How Anti-Zionism Reveals the Weakness of the Humanities

In December the prestigious academic journal Critical Inquiry published an article by Saree Makdisi—a professor of English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles—with the ungainly title “Apartheid / Apartheid / [ ].” Therein Makdisi argues that the situation of Arabs in Israel is very similar to that of blacks in apartheid-era South Africa but worse, explains away the shortage of explicitly racist laws in Israel as evidence of a policy of “radical erasure” and “necropolitics,” and makes clear that no outcome other than Israel’s absolute destruction can be morally or politically justified. Cary Nelson and Russell Berman respond with a point-by-point refutation of the article’s claims, which rest on few facts, outright distortions, a failure to investigate the subjects about which the author writes, and convoluted logic, not to mention a dismissive attitude toward the depredations of actual apartheid. These problems, they contend, are symptomatic of something larger: