6.
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER giving his preface to Dr. Miller, Rivlin found it returned to his mailbox, without an accompanying note. What did Miller think he was doing? Was he being provocative or just stupid? Rivlin couldn’t believe that the young lecturer was so unafraid of him.
At first he was inclined to say nothing until they saw each other at the next departmental meeting. That night, however, he slept poorly. In the morning, unable to restrain himself, he called to straighten the matter out.
“I was wondering if you’d read it…”
But reading Rivlin’s introduction had been a piece of cake for the theoretical mind of the young lecturer. He just hadn’t been sure whether the professor, with whom he had such ideological and methodological differences, really wanted to know his opinion.
“But that’s just it,” the Orientalist said, feeling better. “It’s precisely those differences that make me want to know what you think.”
Nevertheless, he was careful to set their meeting in Miller’s room, a few floors above his own. That way he could get out of it any time he wanted.
Although Miller’s standing at the university did not entitle him to his own office, the young lecturer, who was two or three years older than Ofer, had found a little cubbyhole between two rooms near the rector’s office — a space originally intended for a coffee machine or a file cabinet — and talked his way into getting it. His sense of his own uniqueness, it seemed, made him prefer a cramped room of his own to a larger one shared with someone else.
It was late on a gray winter day. Miller’s narrow window looked out on neither mountains nor sea, but on some houses of a Druze village that appeared engraved in the dust on its glass pane. Rivlin, a tense smile on his face, surveyed the tiny room’s overloaded bookshelves with what was meant to be a benevolent glance. Most of the books were recently published American and German studies of political and sociological theory. Not a single Arabic volume was in evidence. Did this man demanding tenure in the Near Eastern Studies department know Arabic at all, or did he rely entirely on translations for his postmodernist opinions? Moving the empty chair away from Miller’s desk so as not to have to face him like a student, Rivlin positioned himself diagonally and stretched his legs out in front of him. “To judge by your tone,” he began magnanimously, “I take it that you have some objections. Well, I’d like to hear them. I’m open to criticism.”
Miller ran a hand through his sandy hair and took off his glasses. To Rivlin’s surprise, his light blue eyes were childishly innocent. Although the young lecturer could easily guess that the full professor was on the secret appointments committee, he did not beat around the bush. In no uncertain terms, he rejected the Orientalist’s thesis that an academic study dealing with the origins of Algerian national identity could have any relevance to the current bloodshed in Algeria. His tone quiet and considered, he stressed the need to demolish not only the theoretical foundations of his senior colleague’s introduction — which, Rivlin now saw, he had not only read but could remember every word of — but the premises of the still unwritten book to follow. Its reification of the concept of national identity, he contended, doomed it to failure on moral and intellectual grounds.
“Reification?” Rivlin forced a smile while concealing his anxiety over a word whose exact meaning he was unsure of.
Yes, Miller said. National identity was not a natural or empirical given, there being no such thing. It was a fictive construct used by the power structure to enslave the population it purportedly described. He found it deplorable that a senior faculty member, writing at the end of the twentieth century, should collaborate in such an anachronistic, long repudiated, and even dangerous point of view, much less base a book on it.
“A fictive construct in what way?” Stiffening, Rivlin did his best to overlook the connotations of the word “collaborate.”
The young postmodernist was happy to explain. In articulate, if rather mechanical and (Rivlin thought) smugly jesuitical language, he demystified the devious concept of national identity, which served to ghettoize the lower classes and deprive them of their rights within the rigid framework of the national state, whether — for there was no difference — this was of an openly totalitarian or an ostensibly democratic nature.
“Come, come,” Rivlin drawled, in what he intended to be a patronizing manner. “No difference between totalitarianism and democracy? Isn’t that going a bit far?”
But the sandy-haired jesuit, now sitting in the shadow of a passing cloud, stuck to his guns. National identity was an illegitimate concept even in a country like Israel that still pretended, albeit with increasing difficulty, to be democratic. Rather than let people decide for themselves who they were and how they wished to be defined, it trapped them in a rigid category that had no room for change, development, personal experience, or multiple identities. With the full complicity of the academic community, the ruling classes sought to impose an inflexible model of reality, privileging some and marginalizing others, for the purpose of exerting total control.
Rivlin sighed. “I’d say you were the proof that they haven’t succeeded,” he said, wishing he could dampen the young postmodernist’s ardor.
“They can never succeed,” Miller agreed triumphantly. “In the end the whole system will implode.” Ordinary thinking people would rebel against being labeled by the antiquated notions that the professor (sitting now in evening shadow, his head jerked back in dismay) wished to construct his book with. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy would understand that national identity enslaved rather than enhanced them, by curbing their freedom and mobility and preventing a rich interchange of perspectives across permeable frontiers. And the moral absurdity of it was that the enslavers, the engineers of identity who locked the doors and sealed the borders, kept open these possibilities for themselves. They alone retained access to the rich interfaces of language and culture, traveling widely and associating with different peer groups while the masses, locked within the gates of the state, were chauvinistically regimented. And to what end? But that was obvious…
“Not to me,” Rivlin said honestly.
“To make cannon fodder for the next unnecessary war.”
“Whoa there!” he protested. “Begging your pardon! How can a political progressive like you call an anticolonialist struggle against a century of oppression in Algeria unnecessary?”
But the theoretical jesuit was unimpressed by anticolonialist platitudes. Colonialism, he maintained, was not so much a historical or political phenomenon as a ubiquitous condition that co-opted all elements of society. It was present even in countries that had never had colonies, such as Austria or Sweden, to say nothing of Israel, a colonialist entity from the start. You didn’t even have to look at the Occupied Territories to see that. “Take, for instance,” Miller said, with a thin smile, “the hierarchical organization of the university tower we’re in, surrounded by a national park that has wiped out every remnant of the Arab villages that once were in it. Think of the internal division of the floors, with the administration at the top and the slowest elevators serving the lower and middle echelons, where the liberal-arts faculties are, while the high-speed elevators zoom up to the appointments committees and the personnel department and financial offices. That’s where the real power of this university is. And what sits, disgracefully, on top of everything? A military installation, an army radar station! Of course, we pretend it’s not there. Its operators are made to look like students. But let’s not kid ourselves. It combs the area and sends its information to an intelligence base in the Galilee in which everything is secretly processed. That’s where the legitimacy of the whole oppressive power structure comes from…”