In recent weeks, controversy has arisen surrounding an upcoming course in Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies (NES) Department for its inclusion of a book on its sample reading list that claims the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) deliberately cripples Palestinians. The book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, argues that Israel “relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies.” Puar has received widespread criticism for many anti-Israel remarks, including assertions that Israel has “mined” Palestinian bodies “for organs for scientific research.”
The Right to Maim will be taught by Prof. Satyel Larson as part of an upcoming course called “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South.” Princeton’s approval of Prof. Larson’s book choice has received criticism from figures ranging from Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, to organizations such as the Israel-based non-profit, International Legal Forum. The book has also been discredited for its methodology. The scholar Cary Nelson shows how Puar’s book fails on ordinary measures of academic rigor, and one professor describes it as a “witches’ brew of bias, rumor, and postmodernist jargon.” Within the University, the executive director of Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life (CJL), Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, urged the Chair of the NES Department and Prof. Larson to remove the book and “explore alternative ways to teach the course.”
While free speech protections are vital to the University and the book’s removal should not be the first response in a case like this, that does not mean anything goes. A piece of work that has sparked academic scandal must be thoughtfully studied in that context. If Prof. Larson refuses to acknowledge the plethora of scholarship critical of Puar’s book and its unfounded allegations, then she will have strayed from the University’s truth-seeking purpose, and removal of the work as Steinlauf has urged may prove necessary.
Puar’s venomous accusations that the IDF harvests the organs of those killed in “field assassinations” and tries to “stunt” the Palestinian public by maiming innocents should not merit more than a few sentences. These could not be farther from the reality of Israel’s ethic towards bloodshed. Judaism places immense value on human life, and accordingly the IDF’s guiding ethic is to minimize unnecessary harm to civilians and enemy combatants alike.
As a state, Israel must be vigilant against Hamas and Hezbollah, terrorist groups that wish to eradicate Israel and its civilian population. Still, Israeli forces go to extreme lengths to avoid collateral damage in conflicts with the enemies on its borders. The High Level Military Group (HLMG), an international team of military analysts, has noted the IDF’s “scrupulous” observation of International Humanitarian Law, and recommended that other governments study Israel’s “highly advanced” tactics to avoid civilian casualties, such as “‘knock on the roof,’ intelligence gathering methods on the location of civilians, and correct use of warning calls.”
Anti-Israel activists such as Puar rarely take note of this and have taken to fabricating Israeli atrocities whole-cloth. Any reader should question the integrity of a scholar who has avowed commitment to “the global quest for Palestinian liberation.”
It should be unsurprising that Prof. Larson has found allies among leftists in the student body. In response to the CJL, the student group Alliance of Jewish Progressives (AJP) released an open letter expressing concern about “the right-wing Zionist attacks on Professor Satyel Larson’s plans to teach Dr. Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim” and “stand[ing] in solidarity with Professor Larson.” In the letter, which has received almost 400 signatures from faculty, current students, alumni, and other Princeton affiliates, AJP defends Puar’s misinformation about Israel, asserting that Israeli organ harvesting is “well-documented” and a “horrific fact.”
Puar posing with her book, The Right to Maim. (photo courtesy of Twitter/Duke University Press)
The story AJP cites is indeed horrific, but it is not what Puar had referenced – nor does it prove what antisemites want it to. It refers to the case of a rogue pathologist at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute named Yehuda Hiss who admitted he “felt free” to remove organs from those whose families had only consented to autopsy. The bodies were those of Israelis and Palestinians, civilians and soldiers. In 2012, Israel raided the lab and publicized that it had found illegally harvested organs, whereupon Hiss was ousted from the institute. As of 2015, the state had compensated the victims’ families 3.5 million shekels in over 80 court cases. Other allegations of Israeli organ harvesting have been proven to be “political propaganda from Iran and Palestine,” as the Hiss report notes.
Yet Puar has veered from the details of the Hiss case into generalizations that smell a lot like antisemitic blood libel. She has popularized a more recent organ harvesting canard, speculating that Israel “mined for organs for scientific research” in 2015, and that Israel pursues a greater program of “weaponized epigenetics where the outcome is … about needing body parts … for research and experimentation.”* Why does AJP stand behind the author of such misinformation, rather than condemn her work for being the malicious propaganda that it is?
