The IAM posts occasionally receive responses from readers, but when several academics respond to our publications, it merits our attention.
Recently, IAM reported that “Israeli Academics Sign Petition Calling to Sanction Israel.” The post discussed an online petition titled “Call for International Pressure,” signed by over four hundred petitioners, including a group of Israeli academics. Their names are Anat Matar (TAU), Smadar Ben-Natan (U of Oregon), Moshé Behar (U of Manchester), Tamir Sorek (Penn State U), Rafi Greenberg (TAU), Shira Klein (Chapman U), Lior Sternfeld (Penn State U), Ophira Gamliel (U of Glasgow), Hilla Dayan (U of Amsterdam), Regev Nathansohn, Uri Hadar (TAU), Snait Gissis (TAU), Amalia Saar (U of Haifa), Avishai Ehrlich (Academic College Tel Aviv-Jaffa), Efraim Davidi (BGU), Maya Rosenfeld (BGU), Avraham Oz (U of Haifa), Ronnen Ben-Arie (Technion), Yael Berda (HUJI), Anat Biletzki (Quinnipiac University), Sivan Rajuan Shtang (Sapir College), Hannan Hever (HUJI), Orly Lubin (TAU), Raz Chen-Morris (HUJI), Hannah Safran, Revital Madar (European University Institute), Ilana Hairston (Tel Hai College), Amos Goldberg (HUJI), Tamar Hager (Tel Hai College), Miriam Eliav-Feldon (TAU), Noga Kadman.
The petition stated, “We, Israeli citizens, living in Israel and abroad, are calling on the international community – the United Nations and its institutions, the United States, the European Union, the Arab League and all the countries of the world – to intervene immediately and apply every possible sanction… save us from ourselves, put real pressure on Israel for an immediate ceasefire.”
In other words, the group condemned Israel and absolved the Palestinians and Iran from any responsibility. Moreover, the petitioners urged weakening Israel.
Soon after the publication of this post, IAM received an email from Shlomo Sand, an emeritus professor at Tel Aviv University, who had expertise in French culture and cinema. Sand made a name for himself by claiming that Jews are not a people and have no rights to the land of Israel – although there is ample evidence otherwise. Sand wrote IAM and asked for his name to be added to the signatories list.
Worth noting that Sand is among the more notorious examples of anti-Israel Israeli academics. The damages he has caused are considerable. He published two polemical books masquerading as academics – the Invention of the Jewish People and the Invention of the Land of Israel. Sand, who has no academic background in the history of the Jewish People, wrote many errors. As a result, antisemites loved his books. They needed an academic stamp of approval for their antisemitic theories. Not surprisingly, Sand did not publish these two books in academic presses.
Several responses from an anti-Israel Israeli academic came from Micah Leshem, professor emeritus of Psychology at the University of Haifa. When IAM reported on “Claremont Colleges as Battleground for BDS,” Leshem wrote back to say it was “encouraging.” In an earlier post, when IAM reported on “Anti-Israel Academic Erica Weiss from Tel Aviv University,” Leshem responded, “glad to see there are more and more scholars in the field. Your Mantra of Anti-Israel falls rather hollow – what you are really preaching is for hate among people living here. That’s what it boils down to. Again, thnx for showcasing this, it is heartwarming, and I often post it on, albeit without your facile commentary.” IAM could not resist the temptation to respond with irony, “I know, you were always very fond of antisemites, I noticed it already twenty years ago. You should check what is wrong with you.”
Other responses came from academics like Ian Lustick, professor emeritus at the Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, who wrote IAM, “Thanks so much for bringing this courageous initiative to my attention and to the attention of so many others so that the world can know that Israel is more than what it now seems to be.” To an earlier IAM post titled “Moshe Zimmermann Empowers Antisemites,” Lustick responded, “Thanks for providing such an accurate and compelling account of Zimerman’s powerful analysis.” To recall, as IAM concluded in this post that Zimmemman’s obsession with finding parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany blinds him to the fact that despite his egregious comparisons, his academic career flourished and he retired with full benefits. Zimmermann ignored the fact that Israel was not even slightly similar to Germany in the 1930s. If he were teaching there and trashing the Nazi regime, he would have been sent to any of the extermination camps. Zimmermann’s new book empowers antisemites by comparing religious Jews to radical Islamists.
But, the final misunderstanding comes from Prof. Hannah Herzog, professor emeritus of Sociology at Tel Aviv University, who complained about the IAM post “Israeli Efforts to Combat Academic Boycotts.” IAM detailed in a post how the Technion is leading an initiative to battle BDS. IAM referred to a discussion by academics about the initiative, which was circulated by the Academia-IL forum. IAM cited a message by Herzog, who stated she “was amazed to receive this email – is this what the Neaman Institution was created for? To be part of the Shin Bet or any other state body. And all for money. Where did we get to?” When IAM cited Herzog, we stated it was “egregious” of her because “The BDS crowd made no secret of their desire to degrade Israel’s leading role in advanced technology in a variety of fields, including medicine, environmentally friendly agriculture, and environmental amelioration.” Herzog, who IAM never accused of supporting BDS, blamed IAM for suggesting she supports BDS.
As IAM repeatedly stated, many Israeli academics were recruited and promoted due to their political activism rather than merit.
Unfortunately, academic authorities turned a blind eye to the abuse of academic positions. With few exceptions, Israeli universities are public institutions and should follow the guidelines for public universities in Western countries. In the United States, for example, the governors have a say in the institutions through the board. In Great Britain, where tenure was abolished decades ago, advocacy writing masquerading as scholarly endeavor is rare.
Given the extreme wave of antisemitism on Western campuses, the Israeli academic authorities should do more to prevent scholars from fueling the flames.
REFERENCES:
———- Forwarded message ——— From: shlomo sand<shlomosand@gmail.com> Date: Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 3:57 PM Subject: Re: Israeli Academics Sign Petition Calling to Sanction Israel To: Israel Academia <iam.israel.academia.monitor@gmail.com>
אני חותם: שלמה זנד shlomo sand
==============================================
———- Forwarded message ——— From: Lustick, Ian<ilustick@sas.upenn.edu> Date: Wed, Oct 16, 2024 at 5:02 PM Subject: Re: Israeli Academics Sign Petition Calling to Sanction Israel To: Israel Academia <iam.israel.academia.monitor@gmail.com>
Thanks so much for bringing this courageous initiative to my attention and to the attention of so many others so that the world can know that Israel is more than what it now seems to be.
Herzog’s comment lamenting that the Neaman Institute is “part of the Shin Bet” is even more egregious. The BDS crowd made no secret of their desire to degrade Israel’s leading role in advanced technology in a variety of fields, including medicine, environmentally friendly agriculture, and environmental amelioration. Not incidentally, many of the scientific-military developments, including the Iron Dome, saved the lives of countless Israelis from targeted attacks of Iran and its proxies on the civilian population
מבקשת להביא הוכחות על כך שתמכתי בBDS מעולם לא! זו הוצאת דיבה.
אני אף פעם לא חתמתי על עצומה של תמיכה בBDS, וגם הערתי היתה בעצם שאלה מי הם הגופים שצריכים לעשות מחקרים מסוג זה.
תהיתי אם גופי מחקר אקדמיים זה (מכון נאמן) תפקידם להיות הגוף שעושה מוניטור בסוגיות אלה. בדיוק ההיפך מהפרשנות שלכםן. חשבתי שזה תפקיד של גופים הממונים על בטחון המדינה ולא גופים אקדמיים.
אגב, “בשער” אף פעם לא קיבל את מה שכתבתי כי אינני חברה רשמית בפורום. אבל ציטוט אחד הכניס אותי לרשימה “שחורה שלכםן” ופגעתם בשמי הטוב. עילה לתביעה משפטית. אני כמובן לא אעשה זאת, זה מתחת לכבודי. אבל, נראה לי שמתחייבת התנצלות על פגיעה בשמי הטוב.
The Claremont Colleges complex is located on contiguous campuses in the Southern California city of Claremont. They include five undergraduate liberal arts colleges and two graduate institutions. These are Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College, and Keck Graduate Institute.
Earlier this month, a discussion titled “Should Universities Boycott, Divest, or Sanction Israel” was hosted at the Claremont McKenna College. As well known, the BDS movement calls for institutions to cut their ties with “companies that participate in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.” The discussion was part of the Claremont Colleges Open Academy, a program focusing on “core commitments to Freedom of Expression, Viewpoint Diversity, and Constructive Dialogue.” In Open Academy, “Students are given the tools to listen respectfully, ask incisive questions, and engage with greater curiosity and openness to differences of opinion. This is how we strengthen the national practice of our democracy.”
Two professors appeared on the panel, one advocating for BDS and the other arguing against it.
Prof. Yuval Avnur, an associate professor of philosophy at Scripps College specializing in agnosticism and epistemology, represented the anti-BDS position. Prof. David Lloyd, an emeritus professor of English at UC Riverside whose expertise focuses on Irish culture and postcolonial and cultural theory, represented the pro-BDS stance.
As expected, the event was emotionally charged.
Avnur started with a statement on why universities should reject BDS and encourage engagement with Israel. He disagreed with Pitzer College’s decision to remove the Study Abroad program with the Israeli University of Haifa, which was driven by the BDS movement. “The University of Haifa is an incredibly diverse school that provides substantial opportunities for its students… If the aim was to encourage Israel to provide better opportunities for Arab-Israelis, this, I think, was a spectacular and hypocritical failure. We should instead engage with the University of Haifa to strengthen the positive role it plays for Arab-Israelis.” Avnur closed his statement by emphasizing why he believes the BDS movement can cause harm to the Claremont community. “As an academic community, we must do better than getting into simple good versus evil narratives and into false colonizer-colonized dichotomies where they don’t exist… We need to think critically and seek out knowledge about the problems we wish to solve, not accept sloganeering and propaganda. This is why we should reject BDS.” Avnur said.
Lloyd followed up with his pro-BDS arguments, countering Avnur’s claims that the BDS movement is divisive. “BDS is a civil rights movement… It seeks to transform a situation by placing external pressure, not divisive pressure, by any means, in the interest of having people learn to live together.” Lloyd explained how the practices of BDS hold power when targeted toward a country such as Israel.“ BDS is “only really effective where it is possible to put pressure on a population that might conceivably make them change… It is possible for Israel to decolonize.” Lloyd noted that academic spaces were ideal for these difficult conversations. “If we are going to proximate truth or social justice, and I don’t think the two are fully separable, then this is how we do it… We talk. We try to persuade and we try to introduce people to facts they haven’t heard before. The boycott strategy is precisely designed to do that,” Lloyd said.
Worth noting that Lloyd is a longtime anti-Israel activist. Jadaliyya, an independent journal produced by the Arab Studies Institute, describes Lloyd as a “Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.” Adding, he published numerous articles on Palestine and Israel, including “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Israel/Palestine” in The Journal of Settler Colonial Studies and, with Malini Johar Schueller, an essay on the rationale for the academic boycott of Israel in the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom.” For Jadaliyya, it doesn’t matter if Lloyd has no academic background in Palestinian, Israeli, or Middle Eastern Studies. As Jadalliya admits, “Lloyd works primarily on Irish culture and on postcolonial and cultural theory. His most recent book is Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space.”
In October 2023, soon after the Hamas massacre of Israelis, several events took place at the Claremont Colleges. For example, a panel at Pomona titled “Conflation of Antisemitism with Criticism of the Israeli Government: Unpacking a Campus, Domestic, & International Problem.” Another event at Pomona was titled “Standing in Solidarity with Palestine,” co-hosted by Claremont SJP and Claremont Jewish Voices for Peace.
Unfortunately, BDS already scored some wins. In April 2024, Pitzer College removed from its pre-approved list the study abroad programs in 11 countries, including the University of Haifa in Israel. Pitzer’s administration stated otherwise. President Strom C. Thacker wrote in a statement that the decision to remove 11 international programs from the pre-approved list “was made by the Faculty Executive Committee in April. I wish to reiterate, as stated in communications from the Dean of Faculty, that none of the removals from the pre-approved list, including that of the University of Haifa, were for reasons of academic boycott.”
However, in May 2023, a delegation of professors and students from Pitzer College and Claremont McKenna College visited Birzeit University. They came to learn more about higher education institutions in Palestine. The delegation met with Dr. Beshara Doumani, Birzeit University’s President, who addressed the “challenges facing Palestinian universities in light of settler colonialism and for-profit education.”
Doumani emphasized the “significance of academic exchange as a means to break the siege on Palestinian universities.” He stated, “Although the Israeli occupation imposes severe restrictions on Palestinian universities, we developed strong south south academic relations and partnerships with other parts of the world to conquer geography.” During the meeting, the delegation learnt about the BDS movement and mobility programs available to Palestinian students. The delegation has met members of the Right to Education campaign to learn about “Israeli violations against Birzeit University students and Israeli directives that isolate Palestinian universities.” Pitzer College professors also held individual meetings with several Birzeit University professors “to learn more about the academic programs offered at Birzeit University and to explore collaborative research projects.”
To recall, Doumani previously taught at Brown University, where he recruited the anti-Israel Israeli Professor Ariella Azoulay, a specialist in art and culture, to the Middle East Center, which he headed. Azoulay made a career of bashing Israel. She is one of the numerous Israeli scholars rewarded with positions in Western institutions due to their political agenda, a phenomenon IAM has frequently reported.
The BDS discussion underscores the difficulties in providing a balanced discourse as the Open Academy required. Liberal arts on American campuses are full of academic activists such as Doumani or Lloyd. Students are often indoctrinated by their professors to the point that they are unwilling to listen to the other side. As one of the students stated in the BDS discussion:“Some questions, which were back-to-back, were asked in what felt like an antagonistic manner… It didn’t really feel as if some of the questions were coming from a state of wanting to know more but instead an unwillingness to hear out the other perspective.”
On Saturday, Oct. 5, Claremont McKenna College’s (CMC) Open Academy hosted a discussion titled “Should Universities Boycott, Divest, or Sanction Israel” at CMC’s Kravis Center. Featuring two professors, one advocated the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement while the other argued against it.
The BDS movement calls for institutions to cut ties with “companies that participate in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.” The debate around this sentiment is especially prevalent among U.S. college and university students, including those at the 5Cs.
Yuval Avnur, an associate professor of philosophy at Scripps College who specializes in agnosticism and epistemology, represented the anti-BDS position. David Lloyd, a professor of English Emeritus at UC Riverside whose expertise focuses on Irish culture and postcolonial and cultural theory, represented the pro-BDS stance.
Facilitated by Heather Fergusen, associate professor of history at CMC, the emotionally charged event had community members challenging the professors’ perspectives, sharing their own experiences and asking questions.
Following Fergusen’s brief introduction to the professors and outline of the event’s structure, each professor delivered opening statements, addressing their stances on the movement.
“The University of Haifa is an incredibly diverse school that provides substantial opportunities for its students,” Anvar said. “If the aim was to encourage Israel to provide better opportunities for Arab-Israelis, this, I think, was a spectacular and hypocritical failure. We should instead engage with the University of Haifa to strengthen the positive role it plays for Arab-Israelis.”
Avnur closed his statement by emphasizing why he believes the BDS movement can cause harm to the 5C community.
“As an academic community, we must do better than getting into simple good versus evil narratives and into false colonizer-colonized dichotomies where they don’t exist,” Avnur said. “We need to think critically and seek out knowledge about the problems we wish to solve, not accept sloganeering and propaganda. This is why we should reject BDS.”
Lloyd followed up with his pro-BDS argument, countering Avnur’s argument that the movement is divisive.
“BDS is a civil rights movement,” Lloyd said. “It seeks to transform a situation by placing external pressure, not divisive pressure, by any means, in the interest of having people learn to live together.”
Lloyd explained how the practices of BDS hold power when targeted toward a country such as Israel.
“Sanctions and divestment and boycott are only really effective where it is possible to put pressure on a population that might conceivably make them change,” Lloyd said. “It is possible for Israel to decolonize.”
When asked why universities are the appropriate setting for discussions and boycotts, Lloyd noted larger academic spaces as the ideal place for these difficult conversations.
“If we are going to proximate truth or social justice, and I don’t think the two are fully separable, then this is how we do it,” Lloyd said. “We talk. We try to persuade and we try to introduce people to facts they haven’t heard before. The boycott strategy is precisely designed to do that.”
Following the professor’s opening statements, Ferguson opened the conversation for comments and questions. During this time, several students detailed their personal experiences relating to the situation, resulting in some tension and high emotions.
Event attendee Alyssa Wu PO ’28 said that while the space allowed for a productive and necessary conversation, at times, questions felt targeted toward Lloyd.
“Some questions, which were back-to-back, were asked in what felt like an antagonistic manner,” Wu said. “It didn’t really feel as if some of the questions were coming from a state of wanting to know more but instead an unwillingness to hear out the other perspective.”
Wu said that overall, the event was helpful in education on the topics and left her feeling prepared to engage in discourse surrounding them.
“A lot of history, terms and specific documents were talked about,” Wu said. “Just being able to hear them explained in a more simplified manner was really nice, and I plan to use this as a gateway to do my own reading and research.”
[On] Wednesday, Feb. 28, TSL received a statement from Claremont McKenna College (CMC) Professor of Mathematics Lenny Fukshansky that expressed his and dozens of other faculty members’ opposition to the proposed suspension of the Haifa study abroad program and condemned the recent results of the Associated Students of Pomona College’s (ASPC) referendum.
The statement, titled “Promoting Learning, Rejecting Division: Claremont Faculty Against Academic Boycott,” had a total of 38 faculty member signatures. A majority of support came from CMC professors, representing 26 of the signatures. Following behind CMC, Scripps College had six signatures, Pitzer and Pomona College each contributed two and Keck Graduate Institute and Claremont Graduate University had one signature each. No one from Harvey Mudd College signed the statement.
Originally, the letter was drafted in collaboration between a small group of faculty members before being sent to colleagues whom Fukshansky said he knew personally and thought would be interested in signing it. In an interview with TSL, Fukshansky also noted that several individuals expressed support for the letter but ultimately refused to sign it for fear of backlash.
“There were a certain number of people who said that, while they do agree with the statement of the letter, they did not feel comfortable signing it because of, I guess, potential consequences,” Fukshansky said. “To me, it sounded like people are afraid of possible intimidation.”
The statement began by expressing some professors’ opposition to the suspension of the Haifa program, stating that the institution has a diverse array of students and viewpoints.
“The University of Haifa is among the most multicultural campuses in the world,” the statement read. “Its professors express a wide spectrum of opinion on Israel and Zionism. No college committed to promoting inquiry, dialogue and debate should refuse to send their students to the University of Haifa.”
The statement stood in support of President Gabrielle Starr’s Feb. 16 email to the Pomona community in which she opposed ASPC’s hosting of the referendum and suggested that targeting Israel could have antisemitic implications. Similarly, the Feb. 28 statement criticized the referendum’s focus on Israel, noting the historic vilification of Jewish people.
“As Pomona President Starr’s letter notes, branding Israel as the world’s only pariah state is troubling because of a long history of treating Jews as a singular threat to human progress and flourishing,” the statement read.
The statement also argued that, while “there is a spectrum of reasonable disagreement on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” recent calls to suspend the study abroad program at the University of Haifa and to cease academic and economic relations with Israeli institutions did not recognize this spectrum.
“[These initiatives] are part of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is opposed to any relations with Israel, its people, its institutions, and its supporters,” the statement read. “We fear that the intellectual retreat and calcification BDS encourages would make it harder for all of us to engage and understand both Israel and its Palestinian neighbors.”
In the interview, Fukshansky elaborated on his aversion to boycotts specifically.
“I am fairly pro-Israel in this situation and I know a number of people who also are,” he said. “For us, seeing boycott measures or calls for boycott measures feels very divisive. I can think of few things that are more illiberal than a boycott, because a boycott shuts down a conservation before it gets started.”
On Wednesday afternoon, over 350 Claremont Colleges students walked out of classes to demand that the 7Cs divest from companies and manufacturers that support the Israeli government, citing the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The demonstration and delegation effort was part of a nationwide student walkout calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of historically Palestinian land and U.S. support of what many international groups recognize as Israeli apartheid.
Wednesday’s walkout was the most recent student action of many protests, teach-ins, vigils and panels at the Claremont Colleges since Oct. 7, when Palestinian armed group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing approximately 1,300. The Oct. 7 onslaught was one of the largest militant resistance efforts from a Palestinian group since the origin of Israeli military occupation in the West Bank in 1967. As of Oct. 26, Gaza’s Ministry of Health estimates that over 7,000 have been killed by retaliatory attacks by Israel Defense Forces since Oct. 7.
Less than 30 minutes before the walkout was scheduled to begin, Pomona College President Gabi Starr sent an email to students reminding them that they “must adhere to [Pomona’s] student code and demonstration policy at all times,” and that campus safety staff would now be present during protests “to help ensure the safety of all.”
7C community members have called out Starr for her lack of recognition toward and support of Palestinian students. A 5C student who participated in the walkout said they felt dispirited by Claremont administrators’ responses, or lack thereof, to the grief of Palestinian students.
“We’ve seen no [administrative] acknowledgement of the 75 years of apartheid which have been happening in Palestine, which is incredibly disheartening and honestly racist, the way that white lives are being valued more than brown lives,” the student, who requested anonymity for safety and doxxing concerns, said.
Wednesday’s walkout began at 1:30 p.m. when students left their classes to gather on Bowling Green Lawn at Scripps College, participating in protest chants such as “Stop the killings stop the hate / Israel is an apartheid state,” “Hey students, come outside / Claremont pays for genocide,” and “Gaza Gaza head held high / Palestine will never die.” Many wore masks to protect their identities. Several onlookers took photographs and recordings of protestors.
“The protest was peaceful, it was respectful, it was a joyous moment of community and advocacy for people who are being marginalized and whose voices have been overlooked for so long and whose humanity has been continuously stripped from them in the media,” the anonymous student said.
Around 2:15 p.m., students walked through Claremont McKenna College’s (CMC) campus to Pomona’s Alexander Hall, where hundreds of students stood outside administrative offices. One unidentified student leader spoke directly to Pomona’s Vice President and Chief Operating Officer and Treasurer Jeff Roth about protesters’ demands. They asked Roth to disclose whether Pomona was investing their endowment in any companies that fund Israel and to divest from those companies if so. The speaker said that students would escalate action if Pomona failed to disclose investments by Friday.
“Until disclosure, we have every reason to believe that our tuition money is being used to support this internationally recognized apartheid regime and the war crimes of the Israeli State,” the student stated. “We are here because Pomona is complicit with the mass slaughter of an entire people, with the ethnic cleansing and the forced displacement of Palestinians.”
The protest dispersed after closing protest chants on Pomona’s Marston Quad just before 3:00 p.m.
Mark Kendall, Pomona’s chief communications officer, told TSL via email that the institution’s endowment investment policies are set by the Board of Trustees. Kendall referred TSL to Pomona’s audited financial statements for more information on monetary disclosure.
“The pooled funds include international equities, and the investment policies do not single out any country or region with nation-based investment restrictions,” Kendall said. “Donations for current use (such as the annual fund) are not invested alongside the endowment. Tuition and fees also are separate from the endowment and are used solely to support college operations.”
The protester’s request was the latest instance of the BDS movement at the 5Cs, which has taken over some academic and student government discourse at Pitzer College and Pomona, to administrative pushback.
Hours after President Starr’s email in the early afternoon and the completion of the student delegation at Alexander Hall, Pomona students received another email outlining changes in policies for event promotion/advertising, speech and events. The email was sent jointly by Pomona’s Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Avis E. Hinkson and Associate Dean of Students & Dean of Campus Life Josh Eisenberg.
Amid last week’s return from fall break, over 150 7C students arranged a vigil for Palestine on Friday at Pomona’s Smith Campus Center (SCC). The vigil was followed by a teach-in, informing students on the historical context of the Free Palestine movement.
During the vigil, student representatives from different affinity groups and social justice organizations read out messages in solidarity with Palestine. Before the teach-in, some event organizers also handed out information packets to attendees, which highlighted the event’s thesis.
“In order to understand the Palestinian struggle, you must understand it through a framework that captures the historical processes that produced our current conditions,” the pamphlets read. “That framework is ‘settler-colonialism.’ In its current manifestation, this settler colonialism is enforced or sustained through systems of occupation and apartheid. This in turn requires us to understand the Palestinian struggle as one of national liberation.”
After listening to a line-up of speakers, the vigil attendees decorated the SCC fountain with flowers, stuffed animals and letters in support of Palestinians affected by the violence, including a message mourning “insurgents who have died for the liberation of Palestine.”
Some students disagreed with parts of the vigil’s messaging. Riaan Dhankhar PO ’25 spent time working for the House Foreign Affairs Committee on policies around Israel and wanted to look at differences between student and policymaker perspectives on current issues. He cited compassion for Palestinian people and hopes for a ceasefire as his primary reasons for attending the vigil, and said he was disappointed by the nature of the event.
Dhankhar said he felt that some student speakers at the vigil leaned in to propaganda. While he thinks there is “a lot of merit” to calling what is happening in Palestine a genocide, he believes student groups in Claremont should focus on directly helping Palestinians in this moment rather than utilizing combative anti-apartheid rhetoric.
“Everyone in this situation is going through hell. This is the darkest moment in Israeli history since 1967, but it’s also what Palestinians view as the third Intifada, or as the second Nakba,” Dhankhar said. “That I think is getting lost because everyone is so mad and so vigilant and so interested in pointing fingers, that the need for aid and help and the moment to actually mourn the loss and actually have a real vigil has been lost.”
After the teach-in, students and organizers marched around the SCC. Their chants included “Resistance is justified when people are occupied!” and “From Palestine to Mexico / All these walls have got to go.”
