Israel Denial

Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State

Cary Nelson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253045089
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A work of "rigorous intellectual inquiry" critiquing the BDS movement in academia ( Jewish Journal ). Israel Denial is the first book to offer detailed analyses of the work faculty members have published—individually and collectively—in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement; it contrasts their claims with options for promoting peace. The faculty discussed here have devoted a significant part of their professional lives to delegitimizing the Jewish state. While there are beliefs they hold in common—including the conviction that there is nothing good to say about Israel—they also develop distinctive arguments designed to recruit converts to their cause in novel ways. They do so both as writers and as teachers; Israel Denial is the first to give substantial attention to anti-Zionist pedagogy. No effort to understand the BDS movement's impact on the academy and public policy can be complete without the kind of understanding this book offers. A co-publication of the Academic Engagement Network

PART ONE

CONTRASTING AGENDAS: BOYCOTT VERSUS PEACEBUILDING

CHAPTER ONE

THE GOALS AND TACTICS OF THE BOYCOTT MOVEMENT

This is a global, systemic and ongoing campaign to undermine the State of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state…. On the practical level, the campaign seeks to harm Israel’s economy, its international trade (exports and imports), its ability to integrate within the global financial networks, investment in Israel, its integration within cultural and academic communities, and the freedom of movement of Israel’s leaders and their legal immunity…. The campaign is active throughout the world in a variety of domains and arenas in parallel, with mutual ties between them: conceptual-ideological, political-diplomatic, security-military, public, media-PR-consciousness branding, legal, judicial, economic, academic, cultural, and so forth. The delegitimization and BDS campaign is not managed as a hierarchical system with a central command and control but rather as a multidimensional and multi-arena network, which includes dozens of diverse organizations that share ideas and activities and maintain ties among themselves so that they can share resources and information, provide support, and consult and learn at numerous locations throughout the world.

—Assaf Orion and Shahar Eilam, eds. The Delegitimization and BDS Threat to Israel and Diaspora Jewry, 11-12

THE BASIC PROBLEMS WITH BDS

Before analyzing individual faculty contributions to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—contributions that are broadly devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish state and supporting BDS—I provide a brief overview of the movement’s fundamental goals and weaknesses. As has been pointed out repeatedly, BDS leaders are explicit about wanting to eliminate the Jewish state. BDS founder Omar Barghouti declares that “accepting Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ on our land is impossible” and that the only solution is “euthanasia” for Israel; California State University political Scientist As’ad AbuKhalil maintains that “Justice and freedom for the Palestinians are incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel”; and Electronic Intifada cofounder Ali Abunimah concludes that “Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’ is one with no proper legal or moral remedy and one whose enforcement necessitates perpetuating terrible wrongs” and “therefore it is no right at all” (44). The leaders of the BDS movement essentially speak in one voice. Nevertheless, there are certainly well-meaning faculty members and students who sign on to the BDS agenda out of frustration with a stalled peace process. They want to do something to voice that frustration, and they feel that Israel, as the more powerful party, is the most responsible of the two. BDS often seems the only game in town. They see no alternative form of action.

At the same time, no BDS spokesperson has offered a convincing explanation of the founding basis of the movement’s existence—the exclusive, exceptional charge that the state of Israel and its conduct is the world’s single most critical international political problem and its most serious source of human rights violations. Although the international left has had a single issue focus before—from the 1936-39 defense of the Spanish Republic to opposition to the Vietnam War to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa—the facts often warranted that emphasis. The facts about Israel do not. Attempts to explain the assault on Israel have sometimes taken on an absurdist character. When American Studies Association president Curtis Marez was asked why Israel was singled out for demonization, he quipped that “you have to start somewhere,” as though either the ASA or BDS’s international constituency was about to investigate, condemn, and police supposed injustices by other states. The alternative argument, that Israel is “Western-identified” and thus, unlike authoritarian states worldwide, deserves to be held accountable when genuinely monstrous regimes are not, is morally bankrupt.

Human rights standards are seriously undermined when the relative severity of violations is ignored or dismissed. As the BDS movement evolved, the war in Syria progressed, leaving half a million dead, among them several thousand Palestinians, with repeated use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad, mass bombing of civilians by both Syria and Russia, and the revival of medieval forms of torture and murder by ISIS. There has been no organized response by the international Left. It is widely considered pointless to ask “Why Israel?” The bombing of civilians and ongoing famine in Yemen is also largely met with silence. Nearly 100,000 children have died of malnutrition there. To claim under the circumstances that Israel is the world’s worst violator of human rights, as BDS advocates continue to do, is manifestly obscene. It depends on the fantasy that Israel radiates evil well beyond its borders, empowering a new version of a Jewish aim to control the world.

