state of mind,” one that “evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meaning of situations as a whole” (25) can be subjected to various degrees and levels of state scrutiny, harassment, and outright antagonism. When I propose that we think of the Zionist entity’s war on Palestinian attempts at signification as anti-intellectualism, I am thinking through a new layer of categorization that can hopefully elucidate both the range and particularity of one insidious form of colonial repression within an ensemble of elimination.

Finally, it is important to question the individualism that can accompany conceptions of the intellectual. Edward Said argues that even as the direction of society and the evolution of various cultural norms and trends results in the proliferation of what Gramsci termed “organic” intellectuals, those who are naturally shaped into conveyors of meaning as a result of the increasing compartmentalization of socio-political circumstance, it is still important to think of the intellectual as an outlier, and to consider intellectual work to be validated through the challenging of the status quo.

That is, reminding society, particularly its elites, of what they would rather block out or look away from becomes the animating purpose of intellectual activity.

As we continue to resist colonization and to defy the strictures against how we contextualize our oppression, Palestinians in many ways come into focus as an ideal manifestation of this necessary charge. In a forthcoming co-authored essay, Mjriam Abu Samra and Luigi Achilli argue that the Palestinians who today reject the Oslo Accords paradigm and refuse incorporation within the decadent political establishment of the PA constitute “organic intellectuals” in the classic Gramscian sense. Similarly building off of Gransci’s notion of the intellectual, particularly its emphasis on one who is an “active participant in practical life, as constructor and organizer” so that “there is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded,” Ramzy Baroud writes of Palestinian prisoners as “Palestine’s true intellectuals, women and men, mothers and fathers, children and teens, teachers, fighters and human rights advocates, united by a single motive that transcends region, religion and ideology: resistance, that is, taking a brave moral stance against injustice in all of its forms.” 

And the beauty of considering intellectualism in such a fashion is how expansive and freeing it is. Rather than being tied to an official vocation, intellectualism instead becomes about the various strategies and tactics for making, appropriating, and reclaiming meaning, from throwing a stone, to tagging an apartheid wall, to raising a flag, and beyond. The martyr Basel al-Arej codified the inherent overlap between the necessary work of the intellectual and ongoing resistance to the Zionist entity until total liberation.

To resist is to continue boldly forging new horizons of possibility in place of those to be left behind. We must therefore not be shy about collectively identifying the gargantuan towers of opposition to this process, wherever they may be erected, so that we can more concretely unite through their demolition.