The march continued through the campuses to its destination at Commencement Plaza during Pitzer President Strom Thacker’s inauguration. Around 50 students protested Thacker’s Oct. 13 response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Thacker’s statement was his second response to the attack, with the first on Oct. 9 receiving criticism for neutrality.
Wearing all black and silently holding signs raising awareness for the Free Palestine movement, protestors maintained a stark visual for everyone on stage for the remainder of the ceremony.
One student demonstrator, who requested to remain anonymous for safety concerns, felt the need to protest because of Pitzer’s response to the situation.
“As a Palestinian student, I’m deeply hurt that we continue to talk about this genocide as a conflict when a population is being ethnically cleansed, there’s no place for justification. Of course, we must mourn all lives lost, but we cannot dismiss the source of the violence which is settler colonialism and genocide. And Pitzer has a responsibility in addressing the truth as it is,” they said.
The student expressed gratitude for the demonstrations happening for Palestine, in contrast to what they felt was silence on the part of the college administrators.
“While it has been heartwarming to see students teaching other students and faculty just having open conversations about this, it’s also been really disappointing to see that the very leaders of this place are the ones that are either choosing to be silent, or to take a neutral stance on genocide.”
Another student demonstrating at the inauguration, who requested to remain anonymous for the same concerns, cited Pitzer’s need to divest from funding to Israel.
“I think at this school, President Thacker and all of us have a really big responsibility to do what we can to prevent the genocide that is being funded by our tax dollars as an institution we have ties to the State of Israel,” they said. “And I think it’s important that we bring awareness to the genocide that’s happening and we emphasize how important it is for Pitzer College to divest from apartheid Israel, and to stand with Palestinians.”
Five days after these events, the vigil at the SCC was taken down by Pomona facilities staff on Tuesday morning.
Claremont students and faculty have also created platforms to share both research and personal experiences with conflict and occupation in Israel and Palestine. On Wednesday evening in Pitzer’s Benson auditorium, four students and three professors from CMC and Pitzer participated in a panel highlighting an 11-day solidarity tour in Palestine they participated in this summer.
A Pitzer student on the study tour, Jordan PZ ’23, talked about the impactful and joyful time he spent with Palestinian students at Birzeit University in the West Bank during the trip.
“It just felt like college students hanging out and joking around just like we would in Claremont,” he said. “This seems sort of banal, but it is profound because most of us who are Americans are taught to dehumanize Palestinians.”
One of the panelists, Pitzer Associate Professor of English and World Literature Amanda Lagji, spoke to her positionality and perspective on the Palestinian solidarity study tour.
“I’ll mention just briefly how I’ve taken what I’ve learned from the trip back to Pitzer into the classroom,” Lagji said. “My work is not simply to integrate Palestinian voices into my syllabi, not only to understand Palestine’s occupation as settler colonialism, but also to address the perception that to speak about Palestine is impossible.”
Other events that took place this week include a panel at Hahn Hall at Pomona on Monday, “Conflation of Antisemitism with Criticism of the Israeli Government: Unpacking a Campus, Domestic, & International Problem” and a Thursday Community Lunch at the Pomona Womxn’s Union “Standing in Solidarity with Palestine” co-hosted by Claremont SJP and Claremont Jewish Voices for Peace. Today, Claremont Hillel is sponsoring a weekly Lunch and Learn at CMC: “Israel and Us: A Faculty Moderated Discussion.”
Maxine Davey, Ben Lauren and Enoch Kim contributed reporting.
This article has been updated Oct. 27 at 11:00 a.m. to include the perspectives students who demonstrated at Pitzer’s inauguration last Friday.
Birzeit University hosts delegation from Pitzer and Claremont McKenna College, United States
6 Jun 2023
On Thursday, May 25, 2023, a delegation from Pitzer College and Claremont McKenna College, California, US, comprising professors and students, visited Birzeit University to learn more about higher education institutions in Palestine.
The delegation met with Birzeit University President Dr. Beshara Doumani, who addressed the challenges facing Palestinian universities in light of settler colonialism and for-profit education.
Dr. Doumani emphasized the significance of academic exchange as a means to break the siege on Palestinian universities. He added, “Although the Israeli occupation imposes severe restrictions on Palestinian universities, we developed strong south south academic relations and partnerships with other parts of the world to conquer geography.”
During the meeting, the delegation inquired about the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and mobility programs available to Palestinian students.
To answer student inquires, Dr. Amir Khalil, director of the External Academic Relations Office, elaborated on partnerships between Birzeit University and American and European universities, emphasizing the interpersonal skills students develop while studying abroad.
Later, the delegation met members of the Right to Education campaign to learn about Israeli violations against Birzeit University students and Israeli directives that isolate Palestinian universities.
Pitzer College professors also held individual meetings with Birzeit University professors to learn more about the academic programs offered at Birzeit University and to explore collaborative research projects.
Pamela Brooks Gann, President Claremont McKenna College 500 E. Ninth Street Claremont, CA 91711 via fax: (909) 621-8790
Dear President Gann:
I am writing on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express concern about the response of Claremont McKenna College (CMC) to an incident that took place on its campus on March 4, 2013, and to urge the CMC administration and faculty to investigate this incident in a thorough and even-handed manner so as to uphold the principles of free speech and academic freedom.
MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.
As we understand it, Students for Justice in Palestine at the Claremont Colleges, a recognized student organization, was conducting a demonstration on the CMC campus to protest Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, having secured prior authorization from the CMC administration. During that demonstration someone who turned out to be a CMC faculty member is alleged to have urged a security guard to stop the protest and to have repeatedly directed a degrading epithet at a Pitzer student participating in the protest.
The principles of academic freedom protect the right of all members of a college or university community, including students and student organizations, to express their political views and engage in peaceful protest, in keeping with an institution’s reasonable rules and regulations. Those principles also require that such rules and regulations, and any investigation into alleged violations thereof, be applied equally to all; selective application of regulations is itself a violation of the principles of academic freedom and free speech. It is our understanding that the CMC administration’s initial response to this incident was to focus on whether the students had violated college policy on demonstrations, rather than on the alleged incident of verbal assault and harassment, despite a complaint having been lodged regarding the latter. We would point out that CMC’s own Guide to CMC’s Civil Rights Policies and Civil Rights Grievance Procedures deems the use of degrading and insulting epithets directed at people as members of racial, religious, ethnic, gender or other groups, and the creation thereby of a hostile environment for them, to be unacceptable. We also note that such language is particularly troubling when it comes from a faculty member and is directed at a student.
Given this, we urge the CMC administration to conduct a thorough investigation of all aspects of this incident, including the actions of the CMC faculty member involved, and to uphold the right of students at the Claremont Colleges to express their views without being subjected to verbal or physical harassment. More broadly, we urge the CMC administration to publicly reaffirm its commitment to the principles of academic freedom, which require that institutions of higher education protect and foster the vigorous and respectful expression and exchange of ideas and opinions on all topics, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sincerely,
Peter Sluglett MESA President Visitin Research Professor, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore
After three years of unprecedentedly open debate, the membership of the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) membership is finally voting on the Palestinian call to endorse a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
It is beginning to seem as if the arrival of winter spells academic boycott season as well as the festive season. This year in November, the business meetings of two major associations voted overwhelmingly to endorse the call of Palestin..
The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual business meeting voted on 20 November 2015 to send to the membership for a full vote a resolution to endorse the Palestinian call for the
On 10 May 2013, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a “Statement on Academic Boycotts” which states, not for the first time, its “opposition to academic boycotts as a matter of princ..
A new petition titled “Call for International Pressure” is seeking more signatures.
Over four hundred petitioners, including a number of Israeli academics, are listed. Among them are Anat Matar, Smadar Ben-Natan, Moshé Behar, Tamir Sorek, Rafi Greenberg, Shira Klein, Lior Sternfeld, Ophira Gamliel, Hilla Dayan, Regev Nathansohn, Uri Hadar, Snait Gissis, Amalia Saar, Avishai Ehrlich, Efraim Davidi, Maya Rosenfeld, Avraham Oz, Ronnen Ben-Arie, Yael Berda, Anat Biletzki, Sivan Rajuan Shtang, Hannan Hever, Orly Lubin, Raz Chen-Morris, Hannah Safran, Revital Madar, Ilana Hairston, Amos Goldberg, Tamar Yaron, Tamar Hager, Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Noga Kadman, Tamar Yarom.
The petition begins with the statement, “Israeli citizens are calling for actual international pressure for an immediate ceasefire.”
The petition states, “We, Israeli citizens, living in Israel and abroad, are calling on the international community – the United Nations and its institutions, the United States, the European Union, the Arab League and all the countries of the world – to intervene immediately and apply every possible sanction in order to achieve an immediate ceasefire between Israel and its neighbors, for the benefit of the future of the two peoples in Israel/Palestine and of the peoples of the region, and for their right to security and life. Many of us are veteran activists against the occupation and for peace and coexistence in this country. We are motivated by love for the country and its inhabitants, and we are concerned about their future. We were horrified by the war crimes committed by Hamas and other organizations on October 7, and we are horrified by the countless war crimes committed by Israel. Unfortunately, the majority of Israelis support the continuation of the war and the massacres, and change from within is currently not possible. The State of Israel is on a suicidal course and is wreaking havoc and destruction that is increasing day by day. The government of Israel has abandoned its kidnapped citizens (and killed some of them), abandoned the residents of the south and the north, and is abandoning the fate and future of its citizens.”
According to the petition, “The Palestinian citizens of Israel are persecuted and silenced by both law enforcement and the general public. The repression, intimidation and political persecution prevent many who share our opinion from signing this call. Every day that passes further away any possible horizon for an agreement and reconciliation, for a future in which Jewish-Israelis can live safely in this space – and in any case, it is a long and protracted process, but the slaughter and destruction must be stopped immediately! The lack of real international pressure, the continued supply of weapons to Israel, the continued economic, security, scientific, and cultural cooperation make the majority of Israelis believe that Israel’s policies have international backing. Leaders of many countries come back and express shock and condemn Israel’s actions, but the condemnations are not accompanied by any practical action. We are fed up with empty words and statements. Please, for our future and the future of all the inhabitants of the country and the region, save us from ourselves, put real pressure on Israel for an immediate ceasefire.”
In other words, the group condemns Israel and absolves the Palestinians and Iran from any responsibility. Instead, the petitioners urge for the weakening of Israel.
Most of the signatories sound familiar. For two decades now, IAM has reported on these and other Israeli academics who abuse their positions to push for their political agenda. It is an open secret that many were recruited by Palestinian and pro-Palestinian scholars in the West. Some were offered positions in prestigious universities, others spent Sabbaticals in Ivy League institutions or invited to participate in conferences or contribute chapters in books critical of Israel. The majority of them are mediocre researchers who provided the Palestinians with a twisted academic work full of bashing Israel verbiage – to meet their comrades’ demands.
It is well known that Israel is fighting a war on two fronts: the physical battlefield and the public relations campaigns, most notably on Western campuses. The academic authorities in Israel have always shied away from confronting these activist scholars, leaving holes in the public relations campaigns.
אזרחים ישראלים קוראים ללחץ בינלאומי ממשי למען הפסקת אש מיידית
אנחנו, אזרחיות ואזרחים ישראלים, המתגוררים בישראל ומחוצה לה, קוראים לקהילה הבינלאומית – לאו״ם ולמוסדותיו, לארצות הברית, לאיחוד האירופי, לליגה הערבית ולכל מדינות העולם – להתערב באופן מיידי ולהפעיל כל סנקציה אפשרית למען השגת הפסקת אש מיידית בין ישראל ושכנותיה, לטובת עתידם של שני העמים בישראל/פלסטין ושל עמי האזור, ולמען זכותם לביטחון ולחיים.
רבים מאיתנו פעילים ותיקים נגד הכיבוש ולמען שלום וקיום משותף בארץ הזו. אנחנו מונעים מתוך אהבת הארץ ותושביה, ואנחנו מודאגים מעתידם. נחרדנו מפשעי המלחמה שביצעו החמאס וארגונים אחרים ב-7 באוקטובר, ואנחנו נחרדים מאינספור פשעי המלחמה שמבצעת ישראל. לצערנו, רובם של הישראלים תומכים בהמשך המלחמה ומעשי הטבח, ושינוי מבפנים אינו אפשרי כרגע. מדינת ישראל נמצאת במסלול התאבדותי וזורעת הרס וחורבן שגוברים מיום ליום.
ממשלת ישראל הפקירה את אזרחיה החטופים (ואת חלקם הרגה), הפקירה את תושבי הדרום והצפון, ומפקירה את גורלם ועתידם של אזרחיה. אזרחיה הפלסטינים של ישראל נרדפים ומושתקים הן על ידי רשויות החוק והן על ידי הציבור הרחב. הדיכוי, ההפחדה והרדיפה הפוליטית מונעים מרבים השותפים לדעתנו לחתום על הקריאה הזו.
כל יום שעובר מרחיק כל אופק אפשרי להסכם ולפיוס, לעתיד בו יהודים-ישראלים יוכלו לחיות בביטחון במרחב הזה – ובכל מקרה מדובר בתהליכים ארוכים וממושכים, אך את הטבח וההרס יש לעצור מייד !
העדר לחץ בינלאומי של ממש, המשך אספקת הנשק לישראל, המשך שיתופי הפעולה הכלכליים, הביטחוניים, המדעיים והתרבותיים, גורמים לרובם של הישראלים להאמין שיש למדיניותה של ישראל גיבוי בינלאומי. מנהיגי מדינות רבות חוזרים ומביעים זעזוע ומגנים את מעשיה של ישראל, אך הגינויים אינם מלווים במהלך מעשי כלשהו. שבענו ממילים ומהצהרות ריקות.
אנא, למען עתידנו ועתידם של כל יושבי הארץ והאזור, הצילו אותנו מעצמנו, הפעילו לחץ אמיתי על ישראל למען הפסקת אש מיידית.
חתימות ראשונות:
יעל לרר Yael Lerer ענת מטר Anat Matar רון נייולד Ron Naiweld יואב שמר-קונץ Yoav Shemer-Kunz מיכל רז Michal Raz רות רוזנטל Ruth Rosental יעל פוגל Yael Foigel סמדר בן-נתן Smadar Ben-Natan יעל וידן Yael Vidan נהרה פלדמן Nehara Feldman זהר ינוביץ Zohar Ianovici עדי הגין Adi Hagin יותם בן-דוד Yotam Ben-David אני אוחיון דקל Annie ohayon dekel עידית בלוך Idit Bloch משה בהר Moshé Behar שירה חבקין Shira Havkin נעה פרימן Noa Friehmann תמיר שורק Tamir Sorek קרין לוי Karin Loevy רפי גרינברג Rafi Greenberg סהר בוסטוק Sahar Bostock אורית ברור בן דוד Orit Brawer Ben David מיכל בוסטוק Michal Bostock יעל לביא Yael Lavi גלית ספורטה Galit Saporta שירה קליין Shira Klein יובל חושן Yuval Hoshen רותם שטרן Rotem Stern נעמה פרג’ון Naama Farjoun דורון בן דוד Doron Ben David מאיה בן-מאיר Maya Ben-Meir תמר ברגר Tamar Berger שרון גורדון Sharon Gordon ורדית שלפי Vardit Shalfy דורי פרנס Dori Parnes רותי לביא Ruti Lavi תלמה ברדין Talma Bar-Din רועי צורף Roei Tzoref רוני צורף Roni Tzoreff צביקה מרקוביץ Tzvi Markovitz נעם לוי ארז Noam Levi Erez תרצה פוסקלינסקי Tirtsa Posklinsky מתן קמינר Matan Kaminer נגה בליליוס Noga belilius אלון מרכוס Alon Marcus לירונה רוזנטל Lirona Rosenthal גיא הירשפלד Guy Hirschfeld ליאור קיי Lior Kay צביה חורש Tsvia Horesh מיה מוכמל Maya Mukamel עינב קפלן רז Einav Kaplan Raz דורית גורני Dorit Gurny מעיין צדקה Maayan Tsadka חמוטל צמיר Hamutal Tsamir לירון טל Liron Tal לינא דלאשה Leena Dallasheh מרים להט Miriam lahat עמית פרלסון amiT Perelson נעמי ליפין Naomi lippin דיתי תור Diti Tor אהרן כהן-ינאי Aaron Cohen-Yanay שהם סמיט Shoham Smith נופר שמעוני Nufar Shimony עינת יורקביץ Einat Jurkevitch ליאור שטרנפלד Lior Sternfeld לילי ליברזון סלפק Lili Libersohn Slepack עופר ניימן Ofer Neiman איריס רונן Iris Ronen אנה דובינסקי Anna Dubinsky עדינה איזנברג Adina Eisenberg טלי אקנין Tali Aknin טל הלפרן Tal Halpern קרן הרינג Keren Herin אשר פריד Asher Fried שירה ארד Shira Arad אופירה גמליאל Ophira Gamliel מיכל וינר Mikhal Weiner עידו ששון Ido Sasson דניאל דרבי Daniel Darby עומר נגב Omer Negev אורה מור Aura Mor אפי זיו Effi Ziv הילה דיין Hilla Dayan יפעה סהר Yifah Sahar יניב אידלשטיין Yaniv Eidelstein אלמוג שרביט Almog Sharvit דוד זונשין David Zonsheine טל שובל Tal Shuval ורד גמליאל Vered Gamliel עלמה גניהר Alma Ganihar נירית אורן שטרנברג Nirit Oren Sternberg בלהה גולן זונדרמן Bilha Golan Sündermann יובל ציגלר Yuval Ziegler שי גרינברג Shai Grunberg דנה מלצר Dana Melzer יובל אברהם Yuval Abraham לילך מרקמן lilah Markman דני רוזין Danny Rosin ריבה הוכרמן Riva Hocherman סופי קוק Sophie Cooke שירה שהמי Shira Shohami אבי ליברמן Avi Liberman תמר שניידר Tamar Schneider ירדן לויטל Yarden Levital חגית לוי בן נר Hagit Levi Ben Ner ליאורה הורביץ Liora Horwitz ארנונה זהבי Arnona Zahavi עדינה רינת Adina Rinat רגב נתנזון Regev Nathansohn יריב ויסוקר Yariv Visoker אמיר הלל Amir Hallel רחל אברמוביץ Rachel Abramovitz דני רשף Danny Reshef חני רבינוביץ Chani Rabinovich רוני תמרי Roni Tamari סמדר שרון Smadar Sharon רותי קנטור Ruti Kantor עינת ליכטינגר Einat Lichtinger לאה אבן חורב Leah Even Chorev מיה אובר Maya Ober אורי הדר Uri Hadar מיכל ורשבסקי Michal Warshavsky שירה ויזל Shira Vizel ענת גרינשטיין Anat Greenstein תמיר לויטל Tamir Levital איזדורה כהן Isadora Cohen חוה לרמן Hava Lerman נועה וודניצקי Noa Vodnizky רונית רובין Ronit Rubin דבי אילון Debbie Eylon הגר נטר Hagar Neter טלי לוין Tali Levin ליאורה גביעון Liora Gvion תמי קדיש Tammy kadish סינדי כהן Cindy Cohen ערן טורבינר Eran Torbiner מיקי רוטר-פרי Miki Rotter Perry יובל תמרי Youval Tamari ענת לוין Anat Levin ערבה נבו Arava Nevo אסף רומאנו Assaf Romano דבורה קדם Dvora Kedem אוסי רון Ossir ron מיתר אברהם Meitar Avraham הדר עירון Hadar Iron מאיה הרמן Maya Herman גל קובר Gal Kober סנאית גיסיס Snait Gissis עמליה סער Amalia Saar הודל אופיר Hodel Ophir רחלי בר-אור Racheli Bar-Or הדס גור Hadas Gur אבישי ארליך Avishai Ehrlich רות בן אשר Ruth Ben Asher גלית ארבלי Galit Arbeli אסתי שוחט רוזנפלד Esti Shohat Rozenfeld אירה קונטורובסקי Ira Kontorovsky אבי מזרחי Avi Mizrachi רובין איציקסון Robin Janson מלאני מייסון Melanie Mason ליאורה שילמן Liora Szylman מילי מאסס Mili Mass רעות בן יעקב Reit Ben Yaakov אפרים דוידי Efraim Davidi יעל מגנס Yael Magnes שי ווזנר Shai Wosner מאיה רוזנפלד Maya Rosenfeld ענבר חורש Inbar Horesh איתן ברונשטיין Eitan Bronstein ניר הראל Nir Harel משה קיים Moshe Kayam אהוד סיבוש Ehud Sivosh שאול עמיר Shaul Amir שירה חדד Shira Haddad משה אכר Moshe ikar מרים פרנק Miriam Frank דורית ארגו Dorit Argo עינת ויצמו Einat Weitzman יעל שומרוני Yael Shomroni רוני קורקוס Roni Corcos נטע חממי טביב Neta Hamami Tabib שרה כרמלי Sara Carmeli לאה יעל לוי Leah Yael Levy רולי רוזן Rolly Rosen חיים ויטלי כהן Haim Vitali Cohen דניאל מעוז Danielle Maoz נעה פורט Noa Fort שירה בן שחר Shira Ben Shachar דניאל פלנקר Daniel palenker אילה שני Ayala Shani יהודית אילני Yudit Ilany דניאל פרסאי Danielle Parsay רוני פדרמן Roni Federman רונית מריאן קדישאי Ronit Marian-Kadisgay אברהם עוז Avraham Oz רונן בן-אריה Ronnen Ben-Arie יצחק גולדברגר Itzik Goldberger לליב מלמד Laliv Melamed ניצן בויז Nitzan Boys מאיה לרמן Maya Lerman קיקי קרן-הוס Kiki keren-huss לילה מזל יינישן Laila Mazal Yenishen יהודית דבש Judith Debash תמר כהן Tamar Cohen עמית חברוני Amit Hevrony מיכל גרינבאום Michal Grynbaum שרון אסתריק Sharon Estrik עדי וינטר Adi winter איה זמיר Aya Zamir אורי לוי Ori Levy אסתי מיצנמכר Esti Micenmacher תמר להן Tamar Lehahn שרית רוזן Sarite Rosen לירון אחדות Liron Achdut אברהם ברמן Avi Berman תהילה אזרחי Tehila Ezrahi ים קדוש Yam Kadosh שרון לרנר גרבט Sharon Lerner Gerbat אור בן דוד Or Ben David דוד ריב David Reeb קרן תורגמן Karen Tordjman עינת טוכמן Einat Tuchman רחל חגיגי Rachel hagigi עדן מיצנמכר Eden Mitsenmacher יסמין שמעון ברונשטיין Yasmin shimon bronstein גד לוי Gad levy סיגל גדי Sigal Gedi סיגל קוק אביבי Sigal Kook Avivi כרמל דדלי Carmel Dudley אסף אוזן Assaf Uzan יעל ברדה Yael Berda אבי מוגרבי Avi Mograbi הדס שינטל Hadas Shintel ענבר מרים שרייבר Inbar Miryam Schreiber ענת בילצקי Anat Biletzki איתמר סתת Itamar Satat לירון סטולר כוורי Liron Stoller Cavari להי שחר Lahi Shachar ג’ון סיימונס Jon Simons רות בן-נתן Ruth Ben-Natan אביגיל כספי Avigail Caspi שי גינזבורג Shai Ginsburg יובל פילבסקי Yuval Pilavsky אריק סגל Arik Segal אטילה עאבדי Attila Abdi עליזה דרור Aliza Dror ד”ר סיון רג’ואן שטאנג Dr. Sivan Rajuan Shtang עודד כרמי Oded carmi עוז שלח Oz Shelach דפנה סטרומזה Daphna Stroumsa רויטל מטר Rivital Matter רנן עמיר Renen Amir אריאל חיון Ariel Hayun מרב נוב Merav nov חנן חבר Hannan Hever איתמר שוורץ Itamar Schwartz אורלי לובין Orly Lubin שרה הירש מידן Sarah Hirsh Meydan איתן אפרת Efrat Eitan רותם לוין Rotem levin ביאנקה מורנו Bianca moreno שירלי נדב Shirli Nadav אריקה סיגמון Erica Sigmon יונה קדרון שלו Yona Kidron Shalev מיה בן יאיר Maya Ben Yair אמירה סונדרס Amira Saunders יניב אדר Yaniv Adar אוריאנה וייך Oriana Weich נורית אביב Nurith aviv אורנה גורלניק Orna Guralnik מרב דביר Merav Devere יעל ניב Yael Niv רז חן-מוריס Raz Chen-Morris חנה ספרן Hannah Safran דניאלה ליכטמן Daniela Lichtman נוני טל Nuni Tal קטי בר Katty Bar מריבן דוד Miriam Ben David אילה מצגר Ayala Metzger שרון חבצלת Sharon havatselet מרים מור Miriam Moore עתר שימל Atar Schimmel דן שאכטר Dan Schachter אנה מאי שמלה Anna :May chamalet אור סיני Or Sinay אור וינפלד Or Winfield אלי למדן Eli Lamdan שני פייס Shany Payes נירית פוטרמן Nirit Puterman נגה מרדוק Noga Murdoch עפרה טנא Ofra Tene נאוה טולדנו Nava Toledano גלי טאס שני Gali Tas Shani ליאור אלפנט Lior Elefant חדוה יערי Hedva Yaari רחל בן שטרית Rachel Ben-Shitrit תחיה יעקבסון Tchya Jacobson רוית כהן Ravit Cohen אנדריי בליצקי Andrei Belitski יעל אורן Yael Oren טלי ברומברג Tali Bromberg מיכל פומרנץ Michal Pomeranz דפנה ויס-רייזנר Daphna Weiss-Reisner רעיה שטייר Raya Shtaier שלומית ניצן Shlomit Nitzan איריס כץ Iris katz רוויטל מדר Revital Madar איריס גור Iris Gur מאירה אשר Meira Asher יעל פתאל Yael Fattal אילנה הירסטון Ilana Hairston נתי מושקוביץ Naty moskovich דבי ג’יואן dw Debbie Jivan גילי אופיר Gili Ofir מיכל בלומנטל Michal Blumenthal בקה סוזה Becca Sousa דגנית שץ Dganit dhats רועי שינמן Roy Sheinman עמוס גולדברג Amos Goldberg אפרת שושן Efrat Shoshan שרון כהן Sharon Cohen ליהי יפה Lihi Joffe זהר רגב Zohar Regev תאיר קמינר גולדפיינר Tair Kaminer Goldfainer רות רגולנט לוי Ruth Regulant Levi סמדר שני Smadar Shani שירלי ערן Shirly Eran ג׳ואנה ג׳ונס Joanna Jones מאי אילון Mai Aylon נעה פרוידנטל Noa Freudenthal תמים אבו חיט Tamim Abukhait סהר ורדי Sahar Vardi שלומית סטרוטי Shlomit Strutti נגה ברונו Noga Bruno תמר ירון Tamar Yaron אייל מרכוס Eyal Marcus אפרת לוי Efrat levi רעות מימון Reut Maimon אורלי אברהם Orly Avraham תמר סלבי Tamar Selby עלמה פוגל Alma Fogiel דרור קאופמן Dror kaufman סיגל רוטמן Sigal rotman ארנינה קשתן Arnina kashtan יודית הופמן יהב Judy hoffmann yahav אסתי רכט Estee Recht אורי יואלי Uri Yoeli שולה לויטל Shula Levital ניצן אברמסון Nitsan Abramson אילונה פינטט Ilona Pinto מעין טורנר Ma’ayan Turner עידית וינקלר Edith Winkler לילך צ’לנוב Lilach Tchlenov עירית חכים Irit Hakim תמר הגר Tamar Hager מיה ברבי Maya barabi דני דניאלי Dani Danieli יעל דוידס Yael Davids ישראל וינקלר Israel winkler גליה אנקורי Galia Ankori לאה דקל leah Dekel טליה סוויסה Talya Swissa שרה לוינטל sarah Levinthal Shartal מירי אליאב-פלדון Miriam Eliav-Feldon חני סגל Hani Sagal זמיר חבקין Zamir Havkin לסלי מרקס Lesley Marks מיכל פלדון Michal Feldon נינה הלוי Nina Halevy יעל שניאורסון Yael Shneerson פאולה פיטשני Paula Pitashny רותי הרבשטיין Ruth Herbstein רבקה ורשבסקי Rivka Warshawsky שמואל צמל Shmuel Tsemel אלישבע וינטראוב Weintraub elicheva דנה כהן Dana Cohen מרים אביצור Miriam avitsur תופאחה סאבא Tuffaha saba רות פרסר Ruth Preser ורד הדיה Vered Hedaya אורי נוריאל ori nuriel שילה יערי Shilo yaari אדוה מרגליות Adva Margaliot יעל הדיה Yael Hedaya נגה חביון noga chevion עפרה הופמן Ofra Hoffman הדר שגיא Hadar sagi יערה פרץ Ya’ara Peretz אורית יושינסקי Orit Yushinsky נגה קדמן Noga Kadman חנה שביב hannah shaviv קלייר אורן Oren Claire אמיר בולצמן amir bolzman הילה לרנאו Hila Lernau נילי לוגסי Nili lugasi יעל קורן Yael Koren רפי ליין אושרוב Lane Osherov רות שריר Ruth Sharir חנה גלפרין Hana Galperin אירית סגולי Irit segoli שי כרמלי פולק Shai Carmeli Pollak נעמה שפירא Naama Shapira רויטל סלע Revital Sella יעל טל Yael tal תום קלנר Tom Kellner אפרת בן שושן גזית Efrat Ben Shoshan Gazit נועה מזור Noa Mazor אירית אופיר Irit Ofir הדר עמית Hadar Amit חדוה ישכר Hedva Isachar תום טליתמן זוטא Tom Talisman Zuta אמיל פיסקר Emil Pisker דפנה ברק Daphna Barak אסנת בר-אור Osnat Bar-Or יעל קאופמן Yael kaufman אורית שלו Orit shalev דוד פרנקל David Frenkel שרה מירון Sara Meron הדס רענן שחר Hadas Raanan Shachar יעקב אפסטין Jacob Epstein שחר שלוח Shahar Shiloach ויקטוריה טרקן Victoria Tarakan טובה בליי Tova Blay נוי כצמן Noy Katsman יעל סדן Yael sadan תמר ירום Tamar Yarom אביגיל טלמור Avigail talmor טלי הרכבי כרמלי Tali Harkavi Carmeli שמעון אזולאי Shimon Azulay אמנון לוטנברג Amnon Lotenberg אייל רצ׳קובסקי Eyal Ratzkovsky עדית קאופמן-סטרול Idit Kaufman-strull עלמה כץ Alma Katz אורלי כהן Orly cohen נעמה שושנה פוגל לוין Naama Shoshana Fogiel Lewin ארזה קוטנר Arza Kuttner כרמל גורני Carmel Gorni טל ברגלס Tal Berglas איה ארז Aya Erez נועה שובל Noa Shuval מרינה ארגס Marina Ergas עילם מורביץ להב Eylam Murvitz Lahav עמית לירז Amit LIrat
For two decades, IAM has repeatedly covered various anti-Israel Israeli professors teaching at British universities, including Ilan Pappe, the so-called New Historian, and Haim Bresheeth, a filmmaker, who pro-Palestinians have recruited them to bash Israel.
