There follows a series of three short papers delivered at the 2016 conference of the Modern Language Association, along with three letters written by individuals, discussing and explaining their support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign (BDS) called for by a number of Palestinian organizations. The papers are authored by three former presidents of other scholarly organizations that did, unlike the MLA, pass resolutions in support of boycott: Mark Rifkin (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association); Curtis Marez (American Studies Association); and Cathy Schlund-Vials (Association for Asian American Studies). They describe aspects of the debates within their organizations about who gets to speak (and vote) for whom (and what), and how appropriate it is for such bodies to express political opinions. The three letters by individuals (Tim Reiss, Jacques Lezra, Bruce Robbins) were originally written for the website “MLA Members for Justice in Palestine” (April, July 2016).
David Simpson
The Process of Indigenous Alliance Building: NAISA Joins the Boycott
Mark Rifkin, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
What does it mean for an academic association to join the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel? In the case of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), the organization itself does not engage in institutional relations with particular universities, except in terms of the committees that apply to host the annual meeting. Since the chances of receiving such a request from a university in Israel were and are quite slim, what’s at stake in NAISA committing itself to the boycott? The issue, actually, is even more focused: the governing council of NAISA can speak for the organization, but it’s statements are in no way binding on the activities of members. With respect to something like the BDS movement in its various manifestations, NAISA Council could only offer a suggestion to the membership, could only state what the Council took to be the principles and ethical considerations at play in the question of boycotting Israeli cultural and academic institutions. Again, then, why would NAISA “join” the boycott when the apparent material effects of doing so seem so minimal? That question, though, does not really capture the stakes for me, nor I think for the other members of NAISA Council who voted unanimously to support the boycott. The question guiding our actions was something more like, What does it mean not to declare ourselves in favor of the boycott (and implicitly of BDS more broadly)?
Before addressing this question, let me give you some background on how we came to endorse the boycott and what followed. We received a petition in mid-August 2013 from a substantial portion of the membership asking the council officially to declare for the boycott. According to the association bylaws, “The NAISA Council is empowered to speak for the association on public issues where these directly affect our work as scholars and educators. Such issues include, but are not restricted to, academic freedom and freedom of access to information.” The governing council meets once a month via skype, and we addressed the issue of supporting the boycott in several meetings that fall. Once we had decided to express council’s support for the boycott, we were left with the task of drafting a public statement, since we wanted to craft something that captured council members’ sense of the questions and issues at play rather than simply signing onto a statement written by someone else. A subcommittee drafted a statement, which we discussed and edited at length; we approved that final statement in early-December, and it was emailed out to the membership and posted on the NAISA website about a week later. The then-President and Secretary, Chad Allen and David Chang, received a good deal of nasty email in response, with the rest of us getting some but substantially less than they did. (Someone did donate money in my name to the Israeli Defense Forces, so I periodically would receive thank-you letters from the IDF.) The biggest consequence we faced was that the University of Texas at Austin, which was providing a large amount toward subsidizing the cost of our annual meeting that coming May, threatened to pull their funds, but in the end they did not (thanks to the excellent work of our host committee cochairs, Shannon Speed and Jim Cox). While some members may have been upset, there was little in the way of public condemnation and no interest in discussing the matter during the association’s regular business meeting during the annual conference that May. NAISA has continued to grow steadily since that time, continuing the pattern of increase from before the boycott. Whether we lost or picked up members from endorsing the boycott, I’m not sure, but it certainly has not been a negative factor in the well-being or scholarly reputation of the association.
Now to return to the question I posed before: What does it mean not to declare ourselves in favor of the boycott (and implicitly of BDS more broadly)? The call by Palestinian Civil Society for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel states:
These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
- Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
- Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
- Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
This is a call to recognize the self-determination of a people whose lands are illegally and colonially occupied by a government whose authority they do not recognize. It is a demand that the mass displacements that began with the Nakba and that continue to this day within the Occupied Territories and pre-1967 borders (including those of the Bedouin peoples of the Naqab) end and that those lands be returned. Like in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the BDS call combines a demand for recognition of a people’s (or multiple peoples’) traditional territories with acknowledging their full rights to citizenship within the state that has claimed authority over them and their lands, a right which Israel has never provided except in the most hollow, cynical, and tenuous ways. The issue, as understood by NAISA Council, was that of a settler-state that continued to exert illegitimate authority over indigenous homelands. To remain silent, then, was to condone this violence in the face of an active request for aid by those so occupied. Although not all Palestinians may understand themselves, their desired forms of political life, and their collective modes of placemaking as falling under the category indigenous as it has emerged within international movements, such articulations certainly have been offered in the past, are part of contemporary public and political discourses, and provide a legitimate framework through which to approach Palestinian histories and aspirations. What, then, is solidarity if not the refusal to turn away? What do our expressed principles and analyses mean if we are unwilling to put them into practice when called on to do so?
Here, I would like to print the NAISA statement in full:
The council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) declares its support for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
A broad coalition of Palestinian non-governmental organizations, acting in concert to represent the Palestinian people, formed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Their call was taken up in the United States by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. A NAISA member-initiated petition brought this issue to NAISA Council. After extensive deliberation on the merits of the petition, the NAISA Council decided by unanimous vote to encourage members of NAISA and all who support its mission to honor the boycott.
NAISA is dedicated to free academic inquiry about, with, and by Indigenous communities. The NAISA Council protests the infringement of the academic freedom of Indigenous Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the Occupied Territories and Israel who are denied fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly, which we uphold.
As the elected council of an international community of Indigenous and allied non-Indigenous scholars, students, and public intellectuals who have studied and resisted the colonization and domination of Indigenous lands via settler state structures throughout the world, we strongly protest the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and the legal structures of the Israeli state that systematically discriminate against Palestinians and other Indigenous peoples.
NAISA is committed to the robust intellectual and ethical engagement of difficult and often highly charged issues of land, identity, and belonging. Our members will have varying opinions on the issue of the boycott, and we encourage generous dialogue that affirms respectful disagreement as a vital scholarly principle. We reject shaming or personal attacks as counter to humane understanding and the greater goals of justice, peace, and decolonization.
As scholars dedicated to the rights of Indigenous peoples, we affirm that our efforts are directed specifically at the Israeli state, not at Israeli individuals. The NAISA Council encourages NAISA members to boycott Israeli academic institutions because they are imbricated with the Israeli state and we wish to place pressure on that state to change its policies. We champion and defend intellectual and academic freedom, and we recognize that conversation and collaboration with individuals and organizations in Israel/Palestine can make an important contribution to the cause of justice. In recognition of the profound social and political obstacles facing Palestinians in such dialogues, however, we urge our members and supporters to engage in such actions outside the aegis of Israeli educational institutions, honoring this boycott until such time as the rights of the Palestinian people are respected and discriminatory policies are ended.
