Letter Concerning LA City Council Threats to Student Free Speech

[Logo of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Image from http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/committees/academic-freedom/] [Logo of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Image from http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/committees/academic-freedom/]

Letter Concerning LA City Council Threats to Student Free Speech

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following open letter was issued by theCommittee on Academic Freedom of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA)]

July 1, 2014

Bob Blumenfield 
councilmember.blumenfield@lacity.org 

Mike Bonin 
councilmember.bonin@lacity.org

Joe Buscaino 
councildistrict15@lacity.org

Gilbert Cedillo 
councilmember.cedillo@lacity.org

Mitchell Englander 
councilmember.englander@lacity.org

Felipe Fuentes 
councilmember.fuentes@lacity.org

Jose Huizar 
councilmember.huizar@lacity.org

Paul Koretz 
paul.koretz@lacity.org

Paul Krekorian 
councilmember.krekorian@lacity.org

Tom LaBonge 
councilmember.Labonge@lacity.org

Nury Martinez 
councilmember.martinez@lacity.org

Mitch O`Farrell 
councilmember.ofarrell@lacity.org

Bernard Parks 
councilmember.parks@lacity.org

Curren D. Price, Jr. 
councilmember.price@lacity.org

Herb J. Wesson, Jr. 
councilmember.wesson@lacity.org

Dear Members of the Los Angeles City Council:

I am writing on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association to express our deep concern about proposed City Council resolution #14-0002-S67, introduced by Council members Blumenfield and Martinez. This resolution condemns the actions of a group of students at UCLA who in spring 2014 called on candidates for election to the Undergraduate Students Association Council to sign a pledge not to accept free or sponsored trips from organizations that they claim “marginalize communities on the UCLA campus.” The proposed City Council resolution also appears to call on the leadership of the University of California system to take action against the students who organized the pledge. We believe that this resolution clearly threatens the free speech rights of UCLA students.

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 3000 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.

The proposed resolution, generally referred to in the media as the Blumenfield resolution, is a response to a call by UCLA student activists for candidates for student office to sign what they refer to as the “Joint Statement on USAC Ethics.” Signers of this pledge, who we understand constitute the majority of candidates participating in the election, promised not to accept free or sponsored trips from three organizations or programs: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and Hasbara Fellowship. In addition, the pledge included a promise that candidates would not accept sponsorship of trips from any organization that “promotes discrimination” or that “engages in any form of systematic prejudiced oppression.” The activists argued that the political agendas of the named organizations or programs are tainted by Islamophobia, ties to anti-Armenian groups and/or other elements that they believe “marginalize communities on the UCLA campus.”

Whether or not one accepts the assertions about these organizations and programs made in the “Joint Statement on USAC Ethics,” we believe there are grounds for concern that the proposed City Council resolution threatens students’ free speech rights. We agree entirely with UC Chancellor Gene D. Block’s statement that “The decision to circulate this pledge and the choice to sign it or not fall squarely within the realm of free speech, and free speech is sacrosanct to any university campus.” Moreover, despite claims made in the resolution, no evidence has been presented that students who refused to sign the pledge were subjected to bullying or that the pledge is part of a larger campaign of intimidation; in any case, allegations of harassment or intimidation should be handled in keeping with the appropriate university mechanisms or by local police. The City Council resolution seems to characterize all criticism of Israel, or of certain organizations and programs, as intimidation and harassment, and its call on the UC administration to take additional measures to prevent what it terms “intimidation or harassment of any student” may thus undermine UCLA students’ free speech rights. It also strikes at the responsibility of institutions of higher education to encourage free and open debate among students and faculty, even on the most controversial issues.

We therefore call on you, as city council members, to oppose the Blumenfield resolution and any other resolution that threatens or violates the free speech rights of students in the University of California system.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown
MESA 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