Recently, both were interviewed on a TV program by Five Pillars, a UK-based news site covering current affairs related to Islam and Muslims. The message of the program claimed: “There is only one way this is going and that is the end of Zionism.” The program is titled “Al-Aqsa Flood, Gaza Genocide & The End of Zionism.” The written introduction states, “Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and filmmaker Haim Bresheeth reflect on the horrors Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians since October 7, 2023, and explain how by showing its ugly face to the world Israel is sealing its own demise.”
Five Pillars journalist opened the interview by stating: “365 days of mechanized Slaughter yet 27,905 days of the continued Nakba five pillars spoke with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and Israeli filmmaker and academic Haim Bresheeth to situate the last year in the grand timeline of the Nakba.”
Bresheeth: “In many ways, the 7th of October, which people consider as Nakba two, is so much worse. In the first Nakba, about 15,000 Palestinians died. In this last year, since the 7th of October, 23, in all likelihood, around 300,000 Palestinians already died.”
Pappe: “But what is more important, I think, is to understand that this is an attempt to complete what was incomplete. The present Israeli government believes it has an opportunity to complete the Nakba.”
Bresheeth: “The other thing is, of course, in the first Nakba, 750,000 people left their homes. Now we’re talking about 2.3 million people.”
Pappe: “So in that respect, we are in the same historical period, where you have an attempt to create by force a Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world against the will of the Palestinians.”
Bresheeth: “And they have left their homes, but they can’t go back to them because the homes don’t exist, the schools don’t exist, the hospitals don’t exist, the mosques don’t exist, the universities have gone, so what we are talking about is a terrible event not just on the Palestinian timeline but in world global terms.”
Five Pillars: “Just from the top of your memory, what are some of the worst atrocities and debacles that we’ve witnessed this past year?
Pappe: “I think the worst is anything to do with toddlers and babies. I mean, seeing babies being operated without anesthetics, being left alone on a hospital corridor, being buried with the hands of their parents and grandparents tears your heart. If the power and hatred and ruthlessness of a state is directed against such a person, you understand we hit the bottom.”
Bresheeth: “What really stands out for me are a few things. First of all, the great massacres in and around hospitals, so they not only bombed hospitals but they bombed them with one or two tons of bombs, which are actually the bombs that they used in Lebanon a week ago to kill Hassan Nasrallah. You know, we’re talking about a hole in the ground which is 20 meters deep, it’s never been used on any civilian population ever before, and let alone in a hospital. But I’m not just talking about that, I’m talking about the tens of thousands of people who were killed in safe areas that the Israelis sent them there, saying your house, your home, your room, your shop, is not safe anymore, we’re going to wipe it out, now go there and stay there because this is safe, and then they kill thousands of people in those areas, and Israel is lying as a matter of course, when they correct it after a day or after a month or after a year, most people don’t hear the corrections. People don’t know that half of the Israelis killed on the 7th of October were killed by the IDF. President Biden apparently has seen beheaded babies on television, I think he needs a technician to look at his television. What are we talking about, I think, the behavior of Israel is without precedent, and it’s not very surprising that the ICJ has already said that this is plausible genocide, meaning in English, they are committing genocide.”
Five Pillars: “You mentioned, you know, the charges against Israel, do you think its reputation has been damaged?”
Pappe: “The support for Palestine in the global civil society has increased dramatically.”
Bresheeth: “Basically what we see, billions of people, even in the West, an understanding that wasn’t there before.”
Pappe: “And even more importantly, I think, is the fact that the institutions that represent international law, such as the ICJ, for the first time, adopted the language to describe Israeli actions either in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip in a way that reflects much better the reality compared to the language used by governments and mainstream media.”
Bresheeth: “I consider it the South African moment of Palestine, you know, until a certain moment, in the case of the South African Apartheid, people didn’t understand that this needs to be wiped out, and then they understood, billions of people understood, people understood that things are not great in Palestine, but they did not understand how brutal and how inhumane the Israelis can be and now they understand it.”
Pappe: “I think its International reputation has been severely damaged, in fact, anyone with a modicum of decency in them cannot support Israel.”
Bresheeth: “But even in the UK, there are seven Jewish organizations supporting Palestine and most of them are anti-Zionist. This has never happened before, so there are little lights. For example, tomorrow in the European Parliament, Jews from all over Europe are going to celebrate the Jewish New Year for Palestine, they are going to speak to as many parliamentarians as possible as European Jews, saying to them, you cannot support this genocide.”
Five Pillars: “Where do you see all of this going five years from now?”
Bresheeth: “There’s only one way it should go, and I think it’s going that way, and that is the end of Zionism.”
Pappe: “I distinguish between short-term and long-term processes. I’m afraid the short term doesn’t bring any good news. I think, I am optimistic about, I don’t know if it’s 5 years, or 7 years, or 8 years, but I think there are deeper processes in place, processes that are disintegrating the Israeli state from within, but we have to be patient, it will take a while.”
This is the end of the interview. From this program, it is evident that Pappe and Bresheeth wish for the demise of Israel. The odious descriptions of Israel have fueled the large-scale pro-Palestinian protests in the country, contributing to an alarming rise of antisemitic incidents.
Those who castigate Israel as alleged apartheid should note that their hateful words created a new reality, a need to protect Jews by segregating them from the general population. The British government, which has firmly quashed attacks on minority migrants during the recent race riots should do more to prevent such attacks against Jews rather than resort to protective segregation.
Over the decades, British universities have recruited numerous Israeli-bashing academics to escape the label of antisemitism. All these, despite the fact that Great Britain adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism.
Last week, the media reported that Dr. Lior B. Sternfeld, a US-based Israeli academic, met Masoud Pezeshkianin, the Iranian President, in New York as part of an interfaith dialogue hosted by Iran during the UN General Assembly. Sternfeld, an associate professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran. Sternfeld gave the Iranian president a copy of his book. With Sternfeld were several rabbis, including Abby Stein, a transgender female rabbi who is pro-Palestinian progressive, along with Muslim and Christian representatives. The Iranian PressTV posted photographs from the meeting, showing also members of Neturei Karta, the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox group.
Channel 12 reported that Sternfeld was invited by Iranian researchers with whom he has been in contact. It is said he checked with officials in Israel and got their approval to participate. “It was interesting. It was difficult. It was respectful.” Sternfeld quoted Pezeshkian as saying, “the war is terrible and has to stop.” Sternfeld stated, “Iran wants to play a mediating role on the issue of the hostages.” He also said that Pezeshkian asserted that when Israel and the Palestinians reach an agreement on an end to conflict that is acceptable to most Palestinians, Iran won’t carry the flag of the Palestinian struggle.
In contrast, Iran, in addition to advocating for Israel’s destruction and backing terror groups sworn to do likewise — such as Hamas and Hezbollah — has passed several pieces of legislation sanctioning commercial and cultural relations with Israel.
Sternfeld’s 2019 book, Between Iran and Zion, deserves attention. In 2021, Dr. Alessanda Cecolin from the Department of History, University of Aberdeen, UK, whose 2013 Ph.D. focused on Iranian-Jewish Identity, reviewed Sternfeld’s book and found a lacuna.
She stated, “Chapter 4 examines Iranian Jews’ participation in and response to the Islamic Revolution. The main focus of the author is to look at the role of the Jewish intellectuals and their support to the revolution. This chapter follows the development of the leftist intellectual movements and Marxist Jews and claims that the majority of Iranian Jews supported the revolution… The chapter, however, does not account for those Iranian Jews who remained loyal to the Shah. As such, the overall impression is that the whole community supported the revolution when, in fact, mainly the members of the Association of Jewish Iranian Intellectuals (AJII) actively supported the revolution. Evidence suggests that thousands of Jews left Iran during and in the immediate aftermath of the revolution. Despite this lacuna in the chapter… Between Iran and Zion is an important contribution to the current post-Zionist debate on the status and history of Middle Eastern Jews.”
Likewise, Prof. David Yaghoubian from California State University, San Bernardino, who teaches Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict, also reviewed the book. He wrote, “The book presents a revisionist interpretation of Jewish Iranian history that explores the interrelationship between Jews and broader Iranian society. Sternfeld’s approach and findings challenge existing historiography that either views Jewish Iranian history in a vacuum, or extends lachrymose interpretations that selectively center on Jewish oppression and dispossession before ultimate salvation through Zionism and immigration to Israel.”
But, the core problem with Sternfeld’s work is an article he wrote in August titled “Threatened by a moderate Iranian president, Israel is pulling him into a fight.” Sternfeld stated that “Through Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran’s capital, Israel appears to have sought to drag the Islamic Republic into a regional war — one that Iran hoped to avoid — on the first day in office of the new, moderate president.” And that “Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran was intended to urge Iran to respond, and perhaps escalate hostilities, thus finally bringing about the full-blown regional war that Israel craves.” Or that “The Iranian government thus remains reluctant to go to war, in part because it recognizes its domestic risks: war would likely strengthen the ultra-conservative opposition to Pezeshkian, and justify further escalation of oppressive measures at home and abroad. But right now, Israel remains eager to pull Iran into a direct confrontation.”
He wrote that there is a “long and seemingly counterintuitive tradition of Israel preferring conservative, fervently anti-Israel presidents in Iran over reformists, whom it sees as detrimental to its strategic interests. After all, part of Israel’s support among American and European governments derives from the idea that it is a Western democratic outpost in a ‘dangerous neighborhood,’ which can defeat bad actors in the Middle East before they reach Europe and the West. According to this logic, Iran is the chief enemy: an anti-Western, antisemitic, theocratic dictatorship that poses a clear and immediate danger to the world. When Iran elects moderate leaders, it undermines this monolithic caricature — and Israel, which refuses to change its outlook toward its regional neighbors, sees a diplomatic threat.”
He argues that the president of Iran, “As part of his policy of economic openness, and in order to revitalize Iran’s oil industry and economy, he prepared a huge concession for the American oil company Conoco, which included the development of two new oil fields. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei approved the offer, recognizing the value of extending an olive branch to the United States, and by 1995, the U.S. State and Treasury departments had given Conoco approval to move forward with the deal. Then the Israel lobby — AIPAC and the Israeli government — panicked and acted to thwart the franchise. After they warned members of the U.S. Congress of the ‘danger’ of trade agreements with Iran, President Bill Clinton bowed to the pressure. In 1995, he issued two executive orders banning all trade by American companies with Iran, and then allowed a series of new sanctions to be imposed on Iran. The Conoco deal collapsed, and the opportunity to develop U.S.-Iranian diplomacy was lost. The story repeated itself a few years later under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, who was elected on a platform that emphasized the need for dialogue between Iran and the West. Shortly after entering office, U.S. President George W. Bush signaled he was interested in revisiting and potentially restoring US-Iran relations. Therefore, Israel and AIPAC swiftly built up a broad coalition in Congress to renew sanctions on Iran.”
Because of the Israelis, according to Sternfeld, President George W. Bush gave his “Axis of Evil” speech and a “series of new sanctions on Iran. The United States, Israel, and the West had a much easier time with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khatami’s successor, whose provocative style and harsh anti-Zionist statements made it easier to portray Iran as a danger to Israel and the world. But moderate politician Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013 on a promise to reach an agreement with the United States and the West that would allow Iran to maintain its nuclear program for scientific and civil purposes, in return for sanctions relief — a situation that Israel was once again unwilling to accept. The Iran nuclear deal in 2015 represented a victory for diplomacy, but it was presented by Israel as a ‘charm offensive’ meant to disguise Iran’s true ambitions. The Israeli government was determined to prevent a thaw in relations between Iran and the West and the possibility of another vision for the Middle East, which could limit Israel’s ability to maintain its policies toward Palestinians.”
According to Sternfeld, “Unlike the picture that Israel and its allies paint, Iran is a rational actor. It is a country with domestic and international interests, and it employs many tools to achieve them: internal repression, ties with militias and non-state actors throughout the region, and various aid and support enterprises.”
Sternfeld is not alone among Israeli academic legitimizers of a brutal regime that terrorizes its own people, uses proxies to destabilize the Middle East, and wages conflicts small and big against Israel. Shlomo Sand and Ilan Pappe come to mind. As IAM repeatedly demonstrated, these and others like them are rewarded with academic positions in American and British universities. The trend to employ bitter critics of Israel in many Middle East Studies departments has added to the antisemitic and anti-Israeli turmoil on Western campuses and raised questions about the direction of liberal arts education.
No doubt that Sternfeld’s description of the Iranian regime as moderate and Israel as the villain earned him the invitation to meet the Iranian president.
US-based Israeli professor says he spoke with Iran’s president at interfaith meeting
Lior Sternfeld says he gave a copy of his book to Pezeshkian, who knew he was Israeli; transgender rabbi, fringe anti-Zionist Haredi group also participated in event
By TOI STAFF 25 September 2024, 1:14 am
A US-based Israeli academic said Tuesday he met in New York with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, as part of an interfaith dialogue hosted by Iran on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
Lior Sternfeld, an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, said Pezeshkian knew he was Israeli and had also told the UN delegation ahead of the session. Despite this, the invitation was not canceled, according to partial remarks posted by the liberal Hebrew media outlet Relevant.
The author of “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran,” Sternfeld said he gave the president a copy of the book.
Several rabbis also attended the meeting, according to Channel 12 news, along with Muslim and Christian representatives. Among them was Abby Stein, a transgender female rabbi and activist who is a leading figure among pro-Palestinian, progressive Jews.
Iran’s Press TV posted photographs from the meeting, which showed that members of the virulently anti-Zionist fringe ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta were also present.
Channel 12 reported that Sternfeld was invited by Iranian researchers with whom he has been in contact. The network said he checked with officials in Israel and got their approval to participate. It also said Sternfeld raised the issue of the hostages held by Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza.
“It was interesting. It was difficult. It was respectful,” Sternfeld said of the meeting, while quoting Pezeshkian as saying that “the war is terrible and has to stop” in the Relevant video.
Sternfeld claimed: “Iran wants to play a mediating role on the issue of the hostages.”
He also said Pezeshkian asserted that when Israel and the Palestinians reach an agreement on an end to conflict that is acceptable to most Palestinians, Iran won’t carry the flag of the Palestinian struggle.
Iran cut off diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In addition to advocating for Israel’s destruction and backing terror groups sworn to do likewise — such as Hamas and Hezbollah — Tehran has several pieces of legislation sanctioning commercial relations with Israel and forbids its athletes from competing against Israelis in international competitions.
Then-Iranian president Mohammad Khatami caused a domestic storm when he was accused in the conservative Iranian media of saying hello to then-Israeli president Moshe Katsav at the Pope’s funeral in 2005. Khatami denied the interaction occurred.
Part of the Jewish delegation that sat with President Masoud Pezeshkian in New York, Penn State professor Lior Sternfeld tells Haaretz that being in the room with Iran’s president was an opportunity he couldn’t miss
NEW YORK—On Tuesday, one of the most surprising gatherings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly was a meeting between Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and a group of Jewish delegates. And arguably, no one was more surprised than the Israeli professor who attended.
Lior Sternfeld, an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Penn State University and an expert on Iran, told Haaretz he was taken aback when he received an invitation two weeks ago. The meeting was billed as an “interfaith dialogue” (It was later described in Iranian media as “a meeting with several religious leaders and scholars”).
“At first, I wasn’t sure if [the invitation] was genuine. But after some inquiries, I confirmed its legitimacy,” Sternfeld said. The academic’s work on Jews and Iran includes the book “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran,” which assesses how Iranian Jews contributed to Iranian nation-building projects.
Sternfeld said he was also surprised by the reaction when he disclosed his nationality after receiving the invite. “To avoid embarrassment, I informed them that I am, in fact, an Israeli citizen. They assured me it was not an issue.”
The next step was to confirm that his participation was permissible under Israeli law, which prohibits contact with officials from an enemy state. After consulting with the Israeli authorities, Sternfeld determined that his attendance was acceptable.
“It wasn’t an easy decision – I wondered if it was just a ploy,” he said. “But being in the room with Iran’s president, to speak and to listen, was an opportunity I couldn’t miss.”
Several American-Jewish figures, including transgender and pro-Palestinian activist Abby Stein, also attended the meeting in New York. Others present included Ezra Tzfadya, a Rutgers University professor who specializes in Shia Islamic and Jewish political and legal thought, plus representatives from the Neturei Karta Haredi sect (which refuses to recognize the State of Israel and is a permanent presence at pro-Palestinian protests).
Sternfeld, who recently penned a column arguing that Israel is “threatened by a moderate Iranian president” and “Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran was intended to urge Iran to respond… bringing about the full-blown regional war that Israel craves,” said he was the only Israeli present. The meeting, which lasted 90 minutes, was very formal, he noted: “Every delegate had a chance to speak, and Pezeshkian responded to everyone collectively.”
Threatened by a moderate Iranian president, Israel is pulling him into a fight
Israel prefers hardline leaders to maintain a monolithic view of the enemy. Its assassination in Tehran now forces the reformist Pezeshkian into a corner.
On July 5, Masoud Pezeshkian won the run-off elections in Iran to replace Ebrahim Raisi as president of the Islamic Republic, after the latter’s death in a helicopter crash in May. During the short campaign, Pezeshkian sought to win over voters with the basic platform of his reformist camp: restarting negotiations with the West to lift sanctions, building the economy, fighting poverty, and investing in housing, healthcare, welfare, and civil society. He was officially sworn in as president at the end of the month.
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, came to Tehran to attend Pezeshkian’s inauguration. Based on multiple reports, Israel hired local agents to plant explosives in the hospitality compound in which he was staying, used by the Revolutionary Guards to host high-ranking guests. Through Haniyeh’s assassination in Iran’s capital, Israel appears to have sought to drag the Islamic Republic into a regional war — one that Iran hoped to avoid — on the first day in office of the new, moderate president. The expectation is that Iran will have to respond, and more forcefully than its previous choreographed attack on Israel in April.
This continues a long and seemingly counterintuitive tradition of Israel preferring conservative, fervently anti-Israel presidents in Iran over reformists, whom it sees as detrimental to its strategic interests. After all, part of Israel’s support among American and European governments derives from the idea that it is a Western democratic outpost in a “dangerous neighborhood,” which can defeat bad actors in the Middle East before they reach Europe and the West.
According to this logic, Iran is the chief enemy: an anti-Western, antisemitic, theocratic dictatorship that poses a clear and immediate danger to the world. When Iran elects moderate leaders, it undermines this monolithic caricature — and Israel, which refuses to change its outlook toward its regional neighbors, sees a diplomatic threat.
Decades of thwarted diplomacy
In the mid-1990s, Iran was reeling after a turbulent 15 years: the revolution of 1979, an eight-year war with Iraq in which hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded, the death of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, and an economic crisis that threatened to crush the Iranian economy. Under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had assumed office in 1989, the country aimed to rebuild itself — and chart a new path forward internationally.
In particular, Rafsanjani sought to turn a new page in relations between Iran and the United States. As part of his policy of economic openness, and in order to revitalize Iran’s oil industry and economy, he prepared a huge concession for the American oil company Conoco, which included the development of two new oil fields. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei approved the offer, recognizing the value of extending an olive branch to the United States, and by 1995, the U.S. State and Treasury departments had given Conoco approval to move forward with the deal.
Then the Israel lobby — AIPAC and the Israeli government — panicked and acted to thwart the franchise. After they warned members of the U.S. Congress of the “danger” of trade agreements with Iran, President Bill Clinton bowed to the pressure. In 1995, he issued two executive orders banning all trade by American companies with Iran, and then allowed a series of new sanctions to be imposed on Iran. The Conoco deal collapsed, and the opportunity to develop U.S.-Iranian diplomacy was lost.
The story repeated itself a few years later under the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, who was elected on a platform that emphasized the need for dialogue between Iran and the West. Shortly after entering office, U.S. President George W. Bush signaled he was interested in revisiting and potentially restoring US-Iran relations. Therefore, Israel and AIPAC swiftly built up a broad coalition in Congress to renew sanctions on Iran.
