Harvard Law Professor’s Argument On ‘Israeli Settler Colonialism’ And Strong Counter Argument By Student (image@NoahRFeldman)

Noah Raam Feldman, is an American legal scholar and law professor at Harvard Law School. He belongs to an orthodox Jewish family. In his latest article, ‘The New Antisemitism’, he argues that the old European antisemitism has evolved into a “new antisemitism”. His argument is that Israel “was brought into existence by a 1947 United Nations resolution”. The law professor claims that the Palestinian catastrophe or the Nakba of 1948 was actually the failure of Arab invasion to destroy the “nascent Jewish state”.

Feldman’s arguments were countered by a Harvard Law Student, who is a Palestinian. The student called Feldman’s article “inaccurate & intellectually dishonest”, and said that Feldman’s core argument is that the new form of antisemitism is actually the old European antisemitism, the “one which calls Israel a colonial, imperial, &white supremacist project”. The student said the professor’s argument relies on “misinformation and obfuscation”.

The Palestinian student put forth five claims to prove Feldman’s claims wrong. By citing texts from Patrick Wolfe, the founder of settler colonial theory, from his 2006 work ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, the student highlights that Wolfe has explained settler colonialism with Zionism’s founding father Theodor Herzl. Wolfe said “settler colonialism destroys to replace”. He then quotes Herzl’s words from his allegorical manifesto, “if I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct”.

The student’s second claim target Feldman’s words, “whether early Zionist settler should be conceived as colonialist is a hotly disputed question”. To prove him that indeed the earlier Zionists perceived themselves as colonialist, the student shared texts by Zionist leaders Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Theodor Herlz, and said they called themselves as “Jewish Colonization Association”.

In his essay, The Iron Law (1925), Jabotinsky wrote that, “Zionism is a colonization adventure”. In the essay, he said while it is important to speak Hebrew, “it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing”.

The Harvard student then went on to quote Mohammed El-Kurd, the Palestinian writer as saying, “I know that Zionists have colonized Palestine without the need to cite Herzl. I know this because I live it, because the ruins of countless depopulated villages provide the material evidence of calculated ethnic cleansing”.

Kurd, who is native to Jerusalem, ask why do authority of narration was given to the ‘Israeli settler colonialists’ or ‘Zionists’. He ask, “why do we wait for those carrying the batons to speak when our bruised bodies told the whole truth?”.

Agreeing to Noah Feldman’s words that the frameworks like ‘colonialism’ are “often used to make moral judgements”, the law student claimed that the “Palestinians use them precisely. It is Zionists who confound”.

The third claim by the student was about the “most inaccurate, ahistorical, and intellectually dishonest descriptions of the Nakba”. Feldman claimed that, “the Palestinian catastrophe, or nakba, of 1948 was that when the Arab invasion of Israel failed to destroy the nascent Jewish state, many Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their homes by Israeli troops were unable to return. Those Palestinians became permanent refugees in neighboring countries. Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the UN, those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule”.

The student highlights the usage of “nascent Jewish state” by the professor, to denote 1948 catastrophe. The Harvard pupil accuse the professor of ‘inverting’ the “Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of over 750K Palestinians”. The Palestinian said, in other words, Feldman is defining Nakba or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as the “RESPONSE” of Palestinians to their ethnic cleansing. The student also refers Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbaria, to know better about the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe).

The fourth claim by the student was about Feldman’s claim that “Israel’s genocide is not a genocide”. In his article, Feldman wrote, “the genocide charges depend on the intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza war with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people”.

The student took a jibe at the Jewish professor, and said that there are evidences of “genocidal statements by Israeli officials and genocidal actions”, and provide database from Law of Palestine, that show incitement of Israeli genocidal act on the Gaza.

The fifth argument from the student was Feldman’s alleged claim of Judaism as the primary victim of genocide. The Harvard professor said in his article that “if the Jews are depicted as genocidal – if Israel becomes the very archetype of genocidal state – then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defence”.

The student called it “insane” for Feldman to centre Jews as the primary victims of genocide when “30,000 Palestinians have already been murdered in cold blood”.

The law student said, to Feldman, “who cannot see past his own ego”, the Palestinian struggles are illegible, a secondary phenomenon, because of the fact that it will then have negative consequences on him and his “vaunted status as the “archetypal victim”.