While I cannot speak for the entire council, I can say something more about my own reasons for agreeing that NAISA should endorse the boycott. As many others before me have said, a certain exceptionalism haunts discussions of violence in Palestine and against Palestinians. In much public discourse, such violence doesn’t quite get to count as organized state violence, or an intensifying system of racism, or the expansionist aggressions of a settler colonial regime. Instead, it appears as national defense, or bringing civilization to the wilderness, or part of a tit-for-tat among putatively ancient enemies. All of these stories are colonial fictions. All of these ways of minimizing, dismissing, and forgetting the eliminatory project of the Israeli state with respect to Palestinian people/peoples leave aside the asymmetry of force employed among the parties, the dependence of the existence of the Israeli state on ongoing and proliferating Palestinian dispossession, and the sanctioning (if not active incitement) of Israeli violence through the various kinds of aid provided within extant imperial networks (of which the US is most culpable). To be for indigenous self-determination and to stand against empire in the present moment and not to take part in BDS seems to me incomprehensible.
With that being said, there’s one last thing that I should note. One of the questions that emerged among indigenous scholars based in the US in the discussion surrounding the boycott was, why Israel? Or, more specifically, why Israel and not here? Why is settler colonialism by Israel unacceptable and a site of proper international outrage and action, while the theft of indigenous lands in/as the US is unremarkable, or unremarked upon, or implicitly envisioned as somehow already completed such that Palestinians should be spared the extinction to which American Indians have been subjected. What does it mean to understand the ongoing violence there as related to the ongoing violence here, to put a commitment to indigenous self-determination in that instance in the service of commitment to it on these still very much occupied lands? When does the struggle against the colonial politics of Zionism open on to engagement with the colonial politics of US existence, and when does the visibility of the one collude in the other’s erasure?
The ASA’s Academic Boycott and the Right to Education
Curtis Marez, University of California, San Diego
In 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA), responding to a call from Palestinian civil society, endorsed a resolution boycotting Israeli academic institutions. According to its web site, the ASA
promotes the development and dissemination of interdisciplinary research on U.S. culture and history in a global context. Its purpose is to support scholars and scholarship committed to original research, critical thinking, and public dialogue. We are researchers, teachers, students, writers, curators, community organizers, and activists from around the world committed to the study and teaching of U.S. history and culture from multiple perspectives.
The ASA website goes on to say that the association advances and participates in public discussions relevant to the field. Indeed, the ASA has a long history of public engagement with pressing questions about the United States and its historic and ongoing relations with the world.
The ASA has made numerous public statements on contemporary issues, as in its support for women’s rights movements, its 2006 call for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, its statement in solidarity with the Occupy movement, and, more recently, a statement opposing violations of academic freedom in Turkey and a statement in support of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation. When selecting sites for its annual convention, the ASA also has a history of boycotting hotels with bad labor practices.
Since opponents of the ASA resolution questioned the democratic processes that resulted in its passage, it is worth rehearsing that history in some detail.[1] In 2013, the Community Activist Caucus of the ASA submitted a boycott resolution to the ASA Executive Committee (an elected body), which could have passed it or one of its own but decided it was an issue that should be discussed and voted on by the larger National Council (also an elected body) and the membership at large. So at the November 2013 national convention in Washington DC, the Executive Committee organized an open discussion attended by about 745 ASA members. Members distributed information about the boycott in advance and filled the hall with leaflets representing different perspectives. The moderators clearly explained the different actions that could be taken and the process for deliberation. To guarantee a fair and orderly discussion members who wished to speak put their name in a box from which speakers were randomly selected. Speakers were limited to 2 minutes, providing the opportunity to hear from forty-four different speakers during the session’s allotted time. The discussion was passionate but respectful. Speakers included students, faculty, past ASA Presidents, former members of the National Council, former and current members of the American Quarterly editorial staff, American Studies department chairs, the editor of the AAUP journal Academe, and an ASA member also representing the organization Jewish Voice for Peace. While speakers voiced different opinions, the vast majority spoke in support of the ASA endorsing a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.[2]
After the convention, the ASA National Council remained in session for the next eight days to draft a resolution. The result reflects the history and present state of conversations within the ASA, providing a principled position for the Association’s participation in the academic boycott while respecting the different positions of our membership on this issue. Which is to say that the resolution is directed at institutions and not individuals, so has no effect on individual scholarly exchanges; nor is it binding for ASA members. The ASA boycott is thus a largely symbolic gesture but one with real consequences in terms of breaking “America’s Last Taboo” on critical discussions of US support for the Israeli occupation.[3] Finally, the council’s resolution was submitted to the members for a vote, and with an unprecedented voter turnout, it passed by a two thirds majority.
In the last several decades, the ASA has welcomed critical analyses of the US that reach beyond national borders and and that include US foreign policy. The association’s commitment to the “transnational turn” has been accompanied by the comparative study of borders, migration, and citizenship. The ASA also has a history of critical engagements with Native American and indigenous studies that has increasingly come to shape and influence the field, and the ASA resolution thus emerged in relationship to the comparative study of Israeli and US settler colonialism. Finally, the resolution is in keeping with the ASA’s continuing support for ethical research, the right of scholars to dissent and to take public positions, and the right to education.
The resolution, for example, places particular emphasis on the educational consequences of the occupation. Its third clause reads:
Whereas there is no effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation, and Israeli institutions of higher learning are a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights and negatively impact the working conditions of Palestinian scholars and students.
In its statement on the resolution, the National council emphasized “the impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian scholars and students; [and] the extent to which Israeli institutions of higher education are a party to state policies that violate human rights.”