After the attacks of September 11, the political and public discourse in the United States completely changed, but there were still avenues for U.S.-Iranian cooperation. Khatami, for his part, asked to help the United States stabilize Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, which could have helped achieve a sustainable resolution to the war.
Iran had been the most important regional enemy of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and in December 2001, the United States, Iran, and Russia sat down together in Bonn to establish an Afghan Interim Authority to replace the Taliban — an agreement that led Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to accuse Bush of appeasement, à la Neville Chamberlain. The White House officially rejected those comments, but the next month the collaboration came to an end. On January 29, 2002, Khatami’s efforts were answered by President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech and a series of new sanctions on Iran.
The United States, Israel, and the West had a much easier time with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khatami’s successor, whose provocative style and harsh anti-Zionist statements made it easier to portray Iran as a danger to Israel and the world. But moderate politician Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013 on a promise to reach an agreement with the United States and the West that would allow Iran to maintain its nuclear program for scientific and civil purposes, in return for sanctions relief — a situation that Israel was once again unwilling to accept.
The Iran nuclear deal in 2015 represented a victory for diplomacy, but it was presented by Israel as a “charm offensive” meant to disguise Iran’s true ambitions. The Israeli government was determined to prevent a thaw in relations between Iran and the West and the possibility of another vision for the Middle East, which could limit Israel’s ability to maintain its policies toward Palestinians.
After Donald Trump was elected president, in his obscurantism and ignorance, he canceled the agreement, signaling to Iran that it has no partner in the United States, or even in Europe — where American sanctions prevented European economic cooperation with Iran. In turn, Iran accelerated its nuclear project in a way that would not have been possible under the agreement.
This helped contribute to the election of President Ebrahim Raisi in 2021, whose campaign emphasized the failed attempt at diplomacy with the West. However, even under Raisi, there were contacts between the United States and Iran, which had long-term diplomatic potential. Then came Pezeshkian’s inauguration — and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran only a few hours later.
Urging escalation
Unlike the picture that Israel and its allies paint, Iran is a rational actor. It is a country with domestic and international interests, and it employs many tools to achieve them: internal repression, ties with militias and non-state actors throughout the region, and various aid and support enterprises. When one strategy fails, Iran shifts to another.
Iran can survive and enjoy profitable cooperation with Russia and China. But its preferred way of rehabilitating its regional and international standing is through reestablishing relations with the West. Whenever it has had to choose between developing relations with Russia and China or an agreement with the United States and the West, Iran chose the latter.
Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran was intended to urge Iran to respond, and perhaps escalate hostilities, thus finally bringing about the full-blown regional war that Israel craves. Pezeshkian, on his first day in office, was forced to choose whether to abandon the platform he was elected on, and be dragged into a war that would mainly please his opponents within Iran (especially within the regime’s conservative establishment), or stick to his original path.
It is very possible that Pezeshkian will have to defend Iran’s reputation vis-à-vis the Palestinians, especially Hamas, and perhaps upgrade its support for the group. And so while Israel’s security services have proven that they can assassinate a Hamas leader in a hotel room in the heart of Tehran, they have failed to protect millions of Israeli civilians.
Days after the assassination, multiple officials from Pezeshkian’s administration affirmed that the current president’s priorities remain focused on domestic issues, especially Iran’s economy. Iran’s Foreign Minister even went on record to say that the Islamic Republic would withhold its response if Israel agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza — a message reiterated by Iran’s UN delegation in recent days. The Iranian government thus remains reluctant to go to war, in part because it recognizes its domestic risks: war would likely strengthen the ultra-conservative opposition to Pezeshkian, and justify further escalation of oppressive measures at home and abroad.
But right now, Israel remains eager to pull Iran into a direct confrontation — with devastating consequences for civilians across the Middle East.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.
Prof. Lior Sternfeld teaches modern Iranian history in the Department of History and the Jewish Studies Program at Penn State University. He is the author of “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran.”
Lior B. Sternfeld (LS): As a historian of Iran, it has bothered me greatly that historiography of this country makes no effort to reflect the complex social composition of Iranian society. Diversity has shaped Iranian society for centuries, and understanding it is crucial to the understanding of this society today. Iran is a country of minorities. There are almost thirty minorities (religious, ethnic, lingual) and only about half of the population is Persian Shi’i. If you read any of the “big histories” of Iran, you do not get this sense. This historiographical mold can be attributed in part to the nation-building projects of the twentieth century, and also to the dominant trends of Iranian nationalism, to which many of the minorities responded and wanted to interact with.
The case of the Jewish minority presents multiple historiographical and methodological challenges. Historiography of Iranian Jews has been heavily influenced by Iranian national historiography, on the one hand, and very secluded views and methodologies of Jewish studies and Zionism, on the other. The result of this has been a very shallow understanding of the Jewish experience in Iran in the twentieth century. Daniel Tsadik’s book on the nineteenth century had recently come out, revising the entire way scholars should look at the Jewish communities. I read this book in a very transformative period of graduate school and decided to write a paper, a paper which became my first article of this project on Jewish participation in the 1979 revolution.
I found out that the Jews were involved in the revolution in several ways. The Jewish hospital played a key role, and there were other fascinating aspects that, until that stage, remained very silent. The response to my article convinced me that I should write the histories of Iranian Jews in the twentieth century, in all their plurality. I wanted to try and analyze the profound social, political, and cultural transformation of these communities in a very turbulent century.
…just like Iranian society which is far less homogenous than it is usually portrayed, Jewish society is also very diverse.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
LS: This book addresses the responses of Iranian Jews to mainly three political/cultural/intellectual streams that shaped Iran in the twentieth century: Iranian nationalism, Communism, and—in the Jewish case—two phases of Zionism, pre-1948 and post-1948. Iranian Jews articulated many responses to each of these streams. The responses came from different communities, rooted in different contexts, and manifested themselves in myriad ways. For example, we see that Jews felt deep gratitude in a way to the Pahlavi monarchy, which—as they perceived—had liberated them by removing the barriers that blocked them from integrating and assimilating. At the same time, the communist Tudeh Party was the strongest and fiercest opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism in Iran and outside; it talked about social justice, and the vision of an egalitarian society—something that resonated with the Jewish communities, who remained mostly in the lower classes at that time. It was thus the only political party that accepted Jews (and other religious minorities) as members, and so gained many of their support.
This book attempts to show that, just like Iranian society which is far less homogenous than it is usually portrayed, Jewish society is also very diverse. While I am looking at the ethnically Persian Jews as the majority, we also have Kurdish Jews, Iraqi Jews (that can even be categorized as two or three different groups) Ashkenazi Jews (also made of two groups—German professionals that came to Iran in the 1930s, and the other Polish refugees), and many Israeli Jews. All of them helped create these nuanced and multi-hyphenated identities that characterized Iranian Jews—and in a way, still do.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
LS: I was trained as a social historian of Iran, and I was very much interested in writing social history of the national movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Reflecting back on it, I am not sure that I knew at the beginning that one of the missing pieces of this story is the aspect of minorities—but I was excited to study this new angle.
My training also brought me into the major debates of the rejuvenating subfield of Jewish studies in the Middle East. Without the works of Joel Beinin, Orit Bashkin, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Aomar Boum, Joshua Schrier, Michelle Campos, and others (most of them published also with Stanford University Press), this field would have looked tremendously different.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LS: I hope that readers interested in Jewish life in the Middle East in modern times and in Jewish-Muslim relations, aside from the Israel-Palestine conflict, would pick up this book. I am also hoping that Iranian Jews in Israel, and other Iranian Jewish diasporas, would find this account enriching. I hope that Iranians in Iran and abroad would find this analysis of their national story useful, allowing additional voices to be heard and illuminating parts of their histories that—for social, cultural, and political reasons—have been unearthed until now. This is something that I have already seen beginning to happen on my book tour. Folks of Iranian-Jewish heritage, first- or second-generation immigrants from Iran, tell me how they relate to the stories I tell; each adds another story that could have entered the book. There is always the Tudehi uncle, the “liberal student” cousin, the many interactions with Zionist organizations, and the perceptions of Iran as a homeland, etc.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
LS: I am now working on two projects. The first one is an attempt to find the origins of “third-worldism” in the Middle East. The story of the third world usually gives prominence (or even ideological monopoly) to the decolonized nations of Southeast Asia. I am not necessarily disagreeing with that analysis, but I think that the Middle East played a greater role than the anecdotal piece it received in the grand historiography. In this project I examine intellectual-popular discourse of the 1930s and 1940s, including that regarding Zionism (which many Middle Eastern intellectuals considered to be a post-colonial movement), through the establishment of the “Third Force” party in Iran in 1948-9, and Prime Minister Mosaddeq, who actively tried to form a Middle Eastern bloc to counter the influence of Britain, France, the United States, and also the Soviet Union on the other side.
My second project focuses on Iranian-Jewish diaspora communities, especially in the United States and Israel. I want to see how the immigration experience shaped their memories of the “old country,” cultural preservations, relations with non-Jewish immigrants from the same places, etc.
J: You tell a story of centuries-long journey for integration and you underscore the immense cultural attachment and Iranian national identity and pride. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Iranian Jewish community left Iran after the revolution. So, did this project fail? If they felt so attached and part of the society, why did they leave?
LS: I tell a story of a journey. And it is a journey—not a linear steady development—and if there is one thing I want the reader to take from this book is that understanding Iranian-Jewish history is not black and white; it is not a story of persecution and redemption, but rather it is a story that always existed in the middle. It is the story of the hyphen between identities and ideologies.
There were two waves of Jewish emigration out of Iran. The first was in 1948 to 1951, when about a quarter of the Jewish population of Iran left, mostly for the newly-established Israel. The Jews who left in the first wave were—broadly speaking—the poorest and the neediest of the Jewish communities. For them, immigration to Israel could offer some kind of redemption—be it religious, national, financial, or cultural. As I show in the book, even this was very complicated, as some returned to Iran at some point in the future.
The second wave was profoundly different in sociological terms. By the 1970s, the vast majority of the Iranian Jews were part of the upper middle classes and the elites. Most of those who left in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution left as part of their “class” exodus, and not necessarily because they were Jews. We also see that they left for the same places that the non-Jewish Iranians of the same socio-economic class moved to (and much fewer to Israel). This is not to say that, as Jews they did not face increasing dangers and discrimination, but the fact that we see today a community in Iran that is still substantial (unlike any other Middle Eastern country) suggests that we cannot read their history in the same terms that we read Jewish histories of other societies.
Excerpt from the book
Iranian Jewish Zionist: An Identity Mélange
During this period of extensive migration to Israel, even as Iran served as a base for that considerable effort, Zionist and non-Iranian Jewish officials were hardly concerned with the complexity of Jewish Iranian identity. Could Iranian Jews be proud, patriotic Iranians while practicing Jewish traditions? Could they be sympathetic to Zionism and to Israel at differing levels? What about Iranian Jews identifying first and foremost as Tudehi but, in accordance with Tudeh’s official party line, strongly supporting the establishment of Israel? For all Iranians, and Iranian Jews in particular, identity categories were not mutually exclusive (in contrast to what had been expected by Israel and modern Zionism). While many viewed the establishment of Israel favorably, and rejoiced over their homeland’s good relationship with Israel (at least in the beginning), they had no intention to exchange Iran for Israel. The percentage of Iranian Jews choosing the Zionist option was relatively low, and those who did immigrate envisioned that they would see an elevation in their status by doing so.
The slowdown of immigrants prompted Zionist organizations to investigate and analyze this unexpected turn of events. Ultimately they arrived at the identity issue. In 1953 Habib Levy wrote a comprehensive report on Zionist activism in Iran and submitted it to Israel’s president, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, whom he knew from the latter’s visits to Iran. President Ben-Zvi forwarded Levy’s report to the chairman of the board of the Jewish Agency, Berl Locker. Surprisingly, Levy’s tone in this report sharply contrasts with the spirit of his historical writing. In his books (both his memoir and his three-volume history of the Jews of Iran), he praises Iranian Jews’ commitment to Judaism and Zionist ideals. Conversely, his report submitted to Israel’s president seems rather gloomy:
When news arrived of the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jews rejoiced… 30% of Persia’s Jewish communities prepared for their Aliyah—in camps without any sanitation, exposed to the death angel on one side and on the other side, greedy officials of the Jewish Agency that in odd ways and on weird pretexts robbed them of their few belongings. Despite life in Iran being comfortable, they [Iranian Jews] went to Israel and were going to forget the bitterness of the Galuth [exile]. After two thousand and four hundred years of exile, and after 24 hundred years of suffering and tears, they were drunk from excitement and did not pay attention to obstacles, betrayals, and deeds of pocket-picking… Unfortunately today the excitement has dissipated and their fiery nationalistic and religious feelings that were a source of endless power and energy have faded.
Beyond the serious accusations targeting Jewish Agency officials and Israel (accusations upheld by corroborating evidence), Levy lamented the loss of this rare opportunity to keep Zionist fires kindled in the hearts of Iranian Jews. The rest of the report also bears examination. In analyzing the reasons that Iranian Jews were turning away from or losing interest in Zionist ideology, Levy cites the following: “lack of physical, national, religious, and spiritual guidance or training.” In other reports, and as a matter of policy, the Jewish Agency tended to blame insufficient knowledge of Hebrew and the practice of Reform Judaism (as opposed to its Orthodox counterpart) for loosening the bond between Iranian Jews and Zionism/Israel. With that in mind, it is interesting to turn once again to Abramovitch, the JDC observer, whose 1952 report contradicts this assessment. In fact, he describes a heightened emphasis on Hebrew language acquisition and Judaism education among Iranian Jewish youths:
We can point to a whole series of achievements. My recent tour of the provincial towns has been an unexpected pleasure. The younger children, those of the primary schools, not only understood our questions but also answered them correctly. Years of guidance and regular examinations have convinced teachers that our instructions should be carried out, that curriculum we’ve suggested should be taught, and that idiotic superstitious stories abandoned. Children read correctly; they translate correctly; there is proper order to their biblical stories, as well as sequence in their history and religious knowledge. Mr. Cuenca, A.I.U. director, and we can point to a whole series of achievements. My recent tour of the provincial towns has been an unexpected pleasure. The younger children, those of the primary schools, not only understood our questions but also answered them correctly. Years of guidance and regular examinations have convinced teachers that our instructions should be carried out, that curriculum we’ve suggested should be taught, and that idiotic superstitious stories abandoned. Children read correctly; they translate correctly; there is proper order to their biblical stories, as well as sequence in their history and religious knowledge. Mr. Cuenca, A.I.U. director, and Mr. Szyf, who accompanied me on this last trip, were as pleasantly surprised as I was at the answers.
How should we reconcile Levy’s and Abramovitch’s contradicting reports? One way to square the two is to conclude that there was, in fact, no credible connection between Hebrew fluency and a deep understanding of Judaism’s teachings and traditions. Later in his report, Levy offers other fascinating though equally far-fetched criticisms that do not necessarily correlate with his other writings. First, he states that Iranian Jews suffer from the absence of a centralized organization. This unfortunate fragmentation, reflected in the proliferation of small community organizations, meant that Iran’s Jewish community lacked a unified front. Without a strong, central organization, Levy opines, requisite political and social influence will never be achieved. Additionally, the majority of wealthy Iranian Jews had distanced themselves from Jewish nationalism. Finally, and perhaps most critically, he laments, “The young Jewish students overwhelmingly [will] tend to support the Tudeh Party, when there is a void of worthy Jewish organizations.”
Levy fails to entertain the possibility that Iranian Jews purposely avoided creating a strong central organization—which would have distanced their community even further from the larger nationalist sphere. Is it not possible that the Jewish community desired to assimilate, to fit seamlessly into the Iranian social fabric, to count themselves as respected and respectable citizens, and thereby enjoy the same rights and experiences as their non-Jewish Iranian peers? Levy also overlooks key reasons why Jewish students overwhelmingly tended to support Tudeh. As demonstrated in Chapter 2, during the early years from 1941 through 1953, Tudeh offered young Jews a stronger connection to their generation and to Iranian society. Since Tudeh was the largest and single most important political organization in Iran, it is little wonder that young Jews found Tudeh so attractive.47
Another section of Levy’s report is devoted to the hardships that Jews faced upon arriving in Israel. Interestingly, Levy mentions racism and discrimination toward Mizrahi and Persian Jews, regardless of their social status, education, or training. Levy points out that these émigrés could not speak Yiddish, a strike against them. Also, their places of origin made them especially vulnerable to discriminatory practices. Levy proffers the following example: Iranian Jews wanting to enroll their children in an elite boarding school near Haifa were told that the school was at full capacity. Nevertheless, in the ensuing days and weeks their Ashkenazi neighbors enrolled sons and daughters with no problem.48 This type of news made its way to Iran, undeniably hurting Israel’s already questionable reputation around immigration. During those early years, not only did many Iranians return to Iran but, as discussed in Chapter 1, Iraqi Jews also migrated from Israel to Iran. These Iraqis, after finding life impossible to adjust to in Israel, and legally prevented from returning to their Iraqi homeland, settled on their second-best option. Iran at least provided a somewhat familiar cultural climate, and furthermore, a significant Jewish Iraqi community had already established itself. Therefore, Iran became a preferred destination for many Iraqi immigrants, to the dismay of Israel and Zionist organizations.
BDS in Brazil is gaining strength. Already in 2018, Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) passed a resolution reaffirming its support for the BDS movement.
Last year, on April 3, 2023, the State University of Campinas, known as Unicamp, based outside Sao Paulo, shut down the “Israeli University Fair,” an event on campus promoting Israeli universities. The University of Haifa, The Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University, and the Technion organized the fair. Dozens of protesters camped outside the building, blocked the entrance, and declared they would not leave as long as Israelis were inside. They put up Palestinian flags on the walls and carried Palestinian flags while chanting anti-Israel slogans, such as, “we will not allow Brazilian universities to be used to market occupation, colonialism apartheid and Zionism.” Campus security intervened and helped out the Israeli representatives, leading to the event’s cancellation.
The organization Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, Brazil chapter, reported that the action at UNICAMP University was a “direct example of the future of the Zionist entity and its colonial project in Palestine, which will inevitably fall.” Stating, “Our Palestinian people were supported today by their friends and allies, Brazilian revolutionary forces dedicated to confronting racism and fascism. We salute the central leadership role of the Al Janiah cultural center in Sao Paulo, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – Brazil, the Alkarama Palestinian Women’s Movement, student organizers and committees, women’s organizations and labor and union activists in bringing about this victory. Dozens of leftist organizations and movements had earlier gathered at the Al Janiah Cultural Center about one week ago to organize a mass response to the marketing of Zionist universities at Unicamp.”
The Gaza War turbocharged the anti-Israel protest. On June 7, 2024, the Association of Professors at Brasilia University (ADUnB) held a public class titled “Eight Months of Genocide in Gaza: Boycott, Development and Sanctions against Israeli Apartheid and the Role of Brazilian Universities.” Jamal Juma and Maren Mantovani, National and International Secretariats of the Palestinian National BDS Committee, spoke at the event that former ambassador Tadeu Valadares chaired.
Another BDS case took place recently. Dr. Jorge Gordin, an esteemed scholar from the Hebrew University, Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, was forced to cancel a series of lectures at the Institute of Political Science (IPOL) of the University of Brasilia on September 11, 12, 18, 19 and 20.
IPOL published a statement on Instagram, “To ensure the safety of the university community, IPOL has decided to cancel the activities planned with Prof. Jorge Gordin. At the same time, the Institute regrets and is available to all interested parties to promote debates, always respecting divergent opinions and academic freedom.”
The cancellation came after some students complained that Gordin was “republishing military propaganda from the Israel Defense Forces” on social media. The group behind the protest is CAPOL, a non-profit organization of the Institute of Political Science at the University of Brasília, representing undergraduate students. The head of CAPOL, Maynara Navi, stated that the protest was “spontaneous,” noting that the cancellation was received with great satisfaction. She said, “It must be said that Brazilian public funds were used to bring this professor to give a lecture at the university, which must be stopped and reviewed… This professor comes from a university located in illegally occupied territories.”
Navi is unaware that the Hebrew University was founded in 1925.
CAPOL breaches its own regulations, which state in Article 4 that it would “Encourage participation and discussion on issues that affect society as a whole, without distinction of race, color, sex, nationality, sexual orientation, political or religious beliefs.”
The Brazilian case is one more demonstration of the “cancel culture” of academic institutions and the BDS supporters around the world. It is an example of antisemitic hypocrisy when Jews and Israel are concerned. Using “safety concerns” is a thinly disguised excuse for failing to live up to the IPOL commitment to “promote debates, always respecting divergent opinions and academic freedom.”
It also exposes the lies of the BDS movement, which would let us believe that individual Israeli scholars are not targeted in the BDS campaigns.
Brazil university cancels course by Israeli academic after protests
September 19, 2024 at 10:19 am
The Institute of Political Science (IPOL) at the University of Brasilia (UnB) cancelled a course which was due to be taught by Israeli Professor Jorge Gordin after students protested his presence despite being a vocal supporter of “Israeli military propaganda”.
Gordin, who teaches at the Hebrew University in occupied Jerusalem, is known for his open and unwavering support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its military.
The head of the Academic Centre for Political Science (CAPOL) at UnB, Maynara Navi, said the students campaign against the visiting professor was “spontaneous”, noting that the cancellation was received with great satisfaction, as both the Association of Professors (ADUnB) and the University Council have already declared that Israel is an apartheid regime.
“It must be said that Brazilian public funds were used to bring this professor to give a lecture at the university, which must be stopped and reviewed,” she continued.
“This professor comes from a university located in illegally occupied territories, so …. all the academic production he does costs the Palestinians a heavy price,” Navi added.
In April 2023, Palestinian and Brazilian organisations succeeded in forcing the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) to cancel the Israeli Universities Festival, after peaceful demonstrators blocked the entrances to the building, and announced that they “will not allow Brazilian universities to be used to market occupation, colonialism apartheid and Zionism.”
UnB cancels professor’s lecture after “Israeli military propaganda”
Professor Jorge Gordin was supposed to teach at the Institute of Political Science at UnB. Students complained about “Israeli propaganda” on his profile
He was scheduled to give lectures on September 11, 12, 18, 19 and 20. Students were notified of the cancellation last Wednesday (9/11). According to the statement made by Ipol on social media, the event was discontinued to “guarantee the safety of the university community”.
In the same publication , the Ipol Academic Center released an open letter in which it revealed the reasons for the cancellation.
“Yesterday, at the request of students, Capol’s academic coordination identified posts by this professor on social media, in which he republished military propaganda from the Israel Defense Forces,” the text says.
Students issued a call to attend his first class with paraphernalia and flags in defense of Palestine. “The management of Ipol became aware of this entire context and decided to cancel Jorge Gordin’s presentation and release a statement reinforcing the need to respect divergent opinions and academic freedom.”
“Capol is pleased with the decision to cancel Jorge Godin’s activities and hopes that IPOL’s selection of external exhibitors will be rigorous, with a close eye on possible attacks on the image of the Palestinian community, which is going through a period of genocide and barbarity,” the text concludes.
ipol_unb To ensure the safety of the university community, IPOL has decided to cancel the activities planned with Prof. Jorge Gordin. At the same time, the Institute regrets and is available to all interested parties to promote debates, always respecting divergent opinions and academic freedom. 1w
psipatricialembert If he were a Hamas fan, I guarantee that they would not ask for this boycott! 1w 3 likes Reply psipatricialembert Censorship!!!!! Anti-Semites!!!! 1w1 likeReply September 11
Suspension occurred after students claimed to have discovered posts by Jorge Gordin with propaganda for the Israel Defense Forces. | Photo: reproduction/LinkedIn
The University of Brasília canceled activities with Professor Jorge Gordin last Wednesday (11) for allegedly defending the actions of the Israel Defense Forces on social media. He was scheduled to teach classes for five days at the Institute of Political Science at UnB (IPOL) and his participation was suspended to “guarantee the safety of the university community,” the institution reported in a post.
IPOL did not provide details on the reason for canceling the activities, stating only that “it is available to all interested parties to promote debates, always respecting academic freedom”. Gazeta do Povo has been contacting UnB since Wednesday (11) to comment on the cancellation and is awaiting a response.
The reason for the suspension of activities with Gordin was explained by the institute’s Academic Center, stating that students requested the cancellation after posts of his were identified in which he republished on social media posts of “military propaganda of the Israel Defense Forces”.
IPOL stated that, after this request, the students made a call to participate in the class on Wednesday (11) carrying accessories and flags in defense of Palestine.
“The IPOL management became aware of this entire context and chose to cancel Jorge Gordin’s exhibition and release a statement, in which it reinforces the need to respect divergent opinions and academic freedom,” the institute pointed out.
According to his profile on a professional social network, Jorge Gordin describes himself as an expert in regional and local politics, having conducted research on federalism and decentralization in countries such as Israel, the United States, Germany and Brazil. He graduated from, among other institutions, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has worked as a researcher at the German Institute for Global and Regional Studies and at Diego Portales University in Chile.
The report also tried to contact Gordin and is awaiting a response.
Gordin had scheduled a mini-course on the 11th, 12th, 18th and 19th with the theme “Comparative territorial politics” and “The paradox of Argentina revisited”, on September 20th.
The Academic Center also stated that it was “satisfied” with the institute’s decision to cancel activities with Professor Jorge Gordin, and stated that it “expects that the selection of external exhibitors by IPOL will be rigorous, with a close eye on possible attacks on the image of the Palestinian community, which is going through a period of genocide and barbarity.”
IPOL’s decision to cancel activities with the professor, however, divided opinions. Comments on the post in which the suspension was announced classified it as both “regrettable”, “intolerance”, “embarrassing” and “unilateral democracy”, as well as “Zionism”, “victory for all Arab students at UnB” and “effort to stop this supporter of genocide”.
