Friendship and Humanity v.s. The Orgy of Truth Telling

10-22-2023

Roger Berkowitz
At the end of my talk introducing the Friendship and Politics conference last week, I posed a simple question: Can an Israeli and a Gazan be friends? Is it even conceivable at this point that Israelis can come to talk to and respect a Gazan who votes for and defends Hamas, a movement that for decades has sought the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and who supports the October 7th flood of bacchanalian torture and murder that Hamas terrorists unleashed on Israeli civilians?  is it at all possible that a Gazan can respect an Israeli who defends the settlements that displace Palestinians, who insists that Israel is a Jewish state, who demands security on the backs of an oppressive security state, and who has unleashed a fury of destruction that will lead inevitably to the murder of thousands and thousands of civilians? 

Arendt elevates friendship over justice and truth, arguing that friendship humanizes the world more so than does the pursuit of justice. She expresses her preference for friendship over truth in a citation from Cicero who writes:  "I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than to hold true views with his opponents." Given the choice between a so-called truth, a claim for justice and following one's friend, the choice is clear.  But, What does this mean, to prefer to go astray with one’s friends rather than to hold true views with one’s enemies?

Does going astray with one's friends mean that we embrace tribalism? Those who say, no, that the Jew and the Arab are simply human beings, that they should be friends, may feel superior in their universalist liberalism, but they are no longer of this world. The liberal must understand that tribalism is still very much a part of this world, as much as the liberal might want it to disappear. At the same time, the Jew and the Arab must acknowledge that tribalism leads to disaster. 

I write this as a Jew who has tribal feelings for Israel. Tribal prejudices and feelings are real and part of this world.  And yet, The Jew must hear those who argue that to respond to the massacre simply as a Jew seeking revenge or security for the Jew is to deny another part of their reality, that they and their Palestinian neighbors are also human beings and not simply Jews and Palestinians. Friendship stands for the idea that I can overcome tribalism, reach out to others and build bridges across differences. 

Arendt was well aware how difficult such political friendships could be. In 1945 she published "Zionism Reconsidered," an essay that criticized Zionism. Her friend, Gershom Scholem, was incensed by her essay. He wrote her a long critique of how disappointed he was and asked for her repentance.  He ended his letter with "warmest greetings, but also, so to speak, with determination." 

Arendt saw the letter for what it was: Not a conversation amongst friends, but a demand for an apology and admission of being wrong. She called it a "scathing letter." Her response had not the hint of repentance, but responded to his claim of being right with her own. The result was, as she writes, "an orgy of truth-telling." And she ends her letter with a question about whether they can remain friends: She would like to remain friends. But she wonders how Scholem will respond. The reason is that she thinks Scholem, as a man, is vulnerable to believing that his truths must be admitted. 

She hopes, however, that Scholem can follow her example of friendship and not be a "fanatic for truth". More valuable than truth, Arendt writes, are human friendships. Thus she asks Scholem to Follow her example and "know that a human being is far more valuable than his opinions, for the simple reason that humans are de facto much more than what they think or do."

* * *
In the week since I gave this speech, the war in the Middle East has brought little humanity and has unleashed a wild “orgy of truth-telling” on college campuses, newspapers, and social media. There are all sorts of “facts” or ‘truths” that I hear from friends on both sides of the conflict: “The Israeli occupation is as brutal as it is illegal”; “Hamas wants to destroy Israel and all Jews in Israel”; “Israel is an apartheid state”; “Hamas is a terrorist organization”; “the press is pro-Israel”; “the press is pro-Palestinian”; “Israel needs to defend itself”’; “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians”; “Hamas wants to commit genocide against Israeli Jews”; “Israel bombed a Gaza hospital”; “Actually, the Gazans bombed their own hospital”; “that’s just Zionist propaganda.”  

As a cosmopolitan American Jew, I have been trying to make sense of the Arab-Israeli conflict for most of my 50+ years. I’ve traveled to Israel many times and also to East Jerusalem and to the West Bank—never to Gaza. I’ve met Israeli Arab politicians and celebrated Ramadan with Palestinians and Passover with Israelis. What have I learned? That the conflict is tragic. Both sides have unfulfilled dreams, both have legitimate grievances, and both have blood on their hands. These days, both sides speak the language of absolute justice. Both Hamas in Palestine and the Netanyahu government in Israeli see themselves as righteous warriors and both show almost no capacity to imagine the complexity of the real world. There is no side with the moral high ground. In sum, the Arab-Israeli conflict—one of the most complicated political and moral quagmires in world history—is presented by both sides within a framework of moral and political reductive righteousness. 

Colleges and Universities are places of education. I would like to believe that if anywhere we can think together as friends and across tribal and partisan divides about world problems marked by complicated historical, ethical, and political backgrounds, it would be at institutions of higher learning. Where better than colleges and universities to put aside the orgy of truth telling and treat each other with respect due to those who are open and curious to learn, those who seek out divergent opinions to test their own, and those who covet the fellowship of the mind? Where better to treat each other with humanity even when our tribal allegiances lead us to fundamentally disagree?

Sadly, colleges in the United States have struggled to choose friendship and the politics of humanity and too often descended into orgies of truth telling. The orgy began with a statement by the Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard University that celebrated Hamas’s terrorist rampage as a justified act of resistance and placed the full blame for the atrocities on Israel. Alumni and a former Harvard President demanded that Harvard’s President take sides and condemn Hamas and the students. A truck appeared in Harvard Yard displaying pictures of the students who were members of these 30 organizations including their phone numbers, addresses, and majors. And then thousands of Harvard students gathered to condemn their university for not supporting its Palestinian students. 

On my own campus at Bard College, the Students for Justice in Palestine [originally] released a statement [later retracted] saying that they stand “in unwavering support with the unity Intifada in Gaza and occupied territories.” The statement adds, “There is no such thing as ‘maintaining peace’ when dealing with a violent settler state.” And it promises, "From the river to the sea, we will continue to fight for the honor and dignity of Palestinian people. We are part of this movement…. Liberation is a material process that requires confrontation by any means necessary.” 

This is chilling jargon that should be called out for its simplifications, reductionist righteousness, and antisemitic dehumanization of Jewish lives. At the same time, we should cut our students some slack. They are young, idealistic, and exuberant, exactly as I hope young people will be. It is far better for a young person to err on the side of irrational exuberance than to be passively obedient.  It is our job as faculty to meet our students where they are, to help our students think through complicated issues, to refuse sloganeering, and to inspire them to embrace the humanity of friendship over the desert of absolutist moral self-certainty. 

[added 10.23.23. I want to add that unbeknownst to me and two days before this essay appeared, the Bard SJP chapter released a revised statement that is noteworthy for its humanity and thoughtfulness. I gather that after their original statement, some faculty who knew them reached out to them and explained why their original statement was misguided. To these students' great credit, they retracted their original statement and then released a new and very thoughtful statement. This again is evidence of the great possibility for education at a college like Bard, and it gives me hope that friendships across the Israeli-Palestinian divide are not only possible, but alive and well.]

At our best, we who have the responsibility to seduce our students into the life of the mind are blessed with seeing them learn to think, to see the world from the perspectives of others, and begin their journey of courageously confronting and resisting reality, whatever it may be. Many of my colleagues are working to put together a wide-ranging speaker series and other fora in which experts from across the ideological spectrum and from different tribal backgrounds are speaking to our students. We are encouraging students to learn and question. At an extraordinary event this past week, my colleague Fred Hof— former chief-of-staff of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, a former Ambassador charged with mediating the Syria-Israel peace,  and Bard’s diplomat-in-residence—spoke and took passionate questions for hours from students from a dizzying range of political and emotional positions. In a packed room, our students accepted our invitation to think.

But we are not always at our best. I was shocked on Thursday to see an email sent around on the college listserve—in violation of college policy—that asked faculty to sign a statement in Solidarity with Palestinians. It is a letter that says it refuses hierarchies of grief, and yet stands only in solidarity with the Palestinian people and not with the Jewish people. 