Those obsessed with the Jewish state, those who believe it is at the center of all the world’s ills, do not entertain any doubts about their fixation. Nonetheless, the point has to be emphasized, since it assumes the existence of a comparative judgment that is often discounted and that the facts would not support. The fallback position is to say that BDS is answering the unique 2005 call by Palestinian NGOs to support the boycott. Yet the contemporary boycott and divestment movement began in 2002, so the “call” of Palestinian civil society three years later did not bring BDS into existence, the call being instead an endorsement of political activity already under way. Any credible definition of human decency, moreover, would concede that the call of the dead and dying in Syria and Yemen on the conscience of the world sounds louder than BDS’s slogans.

BDS advocates three different categories of boycotts—academic, economic, and cultural. Economic boycotts in turn can be divided into those targeting products manufactured in Israel and those directed against investments in companies doing business there. Most local campus campaigns, organized by students and faculty, have urged divestment from stocks in those companies, though no responsible governing board is ever likely to give up its independent authority to manage university investments. Given that the votes are in that sense meaningless, despite the fervor with which the campaigns around them are waged, it is clear that a battle for long-term influence over hearts and minds is the real objective. Campaigns for a boycott of Israeli universities confront opposition not only from pro-Israel students and faculty but also from those who may have no special interest in Israel but believe open communication between faculty members worldwide is fundamental to academic freedom and thus oppose all academic boycotts. Even though the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) includes some anti-Zionists amon its national staff and elected leadership, it formally opposes all academic boycotts.

Both on campus and in professional and religious associations the BDS strategy is to put an anti-Israeli boycott on the agenda year after year. We now have examples in all categories of campaigns waged for a decade or more, often with acrimonious debates crowding out all other topics. Faced with a sound defeat, BDS forces nonetheless return the following year, often arguing that any effort to table the battle represents an effort to suppress their freedom of speech. On campus especially the debates are often based on identity politics, with pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students vying for premier victim status. Each group testifies to local evidence of discrimination and harassment and emphasizes how threatened and intimidated the debate makes them feel. Actual knowledge about realities in Israel and Palestine plays a decreasing role in these confrontations.

BDS drives on campus and in professional associations typically have a much harder time winning a membership-wide divestment or boycott vote, as opposed to one taking place only among elected student government or professional association representatives, especially if the entire student body or professional association membership is large and diverse. As votes at the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota in 2017 and 2018 demonstrate, however, years of campaigning can eventually win victories for BDS. A vote taken by a smaller elected group can be preceded by years of campaigning to get one’s allies elected. The group that campaigns hardest, often without disclosing their candidates’ real agenda, may win an anti-Zionist vote in a given year. BDS supporters often base their candidacy on another issue entirely, as when Stanford University’s David Palumbo-Liu ran for the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council as a purported champion of graduate students, whereas in fact his actual goal was to promote an academic boycott of Israel. In the book’s afterword I describe the organized effort to deceive members of the American Studies Association about candidates’ agendas. Both student governments and professional association governing groups end up partly composed of stealth candidates. The publicity produced virtually never acknowledges the deceptive political organizing that preceded the vote.

Faculty and students supporting BDS resolutions often say they want to pressure Israel to change its official policies. Yet BDS leaders have never agreed on a clear set of recommended policy changes, let alone a plan and a strategy for promoting them. Unsurprisingly, then, the BDS website has never advocated the kinds of practical policy changes recommended here in Chapters Two and Eleven. Oddly enough, BDS actually brags that it limits its demands to its three main goals—a right of return for all Palestinian refugee descendants, the dismantling of the security barrier or “wall,” and full rights for Israel’s Arab citizens. The first two are wholly unrealistic and the third deceptive about the status of Israel’s Arab citizens.

In order to win support for a boycott of Israeli universities, the goal most often promoted in academic associations, BDS allies always insist that they intend to boycott institutions, not individuals. In what amounts to a brainwashing strategy, BDS members repeat this claim over and over again, despite it having been steadily disproven since the movement began. Institutions are not composed of empty buildings. As living enterprises, they are comprised of the people who work in them. If you tell faculty members not to write letters of recommendation for students who want to study in Israel, as BDS does, the most direct impact will be on the students you are hurting, not on the schools they want to attend. If you urge colleges and universities to cancel study abroad programs in Israel, as BDS does, you are constraining student choice and academic freedom. If you oppose research cooperation between American or European institutions and universities in Israel, as BDS does, you are sabotaging individual and group collaborative research projects already under way as well as those proposed for the future. The list goes on, but the point is already clear: BDS’s assertion it doesn’t target individuals is not merely deceptive; it is completely false. I provide numerous examples of BDS-inspired assaults on individuals in the next section of this chapter.

