16.04.25
Editorial Note
In April 2024, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives announced that he is expanding the House Education Committee’s investigation into antisemitism on college campuses. Earlier that year, in January 2024, the House Committee on Ways and Means launched a probe into the University of Pennsylvania’s tax-exempt status, citing an alleged failure to protect Jewish students on campus.
Penn is the alma mater of Dr. Nimrod Ben Zeev, where he completed his PhD in the History Department in 2020.
The subject of his dissertation is Israel’s construction industry and its Arab workers. For Ben Zeev, they “remain part and parcel of the colonial, exploitative structure the erection of which this dissertation has narrated, would likely furnish an infuriating and tragic laundry list. From the Israeli Right’s notion that construction in illegal settlements was the ‘proper Zionist response’ (tguva tziyonit holemet) to all manners of perceived Palestinian and international encroachments on Israel, held and acted upon since the late 1970s; to the disastrous equations of demolition endorsed by current Israeli leadership, whereby the homes of Palestinians within Israel built without a permit are demolished to appease popular rightwing anger at government demolitions of structures in illegal settlements in the West Bank.”
Ben Zeev’s PhD supervisor was Prof. Eve Troutt Powell, an anti-Israel activist. For example, Troutt Powell filed a lawsuit against her University in March 2024, alleging a pattern of “McCarthyism” for preventing speech in opposition to Israel. The lawsuit was filed with Huda Fakhreddine, associate professor of Arabic literature, in conjunction with Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine. The complaint alleged that “efforts to investigate the University over alleged antisemitism on campus have threatened professors’ academic freedom.” The case was dismissed.
Ben Zeev’s PhD committee included Prof. Sherene Seikaly from UC Santa Barbara. Seikaly’s bio indicates she held the Qatar Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University. Seikaly’s book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how “Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body.” Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine “focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession.” Seikaly currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Seikaly was featured in an online series, “What Have We Learned? Israel’s Genocide — One Year On,” in October 2024. The Co-Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab american cultural Center, George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Interestingly, Penn University boasted about Ben Zeev’s four-year postdoctoral appointment at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Penn is apparently unaware that the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute is not an academic institution and, therefore, not recognized by Israel’s Council for Higher Education.
Earlier this month, Ben Zeev co-authored an article titled “Fighting Side by Side in Israel-Palestine.” His co-author, Dr. Leena Dallasheh is an Israeli Arab who describes herself as “An activist scholar.” According to her website, her research focuses on the history of Palestine/Israel. “She held several academic positions, the last of which was associate professor at Cal Poly Humboldt. She received her PhD in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at NYU. Before coming to NYU, she received a law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.”
The authors begin their article by stating, “There is a long and noble history of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians resisting Israel’s crimes together.”
The article discusses Masafer Yatta and the documentary film “No Other Land,” which brought to global attention “yet again Israel’s crimes as occupier and violator of Palestinian rights and showed how progressives from across the national divide collaborate to achieve common objectives… The debate brought into focus the whole question of cross-national activism for Palestinian justice, and ‘co-resistance,’ or joint struggle, against Israeli occupation and Jewish supremacy.”
According to the authors, “Co-resistance focuses on protecting Palestinian existence on the land, exposing Israeli colonial crimes, and making inroads within the Jewish community to oppose Israeli repressive mechanisms, pushing Jewish activists to use their structurally privileged position in the region to aid Palestinian rights and liberation. It is of particular value in the context of Palestine/Israel because of the settler colonial context in the land. As multiple Palestinian scholars and activists have noted, the way Zionist settler colonialism developed in Palestine/Israel renders the expulsion of the settler population neither practical nor moral. Co-resistance offers a politically sound strategy toward substantive decolonization, along with independent struggle within the respective communities. In the long run, through co-resistance, a growing number among the settler population can embrace a decolonial future in the land, expanding the fissures within Israeli society and providing fertile ground for international mobilization to end Israeli occupation and injustice.”
They detailed the history of movements that brought together Arabs and Jews. They first discussed Communism, followed by the founding in 1974 of “the student movement CAMPUS (the Hebrew acronym for Groups for Social and Political Student Involvement) brought together Palestinian and Jewish students in Israeli universities. The movement joined Palestinian protests against the occupation. Another organization, the Committee for Solidarity with Birzeit, was founded in 1981 as an Israeli group in solidarity with the Palestinian struggles at Birzeit University, then a hub of the Palestinian left’s anti-occupation struggles. The movement, ‘Down with the Occupation,’ was a continuation of the Committee for Solidarity. With the start of the Palestinian Intifada in 1987, its members vocally expressed solidarity with the uprising. These groups worked on using their privileged status as Israelis to defend Palestinians, bring Palestinian opposition voices to Israelis, and shape Israeli public opinion.”
