In Defense of UCLA Professor David Shorter and All Scholars Who Support the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

[Image from USACBI.org] [Image from USACBI.org]

In Defense of UCLA Professor David Shorter and All Scholars Who Support the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following open letter was issued by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) on 1 May 2012.]

In Defense of UCLA Professor David Shorter and All Scholars Who Support the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel

In March 2012, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, the co-founders of an anti-Palestinian organization known as the “Amcha Initiative,” emailed a letter to California politicians and administrators of the University of California that accused UCLA Professor David Shorter of misusing campus resources for “the purpose of promoting the academic and cultural boycott of Israel” to students in his course, “Tribal Worldviews." That course, which was offered in winter 2012, explores indigenous struggles around the world and the use of global media and arts to mobilize for indigenous rights.  Dr. Shorter’s course site included dozens of links to websites, articles, petitions, and videos, as examples of indigenous and activist campaigns, including a link to the website of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), a campaign which Professor Shorter himself has endorsed along with hundreds of other faculty members from universities across the country.

Without directly communicating with Dr. Shorter, or speaking with his students or Teaching Assistants, the chair of UCLA’s Academic Senate,  Dr. Andrew Leuchter, reviewed the course materials at the behest of Amcha. He then conveyed to Prof. Shorter, through his department chair, that he should not repeat the “mistake” of providing the USACBI weblink, making no mention of the other dozens of sources on the course site.  As the sole reviewer of Dr. Shorter’s teaching, Dr. Leuchter did not involve the Academic Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom, nor did he account for the larger collection of materials on the course site offering a diverse range of perspectives. Among these were United Nations documents that framed the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous struggle, and thus clearly within the scope of the course, as Dr. Shorter explained to his students.  In an informal conversation, Dr. Shorter expressed to his chair that he understood the larger social context of the accusations and that the matter deserved further discussion.

Relying on one sentence from Dr. Shorter’s chair that described him as “understanding the situation,” Dr. Leuchter falsely communicated to Amcha, UC and UCLA administrators, and California politicians that Professor Shorter understood “his serious error in judgment has said that he will not make this mistake again.”  Responding to a subsequent press release from Amcha the next day, newspapers started calling Dr. Shorter asking for a comment on his recent disciplinary action and stance on Israel.  In response to this assault on academic freedom, Dr. Shorter has been joined by departments, colleagues, Deans and California Scholars for Academic Freedom in asking for an official review of the inappropriate way in which this matter was handled at UCLA.

All scholars and people of conscience must stand behind Dr. Shorter’s academic freedom to allow students to know about, and discuss, the Palestinian call for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.  USACBI encourages critical analysis of the impact of Israeli occupation and apartheid on Palestinian civil society, including students and educators and its ongoing racist policies against and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population. To this end, USACBI promotes the global, non-violent campaign of boycott and divestment that has expanded across U.S. college campuses, modeled on the campaign opposing apartheid in South Africa, which was seen as a just struggle on U.S. Campuses.

Yet it is apparent that faculty who allow their students to exercise their academic freedom to learn and think about political movements are being singled out and censored by campaigns of intimidation and harassment that aim to suppress and silence criticism of the Israeli state. The collusion of university administrators with such repressive and biased campaigns sends a chilling message to U.S. scholars that they do not have academic freedom in the case of teaching about Israel-Palestine.

Dr. Shorter and many other university professors have, in the face of political pressure, taken a principled and courageous stand by endorsing USACBI–a campaign based on recognizing the international rights for the Palestinian people, and holding Israeli institutions accountable for complicity in violations of international law. We uphold the academic freedom of U.S. scholars and students to discuss and debate the Palestine issue freely without threat of censure or reprisals.

We vigorously defend the right to education of Palestinian students and scholars in the face of daily assaults on their academic freedom, not to mention their freedom to live without occupation, violence, racial segregation, displacement, and humiliation.

USACBI encourages all faculty members of conscience to endorse its Mission Statement [2] and to exercise their academic freedom by linking the USACBI web site to their own university homepages. Doing so demonstrates that we will not be silenced and bullied into self-censorship, and that we support indigenous struggles for freedom and self-determination as well as the right to open academic debate and democratic faculty governance.

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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