Relativism And Reporting On The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Gershom Gorenberg highlighted the first event of a new organization at Columbia University, a campus in need of as much help as it can get since the notorious Joseph Mosad likely gained tenure - the matter is strangely still not official. Danny Hertz, son of Eli Hertz, the director of Myths & Facts, co-founded the new organization known as Campus Media Watch.

The other speakers featured were Dr. Joshua Teitelbaum, Senior Fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University; Dexter Van Zile, a Christian Media Analyst for CAMERA; and Charney Bromberg, the executive director of the non-profit Meretz USA for Israeli Civil Rights and Peace. The panel thus was split two and two between pundits who are likely to criticize the Palestinians - Teitelbaum and Van Zile - and those who are likely to criticize the Israelis - Gorenberg and Bromberg.

Van Zile was the most impressive of the panel. During the Q&A, when asked how one can reconcile Palestinian incitement to violence with the Palestinian desire for peace, he simply said, "I don't think that you can." During his fifteen minutes at the microphone earlier in the evening, he discussed the views of the church that he grew up in and how he decided to leave it because of its dysfunctional narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Regarding Gorenberg, the most famous member of the panel, I was surprised and a bit pleased when he expressed disappointment at the questions during the Q&A, which were highly politicized. "People are writing questions with their made-up minds and asking us to respond to their made-up minds. We are here to provide information to genuine questions, people seeking to complexify their view." A call for complexity was the note on which Gorenberg ended his comments, calling upon the students to not be on this side or that side but to be on the side of complexity. Such an appeal may be the most successful appeal possible on college campuses because it fits in with the general program of university education. But, it also had a ring of relativism to it in that it denies that one can come to a clear, determinate understanding of a topic through the acquisition of knowledge. For this reason, I remarked to one of the audience members after the event that Gorenberg was the most sophisticated member of the panel. I didn't mean that as a compliment.

As for Bromberg, an apparent lightweight, in conversation afterward, he referred to Netanyahu's cabinet as "mad men," used the f-word when referring to the last American president, and assured those within ear shot that "the majority of Palestinians want peace."

The audience did contain a few potential and actual rabble-rousers, including the repulsive self-hating blogger Philip Weiss. Students wearing keffiyahs laughed to one another during the comments of Van Zile. Nevertheless, a strong showing of reasonable students and professionals gave the event an overall aura of respectability.