Then, they moved on to discuss “After Jewish Supremacy.” Stating that “The Oslo years were mostly a retreat from co-resistance and saw the emergence of dialogue groups, which consisted of meetings between Israelis and Palestinians mostly devoid of a clear political project and glossed over the deepening occupation, segregation, and inequality in the region. Palestinian critics rightly called out these dialogue groups and the cottage industry of programs, which uncritically espoused co-existence without challenging the status quo and normalized the Israeli state’s colonial practices. The collapse of the Oslo process with the beginning of the Second Intifada led to a reexamination of previous modes of resistance and a clearer concept of what joint struggle, or co-resistance, entails.”
The authors discuss how in 2001, “Palestinian and Israeli activists established Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. Part of Ta’ayush’s innovation was that the movement explicitly framed its struggle as a decolonial struggle in a settler colonial setting by developing a model that could challenge the very structures governing Palestinians’ lives. Ta’ayush activists accompanying Palestinian farmers and shepherds to their lands. This was, in part, a response to the shortcomings of previous co-resistance and coexistence endeavors. Ta’ayush’s founders understood these earlier efforts as reproducing existing power disparities between the two communities, as a result prioritizing Jewish perspectives and concerns. Palestinian communities shaped and led the movement’s direct-action practices, while Israeli Jews were called to use their privilege to protect Palestinian communities. This formula sought to bring the colonial reality into focus while also resisting it. Ta’ayush was consolidated at a dire moment: the Israeli assault on and reoccupation of the West Bank’s urban centers, in which Israeli forces laid siege to cities, laid waste to entire neighborhoods, and deprived Palestinian communities of basic needs such as food, water, and security. As the group sought to respond to these needs, it worked to develop a political project against occupation and for social justice. It pursued the widest possible platform to allow greater participation by Israelis, while adhering to a clear political line: Ta’ayush defined its work not as humanitarian action but as shedding light on Israeli crimes and presented an alternative future based on living together, through justice and equality. Ta’ayush’s approach to co-resistance played an important role in developing the forms of joint struggle.”
Recently, Tel Aviv University recruited Ben Zeev to its History Department. Interestingly, Professor On Barak from Tel Aviv University was also a member of Ben Zeev’s PhD committee.
Tel Aviv University is a public university. The taxpayers who support tertiary education expect good value for their investments. Ben Zeev’s anti-Israel scholarship is a poor return for their money. As IAM documented, some liberal arts departments at the University have a long history of hiring and promoting activist academics who use their position to advocate for radical left-wing causes.
Worse, Ben Zeev’s polemical scholarship, like other missives of anti-Israel academics, bolsters the flames of antisemitism on Western campuses. Since October 7, Israel has launched numerous initiatives to combat this phenomenon. What is the point of providing Ben Zeev with a paid platform to produce material that might be used by the academic delegitimizers of Israel?
REFERENCES:
04.01.2025Fighting Side by Side in Israel-PalestineBYLEENA DALLASHEH NIMROD BEN ZEEV
There is a long and noble history of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians resisting Israel’s crimes together.
When the Palestinian-Israeli coproduction No Other Land won the Academy Award for best documentary feature film in early March, jubilation was palpable. It brought to global attention yet again Israel’s crimes as occupier and violator of Palestinian rights and showed how progressives from across the national divide collaborate to achieve common objectives.
This week, this reality was brought again into sharp relief with the assault and arrest of one of the film’s directors, Hamdan Ballal, after Israeli settlers attacked his community.
No Other Land follows the struggle of the people of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of nineteen Palestinian communities in the south of the occupied West Bank. It chronicles their ongoing fight against Israel’s attempts to dispossess and displace them through military decrees, the repeated demolition of homes and community structures, settler violence, destruction and deprivation of access to their resources, and court rulings. It also documents community struggles between 2019–2023, making use of home videos, interviews, and archival footage to tell the story of the people of Masafer Yatta’s decades-long fight for their homes, land, and lives, while also shedding light on the Israeli activists who joined and documented that struggle.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli officials, journalists, public figures, and others launched an assault on the film, frequently while stating that they have not seen it nor do they intend to. But counterintuitively, No Other Land was also attacked by some participants in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
While many lauded its role in exposing Israeli colonial practices and centering Palestinians’ steadfastness, others argued it reproduced colonial dynamics in which Palestinians required Israeli permission to narrate their story. The debate brought into focus the whole question of cross-national activism for Palestinian justice, and “co-resistance,” or joint struggle, against Israeli occupation and Jewish supremacy.
