Israel's Dead Soul

Chapter 3. Ethnonationalism as an Object of Multicultural Decorum: The Case of Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson

_ I n this chapter i examine the work of two intellectuals whose scholarship is rooted in socially liberal traditions of black Christianity. Both intellectuals, Cornel West and michael eric Dyson, are prolific writers and public figures. Both have produced seminal theoretical and philosophical work. Both comment frequently on issues of broad debate (using points of view considered radical by corporate media standards). And both occupy exalted positions in academe (West at princeton and Dyson at Georgetown). The two are generally aligned politically and work within the same intellectual traditions, some of which each helped create. West and Dyson are two of this generation’s most important intellectuals. Their work is wide-ranging and often intended for nonacademic readers, an admirable orientation that entails a set of special problems. One of these problems encompasses the political expectations of the audiences, which tend to be sharper and less ambivalent than those of academic readers. When it comes to the israel-palestine conflict, this problem is particularly acute. West and Dyson betray their deftness as critical intellectuals when they discuss the israel-palestine conflict in their roles as nonacademic commentators. They therefore offer interesting complexities to contemplate about the inherent problem of the public intellectual. Ethnonationalism as an Object of Multicultural Decorum The Case of Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson The ass went looking for horns and lost his ears. —Arabic proverb 3 72 b Chapter 3 Cornel West and the Ethics of Faithful Equivocation Cornel West is one of a handful of modern American intellectuals who have come to symbolize academic radicalism among popular commentators without ever actually having proposed any truly radical ideas, those that seek to dismantle rather than ameliorate structures of economic, sexual, and racial injustice. like the vast majority of people conceptualized as public intellectuals, West did not develop his broad public appeal by espousing dangerous ideas. (The obvious exception was edward said, but he arguably never achieved the same level of mainstream acceptance as West.) yet his appeal as a straw man for curmudgeonly culture warriors chafed by the supposed decay of timeless Western values indicates that West is nevertheless mildly threatening, even if he isn’t really taken to task for being radical but for not being quite patriotic enough. There is one area in particular in which West’s writing fails to achieve either analytical or ethical distinctiveness, thereby acting as a metonym for West’s political timidity in general: the israel-palestine conflict, something West assesses beyond the boundaries of its own history by emphasizing multicultural American paradigms rather than revolutionary decolonial advocacy. in speaking about the israel-palestine conflict, West often employs the liberal American vocabulary of tolerance and coexistence , an anomalous approach that reduces israeli Jews and palestinian Arabs to irrationally competing factions who merely need more open-minded dialogue rather than a significant redistribution of land ownership, natural resources, economic capital, political power, and military strength. Also to be overcome are serious restrictions on palestinian freedom of movement, upward mobility, urban development, and access to farmland, family, education , and employment. The israel-palestine conflict is not the result of poor communication, religious acrimony, or cultural intolerance . These phenomena are the outcomes of foreign settlement and ethnic cleansing, not their progenitors. By emphasizing these phenomena rather than Jewish ethnonationalism, West decontextualizes the israel-palestine conflict from its proper origin in Zionist colonization and reifies israel’s placement in proper multicultural discourse as a legitimate exemplar of Jewish culture, worth celebration and indispensible to the adoration of diversity. Ethnonationalism as an Object of Multicultural Decorum b 73 West, a dexterous intellectual, should know better than to uncritically conceptualize a nation-state as worthy of the sort of exaltation that attends cultural interchange. states are selfregulating actors whose interests cannot be detached from myriad iniquities arising from their very structure and their inescapable relationships with competing entities. As Amilcar Cabral observed, “The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated.”1 Cabral’s statement urges people to identify with the cultures of resistance vis-à-vis the technocracy of the oppressive state, an appeal that is especially valuable when we think about the monotonous conflation of Jewish culture with israeli technocracy. To perfunctorily accept israel as...