The contrast between protests in Gaza and protests ostensibly for Gaza is startling. In Gaza, Palestinians are out in the streets calling for freedom from Hamas rule despite the knowledge that they are risking their lives to do so. Indeed, just this weekend Hamas abducted a protester, tortured him to death, and left his body on his family’s doorstep as a grotesque warning to others. On U.S. campuses, meanwhile, protesters are out in the streets to oppose restrictions on their pro-Hamas demonstrations.
It’s all part of an overall trend in which Palestinians in the territories and “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West are moving in two different intellectual directions. Westerners are unambiguously moving backwards.
A book that should be required reading on the Arab-Israeli conflict at every American university is Self-Criticism After the Defeat, by Sadik al-Azm, a groundbreaking 1968 critique from within the Arab world. Azm, a Syrian intellectual, wrote this superb dissent from what he saw as Arab leaders’ denialism after the Six-Day War in 1967. The war, he felt, exposed how the rest of the world was leaving the Arab world behind, and Arab leaders responded by pretending the war was not a defeat but a mere setback in the inevitable triumph over the Zionist project.
The version of the book in circulation today includes a forward by the late Lebanese-American intellectual and academic Fouad Ajami and three response-essays by other Arab writers, including the foundational Palestinian novelist turned PFLP terror recruit Ghassan Kanafani. Ajami’s essay is on the stultifying atmosphere in Arab thought that was disrupted by Azm’s gust of fresh air.
Rereading Ajami today, however, from an American perspective is jarring: It sounds like he’s talking not about pan-Arab groupthink from the 1950s and 1960s but the elite U.S. university in 2025.
Part of the problem, Ajami writes, was that the echo chamber of the “Arab street” left the publics ill-prepared for Israel’s victory because they didn’t expect it or plan for it: “No one had told ordinary Arabs that Israel was there to stay, that she had won the struggle for statehood on her own, that the verdict of the 1948 war could not be reversed.”
Today’s college students and activists, the bright minds of the future, are that Arab street. Magical thinking, faith in their own cause, and self-righteousness have cloistered them, and instead of expanding their horizons their professors only locked them in further, sealing them off from reality. There is something almost anti-modern about it, as if they don’t have access to sources on the outside.
Ajami highlights Azm’s quest “to strip Arab thought of its belief in fate and folk tales and superstition.” What else is the alarming anti-intellectualism of “decolonization theory” than the academy’s version of folk tales and superstition? To be a student in good standing in many of the most elite colleges today requires one to believe, or pretend to believe, that the People of Israel have no connection to the Land of Israel. Our very own flat-earthers.
Of course, prior to the advent of Palestinian nationalism, the Jewish connection to the land was widely acknowledged in the Arab world. Its erasure is a purely political campaign, a self-manufactured Dark Age that has now been imported by Westerners for, again, entirely political instrumentation. Azm and Ajami talked of excuse-making, of the tendency of the region’s inhabitants to complain about the supposed unfairness of Jewish victory.
Ajami, writing in 2010 from his own perch in American higher education and marveling at how long it took for Azm’s book to have its English translation, explains:
“Nowadays, we speak, and rightly so, of the cultural isolation of the Arabs—the fact, for example, that a vast Arab world translates into Arabic only a fifth of the number of books that Greece, with its eleven million people, translates into Greek. But we have ethnocentrisms of our own, in this big and open American republic. It is a wonder that this seminal book was never [before] translated into English. The shadow of American power lies across that Greater Middle East, but the people of that region remain mostly strangers to us.”
Modern anti-Zionists form a uniquely, unabashedly superstitious sect. Eventually they, too, will grow out of it. One hopes.