In terms of the right to education, the ASA’s boycott resolution resonated with the 2013 ASA conference theme, “Beyond the Logic of Debt: Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent.” My presidential address, subsequently published in American Quarterly under the title “Seeing in the Red,” focused on student debt, which among other things helps pay for US university collaborations with Israeli institutions.[4] In my talk I asked what is the relationship between the policing of campus dissent on the one hand, and the disciplinary force of student debt, on the other? In distinct yet related ways, both student debt and the occupation of Palestinian territories imperil the right to education, or what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “study,” a practice of collective thought and social activity irreducible to and in fact antagonistic to market logics. This point was suggested by a recent contribution to AQ by Rana Sharif titled “The Right to Education: La Frontera to Gaza.” Sharif’s essay was part of a forum based on a teach-in at University of Southern California (USC) organized by David Lloyd and Laura Pulido about “the connections and differences between the struggles of the Chicana/o and Palestinian peoples.” Sharif notes that the “cartography” of the Israeli occupation, with its “fragmentation of land due to borders, checkpoints, barricades, and the apartheid wall,” limits Palestinian students’ access to school. For instance, the wall blocks the path of 36 percent of students at Al-Quds University and prevents about 15,740 students from reaching their schools, while over 90 percent of An-Najah University students report missing classes because of checkpoint delays. Palestinian students are also frequently detained and harassed in response to their campus organizing efforts. Finally, Sharif argues that the educational system in the occupied territories often excludes knowledge about Palestinian history and culture: “The systematic denial by Israel of the histories of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, the fate of the refugees, and the destruction of Palestinian villages, amounts to an attempt at eradicating any cohesive Palestinian identity.” In this way, the educational erasure of Palestinian history and culture thus complements the material obliteration of Palestine.[5] Sharif builds on the work of Birzeit University’s “Right to Education Campaign,” and a recent review of stories on their website details the different ways that the occupation endangers Palestinian education: “Students in Detention”; “Closure of Educational Institutions”; “The Wall’s Impact on Education”; and “Incursions and Attacks” on Palestinian schools and universities. Their website also reports on how the Israeli blockade of Gaza has financially devastated both universities and students, who have increasingly gone into debt. Finally, Birzeit’s website features notices of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) endorsements from non-Palestinian student groups focused on the abolition of student debt. As I concluded in my ASA presidential address, the student-led BDS movement on college campuses could thus also be described as part of a larger movement to take some control over the student debt financing of settler colonial violence.
The ASA’s critics predicted that if passed the resolution would splinter the membership and destroy the association, but the opposite happened: in the wake of the boycott the ASA experienced a significant increase in members and fundraising. The ASA is now bigger and better than it has ever been. Although critics also charged that the boycott would limit dialogue, transnational discussions of Palestine, Israel, and the United States have significantly increased at the ASA national convention, including scholars from Israel/Palestine. At the same time, ASA members are increasingly active participants in important national discussions. While not alone in this regard, the ASA helped open up an unprecedented discussion of US policies with regard to Israel/Palestine, and in particular the state of education there. The ASA is well situated to help us understand the challenges faced by education under a Trump administration that has been partly modeled on Netanyahu’s Israel.[6]
In terms of education, Trump stands on the shoulders of decades of rightwing work to discredit critical thinking about race, gender, sexuality, and empire. His blasting of “political correctness” can be traced to the early 1990s when conservative intellectuals and think tanks used the concept to help defund university education focused on problems of inequality, especially racial inequality.[7] Similar logics were at play in attacks on Ethnic Studies in Arizona and elsewhere, as well as in the conservative, state-level gutting of public education, from colleges to K-12. Trump’s anti-PC rhetoric has drawn upon this longer history in order to shout down critical accounts of structural inequalities, while increasingly making schools spaces hostile to critical thinking and traumatizing and unsafe for children and youth of color. All the news stories of Trump-inspired hate speech in colleges, high schools and elementary schools feels like the culmination of a long reactionary march though the public school system aimed at reproducing exclusionary nationalist constituencies.[8] Which is to say we may be witnessing the “Israelization” of US education.
For their part, far right Israeli politicians see their interests and desires mirrored in the Trump administration. In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the Israeli cabinet approved 7,000 new settlement housing units in Jerusalem that had been frozen for years because of opposition from the Obama administration.[9] Israel’s leaders have been emboldened by Trump to push a new bill that would retroactively legalize illegal settlements. The bill is supported by far right politician Naftali Bennett, a Trump supporter and head of the far right Jewish Home Party. One of Israel’s most ardent and influential advocates of expanding illegal settlements, Bennett responded to the outcome of the US election by proclaiming that “the era of the Palestinian state is over.” He argues that Israel should annex 60 percent of the West Bank, effectively making a Palestinian state impossible.[10]
As education minister, Bennett’s budgets have favored religious over secular schools and religious studies over math and science.[11] He has also limited academic freedom by barring schools from hosting speakers critical of the Israeli Defense Forces. Perhaps most infamously, Bennett endorsed the banning from high schools of Boderlife, a novel by Dorit Rabinyan about a lover affair between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man. According to Haaretz, among the reasons cited for the novel’s ban “is the need to maintain what was referred to as ‘the identity and the heritage of students in every sector,’ and the belief that ‘intimate relations between Jews and non-Jews threatens the separate identity.’ The Education Ministry also expressed concern that ‘young people of adolescent age don’t have the systemic view that includes considerations involving maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the people and the significance of miscegenation.’”[12] According to Haaretz columnist Or Kashti, the banning of Borderlife reinforces “the separation between the two peoples that lies at the heart of the Israeli school system. One of the most tangible expressions of this division, aside from separate school systems, is the institutionalized and official disparity in the Education Ministry’s funding for Arab students in comparison to their Jewish peers – which in high school is about 30 percent greater for Jews.”[13] With the rise of Trump, I thus project that the postboycott ASA will unfortunately find many new opportunities for the comparative study of racial inequality in US and Israeli education.
Third World Solidarities: The BDS Movement and Asian American Studies
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, University of Connecticut
On 16 May 2013, Jonathan Marks (Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Ursinus College) penned an open letter titled, “To Professors of Asian-American Studies.”[14] Published in Inside Higher Ed, Marks’s critical dispatch focused on the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS)’s 20 April 2013 “Resolution to Support the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions,” wherein he quickly took to task the organization’s resolution process. Expressly, Marks negatively reviewed the resolution vote (which was “problematically” done by secret ballot); he then shifted his censure to encapsulate what he deemed a profoundly distressing silence involving both membership and interdiscipline. Averring that “not one Asian Americanist has voiced dissent” since the resolution vote, Marks wondered if those in the Association “knew about the BDS movement,” given that “one has to ignore the fact that not one person in your field has thought the resolution controversial enough to question.”[15] This assertion of nonknowledge and ignorance foregrounded an admittedly puzzling citation of blogger Byron Wong, a self-proclaimed expert on “Asian American intellectualism, activism, and literature.”[16] Acknowledging that Marks had contacted him after the AAAS passed its historic resolution, Wong proceeded to “clarify” the field’s “problem.” “Because the whole notion of “Asian American” was created by hippies (unlike the concept of “African American which probably extended back past the Civil War), its primary foundation is deconstruction and doubt.” Wong added, “Asian Americans often distrust Asian American professors – fair or not, many of them feel that these are the people who forced Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and David Henry Hwang on us.”[17]
Notwithstanding Wong’s confessedly sophomoric dismissal of Asian American literary studies (which, by the way, has been less than kind to Amy Tan), this perplexing reliance on the blogger, whose only “credential” appears to be the “racial” fact that he is Asian American, was rhetorically matched by Marks’s convenient utilization of curated anti-BDS quotes from the likes of Norman Finkelstein, Eric Alterman, and Noam Chomsky, who to varying degrees and ends decried the efficacy of such boycotts (though each supports the politics that animate them).[18] In concluding, Marks indignantly questioned the veracity of AAAS’s mission/vision statement and directed his ire at Asian Americanists, maintaining that the organization, “which claims to ‘act as an advocate for the interests and welfare of Asian-American studies,’ and consequently to act as an advocate for your interests and welfare, has hitched your wagon to a single deeply controversial strand of Israel criticism. Even if you do not agree with Alterman, Finkelstein, or Chomsky, don’t you think that unanimous agreement on the matter about which even Israel critics disagree vociferously is a sign of your field’s ill health?” Marks’s dire diagnosis of Asian American Studies was affectively matched by what he termed an irresistible question to field and practitioners: “Are you at all embarrassed?”[19]
David Palumbo-Liu quickly responded via a short yet powerful piece to Marks, published in Inside Higher Ed on 20 May 2013; as Palumbo-Liu succinctly noted, Marks’s “letter moves out from a critique of a single vote to a broad indictment of many fine scholars and teachers, indeed all of those in the field, impugning their moral character simply because their judgment did not coincide with your own.”[20] To be sure, Palumbo-Liu’s response in many ways offers a compelling “last word” on Marks’s inflammatory letter. And, if this presentation was concerned with “last words,” I could draw upon my intimate experience with the BDS movement: as one of the original twenty-nine signatories to the AAAS resolution to support the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, which not coincidentally occurred a AAAS conference in Seattle focused on the “Afterlives of Empire,” as a participant at that conference, and as an attendee at the resolution meeting, I could easily counter – by way of firsthand account and on-the-scene witnessing – Marks’s unsubstantiated appraisals of nonprocess, nonknowledge, and nonprotest.
