Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics: Palestine-Israel in British universities

By Ruth Sheldon

For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts within British universities around issues of free speech, 'extremism', antisemitism and Islamophobia. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression?

This book draws on original ethnographic research with student activists on different sides of this conflict to initiate a conversation with students, academics and members of the public who are concerned with the transnational politics of Palestine-Israel and with the changing role of the public university. It shows how, in an increasingly globalised world that is shaped by entangled histories of European antisemitism and colonial violence, ethnography can open up ethical responses to questions of justice

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526108586

Ruth Sheldon

Ruth Sheldon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London

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Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics

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Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics

Palestine–Israel in British universities

Ruth Sheldon

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Ruth Sheldon 2016

The right of Ruth Sheldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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ISBN 978 1 7849 9314 6 hardback

First published 2016

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Series editor’s foreword

Introduction: unsettling subjects of justice and ethics

1Contested framings: democratic conflict and the public university

2Finding the words: towards ethical ethnography

3University melodramas: the claim of reason

4Tragic action: ambiguous passions and misrecognition

5Ordinary ethics: conversation, friendship and democratic possibilities

Conclusion: good relations, free speech and political activism

Postscript: unfinished conversations

References

Index

Preface

Each time I visit my grandmother in her flat in north-west London, she points me towards a set of framed photographs that sit in a glass cabinet in her living room. In one of these pictures (Figure 1), she appears as a glamorous teenager linking arms with her suave fiancé. Smiling, this cosmopolitan couple strolls along a Prague street. In a second picture (Figure 2) taken not long after, everything has changed. In the foreground, my nana is tanned in a short-sleeved blouse and pinafore, frizzy hair pragmatically pinned back as she industriously prepares crepes on the street. Her now-husband has rolled up the sleeves of his sweat-soaked shirt as he looks down with concentration. A yellow-hued background evokes the warm sensuality of this place: 1940s British Mandate Palestine.

Figure 1 My nana and her fiancé strolling in Prague, 1939.

Figure 2 My nana and her now-husband cooking crepes to sell on a street in Tel Aviv, 1940.

In 1939, as my family began to perceive the imminent threat posed by Hitler, my seventeen-year-old nana and her fiancé booked onto an illegal transport to take them from their home in Prague to Palestine. My great-grandmother, along with so many members of this close extended family, remained at home. My nana never saw them again; they were killed by the Nazis. After a six-week boat journey and internment in a British camp in Lebanon, my nana arrived with her now-husband in Palestine. Life was hard as this young couple, who had grown up in affluent homes, struggled to earn a living and then to support their young son, my uncle. My nana’s husband could not cope. In 1947, now a single mother, my nana left Palestine and came to settle in London.

In the time that had passed between these two photographs, my nana’s life had become inextricably enmeshed with the passage of suffering between Europe and the Middle East that affected so many people in the mid-twentieth century. In the space between these images is her singular experience of the interconnected violent ruptures of the Shoah (the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry between 1939 and 1945) and the Nakba (the Palestinian national devastation: the mass dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes that accompanied the 1947–48 foundation of the State of Israel in British Mandate Palestine).¹ The relationships between these geographically dispersed events – the murder of over six million European Jews and the creation of over 750,000 Palestinian refugees, who remain unable to return to their homes – continue to shape our contemporary political landscape. They are connected not only in the grand narratives relating to European fascism, Zionism and British imperialism in the Middle East, but also in the biographies and political attachments of ordinary people, such as my nana. Their consequences continue to be inherited by later generations; they are felt directly by those subject to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 and the continued violence against Palestinian and Jewish citizens in Israel. They are also carried indirectly by people living beyond the region, who are drawn into a transnational politics of memory that moves across borders igniting in seemingly distant settings around the globe.

In June 2013, on a sunny, breezy day, my nana and I were sitting together in her living room talking with and around her stories about those difficult times. Our conversation turned to the present and she looked at me directly repeating, in her thick Czech accent, her passionate commitment of ‘I love Israel!’. Setting her face stubbornly, anticipating confrontation, she told me that ‘the Arabs’ cannot be trusted because they want Israel for themselves. In the same breath, she angrily denounced religiously orthodox Jewish groups in Israel, which she said were damaging everything that Israel is and could be.