Rather than relitigating the definition of normalization or summarizing the debate, we focus here on the practice of co-resistance, its viability, and historic meanings in Israel-Palestine by examining several key historical examples of Jewish-Palestinian co-resistance from the period of British rule until the early 2000s. This is by no means an exhaustive list of such struggles. But it illuminates the historical dynamics, challenges, and limitations of co-resistance.
These examples show that co-resistance was historically practiced in a wide range of ways in the region, from political parties to direct action, depending on the particular circumstances. What unites these instances is the principle of shared and active opposition to the colonial order, first under the British and subsequently under Israeli rule.
Co-resistance focuses on protecting Palestinian existence on the land, exposing Israeli colonial crimes, and making inroads within the Jewish community to oppose Israeli repressive mechanisms, pushing Jewish activists to use their structurally privileged position in the region to aid Palestinian rights and liberation. It is of particular value in the context of Palestine/Israel because of the settler colonial context in the land. As multiple Palestinian scholars and activists have noted, the way Zionist settler colonialism developed in Palestine/Israel renders the expulsion of the settler population neither practical nor moral. Co-resistance offers a politically sound strategy toward substantive decolonization, along with independent struggle within the respective communities.
In the long run, through co-resistance, a growing number among the settler population can embrace a decolonial future in the land, expanding the fissures within Israeli society and providing fertile ground for international mobilization to end Israeli occupation and injustice.
Side by Side
Since the British Mandate period, Jews and Palestinians have repeatedly joined forces in resisting colonial structures. In the 1920s, Palestinian Arabs and Jewish immigrants joined forces in the Palestine Communist Party (PKP). The party’s history is far from an ideal for co-resistance. Yet the Communist experience kept the possibility of imagining a democratic, anti-colonial alternative alive.
The party was unevenly reconstituted as a single party — which Jewish leaders dominated — the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI), in the wake of the Nakba in 1948. Despite the unequal structure within the party, MAKI provided the main space for the struggle of Palestinians who became citizens of Israel to remain in their homeland in subsequent decades, when Israel imposed a military rule on Palestinian citizens. Acts of solidarity and resistance led or supported by MAKI members radicalized a core of Jewish activists to continue anti-colonial struggles over the following decades.
In the early 1960s, Israeli authorities’ plans to establish a new Jewish town, later dubbed Carmiel, in the Palestinian-majority area of the Shaghur galvanized resistance among a broad coalition. It also introduced a new generation of Israeli-Jewish activists who worked alongside the Shaghur’s Palestinian residents. The latter’s role in the struggle attracted considerable media attention in the Israeli press and helped generate support for the Shaghur residents among a then nascent international antiwar and nonproliferation movement.
The 1970s and ’80s witnessed another wave of joint activism. Founded in 1974, the student movement CAMPUS (the Hebrew acronym for Groups for Social and Political Student Involvement) brought together Palestinian and Jewish students in Israeli universities. The movement joined Palestinian protests against the occupation. Another organization, the Committee for Solidarity with Birzeit, was founded in 1981 as an Israeli group in solidarity with the Palestinian struggles at Birzeit University, then a hub of the Palestinian left’s anti-occupation struggles.
The movement, “Down with the Occupation,” was a continuation of the Committee for Solidarity. With the start of the Palestinian Intifada in 1987, its members vocally expressed solidarity with the uprising. These groups worked on using their privileged status as Israelis to defend Palestinians, bring Palestinian opposition voices to Israelis, and shape Israeli public opinion.
After Jewish Supremacy
The Oslo years were mostly a retreat from co-resistance and saw the emergence of dialogue groups, which consisted of meetings between Israelis and Palestinians mostly devoid of a clear political project and glossed over the deepening occupation, segregation, and inequality in the region. Palestinian critics rightly called out these dialogue groups and the cottage industry of programs, which uncritically espoused co-existence without challenging the status quo and normalized the Israeli state’s colonial practices. The collapse of the Oslo process with the beginning of the Second Intifada led to a reexamination of previous modes of resistance and a clearer concept of what joint struggle, or co-resistance, entails.
