Why Anthropologists Should Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

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Nov 10, 2014 Palestine-Israel
Why Anthropologists Should Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

Why Anthropologists Should Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

By : Ilana Feldman and Lisa Rofel

On Israel and Palestine: Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israeli Institutions

In its best moments, anthropology is a discipline that is dedicated to social justice. It is a discipline that has historically stood up for marginalized peoples around the world. Anthropologists have not always lived up to these best ideals, of course, and the history of our discipline includes cooperation with colonial and imperial regimes and with war machines. Yet there have always been anthropologists who have criticized these relationships. And as a collectivity, we have generally looked back upon these moments of complicity with regret. The AAA has passed resolutions condemning academic research that lends support to the oppression of indigenous and subaltern cultural groups, as well as numerous motions that support human rights in a variety of communities and contexts.

Anthropologists once again have the opportunity to take a stance in support of the international, national and human rights of an indigenous group, in this case Palestinians. Palestinians have asked for solidarity in support of their efforts to end the 47-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to gain equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to resolve the more than 65-year Palestinian refugee condition, ongoing since the displacement and dispossession of the majority of the Palestinian population in 1948. Palestinians have asked the international community to join in non-violent struggle against these violations, and to engage in campaigns of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

There are a number of things the AAA, and individual anthropologists, can do to participate in this effort. We can, and should, condemn widespread Israeli violations of Palestinian academic freedom, the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land, destruction of archeological sites, and systematic and pervasive threats to Palestinian community and culture. We can, and should, condemn Israeli practices that deny international scholars and students access to research and teaching opportunities in Palestine, both isolating Palestinians and undermining scholarship. And we can, and should, support a boycott of complicit Israeli institutions as part of the international effort to apply pressure on Israel to end the occupation.

As an occupying power, Israel has responsibility to protect the lives and rights of Palestinians under occupation. Instead, it has pursued a vigorous policy of settlement building in Palestinian territory, expanded significantly after the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords that many hoped would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It has appropriated Palestinian water resources and destroyed agricultural land. It has progressively limited Palestinian movement and denied Palestinians access to each other. In Gaza it has imposed a blockade that is designed to keep the population suspended on the edge of a humanitarian crisis. This summer it launched its third assault on Gaza in seven years, killing over 2,000 people, largely civilians. International human rights organizations have accused the Israeli military of widespread war crimes in Gaza.

In the face of this continued and intransigent occupation, an overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society organizations and unions, including the Palestinian Council for Higher Education (CHE) and the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), have called for BDS, including an academic and cultural boycott. This boycott is of institutions, not individuals. It asks scholars not to accept invitations to give lectures, be visiting faculty, or attend conferences convened or co-sponsored by Israeli universities. For anthropologists, this would mean they can do field research in Israel, but not formally under the aegis of an Israeli institution. Anthropologists can continue collaborative relationships with Israeli scholars, but again, not under the aegis of an Israeli institution. The boycott also asks scholars not to arrange institutional agreements between their home institution and Israeli academic institutions or research institutes or to publish in Israeli academic journals sponsored by an Israeli university.

As scholars and teachers, members of the AAA are naturally concerned with academic freedom and may worry that their participation in a boycott would contravene those commitments. It would not. Not only is the boycott a statement in support of Palestinian academic freedom—which is consistently violated by Israel—it does not undermine the academic freedom of Israeli scholars. Any Israeli scholar, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, has the right to freely express their views and conduct their scholarship. The boycott does not deny Israeli scholars the right to attend conferences such as the annual AAA meeting, come to US universities, or publish their work; it only requires that they not do so as representatives or ambassadors of their institutions. The academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions is not based on race, ethnicity, or citizenship. It is not a boycott of individuals.

If the AAA adopted a boycott resolution, it would impose requirements on the association, but not on individuals. In their professional engagements members of the AAA would be free, as in all matters, to follow their conscience. The AAA recommends ethical practices, but does not adjudicate these matters. Boycott would be no different. For the association, its commitment would likely be to refuse in its official capacity to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions, or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives of those institutions or on behalf of the Israeli government, until Israel ceases to violate human rights and international law. By supporting a boycott, AAA members would put the power of our collective voice behind our commitment to justice.

Members of the AAA might expect Israeli universities to be vocal in their condemnation of violations of Palestinian rights, including to academic freedom. They are not. In fact, not a single Israeli university has ever spoken out against or condemned the occupation. Nor has the Israeli Anthropological Association. In the latest assault on Gaza, the Israeli government bombed 141 schools and utterly destroyed the Islamic U of Gaza. In the summer of 2014 alone, Israeli forces raided Al Quds U in Jerusalem, the Arab American U in Jenin, and Birzeit U near Ramallah—yet again. Since 2000, 185 schools have been shelled and scores of teachers and students have been shot at and arrested. Israeli universities did not speak out against these assaults.

Israel’s academic institutions are directly and materially involved in the occupation. Virtually all Israeli universities are involved in defense-related research with the Ministry of Defense. Ben Gurion U, Hebrew U, Tel Aviv U and Haifa U all made explicit statements of support for the summer 2014 assault on Gaza, including providing financial benefits to soldiers. Universities have been part of the colonization of Palestinian territory: part of Hebrew U’s campus is built on confiscated Palestinian land; Ariel U, the most recently accredited Israeli university, is located in a West Bank settlement.

Israeli universities also discriminate against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Some 20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, yet they make up only a tiny percentage of university faculty; these scholars face barriers to promotion, especially if they are known as critics of the government. Palestinian students in Israeli universities have less access than their Jewish counterparts to scholarships and campus housing, as a result of privileges offered to those who serve in the military. Their freedom of political and cultural expression is regularly curtailed. Israeli Jewish faculty members openly critical of state policies are also marginalized and threatened.

No Israeli university has spoken out in support of Palestinians’ right to education and academic freedom. Neither has the Israeli Anthropological Association. While Israeli scholars will certainly be inconvenienced by this boycott, through its restrictions on movement and repeated targeting of Palestinian universities the Israeli government has forced Palestinians to make a Herculean effort to pursue the right to education, let alone the right to academic freedom. The Israeli government also makes it extremely difficult for Palestinian scholars to travel abroad (since it holds the power to issue travel permits), for foreign scholars to teach in Palestinian universities, and for international students to study in Palestinian universities.

The US government provides enormous sums of money to Israel every year. US citizens are, therefore, not just witnesses to Israeli crimes, but complicit in them. For that reason an association such as the AAA—with American in its name, located in the US, and with a majority of its members US citizens—has particular responsibility to support the boycott. This support is an effective way to speak not only to the Israeli government, but to the US government. It is a crucial way to open up public discourse and to indicate that the US government needs to change its stance. It is about ending the silencing atmosphere in the US academy about the Palestine/Israel conflict as well.

As employees in institutes of higher learning we have a particular interest in and responsibility to respond to the obstacles to the right to higher education that the Israeli state has created for Palestinians both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. As educators we have a responsibility to model forms of horizontal solidarity for our students, showing them that charity is not the only form of engagement they can have with the world. The AAA fosters an engaged anthropology that is committed to supporting social change efforts that arise from the interaction between community goals and anthropological research. It is time for anthropologists to stand up for the Palestinian right to education, social justice and freedom.


[This article was originally published on Anthrpology News] 

[To sign the anthropology petition in support of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions, please visit: https://anthroboycott.wordpress.com/]
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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