CAF Letter on SUNY Collaboration with Turkish Council of Higher Education (YOK)

CAF Letter on SUNY Collaboration with Turkish Council of Higher Education (YOK)

CAF Letter on SUNY Collaboration with Turkish Council of Higher Education (YOK)

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

Dr. Kristina M. Johnson
Chancellor
The State University of New York
chancellor@suny.edu

Dr. Maryalice Mazzara
Director of Educational Programs
Office of Global Affairs
The State University of New York
Maryalice.Mazzara@suny.edu

Dear Chancellor Johnson and Dr. Mazzara:

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our deep distress at the decision of the State University of New York (SUNY) Global Center in Manhattan to sponsor a panel discussion on 2 November 2018 in conjunction with the Turkish Council of Higher Education (known by its Turkish acronym as YÖK). Established in 1982 to oversee the Turkish system of higher education, YÖK has in recent years played a key role in the harassment and dismissal of thousands of Turkish university faculty and staff on the orders of the Turkish government, in egregious violation of the principles of academic freedom. In this context the panel’s title – “Searching for the Future, Preservation of the Academic Heritage in the Middle East” – is the height of hypocrisy. Given YÖK’s complicity in the purging of Turkish faculty and academic staff on purely political grounds, we do not believe that SUNY or any of its components should collaborate with it or treat it as a legitimate academic entity.

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 2500 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.

MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom and other organizations, including Scholars at Risk and  Human Rights Watch, have thoroughly documented the Turkish government’s relentless campaign against faculty, staff and administrators at that country’s institutions of higher education and its wholesale violations of academic freedom. We call your attention to our committee’s most recent letter on Turkey, dated 17 July 2018, protesting the dismissal by government decree of an additional 206 academic personnel from 63 public universities in Turkey along with another 52 academic administrative personnel from 24 universities, and to our many other letters denouncing the assault against Turkish academics and universities. All told, since the July 2016 attempted coup d’etat the Turkish authorities, with the active collaboration of YÖK (see for example http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20170715061722938), have dismissed nearly 6000 university personnel. Few of those dismissed have been restored to their former positions, and most of them are permanently barred from employment in the public sector. The government’s claim that all of these faculty and university administrative personnel are guilty of conspiracy against the state has been widely debunked; yet many of them face criminal prosecution simply for failing to conform to the views of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian president and ruling party.

It is therefore outrageous that any self-respecting institution of higher education would associate itself with, and thereby lend legitimacy to, YÖK, which has lost whatever independence and credibility it may once have had. Today this entity serves to provide cover for the Turkish government’s campaign to destroy the autonomy and integrity of Turkey’s institutions of higher education and to violate the academic freedom of its scholars and educators. We therefore call on SUNY to immediately cancel the 2 November 2018 panel discussion at the SUNY Global Center, to publicly disassociate itself from YÖK, and to vigorously reaffirm its commitment to the defense of academic freedom, in Turkey and elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Judith E. Tucker
MESA President
Professor, Georgetown University

Amy W. Newhall
MESA Executive Director

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412