The Israeli response was immediate following the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 6, 2023. The offensive included airstrikes and a ground invasion of Gaza to dismantle the group’s military infrastructure. Hamas, which has killed civilians, raped women and tortured Israelis, is still holding people kidnapped in the attacks.
The conflict subsequently expanded to other fronts as well, and Hamas-allied groups in Lebanon, such as Hezbollah, launched attacks on Israel, raising fears of a wider regional conflict.
The Institute of Political Science (Ipol) at the University of Brasilia (UnB) has cancelled a course that was to be taught by Professor Jorge Gordin from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. The decision was made following a protest by pro-Palestinian students who opposed the professor’s presence.
In a public statement, Ipol regretted the development and stated that it had cancelled the course “to guarantee the safety of the university community”.
Jorge Gordin was scheduled to present a short course entitled “Comparative Territorial Politics,” which would be held on September 11, 12, 18 and 19 in the institute’s auditorium. A lecture entitled “The ‘Argentina’ Paradox” was scheduled to take place on the 20th.
“Due to the reactions that were raised, and although the topic of the lecture was not war, out of caution and in agreement with the professor we decided to interrupt the activities. We reaffirm our commitment to respectful dialogue, freedom of expression and academic freedom,” the institute said in a note sent to Mônica Bergamo’s column in Folha de S.Paulo.
💻 PUBLIC CLASS | ADUnB-S.Sind. will hold, on the afternoon of this Friday, June 7, the Public Class: “Eight months of genocide in Gaza: Boycott, Development and Sanctions against Israeli Apartheid and the role of Brazilian universities”.
The event will be attended by Jamal Juma and Maren Mantovani, National and International Secretariats of the Palestinian National BDS Committee, respectively.
The mediation will be carried out by retired ambassador Tadeu Valadares.
Protesters force cancelation of Brazil university event promoting Israeli academiaAmid demonstration by pro-Palestinian activists, security at State University of Campinas escort out representatives from four of Israel’s top institutions of higher learning By CANAAN LIDOR 5 April 2023, 1:57 am
One of Brazil’s most prestigious universities shut down a promotional event on its campus organized by several Israeli institutions of higher learning, following protests by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
The State University of Campinas, situated near Sao Paulo and know as Unicamp, on Monday unexpectedly cancelled the “Israeli University Fair,” an annual promotional event scheduled that day. It was organized by the University of Haifa, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Bar Ilan University and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology to attract students and academics.
Dozens of protesters demonstrated outside the building until campus security intervened and extracted the promoters of the Israeli universities, leading to the event’s cancellation, the R7 television channel reported. Unicamp’s rector, Tom Zé, had declined pro-Palestinian activists’ demand that the university scrap the event but said he supported the right of students to demonstrate against it.
The decision to cancel the event was taken because of security concerns, his office told R7.
The protesters camped outside the building and said they would not leave as long as Israelis were inside. They scrawled Palestinian flags on the walls and carried Palestinian flags as they chanted anti-Israel slogans.
The Israelite Federation of Sao Paulo, or FISEPS, condemned the protesters.
“The images of protesters fomenting hostility to Israeli university representatives are revolting and need to be investigated and firmly condemned by authorities and society,” FISEPS said.
Samidoun, an international pro-Palestinian group whose Brazil chapter was involved in the protests at Unicamp, celebrated the cancellation as a “victory.” Masar Badil, another local pro-Palestinian group, wrote in a statement that just as the event was canceled at Unicamp, “the Zionist entity and its colonial project in Palestine, will inevitably fall”.
Victory in Brazil: Popular mobilization leads to cancellation of “Israeli Universities Festival”
Apr 3, 2023
Palestinian and Brazilian organizations and mobilization led to the cancellation of the “Israeli Universities Festival” at the UNICAMP university near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Palestinian activist Rawa Alsagheer announced that the festival, scheduled for today, 3 April, was “cancelled under organized popular pressure,” emphasizing that this is “an important achievement in Brazil on the popular boycott front, thanks to the sacrifices of the Palestinian people, the steadfastness of the prisoners’ movement and the revolutionary solidarity forces that stand with us.”
She said, “The Zionist university fair was cancelled a short while ago, under the pressure of the crowds of demonstrators who occupied the building and surrounded its main entrances until the announcement of the cancellation.”
The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, affirms that this action at UNICAMP University is a direct example of the future of the Zionist entity and its colonial project in Palestine, which will inevitably fall.
Our Palestinian people were supported today by their friends and allies, Brazilian revolutionary forces dedicated to confronting racism and fascism. We salute the central leadership role of the Al Janiah cultural center in Sao Paulo, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – Brazil, the Alkarama Palestinian Women’s Movement, student organizers and committees, women’s organizations and labour and union activists in bringing about this victory.
Dozens of leftist organizations and movements had earlier gathered at the Al Janiah Cultural Center about one week ago to organize a mass response to the marketing of Zionist universities at Unicamp.
Growing Brazilian Political Party Reaffirms Support for BDS Movement for Palestinian Rights
آذار/مارس 07,2018-12:00 AM
The call for BDS measures in Brazil is particularly significant because the country is one of the largest buyers of Israeli weapons and military technologies in the world.
March 7, 2018 — Last month, Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) passed a resolution reaffirming its support for the BDS movement for Palestinian rights. PSOL is a growing progressive party in Brazil, with six representatives in the National Congress, nine in different state assemblies and 53 in municipal chambers. In 2017, it was the party with the largest number of new members in the country.
The call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) measures in Brazil is particularly significant because the country is one of the largest buyers of Israeli weapons and military technologies in the world.
PSOL’s resolution states that the party is committed to “intensifying efforts to place a military embargo on Israel” and references “technologies and techniques” exported by Israel to Brazil that “deepen repression, racism and militarization against the interests of the Brazilian people.”
Pedro Charbel, Latin America Coordinator for the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which leads the global BDS movement for Palestinian rights, said:
The BNC is heartened by the PSOL’s reaffirmation of its support for the BDS movement for Palestinian rights. The party has heard the call from Palestinian civil society for a meaningful and effective expression of solidarity, and it has responded affirmatively. We hope the party and all its members will keep working to advance BDS in Brazil.
Brazilian authorities use Israeli armed vehicles to repress demonstrations in São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro’s deadly military police, notorious for targeting poor Black and Brown people, receives training from Israeli companies. Brazil spends millions on Israeli weapons and military technology.
The Brazilian government should heed the call by Brazilians and Palestinians alike to stop trading in military weapons, technology and training with Israel.
Whether in Rio’s favelas or in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, we are working together to defeat a global industry of injustice.
Juliano Medeiros, PSOL’s president, stated: PSOL’s resolution reaffirms the Brazilian Left’s long-standing commitment to the Palestinian people and to the pursuit of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.
Another social experiment by an anti-Israel Israeli academic has emerged.
Her name is Erica Weiss; she is a professor of Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Much of her work focuses on Israel’s army refusal. For example, “Competing ethical regimes in a diverse society: Israeli military refusers;” “Best Practices for Besting the Bureaucracy: Avoiding Military Service in Israel;” Refusal as Act, Refusal as Abstention;” “Incentivized Obedience: How a Gentler Israeli Military Prevents Organized Resistance;” “Beyond Mystification: Hegemony, Resistance, and Ethical Responsibility in Israel;” “Sacrifice as Social Capital among Israeli Conscientious Objectors,” and similar.
Weiss is leading a research project on coexistence called “Praxis of Coexistence.” In Israel, she looks at coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. Her team focuses on “working-class and poor cities where residents don’t always buy into the ideology of liberal multiculturalism yet still find ways of living together,” she writes. “We carry out research in six countries, in cities such as Birmingham in England, Ramle in Israel, and Timișoara in Romania, where significant tensions exist between religious and ethnic groups cohabiting the same spaces.” Her project “investigates how communities accommodate differences in culturally resonant ways and asks what everyday practices and justifications they draw on to maintain civil relations and avoid conflict and violence.”
In a recent article, she claims “Criticizing Israel is risky business in academia.” She takes issue with the alleged risks of academics who criticize Israel. She brings three examples: the case of the anthropologist Ghassan Hage, who was dismissed from the Max Planck Society in Berlin for his anti-Israel posts on social media; the Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who claimed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza as well as called for the abolishment of Zionism; and the anthropologist Regev Nathansohn, an untenured professor at Sapir College in Israel, who signed a petition calling for the United States to stop arming Israel and characterized the war on Gaza as “plausible genocide.”
Weiss claims, “Many of the scholars who have been punished for criticizing Israel, including Hage, Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Nathansohn, have long track records of research and writing oriented toward finding ethical paths forward in the ongoing disaster in Israel/Palestine. Their work promotes the kind of dialogue that’s critical to any progress that Jews and Palestinians may hope to make toward peace and justice in the region. These scholars are trying to enact and give life to ethical projects beyond the academy to oppose state violence and ethno nationalism. This is grounded research in the deepest possible way. The only threat they pose is to the ability of Israel to act with impunity.”
She stated, “When I see the work of these scholars being misrepresented and attacked, I feel a duty to speak out.”
Weiss misrepresents the cases: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian made her decision to retire from the Hebrew University and Regev Nathansohn is still teaching at Sapir College.
Her defense of Ghassan Hage is egregious. Hage was indeed dismissed by the Max Planck Society in Berlin, which reacted to his posts, including a poem published on October 7, 2023.
Hage wrote, “When the Zionists occupied Palestine and the Palestinians resisted, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said. And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard and unyielding occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said. And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, and strict occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said…. And here we are today. And the Palestinians, like all colonized people, are still proving that their capacity to resist is endless. They don’t only dig tunnels. They can fly above walls. And the Zionist response is to say: we’ll show you! No more Mr. Nice Guy! We’re going to further upgrade our occupation to at least monstrous, homicidal and diabolical. And does anyone among the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists think of saying: Don’t you think we need to find a way out of this infernal cycle? No, for indeed, the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists is part of the infernal cycle, and all it has in it to do is to acquiesce and say: Israel has the right to defend itself”
Max Planck Society explained that Hage was fired because of his “posts on social media expressing views that are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society.”
Weiss then discusses “Human rights experts and activists [who] have named the situation in Palestine ‘scholasticide’ or ‘educide,’ terms that refer to the systematic destruction of a people’s educational system… According to numbers released by the Palestinian Education Ministry in April 2024, Israeli forces have killed more than 5,000 students and 260 teachers since October 2023. They have bombed all 12 of Gaza’s universities and attacked more than 500 schools—including buildings where displaced families are sheltering.”
She asks, “What should concerned people do about attacks on educators who express critiques of the Israeli state?”
Weiss argues that “Scholars and educators who have worked constantly toward a vision of multi ethnic and multi religious coexistence, like Hage, are being accused of hatred… we need to be helping the public understand our fellow scholars’ work and why it matters when they are censored. When these scholars are accused of criticizing Israel, their commentary and analysis must be understood within the context of their body of work and the political reality in Israel/Palestine.”
Weiss continues, “University administrators and politicians who accuse critical scholars such as Hage of antisemitism seem incapable of distinguishing between those who use their critical voices to question violence and racist and colonial policies and create conditions for justice and peace in the region, and those who promote actual antisemitism, including in some academic circles.”
Weiss argues, “As someone who has worked on questions of state violence, coexistence, tolerance, and peace in Israel/Palestine for two decades, I was struck by how Hage’s descriptions of multi ethnic and multi religious communities resonated with historical accounts of the region before the state of Israel was created. I still find these possibilities of pluralism in the communities where I work.” In Ramle, Israel, she found “coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, looking at daily interactions between neighbors in places like this food market… in Ramle, I have seen deep friendships and relationships of care and reciprocity between Jewish families that arrived from Middle Eastern countries decades ago and their Palestinian neighbors. These relationships call on older traditions of religious tolerance in the region.”
She ended her article by urging, “we must expand our responses beyond anemic defenses of academic freedom and freedom of expression. As essential as these principles are, they do not enable us to fully demonstrate the ‘post-truth’ distortions of ethical reasoning and commonsense that are occurring in the censorship of critical voices of Israel. We can and must do more. We must use our knowledge of history, politics, and culture to name and challenge the ethical distortions being brandished in cynical rhetorical ploys. Those consuming media related to Israel/Palestine can also do more to fact-check and analyze the content and sources they encounter, following guidance from organizations such as the News Literacy Project. In this era of rampant misinformation, we need more scholars, journalists, and other informed citizens to step up and communicate about distortions of facts beyond the academy. And we need an academy that puts decisions about sanctions in the hands of those who are qualified to make these evaluations, such as experts in the Middle East and antisemitism, rather than administrators and lawyers.”
Over the years, IAM has profiled many Israeli academics who abuse their positions to contribute to the anti-Israel propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Erica Weiss represents an addition to this club of veteran Israel-bashers. However, her position is especially perverse given the brutality of the Hamas attack against civilians. How can one describe the barbarity of killing innocent women, men, the elderly, and children, abducting others, or gang-raping women as “resistance”? Weiss, who is so enamored of “ethical solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, fails to realize that ethics should apply to the treatment of Israeli Jews as well.
These Israel-bashers are following the formula that the Palestinians (including Hamas) can do no wrong and the Israelis can do no right. This pernicious formulation allows Hamas to be portrayed as “resistance heroes” and their victims (even the peace activists in the kibbutzim) as villains in the settler-colonial drama.
The case of Weiss highlights the failure of the academic community to oppose activist scholars who abuse their position to spread propaganda.
Speaking Truth to Israel Requires More Than Academic Freedom
Educators and students critical of Israel’s war on Gaza face censorship, harassment, and dismissal. An anthropologist who researches coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians argues such critics need more than free speech protections.
CRITICIZING ISRAEL IS risky business in academia. As a professor at an Israeli university who leads a research project on coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, I’ve witnessed the threats firsthand.
Students motivated by right-wing organizations have recorded me and my colleagues in classrooms and hallways, waiting for us to say something they can take to the administration, press, or police. Faculty critical of Israel are surveilled by activists from ultranationalist organizations such as Im Tirzu and Israel Academia Monitor. Israel’s legislature is currently considering a bill requiring the Council for Higher Education to fire professors who show “support for terrorism,” a coded phrase often interpreted to include criticisms of the state.
I lead a collaborative, international research project called Praxis of Coexistence. Our team looks at working-class and poor cities where residents don’t always buy into the ideology of liberal multiculturalism yet still find ways of living together. We carry out research in six countries, in cities such as Birmingham in England, Ramle in Israel, and Timișoara in Romania, where significant tensions exist between religious and ethnic groups cohabiting the same spaces. The project investigates how communities accommodate differences in culturally resonant ways and asks what everyday practices and justifications they draw on to maintain civil relations and avoid conflict and violence.
In December 2023, I attended an online seminar featuring the anthropologist Ghassan Hage, a leading expert on race and migration. I found his work enlightening and suggested reading Hage’s recent book, which focuses on coexistence and religious pluralism, with the Praxis group. Everyone was enthusiastic to do so. But a few days before we met on Zoom to discuss the book, the news broke that Hage had been fired from his position at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany.
In a short statement, the Max Planck Society stated that Hage’s views, as expressed in social media posts, were incompatible with the values of the institution. Hage had denounced Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, and the society implied his criticism was antisemitic according to German law. Hage responded to this claim, standing by his critique of Israeli ethnonationalism and condemnation of the violence and humiliation imposed on Palestinians. He reasserted his commitment to the “ideal of a multireligious society made from Christians, Muslims, and Jews living together on that land” of Israel/Palestine—an ideal that I share.
My group and I exchanged this news on WhatsApp. We were deeply confused by the decision to terminate his contract, which was particularly disorienting in light of our recent engagement with Hage’s valuable work.
Unfortunately, Hage’s experience is far from unique right now.
In Israel, attacks on educators and students critical of the state have intensified since October 7, 2023. In March 2024, Palestinian feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended from Hebrew University in Jerusalem after claiming Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and calling for the abolishment of Zionism on a podcast. Later Shalhoub-Kevorkian was arrested at her home by the police, though quickly released.
Another example: Anthropologist Regev Nathansohn, an untenured professor at Sapir College in Israel, signed a petition calling for the United States to stop arming Israel and characterizing the war on Gaza as “plausible genocide.” He was attacked by students, condemned by his college, and put on unpaid leave, making him ineligible for unemployment benefits.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is without speaking of the situation for Palestinian academics in the West Bank and Gaza, for which the term censorship is wholly inadequate.
Human rights experts and activists have named the situation in Palestine “scholasticide” or “educide,” terms that refer to the systematic destruction of a people’s educational system. According to numbers released by the Palestinian Education Ministry in April 2024, Israeli forces have killed more than 5,000 students and 260 teachers since October 2023. They have bombed all 12 of Gaza’s universities and attacked more than 500 schools—including buildings where displaced families are sheltering.
GOING BEYOND “ACADEMIC FREEDOM”
What should concerned people do about attacks on educators who express critiques of the Israeli state?
Most of these statements focus on condemning censorship and emphasizing the rights of academic freedom and freedom of expression. The Board on Academic Freedom in Germany, where scholars critical of Israel face particularly restrictive conditions, urged “universities and research institutions to commit themselves to building and maintaining spaces for discussion and encounter, which welcome plurality and contradiction.”
Protecting academic freedom and freedom of expression is crucial—especially given the widespread silencing of Palestinian human rights advocacy. But doing so does not address the full extent of the problem.
One could imagine a situation in which a scholar espoused offensive or problematic views but was protected by these freedoms. On its own, a commitment to protecting free speech is politically and ethically neutral; this is why the American Civil Liberties Union defends the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Ku Klux Klan.
Protecting freedom of speech alone is not enough.
The free speech discourse misses the way the recent wave of dismissals and suspensions are in many cases a complete upside-down distortion of reality. Scholars and educators who have worked constantly toward a vision of multiethnic and multireligious coexistence, like Hage, are being accused of hatred. Protecting their freedom of speech alone is not enough.
Scholars in the social sciences and humanities must put our ethical values and critical thinking tools to work to explicitly challenge such “post-truth” distortions. To start, this means insisting that a scholar’s work is more than their social media presence. But beyond that, we need to be helping the public understand our fellow scholars’ work and why it matters when they are censored. When these scholars are accused of criticizing Israel, their commentary and analysis must be understood within the context of their body of work and the political reality in Israel/Palestine.
CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP ON COEXISTENCE
What does it mean to “support Israel” today?
Jacqueline Rose, a humanities professor who has explored internal Jewish critiques of Zionism, argues Israel is locked in a “spiral of destruction.” This spiral harms and traumatizes Palestinian people and Israeli people. Israel, Rose argues, is ruled by a government that is systematically eliminating any chance for justice and peace.
Within this political context, antisemitism and anti-Zionism are wrongly conflated. University administrators and politicians who accuse critical scholars such as Hage of antisemitism seem incapable of distinguishing between those who use their critical voices to question violence and racist and colonial policies and create conditions for justice and peace in the region, and those who promote actual antisemitism, including in some academic circles.
When the Praxis research group met to discuss Hage’s reading, we were struck by his commitment to understanding how communities learn to coexist with others who are different from themselves. His work describes a mode of living within dense, urban settings that is attuned to others and in conversation with people who sometimes express dramatically opposing claims and aims. This approach to navigating conflict contrasts with the tendency within modern capitalist societies to impose order by avoiding direct engagement and using the law to live impersonally and transactionally.
Hage’s insights resonated deeply with the empirical data we’ve gathered. In the places we work around the globe, people from varied religious and ethnic backgrounds live intimately in ways similar to those Hage describes. Neighbors and strangers often seek to deal with conflicts directly and avoid involving the police or the state. In these places, a stolen bike will start a long chain of calls and conversations involving intermediaries, parents, and community and religious leaders, all seeking to find a path to repair that avoids violence.
The author’s research focuses on coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, looking at daily interactions between neighbors in places like this food market in Ramle, Israel.
In other words, Hage highlights and theorizes modes of living together with difference that actually work. As someone who has worked on questions of state violence, coexistence, tolerance, and peace in Israel/Palestine for two decades, I was struck by how Hage’s descriptions of multiethnic and multireligious communities resonated with historical accounts of the region before the state of Israel was created.
I still find these possibilities of pluralism in the communities where I work. For example, in Ramle, I have seen deep friendships and relationships of care and reciprocity between Jewish families that arrived from Middle Eastern countries decades ago and their Palestinian neighbors. These relationships call on older traditions of religious tolerance in the region. They persist in part because Ramle remains peripheral in contrast to economic centers like Tel Aviv or symbolic centers like Jerusalem.
These fleeting and partial spaces of Israeli/Palestinian coexistence—ones that defy the ethnonational logics of the Israeli state—could be nourished, but they run the risk of disappearing entirely.
LIVING OUR ETHICAL AND POLITICAL VALUES
Many of the scholars who have been punished for criticizing Israel, including Hage, Shalhoub-Kevorkian, and Nathansohn, have long track records of research and writing oriented toward finding ethical paths forward in the ongoing disaster in Israel/Palestine. Their work promotes the kind of dialogue that’s critical to any progress that Jews and Palestinians may hope to make toward peace and justice in the region.
These scholars are trying to enact and give life to ethical projects beyond the academy to oppose state violence and ethnonationalism. This is grounded research in the deepest possible way. The only threat they pose is to the ability of Israel to act with impunity.
When I see the work of these scholars being misrepresented and attacked, I feel a duty to speak out. I know many anthropologists and other scholars agree. But we must expand our responses beyond anemic defenses of academic freedom and freedom of expression. As essential as these principles are, they do not enable us to fully demonstrate the “post-truth” distortions of ethical reasoning and common sense that are occurring in the censorship of critical voices of Israel. We can and must do more. We must use our knowledge of history, politics, and culture to name and challenge the ethical distortions being brandished in cynical rhetorical ploys.
Those consuming media related to Israel/Palestine can also do more to fact-check and analyze the content and sources they encounter, following guidance from organizations such as the News Literacy Project.
In this era of rampant misinformation, we need more scholars, journalists, and other informed citizens to step up and communicate about distortions of facts beyond the academy. And we need an academy that puts decisions about sanctions in the hands of those who are qualified to make these evaluations, such as experts in the Middle East and antisemitism, rather than administrators and lawyers.
I am a cultural anthropologist researching the ways people navigate the ethical dilemmas they encounter during their everyday lives and with people who are different than themselves.
I am originally from New Paltz, New York. I did my Ph.D. in Anthropology at Princeton University (2011). I joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University in the fall of 2013. I do my research in Israel and Palestine, using ethnographic methods.
I live in Caesarea with my husband, Michael, and our three children, Jordan, Boaz, and Adar.
Research:
Peace and Inter-Religious Coexistence- I am interested in how people think about and imagine peace. I am particularly interested in the ways that people who are far from the professional spheres of peace and reconciliation think about peace. I am interested in understanding the ways secular and religious groups think about peace differently and through different traditions.
Ethics and Ideas of Justice– My research involves a non-normative examination of the way people understand their ethical obligations. In my previous research, I looked at the way Israeli soldiers struggle to reconcile the responsibility they feel towards Palestinians and the responsibility they feel towards other Israelis. In my new research I am asking how people understand coexistence through the lens of faith. I ask how religious study and prayer inform people about their ethical responsibilities to their neighbor, and how they come to understand who falls under this category of care.
I am interested how political ideology effects people’s understanding of community and responsibilities to the state and to one another. Israel has both liberal and non-liberal components both within the legal and political structure and within the Israeli population. This diversity means many ethical models coexist and compete in public and private. I am very interested in tracing these influences in my work.
Democracy- I am interested in the ways different groups imagine the public sphere. How people think about topics like religion and state, community, public discourse, and civic conflict resolution through their different traditions and beliefs are of particular interest.