The problem persists because BDS campaigns promote comprehensive hostility toward Israel; that encourages individual students and faculty to take matters into their own hands and carry out actions against others in their community. As I detail in the next section and note again in the chapter on Judith Butler, these practices began in 2002 and continue to the present day.

This record of BDS and BDS-inspired assaults designed to discredit, harass, intimidate, or deny the rights of individual faculty and students is matched, ironically, by a parallel lack of substantive actions that could actually make a positive difference. Throughout its history, BDS has neither done anything that actually helps Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank nor articulated proposals to do so. BDS support for the Palestinian narrative consequently has only limited political impact. Instead the movement offers students and faculty in North America and Europe opportunities to feel good about themselves, and to take symbolic actions that announce they stand for an abstract principle of justice.

One might reasonably conclude that the BDS movement’s most damning flaw is its failure to address the most pressing needs of Palestinians themselves. I certainly thought so for a time. But developments in the US and several visits to the Holy Land convinced me there was a still more destructive strategy in the BDS playbook—the anti-normalization campaign. That campaign intensified in the summer of 2014 when BDS worldwide joined forces with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to distribute its Guidelines for Academic and Cultural Boycotts. This document included a prohibition against any relationships that would have the effect of “normalizing” relationships with Israeli universities and other institutions. Hence, in addition to the steps above, a series of boycott components were listed, all to be initiated as soon as possible. Among them: academic conferences held in Israel would be prohibited; reprinting papers by Israelis in US and European journals would be disallowed; collaborative research and exchange and study abroad programs should be shut down; and artists should refuse to perform in the Jewish state.

Within a year the anti-normalization campaign in Britain and the US produced a particularly destructive campus project: mounting efforts to shut down invited Israeli speakers. As I will detail shortly, that project has been under way at least since 2010. Indeed anti-normalization created what masqueraded as high principle—a supremely moral basis for rejecting all dialogue with those sympathetic to Israel, even if they were working to promote the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. In 2018 former faculty member Steven Salaita took this further than anyone else, demanding that Zionists be expelled from any progressive meeting on campus or elsewhere. Whether working on climate change, health care, voting rights, union organizing, or better race relations, groups should cast out Zionists before moving forward.

But what in the West resulted in student/faculty rejection of dialogue and debate coalesced in the West Bank as something far more sinister—the condemnation of any and all contact with Jews or Israelis that could be construed as “collaboration” or “treason.” These are actions that Palestinian paramilitary and terrorist groups are willing to punish by death. Thus Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian faculty member who took a group of his Al Quds University students to Auschwitz, suffered an attempt on his life when he returned. That incident will be addressed more fully in Chapter Ten on “Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities.”

In 2016 I was part of a small group that met in Israel with the director of an NGO that selects a group of young professionals each year—fifteen Israelis and fifteen Palestinians—and trains them in negotiating skills. The goal is to prepare skilled negotiators to work together if the political environment should make it possible to revive the peace process. Among the assignments is to study the Northern Ireland peace process. The participants meet regularly for a year until a final session at a house on a windswept island off the coast of Sweden. That is the only building on the island and the session takes place in frozen conditions in the dead of winter. No one is inclined to go outside. The idea is to put the group in intense unbroken contact with one another. Then they practice negotiating a peace agreement, with the Israelis negotiating for Palestinians and the Palestinians negotiating for Israelis. The principle is that you cannot negotiate until you understand the other side, its history and self-perception, and the arguments it uses. I am permitted to talk about the program, but not name it. The whole process takes place in confidence—because the Palestinians who participate are risking their lives by doing so.

More broadly, the anti-normalization campaign makes it difficult—and often impossible—for ordinary Israelis and Palestinians to work together in practical ways to improve peoples’ lives. The main exception is the continuing cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. That cooperation is the clearest foundation for the work that would have to take place for a peace agreement to be implemented. And yet BDS advocates, including some named in this book, consistently condemn it.

That is what anti-normalization means in an environment that most in the West prefer not to confront in its naked reality. It would at best be ...