U.S. academics bemoan “rigged” fight in battle against BDS. By Debra Nussbaum Cohen. Haaretz, September 27, 2014.
Cohen:
Cohen:
Liberal professors say they are becoming
increasingly marginalized and threatened by the boycott movement. “Academics
have surrendered themselves to slogans on the Israeli-Palestinian issue” warns
one.
NEW
YORK – The BDS movement is hitting home for David Rosen, a long-time professor
of anthropology at Farleigh Dickinson University. Rosen’s professional group,
the American Anthropological Association (AAA), is debating BDS measures at its
annual conference in early December. And already, Rosen says, he can see that
the process is “rigged” against those who oppose BDS.
The AAA
is one of several considering BDS resolutions that are sweeping university
campuses, from student governments (where the motion to boycott and divest are
mostly symbolic) to teacher unions and academic associations, where they have
concrete impact. The language around the issue is frequently vituperative, with
some BDS supporters making thinly veiled references to “Zionist money” and
power, and both sides trading accusations that the other is stifling academic
freedom.
The
academic boycott movement is gaining force, even as those who view it as
dangerous ramp up opposing efforts. And it is leaving many Jewish professors –
who by and large identify as liberals – feeling isolated.
“The
academic boycott movement is growing like untended weeds, being watered by the
American Jewish establishment’s refusal to engage around Israel’s oppression of
the Palestinians,” says Eric Alterman, distinguished professor of English and
journalism at City University of New York’s Brooklyn College and Graduate
School of Journalism. In February, Alterman cofounded the academic advisory
council of the Third Narrative, a group of 100 anti-BDS, anti-occupation
academics.
Rosen
is an anthropologist of Africa and the Middle East who will present his study
of Israel’s social protest movements at the AAA conference. He has been an AAA
member for 47 years, but during some of the sleepless nights he has spent
thinking about the upcoming AAA debate, he has thought of resigning.
The
AAA, which has assembled a task force devoted to the organization’s engagement
on Israel-Palestine, has some 10,000 members, said Executive Director Edward
Liebow. Twenty-five of them have Israeli mailing addresses.
At the
annual conference – running December 3-7 in Washington, D.C. – panel
discussions devoted to the topic will be led almost entirely by BDS advocates,
including Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the
Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel; and Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive
director of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her group played a key role in persuading
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to vote, in June, to withdraw $21 million in investments from three major manufacturing companies that sell construction equipment
to Israel. While JVP does not currently work to create academic boycotts of
Israel, it supports them, and is developing its own academic council,
Vilkomerson tells Haaretz.
Other
participants in the upcoming AAA panels have publicly endorsed academic BDS.
All of them are stocked with speakers from leading American universities and
the Palestinian territories, Rosen said in a letter to the AAA. Not one speaker
is from a major Israeli university, and only on one panel have BDS opponents
been invited to speak.
If a
resolution ends the AAA’s relationship with Israeli universities for, say,
accepting government funding (which most universities both in Israel and the
United States do), it will marginalize Israeli – and even American-Jewish –
anthropologists, Rosen says.
“They
say this would not mean that individuals could not come to meetings, but they
couldn’t use travel money” allocated to professors by their universities for
conferences, Rosen adds. “Will Israeli scholars be able to publish articles in [AAA]
journals? Will they have to show that their work wasn’t supported by the
government? It could be incredibly stifling of all forms of academic speech.
And who is going to want to prove that they were ‘good Jews,’ that they didn’t
accept money from the Israeli government?”
Liebow
responded by email: “It is highly speculative to contemplate the implications
of such a resolution. None have been proposed to date. Any implications would
depend on the resolution’s wording, and the conditions set forth, both for any
call for action and the conditions that must be met for such a resolution to be
lifted.”
The AAA
requires motions to be presented within a month of the meeting, which means
that none are allowed until early November, Rosen notes.
The
planned BDS panels “are already like the boycott, because no Israeli
anthropologist is included,” says Rosen. “Even long-term Israeli members of the
AAA have been completely marginalized in this discussion. From my point of
view, it’s totally rigged.”
Harvey
Goldberg chairs the Israeli Anthropological Association. “Almost all Israeli
anthropologists are employed in institutions that are funded by the state,” he
wrote in a letter to the AAA. “A boycott would stigmatize and cause concrete
harm to these individuals, whatever their political opinions.
“Israeli
anthropologists – like others around the world – are not accountable for their
governments’ decisions. The academic boycott movement claims that Israeli
academics ‘are furnishing the ideological justification and technical means for
the occupation to continue.’