Current Collaborations:
Carole McGranahan, “Rethinking Disciplinary Ethics in Anthropology” and editing essay collection “Rethinking Pseudonyms in Anthropology” in American Ethnologist, University of Colorado, United States Nissim Mizrachi, The Perception of Tolerance in Israeli Society, Tel Aviv University, Israel Yifat Biton, Building a Research Driven Model for Conflict Resolution, Bridging Insights, Israel Gili Re’i and Eilon Schwartz, Expanding the Imagination of Peace, Van Leer Institute, Israel
Liberal citizens are held ethically accountable not only for their own acts and behaviors, but also those of their state. Reciprocally, a proper liberal subject is one that metonymizes with the state, merging their fates and moral worth, and taking personal responsibility for the state’s actions. I claim that as a result, the liberal subject is not…
All Jewish military refusers in Israel defy state law and incur public acrimony for their transgression. Yet different social groups use distinct ethical regimes to justify this controversial act. While liberal Ashkenazi refusers cite personal conscience, ultra-Orthodox refusers rely on scriptural authority, and Mizrahi refusers often appeal to fam…
This article considers the evasion of mandatory military service in Israel. Exemption from service is granted on a number of grounds at the discretion of military bureaucrats. Each year, many young people seek to obtain such an exemption for a wide variety of reasons, both ideological and pragmatic. At their disposal is a body of knowledge, collect…
en In this article, I consider the shifting politics of animal rights activism in Israel in relation to human rights activism. I find that whereas in the past, human and animal rights activism were tightly linked, today they have become decoupled, for reasons I explore in this article. Although human and animal rights activism once shared social an…
In this article, I offer an ethnographic examination of neoliberal techniques of control through absence by the Israeli military, the state institution most associated with discipline, indoctrination, and direct coercion. I highlight the ways that the apparent withdrawal of the state from practices of indoctrination and the punishment of conscienti…
This article considers the role of the humanitarian sentiment empathy in peace initiatives in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Recently, a sustained critique of humanitarianism has emerged. While many of these accounts focus on the ethical effects of specific manifestations of humanitarian governance, there is a significant strain criticizing the in…
This article reevaluates the usefulness of the theoretical continuum between hegemony and resistance in light of recent Israeli experiences. Specifically, through the comparison of “conscientious objection” and “draft evasion,” I find that the breakdown of hegemonic consciousness is not sufficient to understand why some disillusioned Israeli soldie…
This article considers counterhegemonic sacrifices as a means of social intervention, and in doing so explores the social efficacy of non-ritual sacrifice in the modern era. Ethnographically, this article examines the way Israeli conscientious objectors succeed in having their refusal of military service and the social costs they incur understood a…
In Conscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions…
The Israeli military’s Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants’ principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected b…
In this article, I explain why some of the most elite and dedicated soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces ultimately became conscientious objectors. I argue that because the sacrificial moral economy, and not the state as supersubject, was hegemonically inculcated in these young people, resistance was possible. This case prompts a reconsideration…
Saturday, October 7, 2023Israel-Palestine: The Endless Dead-End That Will Not End
When the Zionists occupied Palestine and the Palestinians resisted, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard and unyielding occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, and strict occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict and brutal occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal and severe occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe and unrelenting occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting and ferocious occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious and callous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous and merciless occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless and heartless occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless and cruel occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel and brutish occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish and inhuman occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman and heinous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman, heinous and hideous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And when the Palestinians continued to resist, the Zionists decided to teach them a lesson by upgrading their occupation and make it a hard, unyielding, strict, brutal, severe, unrelenting, ferocious, callous, merciless, heartless, cruel, brutish, inhuman, heinous, hideous and barbarous occupation, and the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists acquiesced: Israel has the right to defend itself they said.
And here we are today. And the Palestinians, like all colonised people, are still proving that their capacity to resist is endless. They don’t only dig tunnels. They can fly above walls.
And the Zionist response is to say: we’ll show you! No more Mr. Nice Guy! We’re going to further upgrade our occupation to at least monstrous, homicidal and diabolical.
And does anyone among the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists think of saying: Don’t you think we need to find a way out of this infernal cycle?
No, for indeed, the self-congratulatory transnational consortium of colonialists is part of the infernal cycle, and all it has in it to do is to acquiesce and say: Israel has the right to defend itself
******************************************
Comment:
J October 10, 2023 at 1:47 AM
You reduce the actions of Palestinians to the word “resist”, yet indiscriminately firing rockets into populated areas is not “resistance.” You overlook the overt intolerance of Palestinians towards Jews (a two way street, undoubtedly), but you cannot attribute a noble cause to Palestinians and an un-noble cause to Israel, as it is a biased simplification in both cases.
Last week, Cornell University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies hosted the Palestinian Studies Speaker Series. The speakers were Tamir Sorek, a professor of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University, and Sonia Boulos, an associate professor of international human rights law at Antonio de Nebrija University, Madrid, Spain. Deborah Starr, professor and chair of the Cornell Near Eastern Studies Department, was the moderator.
Sorek and Boulos are the co-editors of a new academic journal, The Palestine/Israel Review, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press. In their talk, they explained that the Journal “was created to challenge the typically separated approach to Israel and Palestine studies in academia.” To this end, the Journal includes Israeli as well as Palestinian scholarship.
Sorek said in his talk, “About three years ago, a group of scholars at Pennsylvania State University started thinking… Let’s build a journal that will try to bring these two scholarly fields together.” The journal’s “relational approach,” according to Sorek, aims to emphasize “the intertwined conflicts and progress of Israeli and Palestinian societies. He said that their study in academia has branched due to opposing political agendas.” Sorek argued that Israel studies has largely ignored the “settler colonial context, crucial for understanding Zionism, Israeli society and any kind of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.” He said that “conversely, Palestine studies focuses on the historical injustices faced by Palestinians.”
Buolos explained that the Journal’s key goal is “to increase awareness of how Israeli internal conflicts and policies impact Palestinian oppression.” The Palestine/Israel Review encourages writers to use literature in Arabic. “There exists an entire academic world in Arabic.“ Buolos pointed to the lack of Western use of Arabic materials. “We’re trying to fight against this [to] give voice to the people writing about these things.”
Boulos and Sorek wrote in the Journal’s Introduction: “The current war in Gaza, with the International Court of Justice ruling that a genocide is plausible, has highlighted the pivotal role of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand and contextualize the current wave of apocalyptic violence. At the same time, references to settler colonialism have triggered discursive resistance among certain academic circles. To debate this issue, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?” While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.”
They argued, “Ever since the recent cycle of apocalyptic violence erupted in Gaza, there has been a political struggle between those who believe that the history of recent violent events begins with the Palestinian Nakba 75 years ago or even earlier, and those who want to set the clock on 7 October. We at Palestine/Israel Review place ourselves in the first camp. We believe that the 7 October attacks, including the atrocious targeting of Israeli civilians, and the ensuing Israeli violence in Gaza that could be framed as genocidal (as the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice indicate) cannot be understood outside the context of Israel’s settler-colonial history. Coloniality can also explain how the colonial roots of the international order and of international law have enables this violence. But those who believe that the history of this unfolding human catastrophe begins on 7 October suggest that Hamas’s crimes fall outside history, politics, and sociology, and rationalize Israel’s violence as an act of self-defense. This discourse often ignores the Palestinians’ right to be free from oppression and domination, paying little or no attention to the fact that Israeli occupation in itself ‘constitutes an unjustified use of force and an act of aggression,’ as highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese.”
Furthermore, they argued, “to dismiss the relevance of settler colonialism and broader historical perspectives, members of this camp have relentlessly attempted to discredit scholars who refer to settler colonialism by accusing them of legitimizing violence against civilians.”
To debate these issues, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled ‘Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?’ As stated, “While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.”
Several scholars participated and published papers in the Journal, as Boulos and Sorek described:
Oren Yiftachel argued that “the 7 October attack and accompanying discourses by Hamas leaders places them under the rubric of counter-colonization.”
Ian Lustick argued that Israel “was imagined and created by Jews as a means of salvation, retribution, and protection… now appears as probably the most dangerous threat facing Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.”
Honaida Ghanim argued that “Palestinian hopelessness has intensified to an indescribable extent,” leading to an “intractable organic crisis that culminated in an eruption of extreme violence. Recognizing the colonial character of this dynamics is crucial for confronting it.”
Michal Frenkel was, for Boulos and Sorek, a “snapshot of mainstream Israeli academia, which resists the contextualization of the 7 October attacks in a broader historical perspective marked by continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians.” Frenkel argues that the “colonial lens is sometimes applied, especially by those not directly involved in the study of Palestine/Israel, in ways that appear to justify actions like the Hamas massacre of Israeli and foreign civilians on 7 October.” Instead, she offers an “imperial analysis” that “involves scrutinizing the shifting relations between various empires across different historical periods.”
Boulos and Sorek concluded, “The war in Gaze continues as these lines are going to press. While we are still looking for words to describe and explain the horrors, vocabulary borrowed from other settler-colonial conflicts remains the optimal—even if not perfect—working tool.”
Worth noting that the talk and the Journal reflect the evolution of the pro-Hamas advocacy among scholars known for their long record of delegitimizing Israel, using the critical, neo-Marxist jargon. Hamas is a terror organization and, as such, has been condemned for its atrocities and the murderous attack on October 7. To call the Gaza attack and Israel’s response a “colonial war” is farfetched even by the notoriously biased standards of academics in the field of Middle East Studies. As IAM documented, these scholars are nothing more than propagandists for the Palestinians.
These scholars should be reminded that nearly a year into the Gaza War, there is a large body of empirical evidence that Hamas runs a brutal dictatorship in Gaza, stifling critics who complained about the diversion of billions of international aid to build the enormous network of tunnels and the vast corruption of the Hamas government which helped its officials to build a luxurious neighborhood in Gaza City nicknamed “Beverley Hills.”
The academics featured in the Cornell symposium and the Journal forgot to mention some five hundred kilometers of tunnels built by Hamas. In what is arguably the most radical case of embedding within the civilian population, access to the tunnels was located in public spaces, mosques, schools, and hospitals, forcing the noncombatants to act as human shields for the terrorists.
As usual, in the “colonial” rendition of the conflict, the Palestinians have no responsibility. They are depicted as powerless – like individuals subjected by their colonial master, Israel. Nothing can be further from the truth. The Palestinians had plenty of opportunities to make better choices. First, in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which, under the pressure of the Arab countries and their leader Haj Amin al Husseini, an ardent admirer of Hitler, they rejected, forcing them into the 1948 war in which they lost. After the 1967 War, the Israeli Labor government proposed to trade most of the territories taken in the war for a peace agreement. The Palestinians who participated in the Khartoum Conference responded with the “three no’s:” No Peace with Israel, No Recognition of Israel, No Negotiations. After the signing of the Oslo Accord in I993 between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s PLO, the Iranian theocratic regime mounted a huge effort to sink the agreement. Its’ proxies, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, launched a wave of suicide bombing that morphed into the Second Intifada, where thousands of Israelis were killed and wounded.
There is little doubt that the October 7 attack was also a response to the Abraham Accords.
By omitting the historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these scholars are not interested in historical truth or facts. Equally important, they have not helped the Palestinians to make more reasonable choices. But these are never their goals; their purpose is bashing Israel.
Sonia Boulos (Nebrija University, Spain) and Tamir Sorek (Penn State University), co-editors of the new journal Palestine/Israel Review, will give a talk, “Palestine/Israel Studies: Carving Out a New Intellectual Space” on Tuesday, September 3. This lecture is the first in the Palestinian Studies speaker series.
Knowledge about Palestine/Israel is often shaped by conflicting political struggles. Separate scholarly fields for Palestine and Israel studies reflect different political agendas. Israel studies tend to normalize colonial power dynamics, while Palestine studies challenge them. This separation overlooks the intertwined nature of Palestinian and Israeli societies. Boulos and Sorek question if a new, integrated approach to studying these societies is possible, focusing on structural barriers like the unequal positioning of scholars and resource gaps.
Sonia Boulos is an associate professor of international law at Nebrija University, Spain. Her research focuses on international protection of human rights. She has worked on human rights issues related to the Palestinian minority in Israel, such as, gender equality, due process in Ecclesiastical family courts, and the policing of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Boulos is a co-editor of the new journal Palestine/Israel Review.
Tamir Sorek is a professor of Middle East history at Penn State University. He studies culture as a field of conflict and resistance, particularly in the context of Palestine/Israel. He is the author of The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad (Stanford University Press, 2020), Palestinian Commemoration in Israel: Calendar, Monuments, and Martyrs (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Arab Soccer in a Jewish State: The Integrative Enclave (Cambridge University Press 2007). Sorek is a co-editor of the new journal Palestine/Israel Review.
The Palestine/Israel Review was created to challenge the typically separated approach to Israel and Palestine studies in academia, according to Tamir Sorek, an editor for the journal.
Sorek, along with co-editor Sonia Boulos, spoke in Goldwin Smith Hall on Tuesday as part of the Palestinian Studies Speaker Series hosted by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.
Boulos is an associate professor of international human rights law at Antonio de Nebrija University and Sorek is a professor of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University. The talk was moderated by Deborah Starr, professor and chair of the Near Eastern Studies Department.
The Palestine/Israel Review is published by The Pennsylvania State University Press and includes Israeli as well as Palestinian scholarship.
“About three years ago, a group of scholars at Pennsylvania State University [and I] started thinking, why not?” Sorek said. “Let’s build a journal that will try to bring these two scholarly fields together.”
Sorek explained that the journal’s “relational approach” emphasizes the intertwined conflicts and progress of Israeli and Palestinian societies.
He said that their study in academia has branched due to opposing political agendas.
Sorek argued that Israel studies has largely ignored the “settler colonial context [that is] crucial for understanding Zionism, Israeli society and any kind of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians.”
He said that conversely, Palestine studies focuses on the historical injustices faced by Palestinians.
Buolos explained that one of the journal’s key goals is to increase awareness of how Israeli internal conflicts and policies impact Palestinian oppression.
The journal also addresses the structural challenges that Palestinian scholars face, such as language barriers, which hinder their participation in academic discourse, according to Buolos. The Palestine/Israel Review encourages writers to use literature in Arabic.
“There exists an entire academic world in Arabic,“ Buolos explained. “We’re trying to fight against this [lack of Western use of these materials to] give voice to the people writing about these things.”
This Palestinian Studies Speaker Series, alongside the Antisemitism and Islamophobia Examined speaker series, is being hosted amid high tensions on campus.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, the University has seen incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, causing students of both groups to express fear for their safety on campus.
Pro-Palestine demonstrations have continued into the Fall 2024 semester, including the vandalism of Day Hall on the first day of classes.
The settler-colonial paradigm has gained traction in the study of Palestine/Israel in recent years. The current war in Gaza, with the International Court of Justice ruling that a genocide is plausible, has highlighted the pivotal role of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand and contextualize the current wave of apocalyptic violence. At the same time, references to settler colonialism have triggered discursive resistance among certain academic circles. To debate this issue, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?”. While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. Five scholars from different disciplines participated in the webinar.
Ever since the recent cycle of apocalyptic violence erupted in Gaza, there has been a political struggle between those who believe that the history of recent violent events begins with the Palestinian Nakba 75 years ago or even earlier, and those who want to set the clock on 7 October. We at Palestine/Israel Review place ourselves in the first camp. We believe that the 7 October attacks, including the atrocious targeting of Israeli civilians, and the ensuing Israeli violence in Gaza that could be framed as genocidal (as the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice indicate) cannot be understood outside the context of Israel’s settler-colonial history. Coloniality can also explain how the colonial roots of the international order and of international law have enables this violence.
But those who believe that the history of this unfolding human catastrophe begins on 7 October suggest that Hamas’s crimes fall outside history, politics, and sociology, and rationalize Israel’s violence as an act of self-defense. This discourse often ignores the Palestinians’ right to be free from oppression and domination, paying little or no attention to the fact that Israeli occupation in itself “constitutes an unjustified use of force and an act of aggression,” as highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese. Furthermore, to dismiss the relevance of settler colonialism and broader historical perspectives, members of this camp have relentlessly attempted to discredit scholars who refer to settler colonialism by accusing them of legitimizing violence against civilians.
To debate these issues, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?” While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. Five scholars from different disciplines participated in the webinar.
In his contribution, Raef Zreik argues that settler colonialism is a useful frame for analyzing Israeli society, economy, politics, and law. However, resort to this paradigm as an analytical tool should not exclude other frames of analysis, such as class struggle, feminist approaches, cultural analysis, global politics, economic analysis, and nationalist analysis. But more importantly, no particular political solution can emerge “from the mere fact that a situation can be analyzed under the frame of settler colonialism.” A solution would ultimately depend on the particularities of each settler-colonial society.
Oren Yiftachel argues that the recent cycle of violence in Israel/Palestine is indeed a horrific outcome of the settler-colonial relations between Jews and Palestinians. However, he argues that settler colonialism alone “cannot provide a sufficient account of the complex forces driving Israel/Palestine in general, and the Gaza flashpoint in particular.” He distinguishes between decolonization and counter-colonization. The former “entails the political and legal dismantling of the tools of colonialism,” while the latter entails “the (violent) overthrowing of the regime of a legitimate political entity and the potential eviction or subjugation of settler-immigrant population, even after several generations.” Accordingly, Yiftachel argues that the 7 October attack and accompanying discourses by Hamas leaders places them under the rubric of counter-colonization.
Ian Lustick refers to the legend of the golem in Jewish tradition, who was created by Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to defend the Jews against ferocious antisemitism. While successful in his mission to protect Jews from anti-Semites, with time the golem becomes more and more violent, destructive, and uncontrollable. This eventually forces his creator to end his life to save the community from his violence. Lustick argues that just like the golem, Israel “was imagined and created by Jews as a means of salvation, retribution, and protection.” However, the Zionist settler project with its violence “now appears as probably the most dangerous threat facing Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora.”
In her contribution, Honaida Ghanim argues that the new far-right leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu has deployed the strategy of “conflict management” to dismantle the Palestinian cause. This strategy involves the Judaization of the space and demography on the one hand and the division of Palestinians into isolated communities under Israeli dominance on the other. This was paralleled with international and regional abandonment of Palestinians. Therefore, Ghanim argues that “Palestinian hopelessness has intensified to an indescribable extent,” leading to an intractable organic crisis that culminated in an eruption of extreme violence. Recognizing the colonial character of this dynamics is crucial for confronting it.
The contribution of Michal Frenkel is a snapshot of mainstream Israeli academia, which resists the contextualization of the 7 October attacks in a broader historical perspective marked by continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. She argues that the “colonial lens is sometimes applied, especially by those not directly involved in the study of Palestine/Israel, in ways that appear to justify actions like the Hamas massacre of Israeli and foreign civilians on 7 October.” Instead, she offers an “imperial analysis” that “involves scrutinizing the shifting relations between various empires across different historical periods.”
The war in Gaze continues as these lines are going to press. While we are still looking for words to describe and explain the horrors, vocabulary borrowed from other settler-colonial conflicts remains the optimal—even if not perfect—working tool.
Last week, the Palestinian feminist academic Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian resigned from her position at the Hebrew University, where she served as Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare.
IAM reported on her case that Shalhoub-Kevorkian said in a March 9, 2024 podcast, “yes it’s time to abolish Zionism, this is where I’m going today, just abolish Zionism. Well, it can’t continue, it cannot, it’s criminal, it’s criminal. Only by abolishing Zionism, we can continue, this is what I see… they [the Israelis] will use everything to further kill, it’s a killing machine and it’s a necro, political regime that can survive only on the erasure of Palestinians… the body of the Palestinian, the living body, the dead body, the cut to pieces body, are all capital in the hands of this Zionist entity and of course, they will use any lie, they started with babies, they continued with rape, they will continue with million other lies, every day with another story, we stopped believing them. I hope that the world will stop believing them.”
Arab media also reported the case. The largest Arab media company, headquartered in London, named The New Arab and its affiliate site Arab 48, which belongs to the Qatari-ownedFadaat Media, stated that in the Podcast, Shalhoub-Kevorkian detailed her experience of “working and living under the Israeli occupation” and “spoke about the genocide in Gaza.” Consequently, she was suspended from teaching by the end of the semester in March and then briefly arrested in April for charges of “incitement for her vocal anti-war and anti-Zionist stance.”
In an interview, Alaa Mahajna, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s defense lawyer, said, “Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian made the decision early on… that it was impossible for her to work at a university defining itself as Zionist, but which at the same time talked about freedom of expression and education.” Her lawyer also said that Shalhoub-Kevorkian received compensation from the university for “its behavior towards her.” Her decision to resign was due to “conditions which have been created in the Israeli universities, which consider themselves to be Zionist, and criminalize those opposed this.”
Her latest article, “How Should We Read This War?” was published in May in the newsletter The New York War Crimes’ Nakba Day Edition, published by The New York Crimes Company, bearing the slogan, “Revolution and Resistance Until Liberation and Return.” Shalhoub-Kevorkian wrote: “We witness actual, overt academic oppression as they willfully ignore professional academic behavioral standards and freedom of expression in broad daylight. We see the USA, Germany, France, Britain and other western nations interfering in their universities, denying the right of freedom of expression to all except for those in power. All this calls into question the universality of academic freedom as well as the discourse of equality and justice. Zionism, moreover, benefits from anti-Zionism which it equates with anti-Semitism in order to silence ‘moderates’ and in doing so, erects an ideological barrier against any consideration of the Palestinian cause, in order to prevent thinking of a way out of the crisis beyond an exclusionary and substitutional logic toward the Other. The farcical show put on by the US Congress criticizing university presidents, resulting in the resignation more than one of them, has created a punitive system that works on behalf of the occupier. The ‘policies’ that have labeled symbols such as the keffiyeh — or the Arabic — language as provocative have allowed events such as the shooting of Palestinian youths in Vermont, resulting in one of them being paralyzed. All this state terrorism, this thought terrorism — the real, ongoing threats that we thinkers and researchers face today — result in greater determination on our part to refuse white racist violence, to hold fast to our human principles, to refuse genocide. The questions do not end here: there are struggles over truth, over numbers, over the validity of data, over scientific accuracy, over dates by voices that knowledge ultimately determined by the occupying forces.”
After hearing that Shalhoub-Kevorkian has resigned, a group of academics from the Hebrew University wrote in protest a public letter on August 29, 2024, to Prof. Asher Cohen, President of the Hebrew University, and Prof. Tamir Shafer, Rector of the Hebrew University. They stated, “We, members of the academic staff and administrators at the Hebrew University, learned with great sadness from the media about the retirement of our colleague Prof. Nadra Shalhoub Kevorkian from the Hebrew University, ending decades of studies, teaching and research. Her resignation followed a nearly year-long negative campaign, which included public letters from the university management and colleagues who sought to denounce and ostracize her, publications in the media, and even a continuous and humiliating police investigation (including an all-night arrest). Regardless of our positions in this particular case, we see her retirement and the moves that led to this move as a fatal blow to the Hebrew University and its academic freedom. Along the way, starting from the beginning of the affair in October, the university administration sided with the accusers of Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian and, in an unusual move, suspended her from teaching at the end of the first semester.”
According to the letter, “All this, without examining her words in depth and while making statements to the media that harmed her, her good name and her personal safety. The media took sentences out of context, distorted her words and attributed things to her that she did not say, and the university’s statements condemned her in blatant violation of the accepted rules of criticism within free academic research. In an academic setting such as ours, it is possible to deal with different positions, some of which are critical and shocking and not necessarily pleasant to the ear, to express disagreement if necessary but still maintain every guard for freedom of expression and academic freedom. Instead of listening to the words of Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian and dealing with her claims to the letter, the management chose to deal with half-truths and sweeping generalizations. When she was invited to a police investigation based on her academic articles (absurd in itself), the university publicly disowned her and not a single representative of the university stood by her side during any of the humiliating police investigations she was required to attend. Even now, the news of Prof. Shalhoub Kevorkian’s retirement is being celebrated in the media, with the addition of lies and half-truths and in violation of her privacy. “
The letter ended: “We hereby express our deep disappointment with the university administration, and our fear for our safety and the safety of our colleagues and students in the difficult days ahead of us. The painful end of this affair is a silent and paralyzing message for all university researchers, not least for Palestinian researchers. As written in the letter of the faculty members to the management in April, this year it was Nadera that was put on the dock without a defender, and tomorrow it will be each and every one of us.”
The undersigned are Prof. Amos Goldberg, Prof. Abigail Jacobson, Prof. Shlomi Segal, Prof. Liat Kuzma, and Dr. Einat Rubinstein.
Worth noting that Prof. Amos Goldberg, who signed this letter, has abused his scholarship in Holocaust Studies by equating the tragedy of the Jews in the Holocaust to the self-inflicted Palestinian Nakba. That the murder of six million Jews is comparable to the Nakba reflects the dominance of the post-modern neo-Marxist, critical scholarship in the social sciences. As IAM repeatedly noted, this approach does not require empirical evidence to prove a theory. Hence, Goldberg recently claimed that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian abused her scholarship; she has become an anti-Israel activist whose academic writings besmirched Israel without providing evidence-based proof.
Not surprisingly, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s lawyer told the Arab media, “Professor Kevorkian has received many offers from well-known and prestigious educational institutions across the world, including Harvard University in the US, and many other academic institutions… and she will continue her career in one of the world’s prestigious institutions.”
As in the case of a number of Israeli scholars who made a career of bashing Israel, such as Ilan Pappe, Neve Gordon, Ariella Azoulay, and others, Shalhoub-Kevorkian receives a boost to her career with a position in a prestigious university abroad.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Hebrew University professor resigns due to ‘Zionism’s hold on Israeli universities’
Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has left The Hebrew University of Jerusalem due to her rejection of Zionist ideology’s hold over Israeli academia.
Ameer Ali Bweerat 30 August, 2024
Renowned Palestinian feminist academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has resigned from her post at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem saying this was due to her rejection of Zionism and its “control” of Israeli academia in the wake of Israel’s “genocidal” war on Gaza.
The news of Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s resignation circulated on Wednesday as far-right organisations – such as the self-styled human rights group Btsalmo (In His Image) – celebrated her departure from the major Israeli institution.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s decision comes following an intensive public campaign of intimidation against her after she signed a November petition calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Following her signing of the petition, which was also endorsed by over 1,000 researchers across the world, the Hebrew University asked her to “find another academic home”.
She was then suspended from teaching in March and briefly arrested in April for charges relating to “incitement” for her vocal anti-war and anti-Zionist stance.
Her defence lawyer Alaa Mahajna told The New Arab’s affiliate site Arab 48: “Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian made the decision early on […] that it was impossible for her to work at a university defining itself as Zionist, but which at the same time talked about freedom of expression and education”.
He explained that she had taken her decision before and informed the university she would not be continuing her employment there in the new academic year.
Israeli media and organisations such as Btsalmo put Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s resignation down to the pressure placed on her by figures and organisations who condemned her anti-Zionist positions and her description of Israel’s war on Gaza as “genocidal”.
However, Mahajna clarified that the scholar had in fact based her decision on what was happening more broadly in Israeli academia, namely, the hold of Zionist ideology over universities, as well as the political persecution of those deviating from this ideology, and the prohibition of free speech.
The campaign of harassment against Shalhoub-Kevorkian reached its peak on 12 March 2024 when the Hebrew University temporarily suspended her teaching duties due to her stance against the war on Gaza and other anti-Zionist positions she had expressed in a podcast aired on March 9.
