The Feb. 26 University faculty meeting concluded with a discussion of free speech issues on campus, where faculty shared many opinions on controversial subjects. One of them was my colleague, Prof. Jacob Cohen (AMST), who accused our mutual colleague, Prof. Donald Hindley (POL), of having made comments on the much-maligned Concerned listserv that were tantamount to blood libel.  The accusation, a very serious one, is false.

My analysis concerns the words of well-known Brandeis faculty colleagues but does not describe any personal quarrel with either of them.  Each is publicly accountable by name for his words, which I heard at the faculty meeting and read on the Concerned listserv.  My criticism of their words is no more personal than if I had a disagreement with President Obama.  

False public accusations of blood libel, hate speech and anti-Semitism, accusations which are increasing in number, devalue these significant words that describe deplorable acts and degrade public discourse to a messy food fight at best, or to a frightening witch hunt at worst.  The example described here is not an outlier.  Working at Brandeis has provided me with many other similar examples where rationality and derech eretz, good manners and respect, have died.

Cohen did not refer to Hindley by name, assuming that those present would recognize who he was talking about.  He likened his anonymous accusation to that of University President Frederick Lawrence’s public letter of last summer assailing the Concerned listserv. 

More seriously, Cohen misquoted what Hindley wrote, resulting in a significant misperception and a further erroneous conclusion.  Here’s how it went:

Responding to a posting on Concerned regarding tree planting in Israel, which has included Jewish National Fund forestation on Palestinian villages and fields that were depopulated and destroyed, Hindley wrote the following provocative words:  “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses.  In that way, we combine great trees with our own holocaustic ethnic cleansing.”  

This statement has been Exhibit A in public condemnation of the entire Concerned listserv.  Hindley had to recognize that his incendiary prose risked provoking a serious backlash, and it did. 

But Cohen further redacted Hindley’s words, replacing “Palestinian corpses” with “corpses of Palestinian children.” This emendation facilitated the transition to his accusation that Hindley’s words were synonymous with blood libel, the untrue, infamous and repulsive slander that shtetl Jews habitually mixed the blood of murdered Christian children in matzo meal.  

In contrast, the Nakba really happened: the catastrophic killing of Palestinians, expulsion of their surviving population and obliteration of their villages in 1948 and afterwards, the subsequent cultivation of forests and Israeli villages and settlements on their ruins.  This destruction is documented in the voluminous writing of Benny Morris, Morris’s later right-wing, interpretative revisionism notwithstanding. It is described in Yizhar Smilansky’s historical novel, Khirbet Khizeh, a renowned work of Hebrew literature that figured for years in the Israeli school curriculum, recently republished in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Smilansky’s novel also struck a raw nerve, generating a hasbara response by Israeli historian Anita Shapira, of length commensurate with that of the novel.  Perhaps Ari Shavit said it best in his panegyric paean of praise to liberal Zionism, My Promised Land: “I stand by the damned.”

The contribution of the Israeli “New Historians”—Morris, Pappé, Shlaim, Segev and others—makes these historical realities indisputable. Hasbarist revisionists argue about how and why we ought to view this catastrophe more sympathetically: to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs, and so on.  But these events occurred.

Cohen evoked the grotesque shtetl memory of blood libel accusations, which were untrue and historic slanders that in turn provided a false pretext for pogroms inflicted on the Jewish shtetl communities.  He then conflated the false accusations of blood libel with the chronicled death and destruction of the Nakba, the latter being the historical context of Hindley’s criticism.  Both are accusations of alleged killing, but the first is libelous, anti-Semitic and false, while the second is historically documented and true.  

Furthermore, this conflation is not original. In 2006 I attended a Tauber Institute lecture at Brandeis by Samuel Trigano, a French sociologist, who asserted that photographs depicting dead children after Israeli bombing of south Beirut were a form of blood libel. The children were casualties of Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine: a military strategy where the army targets civilians and civilian infrastructure as a means of establishing deterrence. The doctrine takes its name from the bombing of large apartment buildings in the Dahiya suburb of Beirut by the Israel Defense Forces during the 2006 Lebanese War. Said IDF General Gadi Eisenkot in describing the doctrine, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired … through prioritizing strikes against its assets.” Eisenkot’s colleague, IDF General Giora Eiland, added that in the next confrontation, Lebanese civilian infrastructure would be destroyed.

When any member of any ethnic, religious or national group kills someone, saying so is not libelous, even if members of that group have previously been falsely accused of murder.  This assertion is self-evident.

Hindley’s remark was intemperate and aggrieved many readers. Cohen’s accusation of blood libel was intemperate, and wrong, because it is false. And I support Cohen’s right to free speech, including his right to be wrong.

Return again to Hindley’s statement. Mentioning “corpses” is politically, poetically and provocatively visceral, and “holocaustic” is an unproductive, pugnacious poke in the reader’s eye.  But asserting that Palestinian villages were depopulated and destroyed, their inhabitants killed and driven out, and that organizations (such as the Jewish National Fund) grow forests on land gained through that destruction is not libelous.  It’s factually correct. Condemnation of that collective catastrophe was the subject of Hindley’s remark. The backlash, supposedly regarding its evident rhetorical excess, has served to impugn its political content.  

Donald Hindley, who retires this year, has been at the epicenter of the conflict over the Concerned listserv. Some of the things he wrote on the listserv were, to my mind, both unproductive and provocative.  

Other actions of his were heroic.  I have posted many things on Concerned and tried to avoid the vernacular toward which Hindley was often drawn.  But he also did courageous things that I could not bring myself to do.  He’s neither a god nor a golem but a human, fallible person. I will miss him, and his positive contributions to this University.

—Prof. Harry Mairson (COSI) is a professor of computer science.