CHICAGO: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been called many unflattering things. Yet from his recent talk at the University of Chicago, he can now add “fu**ing snake! , “piece of sh*t! and a slew of other vulgarisms to his repertoire.
What is shocking is not necessarily the language itself, fuelled by passions and legitimate grievances against the former Prime Minister, but the context.
Registration to attend the talk was mandatory days in advance. Upon arrival, attendees were given question cards, reminding them of proper decorum and the university’s commitment to the sharing of ideas, however controversial.
Nevertheless, Olmert’s scheduled twenty-minute speech stretched into an hour-and-a-half, as members of the audience – many of them university students – interrupted with obscenities his every attempt to speak. It took the police over an hour of locating the individual disruptors in the hall and escorting them out of the auditorium, before Olmert was able to speak ten words consecutively.
What is so tragic about this event is not only the exclusive resort to obscenities to voice political dissent, but the fact that within an environment that prides itself in freedom of thought and the pooling of ideas, there was an absolute refusal to listen to the opposite side. How fortunate and ironic, it seems, that Palestinian and Israeli political leaders seem better able to listen to each other than these university students training to be, well, professional “listeners and critics.
I am not contesting the right to dissent, but the means. Had the students listened to the talk, their “cause would have been more credible. Instead, their behavior was at best crude and infantile. Furthermore, they carried out the very dehumanization that they accused Olmert of doing, by refusing to listen to his speech and by degrading his status as a human being.
But given the very real and legitimate sources of the students’ grievances of Olmert’s political past, which contributed to the deaths of over one thousand Palestinians, how might the students have expressed their dissent?
First, they should have remained until the end of the talk. Second, they could have, as a united body, carried out a “silent protest . This could entail wearing a particular slogan or piece of clothing, from a keffiyeh or a Palestinian flag (as some did), to a clown nose signifying the ridiculousness of Olmert’s explanations, to statements plastered onto people’s shirts.
Instead of reducing political protest into a contest of who could yell the loudest and swear the most, the silent protest would have broadcast the loudest message of them all: that the ability to protest, disagree and grieve is not incompatible with the ability to listen.
Shayna Zamkanei is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Chicago. She has worked for think tanks in North America and the Middle East. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