Rather than focus on matters of procedure, however, and instead of concentrating on topics of resistance, I want to draw attention to Marks’ indiscriminate disavowal of field via ignorance, which directly accesses my current role as the president of the Association for Asian American Studies. Such dismissals manifest the ways in which the AAAS was attacked by those on the other side of the BDS movement. Accordingly, while the AAAS boycott was declared an anathema, the organization was nonetheless “small,” irrelevant, and easily contained “threat.” Such diminutive characterizations extended to the organization’s resolution process, which was time and again misreported as only involving twenty-nine signatories; such administrative categorizations conveniently disremembered the 800 other academics and/or Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies scholars who, at that time, had endorsed and/or are involved in the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (as an aside, we as an association have, since the 2013 resolution, shifted our resolution policy to render more transparent our respective processes). Marks redirected the careful deliberations that led to the resolution’s specific focus on Israel and Palestine to human rights violations in other places (the “why not boycott China” argument and the “why not boycott Sri Lanka” conundrum). Even more damning, the very worthwhileness of Asian American studies as a comparative, critical, and transnational interdiscipline – along with the worthiness of its practitioners – was in wholesale fashion suspected, distrusted, and dismissed.
Some – if not all — of these arguments may sound familiar. I would likewise maintain that such repudiations are quite familiar to those who study Asian American history, culture, and politics; these renunciations are equally recognizable to those of us in higher education. Co-opted by conservatives as a flexible solution to a black/white “race problem” and divisively utilized as “evidence” against the perpetual reality of systemic racism, Asian Americans have historically occupied a binaried position as “model minorities” and “perpetual foreigners.” Regarding the former, many higher education institutions (such as my own, the University of Connecticut), Asian Americans – due to an absence of disaggregated census data and an unspoken belief in model minoritization – are not considered an underrepresented population. And in terms of the latter, there are multiple examples of xenophobic violence and anti-immigrant sentiment to access: from the 1885 Rock Springs massacre to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, from Japanese American incarceration to Muslim American racial profiling, from state-sanctioned exclusions of Asian immigrants to state-authorized deportations of Asian American refugees, such foreign-hood has – more often than not – translated into civil rights struggle and human rights transgression.
While it is apparent from my presentation thus far that I am quite critical of Marks’s argument, I do think that the willful forgetfulness via the specificities of Asian America as a political formation alongside an intellectual unwillingness to seriously engage Asian American studies distressingly obscure the profound rights violations which animate the BDS movement: the illegal occupation of Palestine, the infringement of the right to education of Palestinian students, and the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars and students in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. This is not to suggest an alternative strategy in terms of the larger BDS movement; rather, my intent here is to recollect, remember, and remind us of the past/present political stakes of Asian American Studies as an interdiscpline; such memory work purposefully combats historical amnesias via a recuperative assessment of analogous histories and well-established solidarities.
Incontrovertibly, Asian American Studies as identifiable interdiscipline was born out of mid-century civil rights movements and emerged within the context of US war making abroad (most immediately the second Indochina War) and third world liberation at home. While this “field staking” may seem a bit of a digression from the overall focus of this panel – “association presidential perspectives on the BDS movement” – it is telling that Marks’s critique of Asian American Studies as a viable field of inquiry pivots on a problematic conflation of demographics (emblematized by the slippage between “Asian Americans” and “Asian American Studies”) and troubling abjuration of intellectual rigor. And, while Marks implicitly alleges to “chart new ground” via his attack on the AAAS vis-à-vis boycott, this disparagement is by no means unfamiliar to those in Asian American studies, ethnic studies, indigenous studies, and women’s, gender, sexualities studies; as practitioners in these interdisciplinary “identity” fields, we are more than accustomed – within a neoliberal higher education imaginary marked by increasingly corporatized “diversity management” – to accusations of nonrelevance, administratively driven planned obsolescence (via soft funding lines, joint appointments, and budget cuts), tenure/promotion denials, and shifting programmatic/departmental metrics. In sum, while the argument may seem new insofar as it converges on the BDS movement, the attacks against these fields is, quite frankly old hat.
To return to the stakes of Asian American studies vis-à-vis this contemporaneous BDS movement moment, and in the interest of laying bare the racialized (and I would stress racist) dimensions of Marks’ critique (particularly in terms of model minoritized silence and conformist thinking), one must necessarily delve into the very notion of Asian American as politically inflected identity category. From the outset, this category – despite Wong’s attribution that it emerges from a “hippie” think tank – was envisioned by activists as an open-ended panethnic, pan Asian idiom. Such open-endedness is quite lost on those who contend that Palestine and Palestinians fall outside the geopolitical rubric of Asian American studies as a field; this observation – replicated in Wong’s denial of “Asian American” as a real political identity – was reiterated in aforementioned criticisms of the AAAS that appeared in the days, weeks, and months after the boycott resolution. Such allegations of nonrelevance strike a strange chord when situated adjacent the larger history of AAAS resolutions, which consistently involved protests against militarization, imperialism, and mass violence. Like the MLA, the AAAS, issued resolutions opposing the war in Iraq; similarly, the AAAS expression of solidarity concerning Palestinian academic freedom at least carries some echoes with a previous MLA call by the delegate assembly to express solidarity with scholars of Palestinian literary scholars.
