by HAMID DABASHI
From Columbia University to all around the globe, the rhetoric of genocidal Zionism is finally being dismantled
A spectre is haunting Columbia University and other American campuses from coast to coast: that of Edward Said.
The powers of old and new genocidal Zionism have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, European governments, New York Times columnists and Fox News presenters.
They are all barking up the wrong tree.
Which party in this global anti-Zionist uprising has not been decried as “antisemitic” by its opponents in power?
For more than half a century, US political and public discourse has been violently dominated by pro-Israel rhetoric. It is not accidental that a university affiliated with the name of Said, who taught at Columbia for the entirety of his academic life, is now changing that hegemony and putting Zionism, the Jewish supremacist ideology of a garrison state, on the defensive.
Chants of “free, free, Palestine!” have echoed for months now, from the Columbia campus to all around the globe. Said is not here to hear it now, but in the soul of his conviction, he knew it was coming.
The year 2023 will be remembered as the point in our history when genocidal Zionism was finally put on trial at American university campuses. Said’s legacy, and his lifetime commitment to the Palestinian cause, are written all over this student uprising.
Crucial history
Historians of ideas and social movements will soon have to begin the necessary task of putting the pieces of this history together – and the life’s work of a leading Palestinian thinker, who remains an iconic figure at Columbia, will be an important component of that history.
These historians will have many significant dates to consider. One was in the summer of 2002, when about half a dozen Columbia faculty gathered in one of our apartments to initiate an appeal to the university to divest from companies selling military equipment to Israel.
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