This guy has tenure at Columbia

Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, had this to say on Al Jazeera’s website on Oct. 27, 2011.

It’s a deconstruction, of sorts, of recent speeches by U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations on Mideast peace. But Massad isn’t just making the argument that Netanyahu and Israel are responsible for the current impasse in negotiations, or even that a one-state solution to the conflict is inevitable or preferable tothe two-state solution that just about every sane person acknowledges is the only peaceful and just outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Massad, a Palestinian who was born in Jordan in 1963, goes even further, questioning Jewish claims to the Land of Israel by bringing up the long-discredited Khazar myth about the origins of European Jewry. The myth is just that, a myth, but the point of invoking it is to bolster his argument that modern European, and hence many Israeli Jews, aren’t racial or genetic descendants of ancient Hebrews, and thus have no claim to the land today. It’s all part of the idea that Israel is a colonial state established by people who have no business being there and who displaced the land’s original inhabitants with false claims of entitlement. The argument goes hand in hand with the pernicious argument that Israel is like apartheid South Africa, or that it’s a temporary and illegitimate presence, akin to the Christian Crusader states of the Middle Ages.

Massad also mocks Netanyahu’s father’s choice of Netanyahu as a family name (it was changed from Mileikowsky), saying “an invented Zionist name” is part of a broader attempt to fabricate an ancient link to the land. (Never mind that adopting Hebrew names in Israel is the Jewish way of casting off 2,000 years of Diaspora as part of a return to the Jews’ ancient homeland. Would Massad similarly criticize African-American names that evoke African ancestry in the same way?)
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It’s one thing to be anti-Zionist, but denying the Jewish link to the Land of Israel – and doing it by making a racialized argument about the origins of European Jewry, especially when Judaism has never claimed to be a race –  is beyond the pale. At the very least, and to be charitable, it smacks of Massad’s lack of understanding of his adversary. At most, it’s antisemitic.

There’s a lot more in this article that’s deeply offensive to Jews, but perhaps what’s most noxious and upsetting about it is that, in 2011, after more than 2o years of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, a tenured professor feels comfortable making these assertions, and they were published by a news outlet that many people take seriously.

What Palestinians and their supporters don’t seem to understand is that although Israel may be militarily superior to its neighbours, the Jews who inhabit the country are deeply insecure about their state’s survival, given the thousands of years of persecution Jews have endured, and not just in Europe. Statements like this by leading Palestinian intellectuals may reflect Palestinian anger and frustration, but they make Israelis (and Jews) feel more insecure, not less so, and reinforce the feeling that Palestinians are not interested in coming to any sort of accommodation with Israel.

Massad might be acting as a Palestinian attack dog, whose functional role is to say extreme things in order to make others look less radical, but imagine being a Jewish student in one of his classes.