Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics by Ruth Sheldon

Author:Ruth Sheldon [Sheldon, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784993146
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Tensions of melodramatic experience: embodying and unsettling the claim of reason

In the previous discussion, I have claimed that the intensification of circulating moral and epistemic anxieties was a significant factor in the endorsement of the academic boycott debate by the university authorities. However, it was also the case that this event was only possible as a consequence of the willing participation of students, and specifically the leaders of the Israel and Palestine Societies. The academic boycott debate was the only occasion of formal collaboration between an Israel/Jewish Society and a Palestine Society during the period of my fieldwork. As I discussed in previous chapters, this reflected a consistent dynamic of this campus politics; while Israeli and Jewish student societies repeatedly initiated ‘dialogue’ activities, student activists for Palestine rejected intersocietal collaboration as ‘normalisation’. For pro-Palestine activists on campus, boycott was not just an abstract principle but rather a repertoire of activism connecting their work to a transnational social movement. Yet, in contrast with their more frequent refusal of collaboration, the Palestine Society agreed to co-host this particular debate. As the nominated proponents of the pro-boycott position, their participation in this event appeared to put them in the paradoxical position of discursively arguing against academic dialogue. My suggestion is that the Palestine Society’s decision to participate in this event revealed the potency of the liberal imaginary of the university for these students too.

Writing in the student newspaper, Sadiq justified the decision to participate in the academic boycott debate. Contrasting the event with a request by the Israel Society to collaborate in raising money for a humanitarian charity, he stated, ‘We are willing to work with groups who we disagree with,’ adding that the purpose must be ‘to expose these disagreements and discuss them in a constructive way. However, we won’t share a platform on any other basis with these groups.’ In an interview with me a few weeks later, Sadiq explained that the decision to collaborate was not without its internal critics from within the movement:

So you will get groups who are like, not more puritanical, but in their ideological beliefs they apply that very strictly in terms of practice, so, like, we can’t debate Israelis because it legitimises them, so that’s one, like, kind of exceptional idea which might be true, but they may really apply it completely in practice, they will not debate with Israelis anyway. Then you get people like me who are more pragmatic and so, whether or not you think that it legitimises them, which I don’t anyway, we’re … we go for a lot more tactics.

Later, when I met with another Palestine Society member, Yusra, she expanded on the meaning of Sadiq’s terminology of ‘tactics’, explaining how the Palestine Society committee sought to reach out, not only to an activist audience affirming boycott, but to a broader student audience within the university:

I would say that the stereotype that Palestinian activists have is something that we’re always trying to overcome. Erm, so you know being leftist fanatical or whatever, radicals, terrorists, Hamas-supporting, you know we’ve been called a lot of things.

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