In 2001, Palestinian and Israeli activists established Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. Part of Ta’ayush’s innovation was that the movement explicitly framed its struggle as a decolonial struggle in a settler colonial setting by developing a model that could challenge the very structures governing Palestinians’ lives.
Ta’ayush activists accompanying Palestinian farmers and shepherds to their lands. (Tal King / Flickr)
This was, in part, a response to the shortcomings of previous co-resistance and coexistence endeavors. Ta’ayush’s founders understood these earlier efforts as reproducing existing power disparities between the two communities, as a result prioritizing Jewish perspectives and concerns. Palestinian communities shaped and led the movement’s direct action practices, while Israeli Jews were called to use their privilege to protect Palestinian communities. This formula sought to bring the colonial reality into focus while also resisting it.
Ta’ayush was consolidated at a dire moment: the Israeli assault on and reoccupation of the West Bank’s urban centers, in which Israeli forces laid siege to cities, laid waste to entire neighborhoods, and deprived Palestinian communities of basic needs such as food, water, and security. As the group sought to respond to these needs, it worked to develop a political project against occupation and for social justice.
It pursued the widest possible platform to allow greater participation by Israelis, while adhering to a clear political line: Ta’ayush defined its work not as humanitarian action but as shedding light on Israeli crimes and presented an alternative future based on living together, through justice and equality.
Ta’ayush’s approach to co-resistance played an important role in developing the forms of joint struggle which Masafer Yatta’s local communities continue to lead in their now over two-decades-long struggle against ethnic cleansing.
Following Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, this struggle has intensified. Increasing attacks by Israeli settlers backed by the police and army have led to the displacement of two local communities in Masafer Yatta out of a total of twenty West Bank communities, which state and settler violence have displaced since then. Throughout, co-resistance has retained an important role in Masafer Yatta’s strategies of sumud (“steadfastness”). During this period, No Other Land documents Masafer Yatta’s residents’ ongoing resistance to these attacks, with the support of Israeli activists.
No Other Land demonstrates that in Masafer Yatta, as elsewhere, co-resistance has been a crucial way to carry out anti-occupation struggle and envision a society after Jewish supremacy. Running through its history is a common thread: the refusal to accept the separatist logic of colonialism, while working to upend the hierarchies it imposes.
CONTRIBUTORS
Leena Dallasheh is a Palestinian historian and independent scholar.
Nimrod Ben Zeev teaches history in the Department of Labor Studies at Tel Aviv University.
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Nimrod Ben Zeev receives a post-doctoral fellowship at the Van Leer Institute’s Polonsky Academy in Jerusalem
April 10, 2020
Nimrod Ben Zeev has received a four-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Van Leer Institute’s Polonsky Academy in Jerusalem (https://polonsky.vanleer.org.il/home/). Nimrod is planning to defend his dissertation this summer, and take up the fellowship in October. Nimrod is currently a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow, and a Graduate Fellow at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. In previous years, his research has been supported by the Social Sciences Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF).
Nimrod’s dissertation is entitled: “Foundations of Inequality: Construction, Political Economy, and the Senses in Palestine/Israel, 1918-1973.” His committee is: Eve Troutt Powell (Supervisor); Kathy Brown; Heather Sharkey (NELC); Sherene Seikaly (UC Santa Barbara); and On Barak (Tel Aviv University).
Nimrod describes his project on his Departmental webpage:
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An activist scholar
Leena Dallasheh is an independent scholar. Her research focuses on the history of Palestine/Israel, with a particular interest in Palestinians who became citizens of Israel in 1948. She is currently finishing a manuscript on the social and political history of Nazareth from 1940 to 1966, tracing how Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 negotiated their incorporation in the state, affirming their rights as citizens and their identity as Palestinian. She has published articles and reviews in IJMES, JPS, AHR, and edited collections. She has also been engaged in academic and public conversations on Palestine/Israel, and has been interviewed and published in various media outlets. She held several academic positions, the last of which was associate professor at Cal Poly Humboldt.
She received her PhD in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at NYU. Before coming to NYU, she received a law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
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What Have We Learned? Israel’s Genocide — One Year On Featuring Sherene Seikaly (21 October)
By : Jadaliyya Reports
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
Featuring
Sherene Seikaly
Moderated by:
Bassam Haddad
TUESDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2024 2:00PM EST | 9:00 PM GAZA
WATCH LIVE YOUTUBE.COM/@JADALIYYA/STREAMS
Join our eighth edition of “What Have We Learned?” after one year of Israel’s Genocide with Sherene Seikaly, hosted by Bassam Hadddad. Scholars, journalists, activists, and authors select 5 themes/topics and analyze what we have learned about them.
