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(02/18/18 9:20pm)
Three years ago, I walked through the ruins of Palestinian homes on a mountain top in the occupied West Bank. The shepherds and olive farmers were expelled in 1967, forbidden from returning, and the land was designated a “closed military site.” A sign in Hebrew casually marked their dispossession. Now, trailers of Israeli settlers dot the hill. But this type of displacement and resettlement isn’t the past; it’s happening right now all throughout the West Bank.
Like the relics of the Palestinian village I visited three years ago, a similar expulsion was approved for the Palestinian village of Susya last week. On Thursday, February 1st, the Israeli High Court ruled that the homes of over 40 people will be immediately demolished.
The people of Susya have already been through hell: in 1986, Israeli surveyors declared their wells, caves, and prayer space “a closed archeological site,” built a fence around it, bulldozed their homes, and told them to move to Yatta, a town several kilometers away. The residents of Susya refused. Since then, their water cisterns have been filled with gravel and their children have been attacked by nearby settlers. Additionally, homes and other structures in Susya are demolished every few years.
For the past few years the right-wing Israeli organization Regavim and its U.S. funders, such as the Central Fund of Israel, have made it their mission to demolish Susya and other, similar villages in order to expand Israeli settlements in the South Hebron Hills and elsewhere.
Since 2016, we have been campaigning to stop the demolitions of Palestinian villages in Area C of the West Bank, as part of our Stop Demolitions Build Peace campaign. Students on campus are astounded by the videos and photos we show them of families who have not been allowed in their homes for years. Area C is currently under full Israeli military and civil control, and is the site of much of the rapidly growing settlement enterprise. The demolitions of Susya and Palestinian villages like it make way for Israeli settlements to expand into the recently emptied land, a tactic of the Israeli far-right’s long-term agenda to annex the West Bank, in order to ensure a “Greater Israel.” This is a strategy known as “creeping annexation.”
Susya is not nearly the only village under threat of demolition. Just over the weekend, two elementary school classrooms were demolished in the village of Abu Nuwar. This is not 1948; this is not 1967; this is 2018. Pro-Israel, pro-peace, anti-occupation Americans must act now to make our voices heard: we will not stand for demolition. The possibility of a peaceful, sustainable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is quickly slipping away.
We are calling on our community at IU and all over Indiana to speak out against Susya’s demolitions along with demolition threats facing other Palestinian villages. We are calling on our elected officials, leaders in the Jewish community, and everyday individuals to speak out. We need all pro-Israel, pro-peace, anti-occupation Americans to raise their voices in support of Susya. We must do everything we can to help stop this destructive pattern – while we still can.
(12/04/17 6:36pm)
On Tuesday, November 7, Associate Chair of the biology department Dr. Scott Michaels sent an email out about a "small, but possibly growing, movement on campus to remove the name of David Starr Jordan from Jordan Hall." In the past weeks, members of the campus group Students against State Violence posted several notes in Jordan Hall detailing the former IU president and ichthyologist's support for the American eugenics movement. Their hashtags #decolonizeIU and #renameJordan have challenged IU to rename the building and other monuments that venerate him.
I spoke with Lauren and Jacob, members of Students against State Violence (SASV), about their #renameJordan campaign. Their explanations make parallels to similar campaigns to remove or rename campus building, such as the nascent push to rename the Wildermuth Intramural Center (WIC), which memorializes the former IU trustee and public segregationist Ora Wildermuth, or Provost Robel's decision to stop using Woodburn Hall 100 as a classroom because one of its Thomas H. Benton murals depicts the Ku Klux Klan. They also discussed some of SASV's philosophy about activism and their pursuit of social change outside the normal channels of student-administration relations. Our full, recorded interviews are below.
[playlist artists="false" ids="13603,13604"]
In his email, the biology chair wrote that IUPD had been contacted to review video footage of the suspects. He asked people to "please remove [the flyers] when you find them," and "remain vigilant" against future incidents. The social media backlash was swift:
https://twitter.com/moonpatron/status/929061778667048960
https://twitter.com/SASVindiana/status/930260264800407552
https://twitter.com/H3K27me1/status/928634475889741824
Jordan Hall, the Jordan River which runs through campus, Jordan Avenue, several fish species and a scholarship fund are named after Dr. David Starr Jordan, who was an IU professor in 1879, President of IU by 1885, and founding president of Stanford University, which he served from 1891 to 1913. As President of IU, he doubled enrollment, created the modern elective system of courses, and raised funds from the state legislature to transform IU from a religious seminary to a modern research university. He was also one of the foremost ichthyologists of his time.
