Throwback: March 20, 2025

(This article from the March 18, 2005 issue of The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle was written by Two’s alumnus and former University Daily Kansan opinion columnist Sam Hopkins)

There are two universities in Lawrence, Kansas: my school, the University of Kansas, and Haskell Indian Nations University.

Last autumn, I attended Haskell’s back-to-school powwow, a celebration that featured various tribal regalia, dancing, music, and one of the most poignant speeches I have ever heard.

The 94-year-old woman who delivered the opening convocation was a member of the Shoshone tribe, born in Idaho and then sent to Haskell for industrial training. She urged the preservation of Native American customs, and admonished the crowd to protect an adjacent wetland that served Haskell students as a religious refuge when the school’s charge was to “kill the Indian and save the child.”

The diminutive alumna invoked the name of the most famous Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, who led the famed American explorers Lewis and Clark through the Rocky Mountains some two centuries ago.

To my surprise, our speaker expressed not pride but sorrow at this contribution her tribe had made to American history: “I wish [Sacajawea) had never helped those men,” she said forcefully, darting forth a trembling index finger as she spoke.

Initially stunned by her bluntness, I then felt overcome by sadness as I remembered an American-Israeli speaker at one of several AIPAC advocacy conferences I have attended. He called Palestinians “Indian givers.”

The statement struck me for its direct insult to Native Americans, and for its insinuation that the Palestinians are but another group in a long line of whiny irredentists.

The speaker added that al-Masri, a common Palestinian name, means “Egyptian,” reflecting that those people were in fact not indigenous to the land and so could not claim consequent rights.

He left alone Jewish names like Berlin, Ashkenazi, and Hollander that track our people’s movement throughout two thousand years of exile. Aiming to prove that a people were once in a different place will not change their current location.

The Shoshone woman represented the parallel narrative, strongly identified with history’s victims. This subordinate version seldom finds its way into textbooks, but to those who lived it, it is more real than any official account.

So, as fighters struggle physically in the theater of battle, thinkers contend over whose history will. be told. But, no matter who “wins” the right to filter the books, they are unlikely to change the perspective of those who experienced the events the texts depict.

At its best, hasbara can serve its Hebrew translation of “explanation” by making Israel’s case for a secure existence in a calm, intelligent way. At its most virulent, hasbara can  generate messages of cultural delegitimization such as the above.

Denying the existence or the legitimacy of Palestinian identity will not move things forward. Our proper place is to debate the justice of suicide bombing and other means by which the national movement has asserted itself.

Caustic strategies for furthering our seemingly opposite points of view have resulted in the defilement of history as an academic discipline, and has served only to weaken what should be everyone’s common goal understanding.

 We Jews, if anyone, must appreciate the tendency for tragedy to galvanize ethnic identity. Whether or not they existed as a people prior to Zionism’s arrival to Palestine, and whether or not Israel has been the primary cause of their suffering, the Palestinian people’s collective psyche is shaped – much like the Jewish one – by a sense of victimhood.

Ha-Shoah and ·al-Nakba bear extreme significance in our respective cultures, and each must strive to grasp the importance of the other’s greatest anguish.

Students at our American universities who come from Muslim countries and Israel should relish the opportunity to advance their own knowledge away from the regional turmoil as a chance to listen and discuss rather than scream slogans.

I have to believe that we students hope for something better in life than mere polemics. We study in order to have an eventual impact on the way things are and to make more lives better. Saying that European Jews are actually Khazars or that Palestinians are just migrant workers will never change the feelings that attach them to the land in question, nor will it diminish their willingness to kill and die for their cause.

Maintaining academic objectivity is part of the road towards peace. We must also maintain our own. compassion and the understanding that, with proper effort, stories of victimhood and revenge can give way to more hopeful narratives.

This article was first published in Ha’aretz Feb. 27, 2005.