Letter to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law regarding Attack on Title VI-Supported Middle East Studies Centers

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Oct 25, 2014
Letter to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law regarding Attack on Title VI-Supported Middle East Studies Centers

Letter to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law regarding Attack on Title VI-Supported Middle East Studies Centers

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association on 23 October 2014]

Kenneth L. Marcus
President and General Counsel
Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
via fax: 202-756-1301


Dear Mr. Marcus:

I am writing on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our grave concern about the contents and apparent intent of the report released by your organization in September 2014 titled “The Morass of Middle East Studies: Title VI of the Higher Education Act and Federally Funded Area Studies.” This highly tendentious document, which we believe to be replete with false or misleading assertions regarding the Title VI program and the university-based Middle East studies centers which it supports, insinuates that many Title VI-supported Middle East studies centers are “ideologically politicized institutions notorious for one-sided approaches hostile to the United States, the West and Israel.” Its real goal seems to be to restrict or even stifle the free and open discussion of, and the vigorous exchange of opinions on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college and university campuses, thereby threatening the principles of academic freedom and the autonomy of our institutions of higher education.

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 theInternational Journal of Middle East Studies and has some 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. MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom has since 1990 protested actions by governments in the Middle East and North Africa, including many of the Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Israel and Turkey, that we regard as infringing or violating the academic freedom of faculty, students and institutions of higher education. It has also regularly criticized infringements of, and threats to, academic freedom by colleges, universities, government agencies, legislative bodies and other entities in the United States and Canada. All of the committee’s letters since 2001 can be found athttp://www.mesa.arizona.edu/committees/academic-freedom/intervention/index.html.

Your organization’s report claims that “some Title VI programs reportedly continue to provide one-sided, politicized public outreach programs instead of educationally meaningful programming,” particularly with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite a 2008 Congressional mandate that such programs foster diverse perspectives and a wide range of views so as to generate debate on world regions and international affairs. Yet your report fails to provide real evidence to support that allegation or its claim that some Title VI-funded Middle East centers are guilty of what you term anti-Israel bias. Your report never bothers to define this term; instead, it cites one-sided and unsupported allegations made by critics of the Title VI program along with statements allegedly made by a number of speakers at panels on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sponsored by just one single Middle East studies center, UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES).

The quotations from speakers at CNES-sponsored events in your organization’s report have clearly been wrenched out of context and construed in ways that have little or nothing to do with what those who uttered them actually meant. As far as we can tell, these quotes seem to have been taken from “research” contained in a report released by the Amcha Initiative at the same time your document was issued, suggesting a degree of coordination between the two organizations. In its report the Amcha Initiative claimed that 93 percent of the public events concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict organized by CNES “exhibited bias against Israel.” As we discuss in a separate letter addressed to the Amcha Initiative, the methodology of its “study” of CNES’ public events is deeply flawed: it essentially defines any and all criticism of Zionism and of Israel’s policies and actions to be antisemitic. That report’s findings must therefore be deemed unreliable, and the same applies to the evidence of bias supposedly provided in your organization’s report, which relies so heavily on the Amcha Initiative’s defective and tendentious study.

In this connection we call your attention to a statement issued by forty professors of Jewish studies at American universities, including some of the most distinguished and respected scholars in that field, which characterized the Amcha Initiative’s assault on CNES as “deplorable” and declared that its “technique of monitoring lectures, symposia and conferences strains the basic principle of academic freedom on which the American university is built. Moreover, its definition of antisemitism is so undiscriminating as to be meaningless. Instead of encouraging openness through its efforts, AMCHA’s approach closes off all but the most narrow intellectual directions and has a chilling effect on research and teaching.” The statement went on to say that “AMCHA’s tactics are designed to stifle debate on issues debated in Israel and around the world, and the presumption that students must be protected from their own universities is misguided and destructive. Efforts such as these do not promote academic integrity, but rather serve to deaden the kind of spirited academic exchange that is the lifeblood of the university.” We wholeheartedly agree with these statements and believe that they also apply to the contents and apparent intent of your organization’s report, whose real goal seems to be to silence faculty and others at Title VI-supported centers whose views on Israel differ from your own.

Your report concludes by calling on Congress to either amend Title VI so as to eliminate what you claim are “heterogeneous (sic) and discriminatory presentations in Middle East Studies” or terminate the program altogether. As we have seen, your report fails to demonstrate that all or even some Title VI-supported Middle East studies centers have failed to meet the mandates of that program. At the same time, your demand that Title VI be defunded, apparently in order to serve your political agenda of stifling open discussion of an issue of critical national concern, not only threatens the academic freedom rights of the scholars and teachers at those centers but also does a grave disservice to the United States. Since 1958 the Title VI program has made it possible for many thousands of Americans to receive training in the languages, cultures, religions, politics and histories of the Middle East and other world regions and has thereby greatly enhanced this country’s understanding of places around the world in which the United States is deeply engaged. This country continues to have an urgent need for citizens who possess a substantive knowledge of the Middle East, and thus for the Title VI program which for over half a century has done an outstanding job of training them. Attacking this program, and even advocating its termination, as your report does, thus threatens the ability of the United States to understand the world and act effectively in it.

We therefore call on you to withdraw your deeply flawed report on Title VI-supported Middle East studies centers and to reiterate your commitment to academic freedom and the open discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college and university campuses. We also urge you to join MESA in advocating for the reauthorization of Title VI as a nonpolitical educational program of national importance, especially in this period of grave crisis in the Middle East.

Sincerely,

Nathan Brown, President
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