The notes posted in Jordan Hall highlight his darker legacy. In 1902, he published one of the first books on eugenics in America, "The Blood of the Nation: a study of the decay of races through the survival of the unfit." It followed Francis Galton's theory of less than 20 years earlier that selectively marrying desirable members of a species would make the poor, weaker genetics die out. Jordan applied this Social Darwinism to his belief in "superiority of the Anglo-Saxon," arguing that
Colonial aggrandizement is not national expansion; slaves are not men. Wherever degenerate, dependent or alien races are within our borders to-day, they are not part of the United States. They constitute a social problem; a menace to peace and welfare.
He believed that because war killed off the fittest of a nation, the weaker hereditary would populate and corrupt the Anglo-Saxon/Nordic race. For this reason, he opposed WWI and chaired the pacifist World Peace Organization from 1910 to 1914. His solution to the perceived genetic decay of America was a state-sanctioned campaign of forced sterilization, anti-miscegenation and severely limiting immigration from Mexico, east Asia and southern/eastern Europe (which he also considered non-white). In 1906 he chaired the first U.S. conference on eugenics for the American Breeders Association. In 1907 he pressured the Indiana state legislature to pass the first sterilization law in the U.S. California quickly replicated the legislation and has since forcefully sterilized about 20,000 people. California's success was "thanks in large measure to the prominence and organizational abilities of David Starr Jordan and the resources of Ezra Gosney," according to historian Sheldon Ekland Olsen. In 1938, Jordan and his colleague Ezra Gosney founded of the American Betterment Foundation, which produced texts like "Sterilization for human betterment: A summary of results of 6,000 operations in California, 1909–1929."
As this timeline illustrates, the sober Mendelians of the era were never fully on board with this genocidal political agenda. As early as 1910, the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium model thoroughly refuted the idea that sterilization would ever significantly reduce the percent of mentally impaired people in a society. Crop geneticists like George Shull had repeatedly shown that interspecies hybrids survived better than purebred strains. These findings demonstrated that the American eugenics movement was less about science and more about a way to rationalize the dominance of rich, white classes.
According to historian Stefan Kühl in "The Nazi Connection," Indiana and California sterilization laws were direct models for the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws. We also know the California eugenics movement inspired Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia program, which gassed, shot and poisoned an estimated 70,000 people deemed burdens to the state welfare budget and threats to Aryan purity. Letters sent between American eugenicists brag about how the work of the Human Betterment Foundation "played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program." American eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, an associate on the eastern coast, literally wrote the legal model for the Germany's 1933 Sterilization Law. Nazi doctors in their defense at the Nuremberg Trials even pointed to the writings of American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who quipped in the 1927 majority opinion of Buck v. Bell that, "three generations of imbeciles are enough."
For some people, what is difficult about singling out Jordan is that his views were not unusual for his time. As IU biology professor Scott Michaels said in a recent Indiana Daily Student article, "It's easy to see those eugenicists as wackadoodles, but people bought into this, not just Jordan." It is true that eugenics became an unquestioned axiom of how the Americans at every level of government and society dealt with the imprisoned, poor people, the physically disabled, racial minorities and "feeble-minded."
Between roughly the 1880s to 1940s, the eugenics movement pervaded all aspects of American political life, including its progressive forces. Margaret Sanger, feminist icon and spiritual founder of Planned Parenthood, incorporated the language of "positive eugenics" into her arguments for the morality of birth control. In her writings on contraception and abortion, she implored her audience to "assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit." W.E.B. DuBois argued in 1905 that "only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race’s heritage of moral iniquity." Black academia at Howard, Tuskegee and Hampton sponsored seminars on "Assimilationist Eugenics" arguing with DuBois that "'the Talented Tenth' of all races should mix, as the best blacks were as good as the best whites." The NAACP hosted Better Baby competitions to fundraise for civil rights. Most of the American scientific academy supported eugenics. You can find it in the period's college curriculum, biology textbooks, magazine ads and op-eds.