For years my nana did not know, or was not able to know, what had happened to her mother, Josephine. Then, in 2010, my family found a record for Josephine in the Yad Vashem database of Shoah victims. My nana asked us to create a memorial to her mother in Israel. When I asked her, ‘Why not in Prague?’, she replied, ‘No, Prague was home, but I can’t plant a tree in Prague. Israel is our home.’ My father arranged for a ring of trees to be planted. Now, on that June afternoon, my nana once again drew my attention towards the memorial certificate hanging on her wall, telling me ‘that’s all I have for her’. She continued slowly and emphatically: ‘One thing I must say, I can’t believe in God. How could he let Hitler kill all these innocent people, my mother, my aunties, my family, six million?’ I was quiet; this was not a question that I could answer. And, in my silence, I was also reflecting on my experiences during my ethnographic research with students involved in Zionist and pro-Palestine activism within British universities. My nana’s way of speaking about home, God and the Shoah raised troubling questions about the somehow unthinkable nature of Zionism that I had just begun to ask as a consequence of spending time with Jewish students involved in Israel advocacy groups. I had been learning to listen to students who did not so neatly fit a distinction between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ and so could not be so easily dismissed in these terms. And yet, I had also been learning about the experiences of young Palestinians and those students who in different ways felt connected to their cause, not only of their attachments to a different historical narrative, but how past and present violence continued to be felt in the lives of people with whom I had become friends. In these relationships, I had come to feel that my nana’s question was inextricably tied to another; how could we – that ambiguous ‘we’ with which I was somehow identified – inflict such violence on Palestinians?

My experience of being pulled in contradictory directions when engaging with Palestine–Israel may be familiar to some readers of this book. For this is a conflict that raises disturbing questions about the entangled, morally ambiguous nature of Jewish and Palestinian victimhood. These tensions are bound up with the traumatic histories of European antisemitism and colonialism and have also evolved historically following decades of violent conflict in the region, the emergence of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in the twenty-first century, and the consequent fluctuation of Western sympathies for different sides of this conflict.² It is these histories that are expressed in the very public politics of Palestine–Israel which cut across established territorial and temporal boundaries emerging at a particular conjuncture within British university campuses. And it is the questions raised by the complexity and intensity of students’ involvement with this conflict in Britain which lie at the heart of my research presented in this book.

The ethnographic fieldwork that I discuss in the chapters that follow was conducted between 2010 and 2012 during a lively period of student activism when the repercussions of the 2008–9 Israeli military actions in Gaza known as ‘Operation Cast Lead’ were still being felt on campus. As Dávid Kaposi (2014) observes, ‘Operation Cast Lead’ marked something of a turning point in the long history of struggles in Palestine–Israel as well as a shift in representations of the conflict by the public media in Britain. As the first major armed struggle between Israel and Hamas, it reflected a moment at which tensions around ‘political Islam’ rose to the fore. Furthermore, not only did it result in a large number of Palestinian civilian casualties, but the form of violence was also perceived to be qualitatively different from previous Israeli actions in the Palestinian Occupied Territories (ibid.: 1).

This study was therefore engaged with a particular historical juncture in this conflict. However, readers will be responding to this book through the prism of subsequent events, including two more wars in Gaza. At the time of writing, it seems that the intensity of violence in Palestine–Israel is worsening, with each new crisis building on the last so that the situation feels increasingly intractable and bleak. I write this preface after the escalation of violence in Israel and Gaza during the summer of 2014 prompted what were described as the ‘biggest demonstrations yet’ to take place in London in support of Palestinians (BBC News 2014) and claims of unprecedented levels of support for the Palestinian cause among the British public (Watt 2014). Yet, even as campaigns against the oppression of Palestinians have gathered momentum, the vexed issue of antisemitism has featured prominently in the daily media. Reports that events in the Middle East are giving rise to renewed hostility towards the Anglo-Jewish community resonate with heightened fears around the rise of far-right, nationalist and Islamic ‘extremist’ movements in Europe. These events have, of course, impacted on the campus interactions that are the focus of my study, heightening the polarisation that I observed during that period, increasing the pressure on the relationships I explored and posing an even greater challenge for students who seek to cultivate non-violent responses.