I purposefully end with the title of this presentation, which harnesses the solidarity-driven politics responsible for bring Asian American studies “into being.” Denotative of “unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest,” and suggestive of “mutual support within a group,” “solidarity” as political noun is predicated on the identification of activist commonality. Notwithstanding – as Lisa Lowe fruitfully characterized – the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of Asian America, and despite divergent histories with war, imperialism, migration, what undergirds “Asian American” as identarian category is a necessarily politicized understanding of solidarity. The term connects Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Pakastani, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao/Hmong, Burmese, Taiwanese, Thai, and Bangladeshi Americans (among others) and has expanded to include East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian American subjectivities. It connects through a shared but nonidentical, long durée histories of immigration, citizenship denial, de jure discrimination, forced relocation (internment, incarceration, and refugeeism), colonialism, imperialism, and militarization
Last, but certainly not least, “solidarity” as political noun also figures keenly in the institutional history of Asian American studies (and ethnic studies). It was, after all, due to the activist efforts of the Third World Liberation Front (a coalition of the Black Students Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, the Filipino American Students Organization, the Asian American Political Alliance, and El Rancimiento) at San Francisco State College in the late 1960s that we are arguably even here. To further illustrate this coalitional point, and by way of conclusion, what follows is a preamble excerpt from the Third World Liberation Front’s list of demands:
We offer a positive program. We are not anti-white; we are anti-white-racist oppression and it is this powerful and just determinant that is the genesis of our movement but the growth of the movement is affirmative; an affirmation of our humanity, our strength, our beauty, our dignity, and our pride. Our programs are working programs. Our direction is revolutionary. Our method is organization. Our goal is Third World Power. Our essence is a New World Consciousness of oppressed peoples.[21]
Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Timothy J. Reiss
Concerning the MLA, Israel, and BDS, I have more than once been told that the issue is not one for a language and literature professional association that is not a political organization. To take a Kantian aesthetic autonomy stance in this case is of course hypocritically selective, as we have taken many political positions over the years (not least over South African apartheid), when the issues pertained to our professional concerns. Apropos of BDS, these concerns are deep indeed, even could we ignore the daily tortures Israel inflicts on Palestinians, ongoing theft of land, orchards and other property and the often increased individual and collective military and civil assaults. But we cry about academic freedom as our particular (professional) realm, we cry about intellectual freedom more broadly, as do Israelis—for themselves (not least against BDS). We readily ignore the fact that Israel has forever restricted Palestinian rights to those freedoms and continues to do so. Everything we study touches how people think, how we act, morality, speech, worldly and spiritual acts, events, thoughts, deeds. These are, however we define it, what literature and the arts are about—who, what, why humans are—all humans. Israel has for decades been trying to prevent Palestinians from such expression. And while I believe those of us from “First World” cultures, above all European, to be responsible to a past for which we may not be responsible but from whose oppressions we benefit, silence on ongoing oppressions against which collectively raised voices can have a beneficent effect does make us responsible, now, for those oppressions.
Coming from a family associated with modern Israel from far before its start, I write this in great pain of spirit. My grandfather (born in the grand 1848) settled in Manchester from Heidelberg in his twenties or thirties to establish an English branch of a family textile business that prospered so well before World War I, that even when I went up to Manchester in 1960 and opened an account at the main Lloyds Bank for my student loan, an elderly manager called me in to offer all the “help” he could. Since the 1922 crash had destroyed the firm, and I knew nothing of this erstwhile wealth, my father had to resolve the mystery. My grandfather must have been quite enlightened. Having said he would pay for whichever of his children first wanted to go to University and could get in, he did not blink at this being his firstborn, a girl. She went on to become a quite well-known suffragette in the north, author of The Rights and Duties of Englishwomen, the first woman barrister in Manchester (and second in England) and a judge on the Northern Circuit Court. She took all her degrees at the University of Manchester, so I must think it there that she first met and became friends with Chaim Weizmann, a lecturer at the University from 1904 and living in the city for thirty years before going to Israel to become its president in 1949. I’m not sure when Erna went to London to study for the bar, but as Weizmann moved there too for a while during the war, perhaps they further solidified their friendship there. Certainly, during the Versailles conference she worked often with Weizmann as his assistant. I assume these ties continued during their years living in Manchester proximity, my aunts in Didsbury at the end of the Palatine Road out of the city centre, still known to the bus conductors of my student days as Yidsbury and the Palestine Road.
Meantime, my father, five years younger than she (with two siblings in between) and twenty-one at the war’s outbreak, was sent first to the Dardenelles before returning to the Western Front in 1916, where he remained at least until the first months of Paschendaele in July-August 1917. But he had joined what became the Jewish Legion early enough to march into Jerusalem with Allenby and his troops in December. Through the following year, my father led a company in the Legion, with both Ben Zvi and Ben Gurion under his command, promoting the former to sergeant—that, at least, was my understanding; my sister recalls it as the latter. What is certain is that in the late fifties and sixties, when my father had at least once and at times twice a year lengthy business in Tel Aviv, he would lunch with Ben Gurion, as old comrades in arms. (I have no idea what happened to any ties with Ben Zvi.) Weizmann, Ben Zvi, and Ben Gurion (like Herzl) were secular Zionists, two of them at least not just open to living equally and at peace with Palestine’s Arabs but, in Ben Gurion’s case, pushing quite hard for it. My own family, believing throughout those years in the right to a Jewish homeland, were never the fervid Zionists that these future leaders were, maybe because they had not known the pogroms of Central and Eastern Europe. But all believed strongly in a secular state and hoped it able to accommodate as equals those peoples of Palestine who remained in and on the land. The Six Days War dealt that ideal a fatal blow, as did the growing influx of ultra- and Orthodox Jews from Central Europe and the Soviet Union. I remember my father growing ever more depressed by his visits and, as a man who had also fought in World War II, when being a German Jew meant something quite other than what it had during the First World War, horrified by conduct that increasingly smacked of that whose evil, after WWII, allowed Israel to assert in the world’s eyes its moral right to exist. I cannot imagine what he and so many coevals would be suffering now. I cannot think they would do so in silence.
For my own part, touching present issues, I had to take another small step in responsibility eighteen months ago. The following letter to the Royal Society of Canada is self-explanatory and, I am told, bears repeating in the present circumstance [I omit its French doublet]:
To the Administration and Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada
I am proud to have been a Fellow of the Society since 1983, and a Life Fellow since 2007. I thank you all.
