By Tristan Sturm
The recent uproar over a class e-mail by Professor William I. Robinson of the University of California Santa Barbara, which drew an analogy between the Holocaust and the Israeli blockade and recent war in Gaza, “Israel’s Warsaw… (and) a slow-motion process of genocide,” is not a new one among a long list of “˜martyred’ Jewish academics. Professor Robinson, who is Jewish, used juxtaposed images of children behind barbed wire in Gaza and Poland to illustrate his argument for the analogy and drew the knee-jerk denunciation of being anti-Semitic by hawkish observers.
In this clamor of voices for support or detraction of the issue I take no position. I make neither claim that Nazi treatment of Jews can be analogized with Israeli treatment of Gazans, or that Robinson is anti-Semitic. Rather, what concerns me is the more foundational issue of the use of analogy and the naming itself.
The Holocaust analogy is often made in relation to places of ethnic conflict. However, when used in the context of the Israel-Gaza situation, similar analogies which seemingly portray Israel in a negative light are immediately broadcast worldwide as being anti-Semitic. In Professor Robinson’s case, the whistle-blower was his own student, Lia Yaiger, a protege of StandWithUsCampus, an organization that “helps college students challenge anti-Israel bias.”
Analogies such as “balkanization” and “Apartheid” and other acts of naming using labels like “appeasers” and “Nazis,” when applied outside their geographic and historical references often obscure more than they reveal. These analogies are often used as abstract labels for political blaming and calls to action without recourse to the specificities of context. This has the effect of erasing all which preceded the particular event.
To both constituencies, the politico-cultural left and the right, the terms Holocaust or Nazi seems self-evident and are invoked freely to argue a political issue. The use of these labels and analogies can make seemingly complicated issues understandable by virtue of transposing one set of densely packed histories onto another situation. They make familiar the unfamiliar, and thus provide a model for identifying evildoers and victims.
In the backlash against Professor Robinson’s use of this specific analogy, he has been named anti-Semitic by StandWithUs and many others who have commented on the issue. Just as his Warsaw analogy vilifies Israel, so does labeling him as an evildoer portray him as being irrational and therefore unfit for participation in rational discussion or any attempt at disabusing him of his argument. This process of naming acts as a kind of call to action, and the discussion ends with the conclusion that Professor Robinson should not be entitled to teach college students, as Michael A. Waterman recently said in the Los Angeles Times.
Professor Robinson has thus become the poster boy for what is really wrong with the world today, and in doing so his detractors essentially sidestep the opportunity for self-criticism over the very particular handling of the dire situation in Gaza. The analogy between Gaza and Warsaw, and the naming of an individual as anti-Semitic, are both purposefully directed at specific audiences in order to elicit specific political and emotive responses. These distractions prevent comprehension of real and complex situations.
This is not to say that analogies are without merit; indeed they may be necessary for human communication and explanation, but it is nevertheless necessary to point out the limitations of an analogy. Perhaps this is what Professor Robinson had hoped to do as a scholastic exercise in his classroom, or perhaps it was polemical political activism.
Either way, we can recognize the use of analogies ““ always inherent generalizations ““ for use in classroom debate, and such debate is never possibly free of politics contra Waterman’s argument, nor should it be: Critical thought is one of the last bastions of the social sciences.
But we should also recognize that using such loose analogies without specifying the limitations of their use results in the loss of their original meaning and their emotive value as memories. They can also serve as reminders of what should happen “never again.”
Tristan Sturm is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at UCLA and a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.