In this book, I develop a form of public sociology that responds to the demands of the historical moment and acknowledges the pessimism likely felt by readers faced with the escalating violence in Palestine–Israel and the deepening of partisan transnational responses. My hope is to articulate a role for ethnography as a process that can offer ethico-political possibilities for the future, even as polarisation and violence intensifies. My aim here is not to offer a dispassionate analysis of the experiences of the students who participated in my research, but rather to open up an ongoing conversation with them, and so with others who find themselves drawn – personally, politically as well as intellectually – into this conflict. It is for these reasons that I have chosen to begin this book with a personal narrative about my family’s historical connection to Palestine–Israel, to somehow name myself as a Jewish ethnographer and so to confess how deeply I am emotionally caught up in the situation. Of course, in doing so I risk alienating readers who may feel compelled to identify me with one side or the other, for this is a conflict that does not seem to allow for an in-between position. Even in the language that we use to communicate about this conflict, we find ourselves identified as ‘Zionist’ or ‘pro-Palestine’ and those who claim to be neutral are found to be implicitly ‘normalising’ unjust relations.

When I first began to research this subject, my response to this tension was to develop a sociological approach that could offer what I took to be an objective analysis of students’ emotional engagement with Palestine–Israel. I imagined that developing an abstract theoretical explanation of campus dynamics would enable me to respond in an authoritative intellectual manner to those who accused me of bias towards one side or another. And so, for many months during my fieldwork, I sought to hide my own personal connection to my research, not speaking about the particular histories that I carried into the field or the ambivalent and confusing feelings that they gave rise to. Yet, as I began trying to connect with student activists and learning about their experiences, I found that an approach that attempted to neutralise these tensions was profoundly limiting. In such a politicised context, I had not asked myself the reflexive questions about my own feelings that I was asking others, and so why should they open up to someone whose own investments in this conflict were opaque? It was only slowly through the ethnographic process that my approach began to shift as I spent time with particular students who had long engaged with these tensions and participated in sociological networks that value the personal and embodied experience of the researcher as a source of knowledge. This helped me to question how British universities impose liberal norms of universal reason on academics and students so that we feel a pressure to distance ourselves from our feelings and personal experiences as a condition of participation within these public spaces. Gradually, as I connected with people engaged in alternative democratic and sociological practices within universities, I learnt how my own personal experience of this conflict, including my yearning for reconciliation and my ambivalent feelings of shame and anger, could be a source of understanding. In this way, through learning to listen to myself differently, I began to hear and respond to the complexities of others’ experiences.

It is this relational interpersonal process that I will name ‘ethical’ in this book as I ask the question: ‘How is a response to the injustices of Palestine–Israel possible that is also ethical?’ Just as I found this question in the context of my personal connection with my nana’s journey all those years ago, so I wish to challenge theories that situate questions of justice in a distinct ‘public’ arena of detached rationality, autonomy and coherence, of procedural justification, recognition, resolution or resistance. Rather, I claim that the question I ask here is formed in our intimate relationships with family, friends and colleagues, the ghostly figures of our family photographs, our attachments to sacred places, narrated and embodied histories, as well as often ambivalent relationships to political and faith traditions. As such, in order to imagine an alternative to our frozen grammars for engaging with this conflict, I begin by questioning the dominance of Enlightenment values of neutrality, objectivity and abstract rationality in our social theories and in our academic institutions. My suggestion is that through personal reflection on the histories we carry in relation to Palestine–Israel, we can develop more ethical ways of communicating about this conflict that challenge the rationalist norms of our public institutions. By sharing some of my own journey, I hope that readers affected by this violent situation might suspend their judgement in order to engage with the open spirit of this book.

Notes

1 The Palestine–Israel conflict is in part constituted around competing historical narratives of these events so that accounts of the causal relationship between the Holocaust, the development of Zionism and the 1947–48 war in Palestine are deeply contested. It is beyond the scope of this research to offer a detailed discussion of the historiography of these events, but see Bashir and Goldberg ( 2014 : 95) for some helpful references to historical studies of this period. My own approach begins from the observation that memories of seemingly incommensurable traumatic events are at stake in contemporary engagements with this conflict and explores the processes through which we come to be attached to the particular historical narratives that we inherit.

