Alvin Chow

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse told a crowd Friday that other Arab countries were responsible for Palestinian hardships, not Israelis.

The event was sponsored by Chabad at Stanford, in conjunction with the Jewish Law Students Association, Jewish Med Students Association, Jewish Business Association and Israel Peace Initiative.

“We felt a speech by Professor Wisse would be a constructive response to the events,” said Rabbi Dov Greenberg, director of Chabad at Stanford.

Greenberg told The Daily that Wisse’s talk was not intended to directly refute Epstein’s, although in a press release about Wisse’s talk Greenberg said that “students are clearly outraged about Hedy Epstein’s remarks.”

While her audience ate Challah bread and drank champagne for the Kiddush, Wisse discussed the origins and effects of anti-Semitism. Her most pointed remarks related to the current political situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Of course the Palestinian people suffer — it is genuine, it is undeniable, they can’t advance; the Jews would love to cure that suffering, but it is not a problem that the Jews created, and it is not a problem that the Jews can solve,” she said. “The Jews want to do anything to accommodate at any price, but this will not solve the problem. We can not afford to do this, it does not help.”

One student asked Wisse about the extent of Israel’s mistakes in its treatment of Palestinians.

“Could we do it better? Of course, but the one thing we cannot bear is one who believes that we are responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians,” Wisse said. “People who believe this are lying, and that lie is disastrous for both Jews and Palestinians.”

Wisse placed blame instead on the Arab world and on Palestinian politics.

“Why have the Palestinians insisted on keeping refugees?” she asked. “The greatest scandal is that the Palestinians have allowed their people to remain refugees. This is not a creation of Israel, it is a creation of Arab rulers.”

Wisse said the Arab world continuously launches attacks against the Jews, who remain silent and want to be accepted. She said this attempt to “be nice” has led many Jews to willingly accept responsibility for the Palestinian suffering.

“Anyone who takes responsibility for something that they neither did nor can correct is adding to the sum of the evil. The Arab rulers are responsible for the Palestinian conflict and they have to resolve this problem.”

Before the speech, Greenberg acknowledged that Wisse would be dealing with a sensitive subject.

“Religion is like a fire, “ said Rabbi Greenberg. “It is warm but it can burn.”

The evening began with opening prayers and the Kiddush. After sitting down to dinner, Greenberg introduced Wisse, calling her the “roaring intellectual jet of our time who has thundered the Jewish world.”

At the beginning of her speech, Wisse emphasized the importance of the Jewish Diaspora and the Jewish state in international political history. She later described the Jewish Diaspora as a unique political experiment with unique political consequences.

“The Jews determined to live as a people, a national community without the three staples of national existence — without land, without a central political authority, and without the means of self defense,” she said.

“The Jews succeeded because of a combination of flexibility and inflexibility — they learned to accommodate to local political rules and made themselves useful while still remaining loyal to the Jewish religion and adopting a pledge of allegiance to the Jewish homeland.”

This political experiment, Wisse asserted, was temporary. She said the Jews became a “convenient scapegoat, a visible and attractive target with no cost to be paid for their destruction.”

With the eruption of anti-Semitism in the beginning of the 19th century, Wisse said, European politicians adopted a “politics of blame” to secure their political power.

“The politics of blame organized an opposition to democracy; anti-Semitism is anti-democratic,” she said. “Zionism rose as a means of escaping it — the only solution to the problem of European anti-Semitism was to normalize the Jewish situation once and for all by returning to Israel. However, what no one foresaw was that the politics of blame had assumed a life of its own — the Jews fulfilled that capacity to the Muslim and Arab rulers.”

Wisse argued that the opposition to the Jews was the one thing that the Arab world had in common, the center of Arab politics became anti-Semitism.

“Arab rulers accused Jews of denying the Arabs land and held Israel responsible for every problem that the Arabs created.”