Nor was eugenics relegated to political activism. Historian Christine Rosen shows that eugenics "flourished in the liberal Protestant, Catholic and Jewish mainstream." Fundamentalist theologian Harry E. Fosdick, Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Catholic Priest John A. Ryan supported eugenics programs. Catholic social teaching, well-known for its rejection of any agenda that contributes to the "culture of death," had deep divisions in America until the 1930 papal encyclical Casti Connubi officially reputed the movement's methods and goals. U.S. courts continually upheld forceful sterilization as constitutional and necessary "to prevent our being swamped with incompetence." Eugenics was and still is a prominent feature of KKK ideology and white nationalism.
It's nice to think that the movement in America declined after Nazi Germany took it to its logical, genocidal conclusion. But California's eugenics law remained on the books until 1974. The landmark 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell has not been overturned. And as Alexandra Stern demonstrates in Eugenic Nation, only increased access to reproductive technology and the rise of radical liberation movements for women and racial minorities in 1960s and 70s actually challenged the sterilization laws, stigmatized the pseudo-science and shifted public opinion against eugenics. Even now however, thousands of women can remember forced sterilization of Native Americans, Hispanics and blacks mere decades ago. Fairly recently, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that the state of California forcefully sterilized nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010. For Students against State Violence, the memorials to David Starr Jordan on campus implicitly endorse these traditions of violence, sanitize a lurid and horrific history, and trivialize the suffering of its surviving victims.
For my interviewees Jacob and Lauren, how we relate to Indiana's troubled past is inextricably tied to how we memorialize present space. If collective memory is a scarce resource, the university is forced to make choices on who and what to remember. But the argument on Jordan Hall can go a few different ways: According to SASV, naming buildings, roads and rivers after David Starr Jordan makes his legacy something to be emulated and hollowed. That is immoral because our community shouldn't elevate racists and eugenicists. The charitable counterargument says that name-changing effectively erases history; Jordan's name on campus reminds the curious Google-er about Indiana's dark past, which is a good thing. Related to this argument is the suggestion that Jordan actually has a legacy worth remembering – the building commemorates his contributions to science and to the foundation to the university, not necessarily to eugenics. In speaking with the Indiana Daily Student, biology department chair Dr. Scott Michaels asked:
What do you do with someone like that who's made great contributions on one hand and was just a bad person on the other hand? Do we chisel their names off all the buildings? I don't know the answer to that.
The lazy counterargument to SAVS says that no one cares what buildings are named after whom; old people are forgotten anyway and changing the name is more effort than it's worth. A name's origins does not determine its present value.
Lauren rejected both suggestions point-blank. To the first, she claims:
There is a huge difference between recognizing history and memorializing these people. Most of the people we've talked to, who've worked in Jordan Hall, who have been part of this community had no idea about who he was, this eugenicist, white supremacist. So even though the building is named after him, that doesn't mean that history was being recognized in any way. Memorializing these people validates what they did.
She suggested that the building could be renamed and a plaque could give a reason why and explain who Jordan was, both as a scientist and as the architect of Indiana's eugenics program. For her, these kinds of steps would recognize history. The current arrangement does no such thing. For example, Jordan's unique role in Indiana's eugenics laws is notably absent on the Office of the President's webpage on him, nor is it mentioned on any of the portraits of him around Jordan Hall.
As to the lazy counterargument, she says, "there really is no way to separate the name from the person. There really is no reason to why the building can't just be renamed after someone more worthy."
I tend to agree.
(10/23/17 7:36pm)
On Thursday, October 13th a group of IU students came together for a letter-writing event hosted by Jstreet at IU, a pro-Israel, pro-human rights group advocating a two state solution for the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Their issue was the small, Palestinian village of Khirbet Susya, which is under threat of demolition by the Israeli authorities. I spoke with the head of Jstreet at IU, Sarina Siegel, about their campaign:
[audio mp3="https://wiux.indiana.edu/wiux.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/WIUX-news-Susya-Campaign_mixdown.mp3"][/audio]
(04/09/17 9:01pm)
"There's a new sheriff in town."
Nikki Haley, one-time governor of South Carolina and now U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, received standing ovation after standing ovation at the 2017 AIPAC policy conference. Every year, the pro-Israel lobby convenes an annual gathering of supporters, boasting an astonishing number of high profile policy makers from both major political parties. Fresh from studying abroad in Jerusalem, I came with an open mind. What I saw disturbed me.