2 See Chapter 1 for a brief discussion of how transnational sympathies with different sides of this conflict have evolved over time. Key moments in changing transnational perceptions of the conflict include the period following the Holocaust, the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the 1982 Lebanon war, the breakdown of the 1993 Oslo agreement and second intifada, the election of the Islamic political party Hamas in Gaza in 2005 and repeated Israeli offensives in Gaza in 2008–9, 2012 and 2014.

Acknowledgements

This study is centrally concerned with the ways in which the Palestine–Israel conflict erodes trusting relationships between people who feel invested in it. Given this context, I am profoundly grateful to the students who risked sharing personal experiences with me and who in the process educated me in ways that I could not have imagined at the beginning of this project. In my own journey as a student ethnographer engaged with this conflict, I have benefitted from the careful guidance, support and insight of some exceptional supervisors and mentors. Gordon Lynch, Monika Krause, Anna Strhan, Vic Seidler and Stephen Frosh continue to shape my work in more ways than I can name. They have been caring and challenging interlocutors in just the right measure and an inspiration to me as teachers, researchers and public intellectuals.

I am also indebted to colleagues and friends for reading and commenting on drafts of this manuscript and for ongoing conversations which have been a source of pleasure, insight and support; thanks especially to Katherine Robinson, Marta Kolankiewicz, Steph Berns, Sarah Harvey, Lois Lee, Jennifer Fleetwood, Dave Boothroyd, Mariam Motamedi-Fraser, Giselle Vincent, Shaul Bar-Haim, Dávid Kaposi, Katharina Eist, Brian McShane, Liene Ozolina-Fitzgerald, Ruth Braunstein, Fran Tonkiss, Shani Orgad and all the members of the NYLON (New York-London-Berlin) sociology research network and participants in the Wittgenstein reading group. My love and thanks also to my friends Anood Al-Samerai and Elizabeth Brun, who have shared in this journey over many years.

The research that forms the basis of this book was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Research Programme and was supported by staff at the National Union of Students (NUS). Thanks in particular to Alex Bols and Kat Luckock at the NUS for their time and interest in this project. In 2012, I was also fortunate to be awarded a Christine and Ian Bolt Scholarship by the University of Kent, which enabled me to visit the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale and I am grateful to the faculty and students there for their intellectual generosity and hospitality. In the process of publishing this book, I have greatly benefitted from the encouragement of Alexander Smith and I would like to thank him as well as the staff at the University of Manchester Press for all their support.

I am still learning of the many ways in which my family have shaped this work and somehow words on a page feel inadequate as a response to all that they continue to give me. To Mum, Dad and Sarah, to Oli and, now, Samuel – in your singular ways, you exemplify the spirit of connecting with others that I evoke in this book and you remind me time and again to look to my everyday life as the place to find something extraordinary within close relationships.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my grandparents: to the memories of Gerson Katz, Ilse Katz and Marek Sheldon, and, last but not least, to my 94-year-old nana, Ilse Sheldon – thank you from my heart for all our conversations.

Series editor’s foreword

At its best, ethnography has provided a valuable tool for apprehending a world in flux. A couple of years after the Second World War, Max Gluckman founded the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. In the years that followed, he and his colleagues built a programme of ethnographic research that drew eclectically on the work of leading anthropologists, economists and sociologists to explore issues of conflict, reconciliation and social justice ‘at home’ and abroad. Often placing emphasis on detailed analysis of case studies drawn from small-scale societies and organisations, the famous ‘Manchester School’ in social anthropology built an enviable reputation for methodological innovation in its attempts to explore the pressing political questions of the second half of the twentieth century. Looking back, that era is often thought to constitute a ‘gold standard’ for how ethnographers might grapple with new challenges and issues in the contemporary world.