I am also a Jew.
And I learned a few days ago, after reading rather by chance the Society’s news, thanks to email, that in May the Society, with a ballyhoo signaled by the presence of Israel’s president and Canada’s governor general, has affiliated itself with its Israeli homologue. Was there any consultation with Fellows? My shame is nigh inexpressible.
The Society claims to represent academic freedom, of research, teaching, education in all its forms. I learn this affiliation at the very time when Israel has chosen to destroy yet again in Gaza more than 170 Palestinian schools, more than 90 schools “protected” by the UN, at least one University. Even if, as an academic Society, we claim to have nothing to say about the death and wounding of tens of thousands of civilians, of the destruction of their homes, mom-and-pops, factories, shops, parks, hospitals, of yesterday’s murder, without trial, of two of the people accused, up till now without public proof, of having abducted the three young men whom Israel used as an excuse for more than 50 days of attacks against Gaza, of the theft, towards the end of those attacks, of yet many more acres of Palestinian land, and of the collective punishment of the Palestinian people—all actions contravening international law, several UN Resolutions, and the most elementary morality, it is incumbent upon us to cry out against the deprivation of academic rights of which we claim to be protectors. Setting aside the recent, entirely deliberate, destruction (which, you may say, hadn’t yet happened in May), Palestinian teachers and research have always been oppressed by the Israeli government—difficulties or simple forbidding of travel, of participation in congresses, sharing in the same infrastructural and logistical benefits, quite simply, in the same academic freedom that Israel is constantly calling for for its Jewish citizens.
That our Society should have chosen to be affiliated with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (!!) ties us all directly to these terrorist and illegal Israeli actions. Was there any effort, when this affiliation was undertaken, to guarantee Palestinian academic rights? Has there been the slightest protest now? To my great regret, I have no choice but to resign my Fellowship in the Society.
Timothy J. Reiss
I need not say more on this topic. The outright, open military assault on Gaza may be paused. The rest continues in one form or another. This is why another topic needs addressing: the effort to suppress critical outcry by the utterly dishonest elision of criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism.
There are certainly those who identify as Jews and assert Israel to be acting in their name, whether Israeli or not. Doing so, they do help identify Israel and all Jews and repeat Israel’s prime minister’s claim to be speaking in the name of all Jews everywhere, as he did last year in Paris. He has no such right. Despite what such as Senator Feinstein and others in this country want to claim, to be a Jew is not to be an Israeli, just as to be an Israeli is not—unless Netanyahu and his cohorts have their final way—to be a Jew. This position stated by a Jew can elicit from the baying hounds of the JDL and its ilk cries that one is a “self-hating Jew.” I can but say that self-hatred should be the sentiment of those Jews who do identify with what Israel is doing in their name—and if I do not say “what Israel’s government is doing” that is because, tragically, such activities are far from just the government’s. To say all this is not to be anti-Semitic. It is to cry out at what a pariah nation is doing to another people, a people whose land and traditions it has stolen and continues to steal, a people all too many of whom it has killed, tortured, robbed, imprisoned and oppressed in countless ways and continues to kill, torture, rob and imprison—and for whom freedom of expression, freedom to meet, freedom to travel, freedom to engage in academic research and writing, freedom to teach that research and writing are mostly anguished dreams. The MLA owes them our voice.
23 April 2016
Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Jacques Lezra
Dear Friends,
You’ve asked me to join other members of the Modern Language Association who have written statements about BDS. I found it hard to take a public stand when the matter came up for me about two years ago: the fear of losing old, dear friendships weighed; of angering family. Things in Israel/Palestine have changed since then, and here too, for me. Thank you for asking again.
I support the BDS movement, and I believe academic organizations like the MLA should vote to endorse the BDS motions that will come before them. I support the movement for reasons similar to the ones that led me to support the boycott of South African goods during the years of apartheid. Then advocates of sanctions were addressing in one way the scandal of an openly racist regime that sought legitimacy from and financial stability in the international community. We hoped isolating, shaming, and to whatever extent we could manage financially constraining the apartheid regime would help bring about its end. Matters in Israel/Palestine are different. The dispossession of Palestinians and the juridical license to guarantee their subjection through any means necessary is not, with signal and repugnant exceptions, expressed or founded in explicitly racist terms. The moral claim upon us, however, is not different from the claim made upon us by the violence of the apartheid regime. Violence, systematic, structural and punctual, unceasingly exerted in every domain, supported economically and sheltered politically and militarily by the United States: this is the day-to-day experience of the Palestinian population under occupation. I feel a special obligation to reject this state of affairs and to express my solidarity with the people of Palestine, because the country I live in and pay taxes in provides this support to the Israeli government.
I’m asked questions about my position. Many of them are fruit of misinformation or fear. I answer them with some confidence and without claiming to speak for every supporter of BDS, a large, disaggregated movement with different tendencies and constituencies whose core principles and goals are routinely misunderstood and mischaracterized as eliminationist, anti-Semitic, naive, counterproductive, unfair, and so on. Here are the questions I have the greatest trouble answering, for myself and for others. Why would I, or any academic, support the boycott of academic institutions? Surely we should encourage dialogue with colleagues who, after all, may be as repelled as we are by their government’s actions—more so, since they live with their consequences intimately. Isn’t it exactly wrong, exactly counterproductive to close ourselves off to allies, or to the colleagues from whom we’d learn the most about the matter itself? Let’s say we granted that an economic boycott would serve to isolate, shame, and financially constrain the Israeli state and its backers in the United States. And let’s say that this might then have concrete political results. Fine. An economic boycott makes sense. But why the universities?
Because it is in this domain that, as academics, we have some expertise, and thus the greatest responsibility. Because the boycott may, as Lila Abu-Lughod has put it, push members of MLA “and their colleagues and friends in the US to think even harder about what else they might do about the relative privilege in which they work as academics and live as human beings. How could they help Palestinian colleagues achieve equality and dignity, not to mention helping other Palestinians?” (Abu-Lughod has in mind anthropologists, but I see no reason to limit her argument to anthropologists.) Because a boycott of Israeli academic institutions helps to bring into relief the role these institutions have in supporting everyday and structural violence in the Territories. Finally, because the boycott and the discussion it provokes show up the role that academic institutions in Israel and in the United States—including professional organizations—have in normalizing that support: in making it a legitimate part of academic life. It is not.
The answers don’t entirely satisfy. It doesn’t satisfy me, for instance, nor do I think it’s fully possible, to draw a distinction between individuals—colleagues I’d collaborate with outside of institutional frames—and the institutions to which they and I belong, which pay our salaries and furnish us with the material wherewithal to carry on these extra-institutional contacts. But distinctions don’t have to be drawn fully or categorically to be effective under particular circumstances. Not all answers will satisfy us fully. We bear this in mind; we acknowledge the provisionality and friability of our distinctions and the partiality of some of our answers; we hew to them as best we can. They’re enough for me.