Steinlauf observes how Puar’s slander echoes “classic antisemitic tropes stemming from the blood libel of the Middle Ages” and, with regard to her book, asks Prof. Larson to “reconsider the impact of this text.” The AJP letter’s signatories accuse Steinlauf of “censorship,” which is an egregious exaggeration. Steinlauf notes how academic freedom dictates that educators be free to explore whatever materials are relevant to their subject.
Professors should be free to assign texts that will add to students’ intellectual development and advance the truth-seeking mission of the University. But that does not mean that falsehood should be allowed to pass for fact. Instructors should be cognizant of how their own biases have informed their curriculum and ensure that their pedagogy does not suffer as a result. A class designed to serve a political agenda or malign a particular group – even an entire country – is unlikely to advance academic discourse.
Unless Puar’s work is rigorously examined or used as a case study in academics’ use of political rhetoric, it is imprudent to teach it. When Mein Kampf is taught in Princeton courses, it is not presented as an objective depiction of German Jewry; nor is Karl Marx’s description of the Jew as a “huckster” in his essay “On the Jewish Question.” So, too, this book may have a place in the classroom, but its framing must be aligned with the University’s guidelines that scholarship pursue truth above all else. Otherwise, the book will not produce fruitful dialogue and will more likely convince students of scurrilous, unproven claims.
But I seriously doubt that Prof. Larson will encourage a critical assessment of Puar’s claims. “The Healing Humanities” is a small seminar that urges participants to “re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism.” This class will not offer a critical study of war trauma – it will be a workshop in woke victimology.
Prof. Larson’s other work betrays a similar aim. One book she is currently writing will discuss how “colonial ideas of calculability underlie the postcolonial governance of reproduction and reproductive female bodies in contemporary Morocco.” Another book will focus on “sexual violence, carceral culture and restorative justice in postcolonial North Africa.” This framing suggests that contemporary, Muslim North Africa’s regulation of sexuality is to be blamed on European powers, which left the region over 60 years ago. Put simply, these works are intended to be progressive polemics, not disinterested scholarly research.
Prof. Larson makes extensive use of the concept of “discourse” popularized by Michel Foucault, and Puar’s book is hailed as “a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics.” Foucault claimed that scholars must reveal and upend oppressive social frameworks; Prof. Larson and Puar appear to be acolytes of this philosophy. Foucault justified the merging of the academic’s job with that of the activist, and the activist has no reason to provide students a complicated view of the world.
Educators should train students to sophisticate their view of the world in pursuit of the attainment of truth – not amass adherents to social causes. Yet today, ideologues have burrowed within the discipline and used its prestige to do exactly the latter. Since authors often dress their work in academese that is impenetrable to non-academics, the general audience often cannot distinguish this from the serious, truth-seeking work of specialists. Progressive professors routinely promote shoddy academic work to their students; rarely does it reach public attention.
It is easy to grow numb to the avalanche of assigned readings that impugn and misrepresent certain religious, ethnic, or other social groups as bigoted or evil. Still, students of any background should be concerned about this book’s placement in the classroom. Puar has used the socially acceptable language of progressivism to traffic in antisemitic rhetoric. Her legitimation by Duke University’s publication of her work as well as Princeton’s inclusion of it in a course curriculum bodes poorly for other groups that may run afoul of campus favoritism – and it threatens to overturn the already fragile norms of debate on campus.
*After facing backlash for her 2016 lecture, Puar said that she was “not making any empirical claims about current organ mining. Rather, I was conveying a small part of the sheer terror of life in the West Bank.” However, she had indeed given credibility to speculation about organ harvesting in that speech: “On January 1st, 2016, the Israeli government returns 17 bodies of these youth that purportedly lay in a morgue in West Jerusalem for two months… Some speculate that the bodies were mined for organs for scientific research.” She did not interrogate or qualify this speculation, and so in mentioning it, lent her voice to it.
The above is an opinion article and reflects the author’s views alone.
(photo courtesy of Unsplash/Levi Meir Clancy)
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