The New Ethnographies series aims to build on that ethnographic legacy at Manchester. It will publish the best new ethnographic monographs that promote interdisciplinary debate and methodological innovation in the qualitative social sciences. This includes the growing number of books that seek to apprehend the ‘new’ ethnographic objects of a seemingly brave new world, some recent examples of which have included auditing, democracy and elections, documents, financial markets, human rights, assisted reproductive technologies and political activism. Analysing such objects has often demanded new skills and techniques from the ethnographer. As a result, this series will give voice to those using ethnographic methods across disciplines to innovate, such as through the application of multi-sited fieldwork and the extended comparative case study method. Such innovations have often challenged more traditional ethnographic approaches. New Ethnographies therefore seeks to provide a platform for emerging scholars and their more established counterparts engaging with ethnographic methods in new and imaginative ways.

Dr Alexander Thomas T. Smith

Introduction: unsettling subjects of justice and ethics

In late December 2008, a year before I began this research, I was sitting at my parents’ dinner table with their friends. Reports of violent events in Gaza, later named ‘Operation Cast Lead’ or the ‘Gaza War/Massacre’, were just emerging in the media. These events formed part of a longer political trajectory which had recently culminated in the expiration of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. Yet news of the brutality of this violence nonetheless felt shocking as early reports of Israeli missiles striking densely populated civilian areas circulated via the media. The Guardian reported that ‘the timing and scale of the assaults came as a surprise’ (Guardian 2008) as air strikes were later followed by a ground assault in which it was shown that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had used white phosphorus bombs (BBC News 2010). By 21 January 2009, up to 1,444 Palestinian people and thirteen Israeli people would be killed.¹ As our dinner conversation slowed, my father suddenly, abruptly, switched our attention to these events. Conjuring an imaginary interlocutor and banging his hand on the table, he railed against the shame wrought by Israel, shouting ‘Not in my name!’ The visceral quality of his apparently unprompted anger felt somehow bewildering; he was met with a disconcerting silence from our usually vociferous assembled party.

Some kilometres away, towards the centre of an English city, students at Redbrick University and New University were also moved by these events.² Along with students at over twenty-five universities across Britain, they began to initiate energetic campus activism, the likes of which had not been seen for many years (Dugan 2009; Rifkind 2009). Alice, who was an undergraduate at Redbrick University during this period, described how an emergency students’ union general meeting ‘sparked off massive arguments and lots of conflict and led to an occupation … a month-long occupation and their demands were … that the university should be helping these Palestinian people and Palestinian students that are suffering’.³ On the other side of the country at Old University, a students’ union motion supporting Gazans and condemning Israel was debated at a full-capacity meeting staffed by university security personnel. This culminated in vitriolic exchanges between a Palestine Society member and a Jewish student, both of whom were students’ union representatives. At the end of the meeting, students occupied the stage of this lecture theatre, beginning a protest which lasted for days. Soon after, the student newspaper, which had initially supported the occupation, reported allegations of antisemitic assaults against students, ‘including tripping, spitting and snatching of religious clothes’, and published an editorial stating that ‘last week’s events went too far in damaging the diversity of our university’. A motion was passed mandating the students’ union to restore ‘harmony’ on campus while a proposed ‘anti-terrorism’ policy seeking to condemn ‘pro-Hamas’ factions and monitor ‘foreign students’ was defeated. The following month, a university-authorised dialogue commission, set up in response to these tensions, fell apart over the disputed wording of a proposed antisemitism policy, which sought to proscribe the expression of analogies between the Holocaust and events in Palestine–Israel.