In the podcast episode named “There is so much love in Palestine”, Shalhoub-Kevorkian detailed her own experiences of working and living under the Israeli occupation and spoke about the genocide in Gaza, the Israeli authorities’ withholding of bodies, and settler violence.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian was later arrested from her home in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on 18 April 2024, and her home was ransacked by police.
However, she was released after appearing before the Jerusalem District Court despite the police’s appeal against the court decision.
The police claimed that Shalhoub-Kevorkian had engaged in “serious incitement against the State of Israel by making statements against Zionism and even claiming that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip,” and noted the “significant influence” her statements have.
Despite her release, she was subjected to several further interrogations at a police station in Jerusalem.
While her decision to resign was not recent, Mahajna explained that the news had been circulated publicly on Wednesday, after proceedings against Shalhoub-Kevorkian had continued in recent months.
“The right-wing organisation Btsalmo had filed a complaint to the university’s ethics committee against Professor Kevorkian in May, and we responded that they had no authority to submit a complaint against [her], and the university administration agreed”.
He added: “Btsalmo is a right-wing extremist organisation with a racist agenda against Arab citizens, which focuses its efforts and activity against Arab academics in Israeli educational institutions.
“The work of this fascist and racist organisation is to constantly persecute Arabs to satisfy the extremist Israeli right.”
Mahajna said that Shalhoub-Kevorkian had received compensation from the university for its behaviour towards her, and ultimately her decision was due to “conditions which have been created in the Israeli universities, which consider themselves to be Zionist, and criminalize those opposed this”.
Regarding her academic future, Mahajna said: “Professor Kevorkian has received many offers from well-known and prestigious educational institutions across the world, including Harvard University in the US, and many other academic institutions […] and she will continue her career in one of the world’s prestigious institutions.”
This is an edited translation with additional reporting. To read the original article click here.
In this essay, the noted Palestinian feminist scholar and activist Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian asks how to “read this war” — that is, how to understand the present nakba and genocide. This is far from a purely theoretical venture for Shalhoub-Kevorkian, but one that is central to forging paths for resistance and solidarity in the face of Zionist destruction. In March 2024, Shalhoub-Kevorkian was suspended from her position at the Hebrew University. Despite being reinstated after international outcry, she was arrested by Israeli police the following month and subjected to torture in police detention before her release.
This essay was first published in Arabic in December 2023 and appears here for the first time in English translation.
The last question Ghassan Kana fani asks at the end of his book Men in the Sun is: Why didn’t you bang on the sides of the water tank? Those who do not dare bang on the sides of the water tank die, because banging and shouting imply a hope for life. So what, then, does Ghassan Kanafani’s cry mean? Do remaining silent and cowardly, seeking stability, meekly yielding to despotism, and surrendering to exploitation mean death between the burning walls of the tank? The ethical task is psychological,
“… even the rules of analysis have all failed us.”
political — all-encompassing. The economic task is a necro-political challenge to economies of life and death that face indigenous people today. These two sets of challenges face Palestinian researchers at every step. How can we not bang on the sides of the tank ever louder, especially when we witness and painfully live through the ongoing butchery of our compatriots in Gaza; when we face the loss of our loved-ones, our children, our men, our women, our students, our colleagues, our doctors, our journalists, our society, our future…
How can we go on breathing every day when we live through the horror of abandonment and are subjected to continuous crimes? How do we build up our refusal as we sink under the weight of our patriotic, our intellectual, our lived social-psychological concerns. How do we find answers for our steadfast generations and our future in the face of a policy of endless genocide?
How do we read this war, with all its horrors — particularly in view of the fact that our chronology starts with the colonial settler project and its boundless criminality? Do we read this war in the context of physical injuries, such as those described by Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, to understand that these injuries are a confirmation of the criminality of the massacres of the colonial settler project? Should we walk together from the Baptist Hospital [aka Al Ahli Arab Hospital –trans.] to the Shifa Hospital, to the pediatric hospitals that were subsequently bombarded, to the cancer hospital and the Health Services Centers, and consider the significance of their targeting? And then to the Khodaj Center where we see continued mutilation of Palestinian bodies, and from there to babies in the neonatal units deprived of oxygen, their bodies left to rot.
Doesn’t this way of reading events suggest that the bodies of our children — the sons and daughters of our people — their dismemberment, their uprooting, their pain and its treatment are the political capital that feeds this massacre and this project? Or should we read this war through the military-political action in its spectacular approach to criminality, and the endless American support of these crimes, as well as the British assistance in these endeavors with Britain’s declaration that it would assist in the war against our people by providing military intelligence and espionage?
Or through the militarized political support of America and its use of veto power — in addition to both its overt and covert means of support and its insistence on dehumanizing Palestinian men and women? Or should we read it by looking at Israel and its current state of shock — with its crimes of revenge, and its surveillance and legal pursuit of the daughters and sons of our people? Or by looking at the violence visited upon Palestinian political prisoners, at the use of our children and adolescents as a weapon against us, in addition the re-imprisonment of freed prisoners? By looking at the shedding of the mask of democracy and civilization? Should we look at Israel and observe its desire for revenge?
in spite of the solidarity of the actual Arab peoples? The loss of political will of the Arab regimes underscores the vital importance of the people taking the cause to the street in order to shake and weaken immoral “law and order,” both locally and internationally. Or should we read it through the Palestinian Resistance shouting against and resisting the mutilation of both the living and the dead, shouting its opposition to systematic ethnic cleansing, proudly displaying its involvement in self-defense, demanding the right to live and to do so in dignity? movements the world over, demanding an end to the massacre and calling for a ceasefire?
***
We must consider all these decisions we have to consider. We face great challenges, as even the rules of analysis — its terminology, its criteria, methods of interaction, thought processes, the public statements — have all failed us. As an example, the methods of speech and analysis of such prominent thinkers as Judith Butler, Žižek, Habermas and others have supported the criminals by failing to understand the present crimes in their colonial context. They have
***
Or should we read this war through the manifestation of the total unmasking of the colonial settler project throughout the entirety of our Palestine? Or through the abandonment of nations — Arab ones in particular — that have not only lost political will but who, to the contrary, have worked towards marginalization of the Palestinian cause through normalization with Israel, along with continued, systematic uprooting and massacres
Or should we read it through an analysis of worldwide solidarity, and the refusal of people across the world, as exhibited by demonstrations
analyzed the issues through preconceived notions, those of a white racist mindset, when discussing an occupied nation and comply with the imposed “codes of obedience.” I can also assert that they are profiting from the situation; they are watchful of the specter of our occupiers enmity, and fear the punishment and losses associated with any opposition to them. Laws, norms, universal principles of international law, criminology, the study of genocide, feminism, medical sciences as well as military codes of conduct have all evaporated when it comes to Palestine, and more specifically when it comes to Gaza. Ideological conceptions and practices have whittled away principles like the “right to self-defense,” the “innocence of defenseless citizens,” like “child protection policies” or the “enforcement of international laws and norms” — their application now limited to one party only. These laws and norms have, in fact, always sacrificed Palestinian lives and bodies. They ignore the justice of their cause and their right to resistance in favor of the lie of “values and norms” that bear no relationship to humanity or socio-political justice — thus unveiling the lies told about the morally deficient system of “human rights.” Because the Palestinian, in the lexicon of world politics and Zionist hegemony, is not only seen as nonhuman but as non-animal as well, non-deserving of compassion. Palestinian children are non-children, undeserving of protection, of saving, of medical care. The law has been used only in favor of those in power. There are those who deserve to be grieved and there are those who don’t deserve grief. The conversation about what is just, about morality, about “fairness” and “justice”, that preceded this televised massacre have yielded to the influence and the diktats of McCarthyite Zionism. The truth is revealed. We have seen, for instance, what they have done to universities in this country [Israel – trans.], starting with the militarization of academia and academic research, campaigns of violent arrests (which existed previously but under the pretext of legality, whereas now no such pretext is needed). We witness actual, overt academic oppression as they willfully ignore professional academic behavioral standards and freedom of expression in broad daylight. We see the USA, Germany, France, Britain and other western nations interfering in their universities, denying the right of freedom of expression to all except for those in power. All this calls into question the universality of academic freedom as well as the discourse of equality and justice. Zionism, moreover, benefits from anti-Zionism which it equates with anti-Semitism in order to silence “moderates” and in doing so, erects an ideological barrier against any consideration of the Palestinian cause, in order to prevent thinking of a way out of the crisis beyond an exclusionary and substitutional logic toward the Other. The farcical show put on by the US Congress criticizing university presidents, resulting in the resignation more than one of them, has created a punitive system that works on behalf of the occupier. The “policies” that have labeled symbols such as the keffiyeh — or the Arabic — language as provocative have allowed events such as the shooting of Palestinian youths in Vermont, resulting in one of them being paralyzed. All this state terrorism, this thought terrorism — the real, ongoing threats that we thinkers and researchers face today — result in greater determination on our part to refuse white racist violence, to hold fast to our human principles, to refuse genocide. The questions do not end here: there are struggles over truth, over numbers, over the validity of data, over scientific accuracy, over dates by voices that knowledge ultimately determined by the occupying forces. Here in our Palestine, the failures of our times are embodied
There is a loss of moral compass, starting with the colonial-settler project and genocide, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, racism, and continuing with what is termed “religious extremism” within and outside of the state, including the violence of Christian Zionism, where the concept of Amalek legitimizes our extermination via religious teachings and allegations. The continued massacres and even the so called “cohabitation” and peace, reconciliation, the rapprochement between the two people, pluralism and multiculturalism along with other forms of racist psychological warfare are playing with our minds and persons with the goal of depriving us of life and land, and are used for the type of silencing that legitimizes death and makes it inevitable, including death in “the tank.” Except that today we refuse not to bang on the tank. We decide to forcefully and solidly build liberation discourse and movements, and to end the deep-seated occupation. In 2023 truth stood naked in Gaza, and exposed the genocidal war, which included cutting off water and medicine, eviscerating human beings, trees, rocks. The genocide deployed psychological warfare, with its mercurial local and foreign dynamics, with racist and criminal standards, with its violation of the body, of life, leading up to death of Palestinians Genocidal methods, in Israel’s genocide on Gaza, are numerous. They include forced migration and extermination and deliberate targeting and stripping of men. Not that they can ever diminish the dignity of the Palestinian man, but precisely because they have failed to paralyze Palestinian society’s historical and current refusal of eradication. These methods prove their systematic ideological terror and underscore their intention to target our social fabric and societal bonds, to dehumanize our life force and our love, to deny childhood from our children, to target parenthood, to destroy the sanctum of the homes that bring us together and provide us with shelter, to level those homes, the schools, the universities, the hospitals, the playing fields, the cities, the mosques, the churches. They eradicate universal ethics (if there were ever any, because what is happening in Gaza has exposed the truth), to the point that state terrorism is now clearly revealed, visible and audible to all. Today we are left to wonder: when will the global appetite for genocide against the Palestinian who refuses to accept the laws of the jungle and rises up in resistance, refusing eradication, be sated? Resistance carries a price, and our history and our present bear the marks and the burden of a terrible pain.
***
But today we urgently need the following: First, Palestinians’ refusal of humiliation is our identity, our journey and our future. Our heads are held high, as we proclaim in our slogan, “Raise your voice high, death rather than humiliation, raise your voice, raise your voice, the one who cheers doesn’t die.” Second, Palestinian’s love of life is our path forward, a uniting factor that brings us together psychologically, morally, intellectually and politically. Because as Rafif Zeyada said, “We teach life” and as Mahmoud Darwish said, “We love life even if we have no access to it.” Third, to stress the importance of strengthening Palestinian awareness to the ways of the enemy’s propaganda. As Waleed Daqqa taught us, “we mustn’t forget that this is a war against the intellect”. Fourth, to analyze and to challenge, both intellectually and politically, the question as to how the world, with all its laws, standards and ethics, failed us and ignored our voices in the midst of the unseen massacres of Deir Yassin, El Tantoura, Lod, and others, up to Gaza today, even as the massacres are broadcast on television and other media. We need to resist the politics and discourses that enable and support these violent narratives. Fifth, to stress the importance of collaborative thought in order to build practical, analytical and liberatory policies today. I insist on the need for an abolitionist politics, which warrants profound and serious study such that we may offer liberatory political and intellectual analysis. The banging on the walls of the tank has become a matter of life and death in the midst of this carnage. Among the questions we pose ourselves now is: how is each of us to act in this moment? Where do we start and how do we proceed in our abolitionist and liberatory struggle in face of the Zionist genocide? Are there moral-political tenets we need to adopt together? How do we consistently stress today, together, that we refuse to accept militarized approaches and criminal judicial pursuits? Stop the massacres, stop the genocide! How do we struggle together, struggle along with unity and wisdom as we were taught by Kanafani. What is the role of each one of us in this struggle?
***
What should we do? What kind of movement do we initiate politically, intellectually, in terms of research, curriculum? How do we explain our narrative in the face of state terrorism and its supporters and those who work tirelessly to block the critical output of our intellectuals, thinkers and researchers, in the face of those who work in opposition to our resistance, whose condemnation of our efforts builds a barrier to understanding our political project? Our cause today, yes, our Palestinian cause, is the battleground that will define where our times are heading in terms of morals, in terms of work and life. We need to expose this history and today’s destructive political reality and we need to dismantle both of them. We need to dissect state violence in the Palestinian coroner’s morgue, we need to dissect those behaviors that were brought to attention by my dear colleague, the Gazan doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta, along with our activists, our children, our men, our women, our correspondents. We need to expose the authorities and the destructive powers of the state and its allies as so many of our activists and researchers, our pundits, our politicians have, and we need to bang on the walls of that tank… Yes, we need to bang on the walls of that tank not only to offer an alternative critical analysis of the facts, but in order to liberate our people and our Palestine, and to put an end to this genocide.
אני מצרפת מכתב שכתבנו להנהלה בעקבות פרישתה של נאדירה שלהוב קבורקיאן אתמול. המכתב עוסק בהתנהלות האוניברסיטה בעניין, ומביע חשש לחופש הדיבור, החופש האקדמי ובטחוננו כולנו.
Prof. Abigail Jacobson Eliahu Eilath Chair in the History of the Muslim Peoples Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Academic Director, MA Honors Program in the HumanitiesThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem abigail.jacobson@mail.huji.ac.ilhttps://shamash.academia.edu
29 באוגוסט 2024
לכבוד:
פרופ’ אשר כהן, נשיא האוניברסיטה העברית
פרופ’ תמיר שפר, רקטור האוניברסיטה העברית
אנחנו, חברות וחברי סגל אקדמי ומנהלי באוניברסיטה העברית, למדנו בצער רב מהתקשורת על פרישתה של עמיתתנו פרופ׳ נאדרה שלהוב קבורקיאן מהאוניברסיטה העברית, בתום עשרות שנים של לימודים, הוראה ומחקר. פרישתה באה בעקבות מסע השחרה בן קרוב לשנה, שכלל מכתבים פומביים של הנהלת האוניברסיטה ושל קולגות שביקשו להוקיע ולנדות אותה, פרסומים בתקשורת ואף חקירה משטרתית מתמשכת ומשפילה (כולל מעצר למשך לילה שלם). ללא קשר לעמדותינו במקרה הפרטי הזה, אנחנו רואים בפרישתה ובמהלכים שהובילו למהלך זה מכה אנושה לאוניברסיטה העברית ולחופש האקדמי בה.
לאורך הדרך, החל מראשית הפרשה בחודש אוקטובר, התייצבה הנהלת האוניברסיטה לצד מאשימיה של פרופ’ שלהוב קבורקיאן ובצעד חריג השעתה אותה מהוראה בסוף הסמסטר הראשון. כל זאת מבלי לבחון את דבריה לעומקם ותוך יציאה בהצהרות לתקשורת שפגעו בה, בשמה הטוב ובבטחונה האישי. התקשורת הוציאה משפטים מהקשרם, עיוותה את דבריה וייחסה לה דברים שלא אמרה, והצהרות האוניברסיטה גינו אותה תוך הפרה בוטה של כללי הביקורת המקובלים במסגרת מחקר אקדמי חופשי. במסגרת אקדמית כשלנו ניתן להתמודד עם עמדות שונות, חלקן ביקורתיות ומטלטלות ולא בהכרח נעימות לאוזן, להביע חוסר הסכמה במידת הצורך אך עדיין לשמור מכל משמר על חופש ביטוי ועל חופש אקדמי. במקום להאזין לדבריה של פרופ’ שלהוב קבורקיאן ולהתמודד עם טענותיה לגופן, בחרה ההנהלה להתמודד עם חצאי אמיתות והכללות גורפות. כאשר היא הוזמנה לחקירה משטרתית על סמך מאמריה האקדמים (דבר אבסורדי לכשעצמו), האוניברסיטה התנערה ממנה בפומבי ואף נציג של האוניברסיטה לא התייצב לצידה במשך אף אחת מחקירות המשטרה המשפילות שאליהן נדרשה להתייצב. גם עתה, הידיעה על פרישתה של פרופ’ שלהוב קבורקיאן נחגגת בתקשורת, בתוספת שקרים וחצאי אמיתות ותוך פגיעה בפרטיותה.
אנחנו מבטאים בזאת את אכזבתנו העמוקה מהנהלת האוניברסיטה, ואת חששנו לבטחוננו ולבטחונם של עמיתינו ותלמידינו בימים הקשים שעוד צפויים לנו. הסיום הכואב של פרשה זו הוא מסר משתיק ומשתק עבור חוקרי וחוקרות האוניברסיטה כולם, לא כל שכן עבור חוקרות וחוקרים פלסטינים. כפי שנכתב במכתב חברי הסגל להנהלה באפריל, השנה זו היתה נאדרה שהועמדה ללא מגן על ספסל הנאשמים, ומחר זה יהיה כל אחד ואחת מאיתנו.
After many years of failure, the BDS movement has started to see success on Australian campuses.
One avenue of entrance is Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), a not-for-profit trade union for Australian tertiary education. NTEU has close to 30,000 members and offices on campuses at most universities.
In a regional vote in mid-July 2024, the NTEU ACT Division, an NTEU branch, held a General Meeting to consider supporting an Academic Boycott of Israel, in line with the guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and to make that a policy recommendation to NTEU National Council. More than 80 percent of members supported the motion titled “NTEU support for the Academic Boycott of Israel.”
The motion explains that “On 7 October 2023, Hamas’ terror attacks on Israel resulted in the killing and abduction of Israeli civilians. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has condemned these attacks, called for a ceasefire, and called for the release of hostages. The Israeli response to the 7 October 2023 attacks has also drawn widespread condemnation. The International Court of Justice found on 26 January 2024 that South Africa had established a plausible case that Israel has engaged in genocide in Gaza. On 20 May 2024, prosecutors from the International Criminal Court announced they were seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leaders and Israeli leaders, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel has also failed to comply with international law in relation to an International Court of Justice ruling on 24 May 2024 that Israel must immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah.”
The motion goes on to note: “Since the beginning of the conflict, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. At the same time, education has been systematically destroyed in Gaza. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed, and many educators and students are among the casualties. The destruction of Palestinian education has been referred to as a ‘scholasticide’. Palestinian civil society has called on the international community to respond to ongoing oppression and occupation by engaging in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).”
There were earlier signs that a change was coming. The official position of the NTEU, titled “NTEU Statement on Israel and Palestine,” from October 20, 2023, states that “NTEU supports the policies and statements… that call for an end to violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and for the creation of an independent Palestinian State. The quest for a comprehensive peace between Israel and Palestine, based on the co-existence in conditions of security of two sovereign, independent and viable states, requires renewed international attention and support as a highest and urgent priority.” NTEU supports “An end to the occupation of Palestine; Development of a just and sustainable peace in accordance with resolutions 242 and 338 of the UN Security Council; In accordance with 2 above, removal of illegal settlements, withdrawal of Israel from all Palestinian lands and the dismantling of the separation wall; and Immediate recognition by all countries of Palestine as a sovereign state with East Jerusalem as its capital, confirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in a freed and independent Palestine.”
The NTEU calls the Australian Government to “Recognise Palestine as a sovereign state with East Jerusalem as its capital; Until such time as Israel has withdrawn from all Palestinian lands, all illegal settlements are removed, and the separation wall is dismantled: Cease the strengthening of trade relations, including any Free Trade Agreement, with the state of Israel; and Suspend all military and intelligence ties and co-operation with the state of Israel; and Restore aid funding to the occupied Palestinian territories and immediately implement an additional and comprehensive humanitarian aid program for Gaza following the destruction of water, electricity and medical services and the resultant humanitarian catastrophe. Further, NTEU supports the work of Union Aid Abroad (APHEDA) and calls on all members to contribute through APHEDA to the aid effort in Gaza and the West Bank by donating.”
Later, the NTEU posted an announcement titled “University action and solidarity with Gaza: Supporting human rights and academic freedom,” published on May 10, 2024, stating that the NTEU “calls for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, condemns the use of starvation as a weapon, urges the Australian government to halt military trade with Israel, and advocates for a two-state solution to secure a just and sustainable peace.” NTEU “condemns the horrific impact of the war on the higher education community in Gaza, and recognizes the responsibility that Australian universities have to a global higher education community that champions human rights, peace, and democratic debate. We therefore, call on Australian universities to: Explore and implement practical support measures for affected Palestinian educational institutions, their faculties and students, such as the provision of resources, partnerships and institutional scholarships.”
In particular, “Critically review, disclose and divest from research and commercial partnerships with firms and entities directly involved in military support for the war on Gaza. Ensure that Enterprise Agreements and policies protecting academic and intellectual freedom are clearly communicated and vigorously enforced.”
Equally important, the NTEU states that it demands to “Critically review any university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which itself constitutes a challenge to academic freedom.”
Moreover, NTEU is currently running a national campaign to encourage UniSuper to divest from Elbit Systems. UniSuper is a not-for-profit company whose shareholders are 37 Australian universities. It is governed by a corporate trustee named UniSuper Limited. All the Australian universities are represented on the Consultative Committee of UniSuper. In a public letter to Peter Chun, the CEO of UniSuper, NTEU wrote, “We note that UniSuper has a small investment in Elbit Systems, a weapons company that is one of the largest suppliers of military technology to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Given that the IDF is responsible for the death of over 35,000 civilians in Gaza since October last year, UniSuper’s holding in this company is clearly inconsistent with the fund’s values as an ethical investor, and can only damage UniSuper’s hard-won reputation. Based on this, we the undersigned call on UniSuper to divest in total from Elbit Systems and to work with other profit-for-member super funds to divest from Elbit Systems.”
The NTEU ACT Division, as stated in the motion passed in mid-July 2024, has used the rather novel accusation of scholasticide. According to Scholars Against the War in Palestine, a pro-Palestinian solidarity group, scholasticide was first coined by Professor Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian expert on the laws of war at Oxford University. Nabulsi conceptualized it in 2009 in the context of the “Israeli assault on Gaza, Palestine,” but also with reference to “a pattern of Israeli colonial attacks on Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions going back to the Nakba of 1948, and expanding after the 1967 war on Palestine and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.”
As happens with the US campuses, Qatari money bolsters anti-Israel activism on Australian campuses. Jonathan Muir, former Australian ambassador to Qatar, spoke to the media in early 2022, noting that cooperation in education remains significant in the Qatar-Australia bilateral relations, undertaking various projects between academic institutions. More specifically, “Qatar and Australia have done a number of research projects – between Qatar Foundation, Qatar University, and about 23 Australian universities over the past few years.”
For an unknown reason, Australia’s NTEU adopted the false narrative of the Palestinians, which blames Israel for sabotaging the creation of a Palestinian state. The NTEU has never mentioned the numerous opportunities that the Palestinians had to create a state, nor the enormous effort that Iran mounted to sabotage the Oslo peace process and other opportunities.
Even worse, the NTEU has rejected the Working Definition of Antisemitism, which was adopted widely.
Instead of boycotting Israel, Australia and other Western countries should find out who is behind the calls to boycott Israel and turn the table against them. Better still, Western governments should censure Qatar for sponsoring terrorism.
NTEU ACT members vote to support Academic Boycott of Israel
Motion supported by more than 80 per cent at Division General Meeting
NTEU ACT Division held a General Meeting of members on Monday 15 July 2024 to consider whether to support an Academic Boycott of Israel in line with the guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and to make that a policy recommendation to NTEU National Council.
More than 80 per cent of members supported the following motion:
Motion: NTEU support for the Academic Boycott of Israel
Preamble: On 7 October 2023, Hamas’ terror attacks on Israel resulted in the killing and abduction of Israeli civilians. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has condemned these attacks, called for a ceasefire, and called for the release of hostages.
The Israeli response to the 7 October 2023 attacks has also drawn widespread condemnation. The International Court of Justice found on 26 January 2024 that South Africa had established a plausible case that Israel has engaged in genocide in Gaza. On 20 May 2024, prosecutors from the International Criminal Court announced they were seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leaders and Israeli leaders, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel has also failed to comply with international law in relation to an International Court of Justice ruling on 24 May 2024 that Israel must immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah.
Since the beginning of the conflict, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed.
At the same time, education has been systematically destroyed in Gaza. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed, and many educators and students are among the casualties. The destruction of Palestinian education has been referred to as a ‘scholasticide’.
NTEU policy positions on international issues are determined at the national level – by National Council as the NTEU’s highest decision-making body, and by National Executive in between meetings of National Council. A Division General Meeting can recommend policy positions for consideration by National Council or National Executive in accordance with Rule 21.1 and Rule 22.3 of the NTEU Rules.