Among others, attendees heard the impassioned speeches of Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Chuck Schumer, Bob Mendez, Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, the mayor of Jerusalem, and Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, among others. Benjamin Netanyahu skyped in. Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi shared the same floor. For a moment, support for the US-Israel special relationship transcended partisan rivalries. And as the Times of Israel opined, Nikki Haley was the superstar.
She gave off both the southern charm of a Carolina native and the aurora of Margaret Thatcher. She styled herself as a no-nonsense defender of common sense and bulwark against the 'absurdity' and 'ridiculousness' of the United Nations. A hypocritical and biased organization, she cast it as bent on undermining and delegitimizing the Jewish state. “I’m not there to play” she remarked.
The daughter of Sikh immigrants and a staunch conservative, she was the first governor to sign state-wide legislation to punish companies and universities that support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement which seeks to end Israel's military occupation of Palestinian land. BDS explicitly models itself after the divestment and boycott campaign against apartheid-era South Africa, but for AIPAC, the movement disguises anti-Semitism in the language of human rights. Almost every speaker mentioned the specter of BDS on college campuses, and many put the threat on par with a nuclear Iran and ISIS. As the former PM of Canada Stephen Harper remarked, BDS is the threat "we actually need to take the most serious." Of course, no American university, government body, or corporation has yet to divest, sanction, or boycott Israel to my knowledge. It's a debate that you might find at your student government or local food co-op, but hardly at the level of nuclear weapons or transnational terror.
Notably absent from any of the remarks, including Haley's, was serious concern about Israel's now 50-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Aside from Tibet, it is the longest occupation in the world. Nor did any major speaker express significant worry at Israel's wealth inequality (the worst in the developed world) or the growing polarization and trend toward hard-right extremism. In my mind, these seem the more likely obstacles Israel faces in the near future. AIPAC now seems to unhesitatingly embrace the narrative of the Likud party. No other conclusion explains why the lobby invited radicals like Naftali Bennet, the Beit Yehudi head and Minister of Education, who openly boasts "I already killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there is absolutely no problem with that." Why AIPAC, ostensibly committed to the two-state solution, invites a man who advocates for the execution of prisoners without trial and the annexation of Area C (read: Bantustans) under the auspices of true Israel advocacy, is quite telling. It is not the Israel I recognized abroad.
For her part, Nikki Haley committed her upmost to make sure "the days of Israel-bashing are over." She expressed her outrage at the Iran nuclear deal, which she described as "beyond me" and "terrible." The multilateral deal, which included the P5 of the Security Council plus Germany, offered sanctions relief in return for dismantling Iran's nuclear weapons program. With past sanctions failing to stop Iran's progress, and armed conflict off the table (or not?), it was unclear what Haley had in mind as the alternative. Most other speakers, including Paul Ryan, lambasted the 'sunset provisions' of the deal, which lift uranium enrichment and heavy water restrictions after 15 years. Does that mean they will still honor the agreement? Who knows.
She expressed her wholehearted indignation at UN Security Council resolution 2334, passed this past December under Obama's administration. "Never do we not have the backs of our friends. We don’t have a greater friend than Israel. And to see that happen was not only embarrassing, it was hurtful." The resolution condemned Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and calls on Israel to fully abide by its obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention. The U.S. abstained, allowing the resolution to pass. “Everyone at the United Nations is scared to talk to me about Resolution 2334. And I wanted them to know that, Look, that happened, but it will never happen again.”
Similar declarations met enthusiastic applause. She recalled how a "ridiculous report" written by "a guy with serious problems,” compared Israel to an apartheid state. Was she questioning Richard Falk's cognitive ability? Taking credit for his resignation, she said “The first thing we do is we call the secretary general, and say, ‘This [report] is absolutely ridiculous. You have to pull it.’ The secretary general immediately pulled the report, and then the director has now resigned.” Enthusiastic applause followed. Debates rage between (and within) pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps about the applicability of the analogy. What is for certain, however, is that many feel Israel has been unfairly targeted at UN. Haley has before mentioned that Israel is a permanent agenda item in the Human Rights Council, a group that fails to offer similar scrutiny to states like North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Libya. Haley's delegation have boycotted Human Rights Council sessions, calling the body "corrupt," and "ridiculous."