Dear friends, I find it discouraging and enraging that I feel the need now to lay out my bona fides—I feel shame: as if my background, the religion that my parents and sisters and I practiced, the company I’ve kept and sought over the years, my politics, where I’ve lived and how I’ve brought up my children—as if any or all of this could serve to explain my support for BDS, or make my support appear more legitimate or excusable, or could shelter me from gross accusations of anti-Semitism, of ignorance, of naiveté, or should help to persuade others somehow to adopt my position. The situation in Israel/Palestine is on its face so clamorously wrong—the harm being done so clear, the imbalance of power so manifest, the complicity of many in the United States so brazen—that any such justification, any explanation that brings my life in particular into consideration, seems to trivialize my condemning that wrong.
So I won’t reach for those explanations; I won’t lean on my stories. The means available to those of us in the United States—individual academics and our professional organizations—who are repelled by the policies of the Israeli government and who wish to support the Palestinian population are few and likely to become fewer. BDS is one tool; it isn’t the only one, and it shouldn’t be imagined as an alternative, but as a complement, to the sorts of tools US citizens have, have used, and should marshal to seek change and redress in the US: the tools of democratic process, protest, information, education. I support the BDS movement because I believe that it, in combination with other means, will help to isolate the Israeli government internationally; to shame those in the United States and elsewhere who support Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories; to help disclose the role of academic institutions in making possible and palatable to some the Occupation; to apply some small, but perhaps increasing, economic pressure; and thereby help bring about a just solution to the conflict.
All my best,
Jacques Lezra
28 April 2016
Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Bruce Robbins
27 March 2016 marked the eighty-third anniversary of a mass rally at Macy’s in New York City to boycott German goods. Subtracting 1933 from 2016 does not yield a round or otherwise important number, but it’s an opportunity for an edifying moment of retrospect. The Nazis had just come to power, and the rally had been called in response to the steps they immediately took—steps we now see as prophetic– against Jews in the universities and against Jewish businesses. What’s amazing to discover (I found it in D.D. Guttenplan’s compulsively readable biography of I. F. Stone, which has become even more fascinating in the miraculous months of the Bernie Sanders campaign) is how many Jewish leaders back then refused to get involved in the anti-Nazi boycott. After all, they complained, why single out Germany? Won’t innocent people, including Jews, be harmed by such a boycott? And so on.
All political action has some quotient of unpleasantness attached to it. All political action is divisive. But if you manage to step back and consider what will be most meaningful when time has gone by, meaningful to oneself and to others, it may come to seem mean-spirited to have let those up-front disadvantages make your ultimate decision for you. Demonstrating against the Nazis was worth some inconvenience. One wonders what the people who said no to that boycott came to think of their position afterwards.
Reasons for saying “no” to BDS seem to me similarly shortsighted, but that is not to say they have no merits whatsoever or that all the arguments in favor are well-chosen or watertight. “The academy is firmly planted within the structures of power and domination in Israel,” one supporter of BDS wrote recently. This is true, of course. (One thinks of the Dahiya Doctrine of disproportionate force, which premeditates the committing of war crimes against Palestinian civilians, one representative product of Israeli academic brainpower.) But leading with it may be counter-productive. Some Americans, especially those with a weakness for the “people in glass houses” objection, will immediately say that the same holds for the American academy. This is unfortunately also true. They will then conclude that what the opponents of BDS are saying is true as well: that Israel has been unfairly singled out. I don’t believe that Israel has been unfairly singled out, but in order to avoid the appearance of unfairness it is necessary to admit something that many Americans will not want to admit: that Israel is guilty of doing certain things that the United States is not doing. There are plenty of such things. Talking about them does not let America off the hook for the things it is doing. You can’t weasel out of this by implying (as other supporters of BDS do) that the only reason we are not asking for a boycott of the US as well is that the boycott would not be effective because the US is too big to boycott. Especially after 2008, we don’t want to encourage the making of “too big to” arguments.
Racism has of course not disappeared from the United States. Far from it. But racism is not explicit government policy here, as it is in Israel. One of the problems with the overuse of the epithet “racist” by the pro-BDS side is that it severely discourages any effort to compare better and worse situations. If X is racist, it’s racist, and that’s all that needs to or indeed can be said. Like being pregnant, degrees are ruled out. But this is a fight that can’t be won without allowing for a discrimination of degrees. It is a fight whose center is Israel’s greatest economic, military, and political supporter, the United States. If this fight is going to be won, it must be won by arguing that Israel, while not unique in the world, contravenes values that Americans hold dear, like human rights, values that Americans insist on, even if not always successfully, in the conduct of their own government. It is necessary to say that the government of the United States is less racist than the government of Israel and that (along with US funding, of course) is an important reason why, for all our own faults and flaws, Americans should be engaging in a boycott of Israeli institutions.
Today, all but the most stalwart of Israel’s defenders have given up on the project of actually defending Israel’s misconduct. How do you defend the ongoing theft of land for settlements, the periodic butchery of children in Gaza, the refusal to allow Palestinians on the West Bank to use the water that lies under their houses and fields? Little remains for those who (however appalled they may be in private) refuse to speak up against such things except to attack the political forms and the vocabulary in which others do speak up. Like BDS. Or like the more general idea that the conduct of states can be judged by universal principles.
Elevated to the level of the nation, “people in glass houses” becomes the post-poststructuralist common sense that on matters like Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, there are no principles, only exceptions. All nations are founded on acts of violence for which there is no room or justification in the legal and ethical code that violence establishes. Everyone does it, in short, so why pick on Israel? In any case, Israel’s very survival is at stake, so all rules are off. Of course what they present as a matter of life or death is really only a matter of survival as a preferred and indeed privileged identity– “as a Jewish state,” meaning a state where Jews have special privileges and non-Jews can be treated not just as second-class citizens but as if they were not there at all. It is probably not the self-conscious espousal of Carl Schmitt’s philosophy that sponsors most cries of anti-Semitism (and how ironic would that be?), but I would bet that a closet Schmittianism is operating silently and potently in many of those who can’t quite articulate their resistance to BDS but don’t mind acting as if they didn’t have a horse in the race.
