The Gaza Elephant

 -- By Tom Phillips 

Photo:  NY Daily News 

We all know the expression “an elephant in the room.” It means a subject everyone is afraid to talk about, but which is too big and important to go away. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side today, a herd of elephants is in the room, and on each of their their enormous sides, in dripping red, four letters are inscribed. GAZA.

Silence, emanating from Columbia University, has spread through a community known as the epicenter of liberal politics and free speech in New York. Arguably, the worst war crimes of the 21st Century are taking place in the Middle East, and the US is still arming and enabling the aggressor. In the diverse and cosmopolitan atmosphere of the UWS, foreign crises are normally treated as local news. But not these days.

After months of furious protest, Gaza is now too risky to talk about. Those who discuss it in public lower their voices, and look around before they speak. Full disclosure: Even I, a lifetime journalist and disrupter of polite conversation, have learned to shut my mouth while the carnage continues in Gaza. The penalties are ostracism by friends and colleagues, and the ever-lurking shibboleth of anti-Semitism, a charge which even when unfounded and untested, can wreck your life. Ask three former Columbia deans now wandering in the wilderness, with the rest of their lives to figure out how they “touched on ancient anti-Semitic tropes” in their stolen text messages. Which tropes? Where touched, and how? They can ask the former Columbia president, if they meet her in the desert.

At Columbia, fear feeds on fear. The public is barred from the campus, and students are barred from protesting, by private security guards and a maze of barricades that prevent large gatherings — effectively nullifying the constitutional right to assembly. And it’s not just students being intimidated. Long-time Law professor Katherine Franke says she and others are being investigated by the university, facing possible termination for stating the Palestinian point of view in class. And the infection spreads: Franke’s lawyer Kathleen Peratis quit her law firm after it dropped Franke as a client, saying she was too controversial. “What happened at Outten & Golden is the kind of thing that’s happening all over,” says Peratis. 

Student protesters have returned to the written word. Journalism students can’t be barred from campus, and they are already reporting for outlets such as the West Side Rag. Meanwhile protesters have passed around a prescient document — a statement from America’s most eminent historian, Charles A. Beard, on his resignation from Columbia in 1917. He quit to protest the firing of colleagues who opposed US entry into World War One. Beard wrote:

“I have been driven to the conclusion that the University is really under the control of a small and active group of Trustees, who have no standing in the world of education, who are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion. Their conduct betrays a profound misconception of the true function of a university in the advancement of learning.”

Beard saw this as a threat to democracy: “We stand on the threshold of an era which will call for all the emancipated thinking America can command.”

The same is true today. If we lose free speech on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, we lose a bastion of democracy. And we are losing.

Amid the ubiquitous scaffolding on Upper West Side buildings with loose bricks, an invisible architecture of social control is being constructed, to zip loose lips. It begins with spies and informants in classrooms and cafes, rises through a publicity machine that interprets free speech as hate speech, a disciplinary apparatus that finds and banishes scapegoats, economic powers that reward loyalty and punish independence in the private sector, religious bureaucracies that restrain political activism ---and at the top, powerful lobbies that make national issues out of nothing, and use large recurring contributions of campaign money to force elected officials into voting for policies that defy their own morality.

Please Note: This has nothing to do with any “Jewish conspiracy.” Jews and gentiles are prominent on both sides. The real battle is between two kinds of thinkers: partisans whose priority is what’s best for their side; and intellectuals whose priority is their vision of the truth.

It recalls the 2012 German film Hannah Arendt, about a writer/philosopher covering the trial in Israel of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann. Arendt's analysis of Eichmann’s character was unacceptable to many of her Zionist friends on the Upper West Side. They wanted her to paint him as an anti-Semitic fiend from Hell, But Arendt had looked into Eichmann’s soul and found …nothing. Like innumerable mediocrities in every walk of life, he was “just doing his job.”

Arendt called it “the banality of evil.” Her vision of the truth cost her many friends, readers and admirers. But it resounds to this day.