Of Jews and slips and healing cracks: Addendum

A world-renowned professor from the St. Anthony’s College Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University delivered a series of lectures on British Imperialism in the Middle East on a visit to the American University in Cairo. Doubtless familiar with the intellectual climate awaiting him, the professor must have designed his comments accordingly. He divided his lecture equally between Transjordan, Iraq and Palestine, outlining the developments in each between 1920 and 1948, all the while providing juicy anecdotal details both cheery and chilling. The professor minced no words regarding British violence and greed in each case, nor did he bypass the opportunity to draw parallels between their policies and practices then and America’s today. But he also managed to lighten the load by slipping in priggish quotes from British missives with tongue appropriately in cheek (e.g. a message sent to Transjordan’s King Abdallah to inform him that Britain viewed his recent activism in the newly founded ‘Istiqlal (Independence) party with “grave displeasure”).

After the speaker brought his lecture to a polished close, the emcee invited the audience to pose their questions. It was the first time I had attended an academic lecture in Cairo, and I awaited the scholarly commentary with curiosity.

A woman raised her hand and took the microphone. After tapping it and giggling for a few moments, she asked, in broken English,
“So do you really think that Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11th bombings?”

My respect for the professor’s professionalism multiplied tenfold when he did not snort or laugh right in her upturned, lipsticked face. My boyfriend Aaron, the professor’s onetime student, has often referred to this unwavering poise, so characteristic in fact that it has led both admiring and resentful colleagues to compare him to Gilderoy Lockhart, the fulsome phony teacher/celebrity in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. His chiseled features, self-assurance and affable manner had affirmed these allegations in my mind from our first encounter; his grace in fielding the questions of this crowd was to reveal him as a veritable paragon of public composure. Without missing a beat or dropping his smile, he reasoned that since Osama bin Laden had declared himself responsible for the attacks and no one had found any evidence to the contrary, one can hardly question his guilt.

The woman, unsatisfied with his brevity, persisted: “Well have you seen the movie Fa, Faaren, Farheit 9-11? What do you think of that?”

Mutters spread throughout the room. The professor’s smile widened, and he assured her gently that he thought the movie provided interesting commentary on the decision-making of America’s current administration. Apparently under the impression that she and this nice man had established heart-to-heart status, the woman opened her mouth to pursue her chosen line of conversation, an initiative that the emcee mercifully quashed by filching the microphone. I examined the crowd in an attempt to assess other reactions to this little performance. To the naked eye, the participants resembled those at any academic lecture; patchy rows of aging academics of furrowed brow and eccentric attire, along with a smattering of the long-haired and/or -skirted variety as well as the buttoned-up and trimmed variety of grad student. Surely this woman must have tagged along with a friend, unaware of the customary etiquette at such events.

The following two questions, regarding specifics of pre-1948 Israeli land purchase in Palestine, reassured me somewhat as to the preservation of studious decorum. Then the middle-aged Egyptian woman next to me banished such hopes.

“So what is your opinion of the number six million, the supposed number of Jews killed in the ‘ho-lo-caust?’” she raised her fingers in exaggerated mock quotation marks. I sucked in my breath. She plunged ahead. “My son, a few years ago, he wrote a paper on the ‘ho-lo-caust’ and he did lots of research on the number of Jews in Europe at the time of World War Two. He checked lots of sources, archives . . . and . . . and, well, enough to be certain that there were never more than hundreds of thousands of Jews in any European country.” Someone stop her! Is this actually happening? “And the total number they found was no more than one, maybe two million. So what do you think of this number six million?”

The professor gave a slow, inexplicable nod and paced for a moment before placing both hands on the podium and replying with unaffected decisiveness,
“I do not dispute that number, and I refer to the Holocaust with a capital H, without quotation marks. Of course we cannot know the exact number of all who were killed, but that is not important. Maybe it was five million, five hundred thousand. Maybe it was six million, two hundred thousand, I don’t know. But I do know that it was a human tragedy, and I question the motives of anyone who tries to dispute the figure six million.”