When two years later in January 2011 I began ethnographic fieldwork at these universities, the effects of these events were still being felt, sustained through renewals of students’ union policies, in plaques marking buildings and in the repertoires of support for the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Students’ memories of the occupations over ‘Operation Cast Lead’ seemed important in shaping their ongoing activities, including campaigns for Palestinian justice and dialogue initiatives aimed at harmonising campus relations. Their repeated references to the occupations suggested that these events had intensified an ambiguous atmosphere on campus in ways that remained unresolved. In one sense, this activism was exciting and energetic, drawing people together in feelings of solidarity. Nuha shared this feeling with me at a gig as we listened to the hip-hop anthem ‘Long Live Palestine’: ‘I remember we played this constantly for a month while we were doing the Gaza occupation. It was all we listened to. There was one time when it was the middle of the night and we were all falling asleep; Tariq just started singing it and we all woke up and joined in.’ Jewish student groups were also brought together by this oppositional politics: Miriam, a Jewish Society officer explained how anti-Israel politics generated a ‘better community … a good, solid JSoc’. Yet, this intensity was also experienced as disturbing; it was shadowed with aggression circulating among the student body. As David expressed, ‘It did have an impact on the whole of campus, it meant that there was a security guard on every door, it meant that the whole atmosphere on campus just kind of changed.’ And, while students’ conflicting accounts of these events reproduced the polarisation of that period, somehow the activism over ‘Operation Cast Lead’ also opened up more ambivalent feelings. As Michael, a filmmaker who documented these campus occupations, put it, ‘It was, I think, definitely a pretty watershed time for a lot of people who didn’t know how to express their response.’ In the period leading up to my fieldwork, as public attention increasingly focused on university conflicts, what emerged were shifting, ambiguous dynamics of excitement, aggression and attempted reconciliation, in which seemingly distant violent events of the past and the present were being passionately felt in British campus life.

In this book, I begin my exploration of student engagement with Palestine–Israel in British universities by attending closely to the unsettling feel of these political encounters.⁴ This conflict is a transnational issue which is unsettling first of all in the sense of being institutionally disruptive. The campus events described above generated widespread concern about the potential for this activism to destabilise British university institutions. These concerns are not new; for over four decades, the Palestine–Israel conflict has divided students in Britain who have identified with left-wing internationalist campaigns and anti-racist politics, drawing external organisations into campus life and generating attention from policymakers as well as high-profile media coverage (Day unpublished). However, in the context of developing agendas around the threat of ‘extremism’ in Britain, these tensions have emerged as a particular kind of problem for students’ union officers and university managers who are charged with maintaining institutional harmony on campus.

This study explores the various ways in which the highly charged, oppositional student activism associated with Palestine–Israel is currently problematised by stakeholders, who draw on the political discourses of ‘Islamic extremism’, ‘cohesion’ and ‘freedom of speech’ associated with the ‘War on Terror’. However, I also begin from the observation that politicised explanations for the recurrence of these campus conflicts have occluded attention to students’ lived experience of this politics. In opening this chapter with students’ evocations of the exciting, disturbing atmosphere during the 2008/9 campus protests, I also use the adjective ‘unsettling’ to highlight how the activism associated with Palestine–Israel is simultaneously arousing and aggressive, and how it provokes tensions between and within individuals. As such, this book begins by exploring how political conflicts are not only constituted through competing discourses in the abstract, but are also the locus of intense feelings, contradictory desires and visceral interpersonal encounters.

In this introductory chapter, I expand on my claim that attending to unsettlement is an important focus for the study of political conflict within democratic contexts. I begin by drawing on Nancy Fraser’s (2009) theorisation of ‘abnormal justice’ to highlight how this ignition of a seemingly ‘foreign’ conflict within ‘Western’ universities exemplifies key aspects of justice conflicts under conditions of globalisation. Following Fraser, I explore how the transnational politics of Palestine–Israel takes the form of radical disagreement over the established spatial frames through which this conflict has been conceived and practised. Then, by drawing attention to the contested histories, complex truths and violent experiences that people carry in relation to Palestine–Israel, I extend and deepen Fraser’s notion of ‘abnormal justice’. This helps to situate my ethnographic approach to studying politics and ethics as one that reimagines prominent theoretical distinctions between the discursive/embodied and public/personal dimensions of democratic life.

Unsettling spaces: the abnormal justice of Palestine–Israel

At the start of this chapter, we saw scenes of political activism which diverged from the liberal vision of democratic public spheres as arenas of rational communication between objective actors. Students not only responded to events in Gaza with rational arguments, but also expressed passionate irreconcilable personal commitments over the stakes, form and scope of this politics. Students clashed over their dissonant experiences of their campuses during the occupations over ‘Operation Cast Lead’; some felt a swelling of humanitarian or anti-establishment solidarity while others sensed an arousal of antisemitic sentiment. These events evolved through a profound lack of agreement over how to communicate, which manifested in perpetually disputed