On March 19, I opened my inbox to find an email inviting “student leaders” to an event on Wednesday, April 2, titled “The IDF Firsthand: Dinner and Lecture with Sgt. Benjamin Anthony.” The event is being coordinated by a member of Brown Students for Israel and hosted by Brown/RISD Hillel and features Anthony, a veteran and reservist of the Israel Defense Forces and founder of the organization Our Soldiers Speak. As the invitation notes, “Sgt. Anthony will be speaking about his experiences in the IDF and how they relate to media perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The event promises to offer a “rare opportunity to hear firsthand from a participant in one of the world’s most complex geopolitical conflicts.”
Our Soldiers Speak aims to “delve between the headlines and media coverage of the military operations of the IDF,” and to educate audiences “about what transpires on the front lines of battle,” according to its website. Lectures by the organization address everything from violence in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Israeli military’s role in the daily lives of Israeli citizens. Many of Anthony’s events at other schools have been highly attended — and protested — by students and community members, both for his unique perspective on the conflict and for his controversial public defense of the unlawful use of white phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas in Gaza, among other reasons.
I was therefore shocked to learn from the event coordinator not only that the lecture is closed to the public, but that invites were limited to “student leaders” deemed by the coordinator to be “politically involved.” As of Sunday, March 30, the event has not been publicized on either the Hillel website or the Brown events calendar, and no open registration process was offered for students not invited but who might be interested in attending. The event description notes that students will be given a “chance” to ask questions at the end of the lecture. When I asked the coordinator about plans for a Q&A or moderated discussion, he stated that it “depends on how much time Sgt. Anthony has at the end of his talk.”
The ethics of hosting a speaker who has justified the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas — a practice Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations have called a war crime under international law — are dubious. But Brown and student organizations have invited controversial speakers in the past. Most recently, the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions hosted former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, under whom racial profiling occurred through the NYPD’s implementation of the stop-and-frisk policy and surveillance of Muslim communities in New York. After requests to cancel the event were denied, a number of Brown students and community members took part in a protest that resulted in the event being shut down. Student objections to the protesters’ actions were centered on a desire to engage in a meaningful debate about Kelly’s perspectives on stop-and-frisk.
While student questions may not affect a speaker’s position on an issue, hosting polarizing figures theoretically offers an opportunity to foster a spirit of intellectual freedom on Brown’s campus. On the other hand, uncritically presenting an individual engaged in direct or indirect oppression in order to provide what some call a free exchange of ideas cements an unequal power structure that determines whose voice is heard.
Yet the organizers’ decision to host a closed, invite-only event both obstructs any potential intellectual engagement and perpetuates unequal power structures by determining both whose voice is heard and who gets to hear it. The decision deprives the vast majority of the student body of knowledge about the event and access to any potential space for dialogue. Students interested in the conflict are unable to either listen to Anthony’s perspectives or engage in any interrogation of his organization’s campaign, which appears to justify and normalize the everyday violence of one of the most intractable conflicts in modern history.
Furthermore, hosting a speaker whose organization’s stated goal is to convene university seminars on the Israeli military because “the students of today will be the legislators of tomorrow” without offering a critical context treads a dangerous line between offering an alternative perspective and providing a platform for a targeted policy agenda verging on propaganda.
In a global diplomatic context in which negotiations to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are becoming increasingly opaque and elitist, the decision to shroud Anthony’s talk in secrecy and invite primarily “student leaders” is not conducive to broadening student involvement in working toward the conflict’s peaceful resolution. Opening the lecture to the Brown community and providing a 30-minute moderated discussion would be a first step in allowing for meaningful engagement with Anthony’s perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
One need not look further than the events on the conflict hosted by Brown’s Department of Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies program, which typically feature panel discussions or speaker events with up to an hour of moderated discussion, to see that it is not impossible to address such a controversial subject in an intellectual and thoughtful manner. On the other hand, hosting a closed event on campus featuring a speaker engaging in a one-sided attempt to present the “proud truth” of the Israeli military directly obstructs open dialogue on Israel-Palestine.
Reva Dhingra ’14 can be reached for comment at reva_dhingra@brown.edu.
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