My neighbor, however, was just getting warmed up. “But not only Jews were killed! Many others! Minorities, Christians . . . you know, probably Muslims too! Where are they in the six million? Why six million Jews?”

The professor attempted to reiterate his position but she railed on:
“I am not denying anyone else’s tragedy . . . but why exaggerate it? Why is the number so sacred?”

Other voices began to chime in and she continued her harangue even after the emcee finagled the mic away from her. As the conference room teetered toward mayhem and she lost her soapbox, the woman began to lean across my lap to snip along to the Egyptian girl next to me with haughty conviction. She was completely unmoved by the professor’s response, as she was by the plea a young Egyptian man directed toward her, that denying another’s human suffering in order to take revenge on one’s own was not the way forward. She continued to grumble “Mish aktar min itnayn milyoon” (“no more than two million”) with self-righteous shakes of her fat head. I wanted to slap her. I limited my reactions to a series of stifled noises in my throat.

The hijacking of the discussion was complete. The professor submitted to a pelting of questions spiraling downward toward the One: do you think Israel has a right to exist?
• Why must the Jews insist on having their own country? No other religion has insisted on having its own country! This is discrimination! In Islam we do not have this discrimination! (They had clearly managed to forget their Muslim brethren in Pakistan, a country which, as my Pakistani friend pointed out after the lecture, was founded precisely to be an Islamic country.)
• Why must the Muslim and the Jew be enemies? The Muslim and the Christian are not enemies.
• When did America get involved with Israel?
• Did any countries fund Jewish immigration to Palestine pre-1948? Who? Who is to blame?

The professor reminded his interrogators of various historical details politely to debunk the portrait of religious alliance and adversity taking shape between their comments (i.e. the Crusades) and observed that he in fact did not specialize in this area. A moot point in the present company, it would seem. And no one protested; on what grounds could they do so, within the usual confines of lecture etiquette? Would it not constitute a kind of surrender to stoop to the level of these uncouth maligners? Where would one start, anyway: “Your behavior is inappropriate. Please allow us to return to the subject of this evening’s lecture, or leave,” to say nothing of, “If you continue to belittle the massacre of a people who, perhaps unbeknownst to you, has many representatives in this lecture hall, someone may well get up and pound you and I will let them.” So no one said anything at all. The Jewish attendees sat silent with everyone else.

Now, the last thing I want to do here is use this occasion for an opportunity to support or challenge my own views on Israel-Palestine. Like the Oxford professor, this piece of history is not my area, and there are enough blind duelers on this battleground as it is. And as disturbing as I found this discussion, I have heard many a university lecture discussion in the states dominated by the strident voices from the other side of the issue, which make equally chilling comments regarding the Palestinians. This was simply the first time I had witnessed the extent of anger and denial reached by the opposing narrative.

Strange though: I felt hate in that room; but I also felt enjoyment. After all, nothing feels good like reciting a well-loved and oft-repeated line of argument with which you know your company will agree. None of these people are terrorists or active radicals as far as I know, nor are they Palestinian or necessarily invested in the Palestinian cause in anything but word; they are well-dressed and educated Anglophones, out on the town to participate in the popular debates of their day with a famous foreign professor.

It still chills one to the bone however, that this relished repitition could make a woman numb to the mass killing of innocent people. When the discussion finally ended, I found myself edging around my neighbor in order not so much as to brush her, so great was my revulsion. Moments later I saw her hugging and kissing friends and tinkling away about the everyday, which I found equally jarring. Must I succumb to this epic pettiness as well? Must I blame her for her attraction to this tempting grab-bag of powerful and popular things to say about a controversial issue that does not put her in political danger in her own country? Can I fault this woman personally for her participation in this national pastime?

In lieu of pursuing answers to these questions, I have made a mental note to self: when you are lecturing at AUC in twenty years, unless the tragedy of Israel-Palestine has been resolved, try to pick a topic like “migration patterns of tropical fish.” I’ll check out a book on that today, and read that instead of watching the news.