Gaza in Context Project is billing this series as lessons learned, one year on, to break through the fog of observations, narratives, data, propaganda, and images we unfathomably continue to access/witness every day. These conversations are relatively short, intense, and insightful, delivered by thoroughly engaged speakers. Catch our next Episode this week with Sherene Seikaly.
Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series
We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza awaits a massive invasion of potentially genocidal proportions. This follows an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that depict Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.
The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context.
Co-Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab american cultural Center, George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
Featuring
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She held the Qatar Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgetown University and the Europe in the Middle East Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Seikaly was Director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo (2012-2014), where she was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. Seikaly’s Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine focuses on a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. His trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. Seikaly is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Academic Senate, the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Harold J. Plous Award at UCSB; and the UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship. She currently serves as co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies and co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.
Bassam Haddad (Moderator) is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA’s Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
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Penn responds to lawsuit by professors alleging ‘McCarthyism’ for preventing anti-Israel speech
By Ben Binday 05/11/24 3:14pm
Credit: Abhiram Juvvadi
Penn filed a motion earlier this week to dismiss a lawsuit filed by several professors alleging a pattern of “McCarthyism” for preventing speech in opposition to Israel and seeking to stop the University from submitting documents to Congress.
The lawsuit was originally filed on March 9 by associate professor of Arabic literature Huda Fakhreddine and history and Africana studies professor Eve Troutt Powell in conjunction with Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine, a collective of Penn faculty who say they are standing in solidarity with Palestinians. The complaint alleges that efforts to investigate the University over alleged antisemitism on campus have threatened professors’ academic freedom.
Penn’s motion to dismiss sharply disagrees with the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, which was filed approximately a month after their initial complaint, calling the motion “meritless.”
A University spokesperson declined to comment.
At the time of the initial filing, a press release from PFJP said that the lawsuit hopes to convince the University not to comply with the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s request for a plethora of documents pertaining to on-campus antisemitism. According to the press release, the request included “teaching files, emails, and other material for political scrutiny.”
The Committee first opened its investigation into Penn on Dec. 7, 2023, following former Penn President Liz Magill’s testimony before Congress on Dec. 5. On Feb. 7, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that Penn would begin a multi-week process of transferring documents to the Committee. The requested documents included those relating to antisemitism or anti-Zionism on campus, pro-Palestine groups and actions at Penn, foreign donations to the University, and data on Jewish enrollment.
Penn’s response to the complaint contends that “Plaintiffs’ issue is with HEW and not with Penn,” citing the Committee’s motives, definition of antisemitism, and ongoing investigation into the University.
The new motion provides several responses to both the plaintiffs’ lawsuit and motion for a preliminary injunction. It contends that all of the claims lack standing because the original complaint “offer[s] nothing but allegations of possible future injury” rather than any injury that is “certainly impending.”
“Plaintiffs may disagree with Penn’s decision to comply with HEW’s request. But that disagreement does not entitle them to this Court’s jurisdiction,” the lawsuit reads. “Because they have failed to allege enough facts that come close to showing any future injury that is likely to occur—much less certainly impending—their complaint must be dismissed for lack of … standing.”
The response also contends that the plaintiffs’ claims under the United States Constitution and Pennsylvania Constitution fail because they did not sufficiently demonstrate that Penn is a state actor.
The University’s third response to the complaint contends that the plaintiffs failed to state a breach of contract claim by not identifying specific promises and assertions made by Penn.
Penn also contends that the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction should be dismissed due to their aforementioned arguments for why the case should be dismissed. If not dismissed, however, the University also posits that the request should be dismissed “because Plaintiffs have come nowhere close to satisfying their heavy burden.”
Penn — while citing several of their arguments used in response to the motion to dismiss — argues that the preliminary injunction request should be denied because the plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claims and unlikely to “suffer irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief.” It also contends that the requested injunctive relief would harm the House education committee and not be in the public interest.
On April 30, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced that he is expanding the House education committee’s investigation into a housewide probe into antisemitism on college campuses. At the time, a Committee on Education and the Workforce aide told the DP that their investigation was going to continue despite the housewide expansion.
The House Committee on Ways and Means also announced a probe into Penn’s tax-exempt status on January 10, citing an alleged “failure” to protect Jewish students on campus.
israel-academia-monitor.com 