Colonial and Anti-Colonial Ideas at Columbia University (1970)

David Farhi and Edward Said. From The Spectator. 

Recently I had the pleasure of sharing my work and meeting people at an exciting event on "Partitions & Decolonization" at Columbia University's Heyman Center for the Humanities. I began my remarks with reference to the history of Columbia itself, to ground, as I am eager to do, our study of history in the conditions of the present. I recounted an event that took place in October 1970, and the discussion that surrounded it. I share those remarks below, which draw from the pages of Columbia's student paper, The Spectator, available online and Hebrew writings by and about David Farhi.  

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On October 7, 1970, David Farhi, an Israeli orientalist and colonial administrator in the West Bank, delivered a lecture at Columbia University’s Faculty Club, the men’s faculty club, as it was known then. Zvi Ankori, then the newly appointed director of Columbia’s Center of Israel and Jewish Studies, introduced Farhi as “one of the most prominent young intellectuals in Israel.” Farhi’s talk, according to the brief account we have, relayed the usual, colonial, common sense: highlighting the partitioned logic of Israel's colonial realm, the West bank apparently, had “achieved a much higher degree of political sophistication" than the Gaza Strip. And the Arab intelligentsia, again according to Farhi, offered a potential partner for Israel’s vision for pacification, if, that is, they “recognized the existence of the state of Israel." 

The talk caused considerable turmoil on campus. The preceding evening, the Students for a Democratic Society had organized a forum on the Middle East in response to Farhi’s invitation to this campus, wherein the great Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein, then a representative of the PLO at the United Nations, addressed a sometimes hostile crowd. 

Rashid Hussein at Columbia University on October 6, 1970. From The Spectator.

During Farhi’s lecture on the 7th, at least a dozen hooligans from the Jewish Defense League armed with clubs, lead pipes, and belts, fought with student activists. The NYPD made some arrests. Inside the faculty club, “the crackling of loudspeakers and the chanting of both groups” could be heard. 

Columbia University on October 7, 1970. From The Spectator.

The following day, in a letter to The Spectator, Edward Said, a 35-year old professor at Columbia University whom you might have heard of, reflected on the events that transpired. He wrote:

David Farhi, regardless of his academic qualifications, is a colonial official. There are no two ways about that. By sponsoring his visit here and provoking the concern of students and faculty, the university (through the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies) acted a role similar to one it would have played had it sponsored the visit here of a white South African in charge of "black affairs." Farhi works for the Arab Affairs section of the Israeli "H.Q. on the West Bank," and it was because of his post that his presence here on October 7 was enabled, not because of his scholarly attainments. His visit, and everything he said or did, were therefore political, by no means academic.

“Colonialism is colonialism,” Said concluded. 

 

A few days later, again in The Spectator, John Badeau, the Director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, and previously the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt (and President of the American University of Cairo), excoriated Said, proclaiming him an enemy of academic freedom. Badeau also denied Farhi’s political role, describing him as “a bona fide and full-time university professor in Israel.” 

John Badeau in The Spectator.

Said responded in turn: “I simply stated, in a letter of clarification, that the university, through one of its sections, had invited a colonial official to speak here, and that it concerned me and others as well.”

“[Badeau] dark hints about my views on free discussion,” Said continues, “ought properly to be directed at the Israeli government, at present holding over 200 Arab writers and intellectuals under house arrest and without trial. Let me remind him, finally, that words like "free" easily lend themselves to base uses. One such use is to accuse a colleague of advocating repression, another is politically to bludgeon the opposition (as in free enterprise, free world), and still another is to justify one's own carelessness”

The event, and its exchange, is interesting to me. Badeau goes to considerable length to “deny” the political nature of Farhi’s work, the political nature of Farhi’s visit, and even the political nature of the area studies enterprise in the United States as a whole. All the while, painting Said as irredeemably, even dangerously, political. 

From right to left: Prahim le-David: Yad le-David Farhi (Flowers to David: A memorial to David Farhi); Ma‘arakhot (the journal of IDF); Hamizrah Hehadash (the journal of the Israeli Oriental Society).

The irony in all this, of course, is that Farhi is uncontroversially, even heroically colonial, as far as the Israeli record is concerned. He was one of the founders of the military governing apparatus in Judea and Samaria, to use the Zionist locution. In fact, he was among those who marched through Jerusalem's gates on June 8th 1967. His diary from that day recounts simply: "I entered the old city with the interpreter to announce over the loudspeaker the imposition of the curfew and that the IDF controlled the city.” 

For all the claims of his purportedly innocent and legitimate academic role in those heady days here at Columbia, in Israel his legacy is uncontroversially extracurricular, so to speak. In a special issue of Hamizrah Hehadash dedicated to Farhi, his colleagues describe him as “a man of action.” Whatever brief appearances he made among the Orientalists on the Hebrew University campus in suit and tie, it was his tan military uniform that would have been most familiar to Palestinian observers, the subject population he was tasked with pacifying. In another of his diary entries, Farhi lists the actions left to do for the day: "Coordinate operational procedures within the service. Establish contact with the muslim community. Expose Fatah members, members of the liberation movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Communists.” 

These were the activities that Edward Said, mere professor of literature we could say, was keen to expose. So what does it mean for knowledge to be political? What knowledge is considered political, and what isn’t? One thing I try to deal with in my book is the way that the content and form of colonial knowledge—which surrounds us, which we are embedded in, which has served and continues to serve massive projects of violence the world over—is invariably described as academic or neutral or some other innocuous idiom. All the while anti-colonial knowledge, perhaps especially the work of nationalist intellectuals in the Third World, but not exclusively, is considered tainted, or derivative, or “activist,” or some other excuse for not taking it seriously as knowledge. All the while, colonial knowledge can claim neutrality.   

Why do I begin with this story, well, first, to honor the occasion, to connect our past to our present here in New York, which I think is always necessary, that kind of social memory. We are, afterall, in the belly of the beast, we have certain privileges, so to speak. And we would do well to think seriously about what it means to study “areas”—so far off, so different—without thinking about what kind of fiction that division produces. But also because it is precisely these problems which animate this book I've just published, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization. 

October 29, 2025, Columbia University, New York City.