Birzeit University President's Response to CAF Letter Regarding Professor Musa Budeiri

[Image from MESA website.] [Image from MESA website.]

Birzeit University President's Response to CAF Letter Regarding Professor Musa Budeiri

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter is in response to the Committee for Academic Freedom`s letter to Birzeit University`s president, Khalil Hindi, regarding the university`s treatment of Professor Musa Budeiri.  You can read the original letter here.]

Committee on Academic Freedom

Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 

Dear Professor Donner,

Notwithstanding the great regard I have for MESA, I deplore the haughtiness of your letter. Sir, one is left with the impression that you think of the Middle East as your ‘subject’ in more senses than one.

Had you deigned to check with Birzeit administration, rather than setting yourselves up as judge and jury and, moreover, being quick to condemn, you would have learned the following.

The steps taken by Birzeit administration have been

  1. The administration (in fact, I took the decision myself) asked for the ‘offending’ poster to be taken down. This was done to calm tempers and avert the real risk of violent clashes on campus between opposing factions.
  2. The administration asked Dr. Budeiri to issue a statement clarifying his position. He issued a statement that ‘he meant no offence’. The administration issued a statement accepting his clarification.

  3. The administration allowed peaceful protest (demonstrations) by groups of students who wished to do so. For the most part, these were respectful (though, I am told, there were occasionally improper slogans calling for dismissal and punishment of Dr. Budeiri).

  4. The students accused of improper conduct in the initial incident and in the demonstrations have been referred to the University Disciplinary Committee, which has since been investigating the accusations diligently. Composed of rank-and-file faculty members, this committee is independent of the administration. ‘Drastic’ sanctions, such as dismissal for a term or more, have to be approved by the University Council (i.e., the administration). However, the Council has only the power to commute but not raise sanctions.

  5. I asked for Dr. Budeiri’s teaching schedule for next year to be checked to ensure that no student would be obliged to take a course with him. This was done in order to give freedom of choice, but also to avert the possibility of problems arising out of class boycotts. As it turns out, his schedule, which had been set a long time before, meets this criterion.

I do not know the source and purpose of the campaign of misinformation and disinformation being waged, if that is what we are up against. Assuming goodwill, the charges against the administration could be attributed to misunderstandings:

  1. The charge of failure to defend Budeiri may have arisen out of the resolute refusal by the administration to dismiss summarily, without due process, students accused of improper conduct, as has been noisily demanded by some enraged faculty. Instead, the accused have been referred to the disciplinary committee. I am convinced that this right and proper. We believe, perhaps naively, that summary justice is no justice.

  2. The charge of pressure on Dr Budeiri may have arisen out of officially requesting him to confirm that he is ready to assume his teaching duties next academic year, which he has done (he had declared repeatedly that he ‘cannot see himself returning to Birzeit’). I am convinced that this also right and proper.

The case raises serious and difficult general issues:

  1. Where and how to draw the balance between academic freedom and general freedom of expression (including protest by students)?

  2. What are the limits of academic freedom (every freedom has limits)? Do they extend beyond teaching, research and publications (do they, for example, extend to ostentatious display of provocative posters in public space?)?

  3. How to manage the evident rift in Palestinian society without curtailing freedoms?

For us, grappling with these issues is not just a question of intellectual debate, but also of every day practice in difficult, sometimes explosive, situations.

Let me be quite clear. Birzeit University has been built on solid foundations by the toil and sacrifices of many of people over many years; past and present students, faculty, staff and administrations (I am new here; I claim no credit). The foremost duty of the university community is to preserve this institution of which we Palestinians can justly be proud. The current administration, as well as, I trust, future administrations, will not allow infantile leftism, senile liberalism, or extremist Islamism to undermine this great institution, let alone causing it to be torn asunder by internecine strife.

At the risk of being accused of implicitly levelling a charge of hypocrisy, may I respectfully suggest that MESA turn its attention, more usefully, to the defence of the collective academic freedoms of the Palestinian people, which are being trampled upon daily by the Israeli occupation. In particular, would you care to mount a campaign to:

  1. Put pressure on Israeli authorities to grant work visa to academics holding international passports (including those of Palestinian origin) who wish to work at Palestinian universities. I am certain that you are well aware that such visas are nearly always denied.
  2. Put pressure on Israeli authorities to allow students from the Gaza strip to join universities in the West Bank. Again, I am certain that you are well aware of this gross violation of the right to education.

Finally, please rest assured that we will do our level best to defend academic freedom. We so cherish it that we are willing, albeit grudgingly, to be lectured on it by colleagues living under more fortunate circumstances.

Yours sincerely,

Khalil Hindi
President

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