Not all her pro-Israel gestures inspired admiration. In a different point in the interview she bragged, “So when they decided to try and put a Palestinian (the former PA prime minister Salam Fayyad) in one of the highest positions that had ever been given at the UN, we said no and we had him booted out.” Referring to his appointment to the UN mission in Libya, her decision to block Salam Fayyad, known for his moderate pragmatism and high regard in Israeli and American circles, met rebuke and criticism from her peers. "Stunningly dumb" wrote former US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro. "Fayyad is first rate. The UN would be lucky to have him in Libya or anywhere else." said Susan Rice, former UN ambassador.
While it's easy to think Haley's emboldened criticisms of the UN are a fresh wind in an ossified and recalcitrant institution, US defense of Israel at the UN is in fact nothing new. As John Kerry noted in his remarks at the Saban forum last year, the US has often been the only nation in the world to stand by Israel, and under Obama's administration, the US vetoed more than 10 Security Council resolutions about Israel. Haley's predecessors Susan Rice and Samantha Power worked to chip away at the long-standing UN tradition to refuse the appointment of Israelis to leadership positions.
"Until the Palestinian Authority comes to the table, until the UN responds the way they’re supposed to, there are no freebies for the Palestinian Authority anymore.” What freebies? Roaring applause followed. Despite zero diplomatic experience and cheesy bromides, she knew how to whip up a crowd. The real question is whether these commitments bode well for Israel's future and for a just peace for the Palestinians.
To take the words of an Israeli settler I met, AIPAC surely reduces the likelihood that Israel will gain "independence from America" any time soon. AIPAC seems intent on preserving that umbilical cord for the foreseeable future. And for the Palestinian leadership, Haley's appointment certainly confirms where President Trump's priorities lie. Under Nikki Haley's ambassadorship, will Trump be able to negotiate the "ultimate deal"? Only time will tell. But probably not. Peace never was the reason for AIPAC anyway, was it?
(02/19/17 11:33pm)
A week ago, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, signed into law a contentious bill decriminalizing domestic violence between family members. No longer in the Russian criminal code, domestic violence is now treated like any other case of battery, an "administrative violation." Battery carries a maximum fine of 30,000 roubles ($502), community service, or a 15-day detention. Repeat offenses and those causing serious medical damage are still criminalized.
Domestic violence used to have a maximum sentence of 2 years. Additionally, victims will now have to proceed with a "private prosecution" in which they collect evidence and bring their case to court by themselves.
Supporters of the bill argued it would "build strong families" and safeguard the privacy of family life. This past July 2016, the Russian Orthodox Church publicly opposed an opposite bill criminalizing domestic violence, on the grounds it had no moral justification. The Patriarch of Moscow was quoted saying, "there's no real reason to criminalize the reasonable and moderate use of physical violence by loving parents when raising their children."
Ultra-conservative senator Yelena Mizulina co-authored the bill, arguing the state has no business interfering in family affairs. Such considerations run deep in a country with a long history of intrusive state surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Some feel the state has no right to interfere in the family and that feminists have inflated the incidence of family abuse. Maria Mamikonyan, head of the All-Russian Parents Resistance movement, suggested the criminal code already includes "real beatings." She does not find it right to punish parents differently than strangers for the same act of violence. She further claimed that "...women are not offended when we see a man beating his wife.”
Domestic violence does appear deeply engrained in Russian society; the interior ministry itself record around 40% of violent crimes occur in the family.
The bill's critics maintain it will discourage reporting and restrict victims' access to justice. Yulia Gorbunova, Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch, sees it as a "big step backwards," reminiscent of the oppressive Domostroi rules during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. For rights groups, the bill emboldens and empower abusers. Nadia Tolokonnikova, a member of the notorious punk rock band Pussy Riot, said “Let’s be clear: it’s not ‘traditional values’, it’s oppression, it’s a support of violence and it’s a protection of old privileges. Fuck this shit.”
More centrist groups have also spoken out against a perceived culture of impunity and apathy about abuse. Last year, the hashtag “IAmNotAfraidToSpeak” took off in Ukraine and Russia, in which thousands of women came forward to speak of their abuse.
This law heralds a new move to traditionalism by the Russian state, and it adds new meaning to the old Russian proverb, "If he beats you, he loves you." (Если он бьет вас, он вас любит).