Letter Concerning US Department of State Decision to Freeze Scholarships for Students from Gaza

[Logo for Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association. Image from MESA website] [Logo for Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association. Image from MESA website]

Letter Concerning US Department of State Decision to Freeze Scholarships for Students from Gaza

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association concerning the decision by the US Department of State to freeze scholaships for students from Gaza seeking to study in the West Bank.]

13 November 2012

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State 
2201 C Street NW 
Washington, DC 20520

Dear Secretary Clinton:

On behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), I write to express MESA’s concern about the recent decision by the US Department of State to freeze scholarships in the 2012-13 academic year for students from Gaza who seek to further their studies in the West Bank. According to Victoria Nuland, spokesperson for the US Department of State, the scholarships were suspended for this academic year so that American policy can be in compliance with ongoing Israeli policy concerning the issuance of travel permits to Gaza students.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. It is the preeminent organization in the field. The Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3,000 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.

Members of the CAF committee of MESA charged with monitoring infringements upon academic freedom see no justification at all for the US Department of State to strive for compliance with an unjust policy on the part of the Government of Israel. The blanket travel ban in place since 2000 against students from the Gaza Strip who want to study in the West Bank, and the more recent decision by the Israeli High Court that Israel is not obligated to allow Palestinian residents of Gaza to study in the West Bank and may treat them as “enemy citizens” for purposes of passage, constitute blatant discrimination based on national origin since they apply only to one community, the Palestinians. Moreover, the ban and the court decision violate the very human rights conventions to which Israel and the United States are party.

On numerous occasions, most recently in July of this year, CAF has written to the Israeli government to protest its ongoing violations of the rights of Palestinians to education and denial to Gaza students of the possibility to study in the West Bank. The reasons set forth in these letters are ones CAF members would have expected the US State Department to uphold when interacting with the Government of Israel.   After all, these are principles American citizens have long taken for granted as holding for themselves and ones US officials would defend in relations with other nations. Nothing in keeping with these principles justifies the compliance voiced by Ms. Nuland and reflected in the decision she defends. 

The US scholarship program, which has been in place for two years, has offered thirty scholarships annually to promising students from underprivileged backgrounds -- students who would not otherwise have had such a life transforming opportunity. Given that Israel approves approximately 4,000 travel permits per month for individuals from Gaza wishing to travel to the West Bank for medical or humanitarian reasons, we suggest the following: rather than suspend the scholarship program, work with the Government of Israel to expand the latter’s definition of “humanitarian” to include education

Israel’s violations against the rights of Palestinians are extensive, and the barriers it places before those who seek to further their education are a central part of that record. Friends of freedom, especially friends of freedom who claim to view all humans as equal, should have no part in furthering the discriminatory practices followed by Israel. Members of MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom and I therefore urge you to rescind this decision to suspend the scholarship program and pursue the step suggested above. That will allow the US to return to its time-honored position of defending the rights of all people to academic freedom.

We look forward to your response,

 

Fred M. Donner
MESA President
Professor of Near Eastern History, University of Chicago

Cc:
Minister of Education Gideon Sa`ad
Ambassador Michael Oren
Honorable George Mitchell
Ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro

 

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