Mick Hartley

I gave up reading the London Review of Books quite some time ago, so I've missed this latest minor but telling dispute in its letter pages. James Kirchick has the story, 0f feuding academics desperate to establish their anti-Israel credentials…Renowned professor outraged after being accused of saying nice things about Israel:

In most academic circles, especially the ones inhabited by Catharine MacKinnon and Laura Finlayson, the accusation that one is acting as a useful idiot for George W. Bush is a scarlet letter, as depraved as liking child pornography or torturing animals. But the allegation that she is a handmaiden of American imperialism is not what prompted MacKinnon to write a letter to the editor. No, it was the fear that readers of the London Review of Books might mistake her for having even the slightest sympathy for the Jewish State which stirred the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at Michigan Law and James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School to action. The accusation that she had “praised” the Israeli Defense Force for the record of its soldiers in not raping Palestinian women was an outrageous slander…

Had MacKinnon wanted to convince readers that her comment about the IDF and rape was not intended as a mark of approval, she should have cited an infamous Master’s thesis written over a decade ago for, incidentally, Hebrew University, wherein the author decried the absence of rapes committed by Israeli soldiers as evidence of Jewish ethno-supremacy. Because Israeli soldiers, according to Professor Tal Nitsan, are trained not to see Arab women as fully human, raping them would risk diluting the Jewish gene pool. “The lack of military rape,” therefore, “merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences” between Jews and Arabs. Israelis would be better people, in other words, if they raped Palestinians.

So, in a sense, both women are right. Finlayson reasonably assumed that MacKinnon meant to “praise” the IDF when the latter stated that its soldiers do not rape Palestinian women. Yet MacKinnon is also right that, in the “context” of the pages of the London Review of Books, the perception that one has anything remotely positive to say about Israel—including the reluctance of its soldiers to rape Palestinian women—is a form of defamation.