[lbo-talk] "healing process"

[Wojtek S]

I take your point about student victory against administration, but I don't
think an academic discussion of Zionism is a good idea. Every nation has
founding mythology and most nations were formed by imposition of central
authority over others. Debating this is just academic hair splitting.
A far more useful thing is discussing different plans for solving the
current situation outside the box of establishing Palestinian bantustan.
And while the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is deplorable, it pales
in comparison to how people are treated next door. There are double
standards here. Israel is judged by higher standard of democratic state and
condemned while its Arab neighbors are judged by the standard of autocracy
and left of the hook.
If we're are concerned about human rights violations let's focus on worst
abusers not on easiest targets.

Wojtek
Sent from my Droid
On Apr 24, 2013 9:21 PM, "Chuck Grimes" <cagrimes42 at gmail.com> wrote:


> You are missing the point. That student government got this to an open
> vote is a win in a long standing battle between student groups at UCB, that
> reflects the larger battle against the US and Israel.
>
> Of course it is meaningless in direct action outcomes. It remains a
> symbolic gesture. Unfortunately places like Berkeley, Madison, et al are
> sometimes good at symbolic gestures and not much else.
>
> There is another level of contention to the resolution and that is whether
> or not the ASUC senate controls how ASUC funds are spent and in this case
> invested. At a guess, there is probably a committee with administration
> oversight that can control that power if it wants to. This level showed up
> now and again in yore and included who could speak on campus and who
> couldn't. The ASUC is an alternate source of funding for speakers and
> entertainment gigs.
>
> It occurred to me that if progressive student groups wanted to really get
> a bang for their bucks, they could have scheduled a series or panel of
> speakers ranging from Norman Finkelstein to Shlomo Sand to deconstruct the
> heroic myths of Israel and Zionism. As I learned from studying Weimar, it
> is a very old fracture that attempts to weld together an identity that
> Jewish equals Zionism equals Israel.
>
> I'd like to add several academics who would include radical
> anthropologists and sociologists to illuminate the entire formative process
> of national identities and their universal fabrications. The identity
> formation process taps into some sort of psyche bound propensity toward
> tribalism. This prehensility is how we grasp and creat the social and
> ourselves as social beings.
>
> While that view seems far removed from more concrete issues, I would argue
> it is at the core of the problem, which is manifest in the historical-legal
> concept of citizenship. This concept is almost universally constructed on
> exclusion through a whole state apparatus, just to filter out who
> eventually ends up in a room with the flag and can take an oath of
> allegiance. The last thing that a state wants is a open inclusive apparatus.
>
> CG
>
>
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