“That
is,” Goldberg added, “a serious misreading” which “reveals a true disconnect
from knowledge of the situation on the ground.”
Academic
groups like the AAA and the American Studies Association – a 5,000-member group
which adopted a resolution supporting BDS last December – are key associations
for those who teach at university level. The groups publish journals, post jobs
and hold large conferences at which faculty members share research and forge
critical relationships. Last year, the Asian American Studies Association and
the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association also voted to boycott
Israeli institutions.
“Each
boycott somehow gives permission to others. It would be a big feather in the cap
of BDS if they could get this one to go,” Rosen said.
Anger
over the Steven Salaita affair has amplified issues surrounding academic
boycotts. The professor of Indian-American studies was a tenured professor at
another university when he accepted a position at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. The decidedly anti-Israel professor, who is of Palestinian
origin, has written six books, the most recent titled Israel’s Dead Soul.
During this summer’s Gaza war he tweeted, “when a majority of a state’s prime
ministers were born in another country, that state is a settler colony” and
“#Israel’s message to #Obama and #Kerry: we’ll kill as many Palestinians as we
want, when we want. p.s.: fuck you, pay me. #Gaza.”
After
those tweets, the chancellor withdrew the university’s offer of employment, a
decision confirmed by the board of trustees on September 11. It sparked a wave
of protest from those who say that donors pressured the university to revoke
its job offer, and that the decision stifles academic freedom. Salaita has said
he is considering legal action. A petition demanding “corrective action on the
scandalous firing” of Salaita has garnered nearly 19,000 signatures. Salaita,
who has become a cause célèbre, is shortly planning a speaking tour of the
Illinois campuses.
Tammi
Rossman-Benjamin is on leave from her job as a Hebrew lecturer at the
University of California at Santa Cruz. She is cofounder of the AMCHA
Initiative, which tracks anti-Israel and anti-Semitic campus activity. Her
group reviewed activities of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, which over
three years received $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Education through
the Higher Education Act. More than 90 percent of its Israel-related programming
in that period was anti-Israel, she said.
When
she spoke with Haaretz, Rossman-Benjamin was just leaving UC Berkeley, where
Students for Justice in Palestine heeded a call by American Muslims for
Palestine for a day of action on September 23. That call included opposing
programs to study abroad in Israel, which Rossman-Benjamin says is the newest
target of anti-Israel groups. About 75 SJP supporters held a “die in” on the
main campus quad, while about 50 Israel supporters held an opposing rally. “There
is a movement growing from being anti-Israel to being anti-supporters of Israel
– a campaign on the part of many of the pro-Palestinian groups to keep a
pro-Israel narrative off campus,” she adds.
The UC
student workers’ union – which has 13,000 members who work as teaching
assistants in the system’s 10 colleges – has endorsed BDS in a statement that
calls Israel “an apartheid system” and says “the current situation in Palestine
is one of settler-colonialism.” Other teaching assistant organizations are
taking up similar efforts.
The
Doctoral Students’ Council at City University of New York, which has 4,700
members, presented a proposal to boycott Israeli universities at its meeting on
September 12, a Friday night. At that meeting, CUNY’s Alterman spoke against
the measure and objected to the discussion’s timing. The group agreed to
temporarily table it.
“BDS
has taken over the left and is taking over the universities,” Alterman says. “I
would support a nonacademic boycott dedicated to getting Israel out of the
territories. But this BDS is pining for the destruction of Israel.”
And
while BDS advocates say they are anti-Zionist and disavow anti-Semitism, those
who have opposed their efforts say that, in practice, there is no such
distinction.
“It’s reawakened
liberals like myself to the enduring reality of anti-Semitism. There is
anti-Semitism in BDS – quite a lot of it of a nasty variety,” notes Alterman.
“I am shocked by its vituperative character and the movement’s unwillingness to
even admit it.”
He has
never been so personally attacked as he has been for writing about BDS, he
adds, and it saps his energy for the fight. “I am writing less about BDS and
Israel in The Nation, because I just don’t need the tsuris. My students come up
to me and say ‘I hear you’re a racist white supremacist.’ I’ve been in fights
my whole life and have never experienced the level of personal abuse that I
have from the BDS crowd.”
And it
is making its way into classroom discussions. “It’s a politicization of the
classroom,” says Rossman-Benjamin. “We’re seeing much more of it.”
“Academics
have surrendered themselves to slogans on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,”
concludes Rosen. “They have just simply surrendered themselves. It’s only the
beginning now. We’re going to see a lot more attempts. It’s horrible, just
horrible.”