This is not to say that the anti-BDS side never appeals to principle. Whenever the subject of academics’ reluctance to engage in boycotts comes up, as it will, someone will mention academic freedom and our principled investment in the free circulation of ideas. Equally characteristic of us academics, however, is a still stronger disinclination to look into the material circumstances on which academic life depends, including the injustices of access that we know are there but would much prefer not to think about. The fear is that if we did think about them, the whole enterprise would suddenly start to look untenable. It’s these material circumstances that have to be contemplated, however, if we are going to understand why academic freedom is not a good argument against BDS. Yes, there is a legitimate anxiety that, in spite of the distinction between individuals and institutions, some hypothetical Israeli scholars might be harmed by BDS. That is possible. What is certain, on the other hand, is that Palestinian scholars are already massively and systematically being boycotted. The material circumstances of their work lives are such, what with checkpoints, visa delays and denials, and campus closures lasting weeks or months or even years, not to speak of university buildings bombed into ruins, that for them academic freedom is a joke. There is nothing to stand in the way of us doing something to stop it from being a joke. BDS is currently the best option we have.
14 July 2016
NOTES
[1] Edward Said’s experiences in another professional association provides a revealing framework for such procedural questions. In 1999 he was elected President of the Modern Language Association (MLA). In reaction, MLA’s official journal, PMLA, published a long letter to the editor from an Israeli professor calling for people to resign from the association because of Said’s supposed incivility in answering his critics. Said responded that the letter was “an extension of the Israel/Palestine conflict masked as an argument against public misbehaving; it is drenched in the usual hypocrisy about norms of conduct, a tactic employed by publicists who try to hide their real agenda” (Edward Said, letter to the editor, PMLA 114 [Jan. 1999]: 107). Said’s remarks have their parallel in the recent history of the ASA, where its critics raised numerous procedural questions despite the association’s scrupulously democratic process.
[2] This is in seeming contrast with the recent discussion of an academic boycott resolution at the 2017 MLA convention in Philadelphia. The MLA set up three microphones, one for pro-boycott speakers, another for antiboycott speakers and a third for the undecided. Yet witnesses report that antiboycott speakers spoke at both the anti-boycott and undecided microphones.
[3] Edward Said, “America’s Last Taboo,” New Left Review 6 (Nov.-Dec. 2000): 45-53.
[4] Curtis Marez, “Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt,” American Quarterly 66 (June, 2014): 261-81.
[5] Rana Sharif, The Right to Education: La Frontera to Gaza,” American Quarterly 62 (Dec. 2010): 855-60.
[6] For this reason, David Lloyd recently pointed out the irony of the MLA Delegate Assembly passing a resolution barring the association from endorsing an academic boycott of Israeli institutions at the same 2017 meeting where it passed another resolution condemning in advance Trump administration attacks on academic freedom:
During his campaign, it was Israel that Trump invoked as his model for successful racial profiling. It was Israel that he praised for having built a wall that denies freedom of movement on the basis of national origin, race and ethnic identity. Trump praised Israel’s discriminatory immigration policies that arbitrarily deny entry to Muslims and people of Arab origin. And under the Trump administration, there is no doubt that conditions for Palestinians will deteriorate with unprecedented rapidity. [David Lloyd, “’Progressive’ Defenders of the Racial State: Reflections on the Modern Language Association BDS Vote,” Mondoweiss, 9 Jan. 2017, mondoweiss.net/2017/01/progressive-reflections-association/ressive-reflections-association]
[7] See Christopher Newfield, “Inventing PC: The War on Equality,” Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), pp. 51-124.
[8] See two reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election,” and “The Trump Effect: The Impact of The 2016 Presidential Election on Our Nation’s Schools,”www.splcenter.org/news/2016/11/29/new-splc-reports-reveal-alarming-pattern-hate-incidents-and-bullying-across-country
[9] Isra Saleh El-Namy, “Analyst: If Trump Gives Netanyahu a Green Light ‘Palestinians Will Detonate in the Face of Israel,’” Mondoweiss, 11 Nov. 2016, mondoweiss.net/2016/11/netanyahu-palestinians-detonate/#sthash.DHrhpn80.dpuf
[10] Quoted in The Editorial Board, “Israel’s Alarming Settlement Bill,” The New York Times, 17 Nov. 2016, mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/israels-alarming-settlement-bill.html?ref=opinion&referer. And see Isabel Kershner, “Israel’s Right, Cheering Donald Trump’s Win, Renews Calls to Abandon 2-State Solution,” 14 Nov. 2016 www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-trump-palestinian-settlements.html
[11] Akiva Eldar, “Is Israel’s Education Minister Abandoning Secular Schools?,” Al-Monitor, 8 Dec. 2016, www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/12/israel-education-minister-bennett-ultra-orthodox-democracy.html.
[12] Or Kashti “Israel Bans Novel on Arab-Jewish Romance From Schools for ‘Threatening Jewish Identity,’” Haaretz, 13 Dec.2015 http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.694620
[13] Ibid.
[14] Jonathan Marks, “To Professors of Asian-American Studies,” Inside Higher Ed, 16 May 2013, www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/05/16/open-letter-about-israel-boycott-professors-asian-american-studies.
[15] Ibid. See also Rajini Srikanth, “Asian American Studies and Palestine: The Accidental and Reluctant Pioneer,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J Schlund-Vials (New York, 2017), pp. 132-49.
[16] See Byron Wong, “The Association of Asian American Studies and the boycott of Israeli Institutions.” 6 May 2013, www.bigwowo.com/2013/05/the-association-of-asian-american-studies-and-the-boycott-of-israeli-institutions/
[17] Ibid.
[18] To clarify, Marks issued the following assessment, which bears quoting at length: “Do you know about the BDS movement? Are you aware that the movement stands not only for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza but also for “respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba”? As Eric Alterman, who decries the “brutal treatment of the Palestinian people,” argues, the demand for the reintegration of “six or seven million Palestinians” amounts to the “demand that Israel, as currently constituted, commit suicide.” Norman Finklestein, one of Israel’s best known and harshest critics, has said that the BDS movement is dishonest on this score: “They think they’re being very clever. They call it their three tiers. . . . We want the end of the occupation, we want the right of return, and we want equal rights for Arabs in Israel. . . . They know the result. . . . You know and I know what’s the result: there’s no Israel.” Finally, Noam Chomsky, a supporter of BDS tactics properly applied, nonetheless thinks the “call of Palestinian society” to which the AAAS refers is “a gift to Israeli and U.S. hardliners” not only because it implicitly calls for the “destruction of Israel” but also because it targets only Israel and lets the United States, England, and other countries “where it is a hundred times worse,” off the hook” (Marks, “To Professors of Asian-American Studies”).
[19] Ibid.
[20] See David Palumbo-Liu, “An Asian-American Studies Professor Responds.” 20 May 2013, Inside Higher Ed. www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/05/20/asian-american-studies-professor-responds-israel-boycott
[21] Quoted in Gary Okihiro. “Third World Studies” in Theater and Cultural Politics for a New World, Ed. Chinua Thelwell (New York, 2016), pp. 48-49.
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