NTEU ACT Division notes:
NTEU position on Israel and Palestine (NTEU Policy Manual, see ‘Israel and Palestine’ under ‘International’);
Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) statement on Gaza, noting that NTEU is affiliated with ACTU (ACTU statement, 22 April 2024);
Education International (EI) statement ‘Global Student Forum and Education International joint statement on Palestine protests on university campuses’, noting that NTEU is affiliated with EI (EI statement, 3 May 2024);
NTEU statement ‘University action and solidarity with Gaza: Supporting human rights and academic freedom’ (NTEU national statement, 10 May 2024); and
This meeting of NTEU ACT Division members, in accordance with Rule 21.1 and Rule 22.3 of the NTEU Rules, makes the following policy recommendation to 2024 NTEU National Council:
UNSW and University of Melbourne NTEU branches pass BDS motions in landslide votes
In landslide votes, they each called on their respective universities to endorse an academic boycott, divestment from weapons and arms manufacturers and end its relationships with Israeli universities, in accordance with the demands of Palestinians.
On Tuesday August 20, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) branch at UNSW passed a motion endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) while the Melbourne NTEU branch meeting took place today with 315 people present and a 97% vote in favour.
In landslide votes, they each called on their respective universities to endorse an academic boycott, divestment from weapons and arms manufacturers and end its relationships with Israeli universities, in accordance with the demands of Palestinians.
The UNSW deemed the motion as befitting an “urgency of action” given the International Court of Justice (ICJ) preliminary ruling that Israel is “plausibly committing genocide”, as well as the destruction of all universities in Gaza and the targeting of academics.
The UniMelb motion similarly noted that Israel is “committing genocide in the Gaza Strip” detailing the physical, human, scholastic, medical, and institutional facets, and backed the 19 July by the ICJ which confirmed that Israel is “responsible for the crime of apartheid” and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.
They emphasised the “direct involvement of Israeli universities in perpetuating genocide in Gaza and Israeli apartheid, through their roles in weapons research and military training”, and therefore UniMelb’s institutional ties to universities and “weapons manufacturers that arm or support Israel and other repressive regimes.”
As such, the “potential exposure of staff and students to moral and even legal censure” via this connection to war crimes was highlighted, and that because of the ICJ’s ruling for states, there is an obligation for all institutions to “not to enter economic, trade, or investment relations with Israel” that assist and maintain Israel’s occupation.
The UNSW NTEU demanded that Management:
Disclose total monetary figures awarded to UNSW in research contracts with complicit companies
Disclose subject matter of said research
Cut ties with all organisations enabling violence in Gaza
Establish international scholarships for Palestinians arriving from Gaza and partnerships with Palestinian academics and universities
Replace the funding of all staff whose positions depend on arms manufacturers with research for the public good
Ensure protest on campus and academic freedom in relation to Palestine is protected
The UniMelb motion shared the aforementioned demands, in addition to calling for:
Management to cut ties with and cease partnerships with “the defence industry/sector, the weapons industry and militaries in general”, including research collaborations
Amendments to its Gift Policy “to abstain from accepting gifts from donors in the defence sector”
Amendment to its anti-racism commitment by ending its adoption of the controversial (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism which conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism
Join the Scholars at Risk program and host endangered Palestinian academics
Both branches specified that this motion “does not prevent collaboration with individual academics” rather any collaborations with Israeli universities or those “officially mediated” by Israeli institutions.
The UNSW branch also reiterated that “support for Palestine and a commitment to justice is union business” having previously passed motions condemning the 2021 forced evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, and another in solidarity with Palestinians experiencing genocidal violence after the October 7 attack, calling for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid.
Following a Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009, UNSW was revealed to have ties to companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who have research contracts with the US Department of Airforce, Army, and the Navy, and institutional partnerships with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.Similarly, UniMelb is known to have ties to Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems, and partnerships with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.
When asked to comment on the passing of the motion, a spokesperson for UNSW said they are “committed to driving positive societal impact which includes contributing to the security and cohesion of Australia and the wider global community.”
They reiterated their unequivocal support for academic freedom and commitment to “conducting and managing research responsibly and with integrity” including in “joint research and collaboration with international research partners… critical to Australia’s success, security and advancement.”
“The University’s mandatory disclosure scheme for foreign affiliations and partnerships enables consideration of potential risks of our international engagements and fulfilment of our disclosure obligations to government.”
The spokesperson also spoke to the establishment of an Environmental Social Governance (ESG) Advisory Group which will “further focus alignment and reporting” on “environmental, social and governance goals and outcomes” as well as review “investment frameworks, supply chains, policies, procedures and practices… [and] more proactive and transparent reporting.”
David Gonzalez, NTEU branch president at UniMelb said in a press release that “staff and students have been surveilled, silenced and intimidated repeatedly by University management when expressing views against the death and destruction unfolding in Gaza.”
Gonzalez went on to address Chancellor Jane Hansen and Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell, asking them to end the University’s “institutional support of a genocide” and “stop asking staff to be complicit.”
Both NTEU branches concluded by calling for a widespread pressure campaign on the University and called upon NTEU branches across Australia to pass similar motions.
USyd’s NTEU branch passed a motion in favour of an academic institutional boycott of Israel on May 9 of this year, which also provided the basis for UniMelb’s motion.
‘No exchange with Technion, they help Israel drop their bombs’: Students protest medical school’s exchange program with Technion
The Faculty of Medicine currently has an exchange program with Israeli Institute of Technology – Technion – in occupied Palestine, the institute behind the D9 bulldozers used to demolish stolen Palestinian neighbourhoods and hide graves in Gaza.
At 1pm on Wednesday August 21, students and staff gathered in front of F23 to protest the University of Sydney’s ongoing ties with Israeli universities.
The Faculty of Medicine currently has an exchange program with Israeli Institute of Technology – Technion – in occupied Palestine, the institute behind the D9 bulldozers used to demolish stolen Palestinian neighbourhoods and hide graves in Gaza.
The rally opened with chants of “Mark Scott, can’t you hear, we won’t build your weapons here,” and “Uni is for education, not for Gaza’s decimation,” led by Midhat Jafri, a member of Students Against War (SAW). Rally chair, Vieve Carsnew (SAW) opened by linking the struggles of Indigenous peoples in Australia and Palestine, and condemning Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott for his response to the Student General Meeting where he called those in attendance “terrorist sympathisers”.
The first speaker, Daej Arab, spoke about his experience with the movement as a member of staff in the Faculty of Medicine. He said he was inspired by the students rallying outside F23, and that the rally had brought him out to do something he had never done before.
Arab condemned the medical school’s pretence that the exchange program is harmless, and called upon Mark Scott to listen to the results of the SGM, NTEU votes and the 250 medicine students who have petitioned to end this exchange agreement. He concluded by saying “Mark Scott will be gone in three years with his millions, but we will still be here supporting Palestine.”
The rally then marched down Eastern Avenue and Physics Road towards the Nanoscience building, where Jacob Starling (SAW) condemned Mark Scott for maintaining the many ties with Israel despite the high death toll in Gaza.
Starling linked the Gaza Solidarity Encampment to the introduction of the Campus Access Policy, saying that students have succeeded in scaring management, and continued to do so with the SGM, and the unauthorised stall day on July 31st. He further linked USYD’s ties to the Australian government’s complicity in US imperialism, saying that the true terrorist supporters are the bosses who ignore the workers and line their pockets with genocide. Starling ended by urging mass mobilisation, calling for “thousands of students to disrupt business as usual” until demands are met.
Vieves Carnsew then led the rally to the Susan Wakil building, where security refused protesters entry and locked the front door. The third and final speaker, Tawhid, a medicine student, opened by saying “I am disgusted I can study here in this building yesterday, but cannot protest here today.”
He explained the Gazan origin of the gauze he used in class the day before, mourning the fact that Gazan doctors don’t have access to their own invention and instead must use t-shirts and other material to tend to deadly wounds.
Tawhid condemned the virtue signalling of the University’s empty reconciliation with First Nations Australians, while profiting off of the genocide both here and in Palestine. He said that he “[does] not consent to [his] student fees going towards the killing of Palestinians” and hopes that he is the last cohort of this university to wonder who his fees are killing today.
After the rally, students and staff who were scheduled to use the facilities in the Susan Wakil building were outraged at the front door being locked. One student was seen in a verbal argument with security over the protest being locked out of the building.
More than 600 Melbourne University students attended a mass meeting and rally on 15 August to demand that the university end its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The meeting was the largest pro-Palestine action ever held on the campus.
Oskar Martin, Students for Palestine member and Indigenous socialist, moved the meeting’s only motion. It called on the administration to “fully divest from weapons companies and cut all ties with the state of Israel, Israeli corporations and Israeli academic institutions in line with the global boycott, divestment, sanctions movement”.
In his speech, Martin condemned the university, arguing that “what matters most to them is investments that boost their portfolios and power”. He then turned his fire on the officials in the University of Melbourne Student Union. “The student union didn’t want this meeting to happen. They previously backtracked on supporting BDS … but we kept fighting and we won!”
The student politicians who control the student union are mostly from factions associated with the Australian Labor Party. Despite their pretending to champion students’ rights and democracy, their approach to the special general meeting was one of sabotage.
Students for Palestine activists gathered the signatures of 1,200 students to demand the union call a special general meeting on Palestine, as the constitution requires. In response, the union hired lawyers from Labor-aligned law firm Slater and Gordon to find a legal basis to prevent the meeting happening.
The union has form in this regard. In 2022 the union adopted a motion in support of Palestine and the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. But after legal action brought by Liberal Party-aligned student Justin Riazaty, the union abandoned its position.
The lawsuit was settled in February this year after the union agreed, in the middle of a genocide, to rescind its support for Palestine and pay Riazaty tens of thousands of dollars. The student union has since sought to censor pro-Palestine activity in the union, prohibiting office-bearers from using their budgets and social media to oppose Israel’s genocide.
But their winning streak ended on Thursday afternoon. The student union officials watched, aghast, as hundreds of students descended on the amphitheatre wearing keffiyehs, waving Palestinian flags and holding placards inscribed on one side with “Unimelb must divest” and on the other “Students for Palestine”.
“Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest!”, the students roared. Cheers and impromptu speeches echoed around the amphitheatre as student union staff sought shelter behind a barricade they had set up to prevent Students for Palestine activists from reaching the stage.
From the stage, I opened the meeting (to the president’s horror), and the floor was ours. “Put your hand up if you’re here today to stand against Israel, to stand against our government, to stand against our university and to fight for a free Palestine!”, I asked the crowd. A sea of hands shot up in response. Chants of “Free, free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea” made the meeting feel more like an open-air rally.
At one point the student union president tried to address the crowd to explain why the union hadn’t done more to publicly support Palestine. She was heckled, “You voted to rescind the motion!”, and quickly vacated the stage.
Students hadn’t come to this action for mealy-mouthed words or empty platitudes. We get that from the federal Labor government every day. The crowd was electric with righteous indignation at our university’s complicity in genocide. Yasmeen Atieh, a Palestinian socialist and member of Students for Palestine, told the crowd:
“All over the world, students and workers have stood up to their universities and governments, declaring that we will not sit silent whilst people are being killed. Estimates are now that 186,000 have likely been murdered. From opposing the war in Vietnam to fighting against South African apartheid, students have been at the forefront of movements to spark change for decades. And today we’re making history again. Every one of us is making our voices heard, telling the university that it needs to divest. We are telling our government, the Labor Party, that we will not stop and we will not rest until Palestine is free.”
Students overwhelmingly voted up the motion, followed by a victory march to the vice-chancellor’s office, where we stuck our petitions to his office surrounds, warning: “We’ll be back!”
It was a victorious day for Palestine solidarity activism, and a credit to all the activists who refused to accept the union’s cowardice on Palestine, who refused to give up and who campaigned tirelessly to make the meeting a success.
Palestine and Inner West Council: a panel on the case for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
Arguing against the premise that Palestine is not an issue for local government and is about “rates, road and rubbish”, Griffiths said that in this case, rates matter more than ever, as they are going towards companies complicit in, and profiteering off of genocide in Palestine.
June 23, 2024On Sunday, June 23, Dylan Griffiths, an Inner West councillor in the Djarrawunang/Ashfield ward, Palestine Justice Movement, BDS Youth, and Unionists for Palestine held a panel at the Marrickville Pavilion advocating for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) within the Inner West council.Arguing against the premise that Palestine is not an issue for local government and is about “rates, road and rubbish”, Griffiths said that in this case, rates matter more than ever, as they are going towards companies complicit in, and profiteering off of genocide in Palestine.He then spoke about the two ceasefire motions before the Council in November and December 2023, and the open letter put forth by Antony D’Adam MLC and Greens Member for Newtown Jenny Leong. In particular, the stance of Labor councillors and their vote against the motion was spotlighted, with Green Left having reported details from the meeting, and the minutes publicly available. Griffiths then made the point that the final November motion (“Inner West Council supports ceasefire in Gaza”) only came to fruition after public backlash and the resignation of the Inner West Multicultural Committee.Tasneen Shubarta of BDS Youth explained their role in empowering youth to end the illegal occupation through “achievable wins” as strategically determined by the BDS national committee. This includes the implementation of Israeli Apartheid Week on university campuses and targeted boycotts against companies like Intel, Sodastream, and Elbit Systems. Shubarta described the BDS movement as “nonviolent and opposed to discrimination”, based on the South African model which saw divestment as a “recognised tool for change.”Hewlett-Packard (HP) was deemed relevant to the Inner West Council investment portfolio, as well as the Council being serviced digitally by HP. It was argued that if this is the case in one council, it is likely a standard across other councils. HP is directly involved in supplying technology to the Israeli military such as the tiered ID card system and is the exclusive provider of computers for the Israel Defence Forces.Shubarta stated that councils must:
Audit their investment portfolio, disclose and divest
Pledge for an apartheid free zone
Review policies and ethical practices on an annual basis
Ahmad Abadla, a Palestinian activist from Khan Younis, summarised the legal case for BDS, and spoke of his lived experience in Gaza, particularly four weeks before October 7 and the start of the genocide.“Gaza is beautiful and will remain beautiful despite the wholesale destruction,” Abadla said, elaborating on his amazement at the ability of Palestinians to find hope and a will to live.Abadla identified BDS as the best method for people in the West to help Palestinians, and spoke to its narrow beginnings, often deemed “fraught”. He spoke to the history of Jewish businesses being targeted by real antisemites in the 1930s and that Zionists have weaponised this trauma to limit the potential of BDS when it is “one of the most potent tools available for Palestine.”He continued that under the Genocide Convention, private individuals, corporate actors, and city councils must not be complicit, meaning “there may be real legal and financial consequences for being linked to Israel’s crimes and genocide against Palestinians.”Abadla implored the Inner West Council to adopt and call for BDS to prevent and punish Israel’s war crimes and genocide, concluding that “if Gaza doesn’t win, we will all lose our conscience and humanity”.Antony Loewenstein, local resident and author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (2023), who advocated for a BDS motion proposed in 2011 at the then-Marrickville council spoke next. Loewenstein argued that BDS scares those who oppose it, and so they believe that they can demonise it by framing it as anti-Israel and antisemitic. He then stated that change will not come from a sudden mass movement of Israelis from within, but from an outside movement like BDS applying pressure, similar to the outside forces that were one of the reasons for the fall of apartheid in South Africa. Lowenstein continued that Israel is petrified of BDS, since it spends massive funds to counter it, and is supported by the US, which has made BDS illegal in over 30 states. He elaborated on the reasoning for BDS, with corporations like Starbucks and McDonalds having supported Israel long before October 7, and that Israel is one of the top 10 arms industries in the world, battle testing its weapons on Palestinians before being sold globally to other countries to deal with their minorities. He spoke to the criticism of 2011 which viewed BDS as repeating the attacks on Jewish businesses like in Nazi Germany. Loewenstein asserted that BDS is “not going after Jewish people for being Jewish, but for associating and partnering with Israel”, and that all councils must have a Palestinian-led BDS movement. Lowenstein concluded by predicting that many Western states and elites will remain in support of Israel but that civil society and public opinion are being swayed, especially in the 18-35 age bracket.What are the next steps?
Inner West Council’s relation with HP will be questioned by Griffiths in a council meeting in August.
Community group Inner West 4 Palestinehas been formed and its first meeting will occur next Friday, June 28 at the Marrickville Library.
The process of auditing and disclosure of relationships with complicit companies.
A motion in the City of Sydney Council will be presented on Monday night at Sydney Town Hall, with a rally outside and bike riders cycling in support.
100 seats were filled up, as people stood outside on the lawns of the Marrickville Pavilion to listen to the panel. Many also participated in the open discussion at the end, including USyd student campers and National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members.
Various observations were made including that Marrickville is the only Australian city to have a sister city in Bethlehem.
The following suggestions were made to amplify BDS goals:
Mobilise community members to attend council meetings and pressure councillors or threaten the loss of their seat in the coming elections in September.
Check where your superannuation funds are being invested in.
Send submissions for the council’s anti-racism framework, emphasising all First Nations involvement and justice.
Rejection of the IHRA definition of antisemitism as it harms the Palestinian solidarity movement.
One NTEU member also suggested an on-the-spot vote for the council to adopt a BDS policy, which saw every attendee put up their hand in support.
It was concluded that contrary to as many would claim, local government has a significant part to play in pushing for BDS.
A livestream of the panel can be found on BDS Youth’s Instagram.
As an active affiliate of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and Education International, the global confederation of education unions (EI), NTEU supports the policies and statements of both organisations that call for an end to violence in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and for the creation of an independent Palestinian State. The quest for a comprehensive peace between Israel and Palestine, based on the co-existence in conditions of security of two sovereign, independent and viable states, requires renewed international attention and support as a highest and urgent priority.
NTEU supports:
An end to the occupation of Palestine;
Development of a just and sustainable peace in accordance with resolutions 242 and 338 of the UN Security Council;
In accordance with 2 above, removal of illegal settlements, withdrawal of Israel from all Palestinian lands and the dismantling of the separation wall; and
Immediate recognition by all countries of Palestine as a sovereign state with East Jerusalem as its capital, confirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in a freed and independent Palestine.
In accordance with these principle calls on the Australian Government to:
Recognise Palestine as a sovereign state with East Jerusalem as its capital;
Until such time as Israel has withdrawn from all Palestinian lands, all illegal settlements are removed, and the separation wall is dismantled:
Cease the strengthening of trade relations, including any Free Trade Agreement, with the state of Israel; and
Suspend all military and intelligence ties and co-operation with the state of Israel; and
Restore aid funding to the occupied Palestinian territories and immediately implement an additional and comprehensive humanitarian aid program for Gaza following the destruction of water, electricity and medical services and the resultant humanitarian catastrophe.
Further, NTEU supports the work of Union Aid Abroad (APHEDA) and calls on all members to contribute through APHEDA to the aid effort in Gaza and the West Bank by donating at https://palestinecovid.raisely.com
The “ACTU statement on Gaza” released 22 April 2024 which calls for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, condemns the use of starvation as a weapon, urges the Australian government to halt military trade with Israel, and advocates for a two-state solution to secure a just and sustainable peace; and
and reaffirms the Union’s longstanding view that the right to peaceful protest, freedom of expression, and academic freedom are fundamental to the character of universities.
NTEU joins with many others in Palestine, Israel, Australia and internationally to reiterate demands for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, unrestricted access to humanitarian aid, and the lifting of the siege of Gaza.
NTEU condemns the horrific impact of the war on the higher education community in Gaza, and recognises the responsibility that Australian universities have to a global higher education community that champions human rights, peace, and democratic debate.
We therefore, call on Australian universities to:
Explore and implement practical support measures for affected Palestinian educational institutions, their faculties and students, such as the provision of resources, partnerships and institutional scholarships.
Critically review, disclose and divest from research and commercial partnerships with firms and entities directly involved in military support for the war on Gaza.
Ensure that Enterprise Agreements and policies protecting academic and intellectual freedom are clearly communicated and vigorously enforced.
Critically review any university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of antisemitism, which itself constitutes a challenge to academic freedom
This constitutes the NTEU’s position and remains in place until amended, withdrawn or replaced by the National Executive or a future National Council.
We note that UniSuper has a small investment in Elbit Systems, a weapons company that is one of the largest suppliers of military technology to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Given that the IDF is responsible for the death of over 35,000 civilians in Gaza since October last year, UniSuper’s holding in this company is clearly inconsistent with the fund’s values as an ethical investor, and can only damage UniSuper’s hard-won reputation.
Based on this, we the undersigned call on UniSuper to divest in total from Elbit Systems and to work with other profit-for-member super funds to divest from Elbit Systems.
First Name * Last Name * Email Address * Mobile * 04xxxxxxxx no spaces State/Territory * – Select – Current Employer – None – Are you a member of UniSUper Yes No Are you an NTEU member? Email Opt In I would like to stay informed about the campaign to divest form Elbit Systems and other NTEU campaigns.
This campaign is hosted by NTEU. We will protect your privacy, and keep you informed about this campaign and others.
Scholasticide is a term that was first coined by Professor Karma Nabulsi, an Oxford don and Palestinian expert on the laws of war. She conceptualized it in the context of the Israeli assault on Gaza, Palestine in 2009, but also with reference to a pattern of Israeli colonial attacks on Palestinian scholars, students, and educational institutions going back to the Nakba of 1948, and expanding after the 1967 war on Palestine and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
The term combines the Latin prefix schola, meaning school, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Nabulsi used it to describe the “systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel” to counter a tradition of Palestinian learning. That tradition, Nabulsi observed, reflected the enormous “role and power of education in an occupied society” in which freedom of thought “posits possibilities, open horizons”, contrasting sharply with “the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, [and] the choking prisons”. Recognizing “how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution”, Nabulsi noted that Israeli colonial policymakers “cannot abide it and have to destroy it.”
During the latest Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, Palestine in 2023/2024, scholasticide has intensified on an unprecedented scale. Israeli colonial policy in Gaza has now shifted from a focus on systematic destruction to total annihilation of education. There is, indeed, an intimate relationship between genocide and scholasticide. Raphael Lamkin, the pioneering Polish Jewish legal scholar who first defined genocide and played a key role in inserting the concept into international law, saw genocide as an effort to “undermine the fundamental basis of the social order.” Key to this effort, in Lamkin’s conception, was the assault on the cultures of national, ethnic, racial, or religious collectivities.
Scholasticide is comprised of any of the following acts that entail systemic destruction, in whole or in part, of the educational life of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group: 1) Killings and assassinations of university and school teachers, students, staff, and administrators. 2) Causing bodily or mental harm to university and school teachers, students, staff, and administrators. 3) Arresting, detaining, and incarcerating university and school teachers, students, staff, and administrators. 4) Systematic harassment, bullying, intimidation of university and school teachers, students, staff, and administrators. 5) Bombarding and demolishing educational institutions. 6) Destroying and/or looting of teaching and research resources including libraries, archives, and laboratories, as well as facilities supporting the educational process, including playgrounds, sports fields, performance venues, cafeterias, and residence halls. 7) Impeding the import of essential materials for rebuilding damaged schools and universities. 8) Obstructing the creation of new educational structures. 9) Besieging schools and universities and using them as barracks, logistics bases, operational headquarters, weapons and ammunition caches, detention and interrogation centers. 10) Closing educational institutions and/or disrupting their daily operations. 11) Invading educational institutions. 12) Restricting faculty, student, and staff access to educational institutions. 13) Denying education to political prisoners including child detainees. 14) Hindering access to the internet, disrupting the provision of electricity, and preventing free entry of educational supplies including books and laboratory equipment. 15) Blocking the hiring of academic staff and denying them entry to their institutions through visa denial and other restrictions. 16) Revoking residency rights of students or academics who may pursue educational opportunities abroad. 17) Preventing scholarly exchange in all its forms. 18) Disrupting international and domestic funding of educational institutions. All of these acts are currently being carried out to devastating effect in Gaza, Palestine. They are part and parcel of the genocidal effort to impede the reproduction of the social order in that occupied territory, as part of a broader effort to render it uninhabitable, hence paving the way for its comprehensive ethnic cleansing. Many of these acts have long been practiced against educational institutions and communities in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and some are experienced by Palestinian citizens of the Israeli State.
Qatar / QatarEducation key part of Qatar-Australia relations: envoy
Joey Aguilar
Published on March 07, 2022 | 10:55 PM
Co-operation in the field of education remains to be a significant part of the Qatar-Australia bilateral relations, undertaking various projects between academic institutions of the two countries, Australian ambassador Jonathan Muir has said. Speaking to reporters recently, the envoy said Qatar and Australia have done a number of research projects – between Qatar Foundation, Qatar University, and about 23 Australian universities over the past few years. Citing the reopening of Australia’s borders to the world, Muir said that students in Qatar will have the opportunity to study in Australia, which he noted has the 3rd largest number of international students around the world after the US and the UK. “It is important that Qatari students and students in the Qatari community more broadly know that Australia is open for business. Like many countries, we were closed for a long time to new students for a couple of years. Australia is consistently ranked in the top 10 for students around the world,” Muir said. He noted that many students from various countries go to Australia – renowned for its excellent education system – taking up courses like engineering, marketing, and business, among others. Muir said that there are many potential scopes for co-operation between Qatar and Australia in the education field, as well as in trade and investment, and culture. Noting that Australia enjoys a “great trading relationship” with trade volume reaching QR5.5bn in 2021, he pointed out that Aviation services remained Qatar’s top export to Australia, bringing goods not only to the country but also through Europe and the Middle East. Qatar Airways, the envoy pointed out, plays a key role in this co-operation and has been bringing travellers from Qatar and other parts of the world. He urged citizens and residents to visit Australia this summer.
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israel-academia-monitor.com 