Humanities and the Human: The Crisis of Israel Studies and the Ethics of our Methodologies—Reflections after October 7th

Humanities and the Human: The Crisis of Israel Studies and the Ethics of our Methodologies—Reflections after October 7th Arieh Saposnik (bio) Keywords October 7, Israel, Hamas, Ethics, Humanities, academic discourse, "settler-colonialism" Israel was in crisis before October 7th. For at least a number of months leading up to the Hamas massacre that took place that day, it was clear that this was not only a political or a judicial crisis, specific to particular aspects of Israeli life, but rather a crisis in the very meaning of Israel and Zionism; indeed, there was already a creeping sense that we were living a critical moment in modern Jewish history. But October 7th expanded and deepened the crisis in unimaginable ways—unimaginable before that day, and still to a large extent unimaginable months later. At the time I am writing, there remains a sense that this is a moment of historical crisis that incorporates the calamities and predicaments facing Israel in an immediate sense with dilemmas that had been brewing for some time, but seem to have taken on a reality that is more than the sum of its pre-October 7th parts in their fusion into a single, confounding whole: a crisis in Israel's sense of security; a global crisis of liberal democracy; the acute threats posed to liberal democracy by the post-truth culture of the woke, massacre-denying left and the populist, "alternative facts"-promoting right; deepened divisions over the nature and limits of free speech and what is beyond the boundaries of legitimate expression; crises in academic institutions, in no small measure related to these. One dimension of our post-October 7th reality, in other words, is a fusion of numerous preexisting quandaries into an overarching sense of ground-shaking tremors that profoundly impact not only Israel itself and End Page 163 much of the Jewish world; that not only pose what at least at times appear to be existential challenges to the post-1945, post-1989 world order in which some triumph of liberal democracy—however conceived—seemed all but self-evident. A recent New York Times article suggested that the Hamas War, and the political, cultural, and social divisions that it has elicited in many Western countries, may be formative of an entire generation in a manner similar to the way the Vietnam War, and the protest movement that erupted in response to it, shaped that generation and its politics and culture for decades.1 Within this complex admixture of disquieting crises for Israel (and beyond), it is my sense that this is also a landmark juncture for the academic field of Israel Studies and for the very epistemological, ethical even aesthetic assumptions that undergird the methodological foundations of academic research in the humanities and social sciences. I have held for some years that Israel Studies has emerged as a spearhead of sorts in the academic world's need to grapple with its own foundational assumptions. The world that is crystalizing in the wake of October 7th has in my view made it a matter of urgency for our field to closely scrutinize and consider what those foundations are and how they can, do, and perhaps should serve as the infrastructure of what it is that we do as scholars. From the very beginnings of this war, the academic world has been heavily involved and implicated. It was one day after the massacre (before any significant Israeli counter-measures had begun) that a coalition of student groups at Harvard University issued a statement placing full blame for that massacre on Israel. Only a few days later, a Cornell historian, Russel Rickford, proclaimed his sense of "exhilaration" at the Hamas massacre of men, women, and children. (Under pressure from his university's president, herself apparently under pressure from donors, he would later apologize, but stipulated that his apology was for "some of the language" he used rather than for the substance of his enthusiastic support for Hamas' mass murder).2 The presidents of three elite academic institutions in the US were called to testify before Congress regarding anti-Jewish rhetoric and activity on their campuses and the ways in which they...