Texas A&M in Nazareth? Apartheid & More

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Nov 10, 2013 Israel
Texas A&M in Nazareth? Apartheid & More

Texas A&M in Nazareth? Apartheid & More

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) on 7 November 2013.]

When far-right Christian Zionists as infamous as John C. Hagee and Rick Perry and Israeli leaders accused of war crimes like Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu propose a project, any project, it cannot be good for Palestinians or for humankind.

The recently revealed project for establishing an Israeli branch of Texas A&M, the sixth largest university in the US, under the name, Peace University, raises alarm bells among academics, students and human rights activists alike. The attempt to build this campus in Nazareth, in particular, the largest Palestinian city in the Israeli state, makes this project far more suspicious and may hint at the political agendas behind the idea.

Perry, a controversial politician and a fanatic Christian Zionist, is of the view that Texas and Israel share the experience of "civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions.”

Hagee, an unapologetic extremist who supports Israel’s illegal colonies in the occupied territory, among other Israeli crimes and violations of international law, also believes that Hitler was sent by God to force the Jews to move to Palestine. Hagee, who once stated that non-Christians, those who “don’t confess [their] sins to God almighty through the authority of Christ” are “going straight to hell with a nonstop ticket,” is the one who proposed the idea of this “peace” university to Israeli leaders Netanyahu and Peres, who jumped on it, with Peres shrewdly suggesting to build it in Nazareth.

But the initial idea came from the chancellor of Texas A&M, John Sharp, a fervent supporter of Zionism and Israel who wanted “a presence in Israel” as further proof of his “kinship” with its regime of occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid.

This university would indeed provide ample evidence of this “kinship” as Israel’s regime has a lot to gain from it on different levels.

(1) Propaganda: While some may argue that opening a branch of a US university in Nazareth may provide Palestinian citizens of Israel with a concrete opportunity to escape the engrained and institutionalized racism of Israel’s academic institutions, the fact is this project is explicitly proposed to serve Israel’s agenda, not least of which in the propaganda domain where it is suffering considerably, as international public opinion polls reveal, despite its massive PR investment.

The apartheid dimension of the Israeli regime of oppression against Palestinians, and especially the fact that Israel maintains over fifty racist laws that discriminate against its “non-Jewish” citizens, the indigenous Palestinians, is increasingly being debated among academics and activists alike, raising the specter of comparisons to South African apartheid. Quite typically, Israel’s response to its plummeting reputation around the world is to try new media or public relations tricks to divert attention and cover up the state’s foundational apartheid. Recruiting help from far-right Christian Zionists from the US to use education as another smokescreen for apartheid must be understood in this context.

Israeli apartheid is arguably most “embarrassing” in the education sector. A 2001 study by Human Rights Watch of racial discrimination in Israel’s educational system concludes:

“The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes. At each stage, the education system filters out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students." 

(2) Undermining Independent Palestinian Education: Palestinian academics in Israel have worked for many years to establish the first Arab university in the country. But, as the Nazareth-based British journalist Jonathan Cook writes, “Successive [Israeli] governments have turned a deaf ear, fearful that an Arab university teaching in Arabic might make the local `minorities’ uppity.” An academic institute established by Palestinian academics a few years ago in Nazareth is effectively boycotted by the Israeli government, which refuses to provide it with any funding. If the Israeli establishment is so concerned about Palestinian education in Israel, as it now claims as justification for this Texas A&M branch, why has it so stubbornly resisted the idea of licensing a Palestinian university in Israel?

Exposing anachronistic racism, the chairman of the Israeli Council of Higher Education openly considers Palestinians in Israel as prone to violence and counsels improved educational opportunities for them to serve Israel’s overall agenda. He writes: “Anyone who cares about the State of Israel and wants a harmonious [read: submissive] society should care about minorities that represent 20 percent of the population. If [Palestinian citizens of Israel] don’t find their place in society with well-paid jobs, then there is expected to be greater friction.”

Yet another agenda motive is exposed in statements made by the deputy director of the Council. She states: "There’s a phenomenon where Arab students go abroad to study in Jordan and other countries in the region. We want to reduce that trend.”

(3) Further Colonization of Nazareth: By building Nazareth-Elit, conceived as a Jewish-only colony overlooking (i.e., suffocating) Nazareth, Israel was continuing with its racial policy that is as old as the state and implementing a foundational tenet of Zionism: maximum land, minimum Arabs. Palestinian citizens of Israel, and those in Nazareth are no exception, have been effectively caged in ever shrinking, disparate spaces surrounded by Jewish-only colonies intentionally built to prevent their contiguity and potential for demanding autonomy within the state. This Texas A&M satellite will most likely become yet another Israeli settlement, grabbing the precious little open space left in the city of Nazareth, further hindering development and exacerbating the already serious housing crisis.

Needless to say, Israeli leaders, the Council of Higher Education, the Texas A&M management and the Christian Zionist zealots behind this project have failed to consult with Palestinian educators, planners or community leaders to gauge their views on whether such a project would actually serve their true interests. Again, an Israeli-American project is being imposed from above on Palestinians in a patronizing and colonial attitude that is in line with Israel’s decades-old racist treatment of its Palestinian citizens. In light of the above, the A&M in the university’s name may stand for Apartheid & More in Nazareth.
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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