UCLA Professor: What’s wrong with Jews being a minority in Israel?

Finally, after about an hour of partisan arguments from both sides, I heard something that got my attention.

I was attending an event Monday night sponsored by the UCLA Debate Union, billed as “A Spirited Debate on BDS.” It featured, on one side, Professor Judea Pearl and students Philippe Assouline and Joseph Kahn, and, on the other side, Professor Saree Makdisi and students Ahmad Azzawi and Wali Kamal.

From what I hear, after I left, there was a controversial afterword from a professor who was not officially part of the debate. I will address only the formal debate, which is what I saw.

In front of an audience of about 100–150 people who represented both sides, the Judea Pearl side argued the motion: “This House Believes that BDS is Not Moral.”

Nothing surprised me too much in the back and forth. The House side rehashed the well-known arguments against BDS—namely, that it is out to undermine the Jewish state rather than search for peace—while the Makdisi side framed BDS as fighting the injustice of the Israeli occupation with the best non-violent tool available.

We’ve heard it before. Yes, it was helpful to hear it all in one place, and in a civil manner, with no yelling and insults. You could feel some underlying tension, but the panelists made a genuine effort to conduct themselves with class and civility.

Professor Makdisi was effective in his arguments because he constantly appealed to universal values such as fairness, equality, justice, and so on. Focusing on those values helped him finesse the Achilles Heel of the BDS movement—the fact that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Promoting the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to Israel, for example, means the effective end of the “Jewish” state—what a panelist on the Pearl side called national suicide.

Makdisi took that word—suicide—and ran with it, almost ridiculing it as an example of needless hysterics from the Zionist side. You could see where he was going. What kind of just society would treat the arrival of Palestinians as suicide? Sure, there may be a great number of Palestinians who want to return to Israel, but what’s wrong with Arabs and Jews living side by side, in full equality, in the same state and under the same government?

Then, he got carried away and blurted out these words:

“What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?”

I have a feeling he regretted those words as soon as he said them.

Why? Because he’s no fool. He’s a knowledgeable professor, and he surely knows what’s wrong with Jews being a minority in a country of the Middle East.

He knows that, for centuries, Jews in Arab and Muslim countries were treated as second-class citizens, or Dhimmis. He knows that hundreds of thousands of those Jews were persecuted and expelled after the birth of Israel in 1948.

He knows that there are 50 Muslim countries in the world, but only one Jewish one.

He knows that throughout those countries, non-Muslim minorities are routinely persecuted and oppressed.

He knows that the Arab minority in Israel has more rights, freedom, legal protections and economic opportunities than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East.

He knows all of that.

So, when he said, so innocently, “What’s wrong with Jews being a minority?” he probably forgot who was in the audience. Maybe he thought he was talking to a Student for Justice in Palestine crowd, where the elimination of the Jewish state would be like manna from heaven.

But he wasn’t. There were some proud Zionists in the audience, and I was one of them. My Jewish ancestors were minorities in an Arab country. The stories I heard were not of human rights and equality. They were stories about surviving by keeping our heads down and keeping our mouths shut.

That’s why Zionists fought so hard for a Jewish state. Because the Jewish experience of being a minority in a hostile land is not one we ever want to repeat.

Suggesting that it’s OK for Jews to become dhimmis again, well, if you ask me, I think that’s not very moral.

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