As anti-imperialist faculty, staff and scholars at Bard College, we stand against colonial violence from occupied Mohican territories to occupied Palestine. We condemn the genocidal war being waged against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli apartheid state, and the billions in military aid and unlimited diplomatic cover given to Israel by the settler colonial United States…. We mourn every life lost in this war and we refuse hierarchies of grief that would efface the thousands of Palestinians murdered by Israeli occupation forces in the recent military assault on Gaza, and since the 1948 Nakba. We refuse to allow grief to be mobilized to perpetrate a genocidal war against the 2.2 million Palestinian incarcerated in the Gaza Strip. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

I also stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people as I stand with the Israeli people and Jews around the world. But my colleagues chose to stand only with Palestinians. This at a time when I and their Jewish colleagues are suffering deeply. Many of their Jewish colleagues have friends and family in Israel who have either been killed, are being held hostage, or are mourning loved ones. Many of us Jews on campus are mourning friends and worried about family members. We are in shock. And at this time our friends and colleagues chose to sign a public letter in a show of solidarity only with the people who committed barbaric acts of terrorism. I am skeptical of such public letters in general. Better to call your friends and show solidarity with them. But the Faculty letter speaks in one-sided abstractions, it condemns Israel as fighting a genocidal war against Palestinians, and does not mention Hamas’ aim of eradicating Israel and all Jews who live there. It does not even condemn the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. 

My colleagues who signed this letter are not students. They are adults, people I work with. Some of them are brilliant. Many I respect. A few are people who’ve sat at my dinner table. Reading the names of people I call friends on this letter was one of the most difficult experiences of my life. In the moment, it felt like a punch to the gut. 

Beyond the personal, for faculty to sign such a letter also denies their professional responsibilities. Our job as teachers is not to support our students in their tribal sensibilities and their reductionist moral righteousness. It is to make them understand the complexities and challenges of the real world. Standing with our students in their one-sided moralism is not an act of friendship that ennobles their humanity, it is to join them in their self-satisfied orgy of truth telling. It is precisely not what we should be doing as professors. 

And sadly, the signees of such letters—letters that are proliferating on college campuses and in communities such as the arts—are advertently or inadvertently participating in an antisemitic movement that is endangering Jews around the world. The modern left’s love for Palestinians and utter disdain and hatred of Israel cannot be explained outside of antisemitism. This does not mean one cannot criticize Israel–I do all the time. But it does mean that in a world where there are victims of state oppression all around us—the Uighurs in China, Roma, Rohingya people in Myanmar, gay and transgender people in Russia and the Arab world, women in the Arab world, refugees, Sudan, North Koreans, and more—the only cause that the modern left seems to see as its holy mission is that of the Palestinians, and the only people they seem absolutely unable to show solidarity with are the Jews. The ease with which the modern left dehumanizes Jews is inseparable from the wild rise in antisemitic acts around the world. The faculty statement of solidarity does not mention that Jewish students at Bard are being threatened in online forums, that synagogues are being attacked with molotov cocktails and defaced with Swastikas, that Jews are being punched in the New York City Subway, and that Jews are being stabbed and killed around the world. 

We are also witnessing an awful and unacceptable rise of Islamophobia. The horrific stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian American in Illinois was a tragedy, and it is inseparable from the kind of dehumanizing rhetoric coming out of many Israeli supporters who speak of Palestinians and the people of Gaza as if they were animals who deserve to be killed. Such rhetoric is inexcusable and if any group on campus were to say that intentional murder of Palestinian civilians were justified and to be celebrated, such Islamophobic rhetoric should be and would be condemned and rejected. But no one on our campus says such a thing. I can’t imagine anyone signing a letter in solidarity with Israel for intentionally targeting civilians. But what is said, and supported by too many of my students and colleagues, is that we should stand in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza whose government sent soldiers to torture and butcher innocent teenagers at a music festival and grandparents cowering in their homes and, further, that we need not stand in solidarity with Jews in Israel who are suffering from such a horrific attack. 

A few days after I read the faculty letter and confronted the names of my colleagues, I am more hopeful. I am confident that most of my colleagues simply didn’t think about the impact of standing in solidarity with Palestinians and not with Jews would mean. I trust that most of them are not unsympathetic to Jewish agony and suffering. I believe that some of them will come to see that such letters that offer political slogans in place of critical thought are intellectually vacuous and corrosive to the mission of education at our college. Above all, I hope that we can move past the orgy of truth telling and approach Hannah Arendt’s capacious idea of friendship, the belief that we can and must be friends, even with those we don’t like. Only friendship based on respect for others in their plurality and difference can be a foundation for true solidarity, one that is adequate to the complex, horrific, and also hopeful reality of a human world.