Letter Calling on SUNY-Plattsburgh to Defend Simona Sharoni's Academic Freedom

Letter Calling on SUNY-Plattsburgh to Defend Simona Sharoni's Academic Freedom

Letter Calling on SUNY-Plattsburgh to Defend Simona Sharoni's Academic Freedom

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association on 12 September 2016 in response to a continuing campaign to harass and intimidate Professor Simona Sharoni for her views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.]

Dr. John Ettling
President,
State University of New York, Plattsburgh
president_office@plattsburgh.edu

Dr. Jake Liszka
Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs,
State University of New York, Plattsburgh
provost-office@plattsburgh.edu

Professor Andrew Buckser
Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences
State University of New York, Plattsburgh
abuck005@plattsburgh.edu

Dear President Ettling, Provost Liszka, and Dean Buckser:

We write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our grave concern about the campaign of harassment being waged against Simona Sharoni, professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh and a member of MESA, which threatens her safety and well-being as well as her free speech and academic freedom rights. This campaign, which now includes a request under New York State’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) that SUNY Plattsburgh make available records relating to Professor Sharoni’s hiring, employment and academic activities, appears intended to intimidate and ultimately silence her because of her public support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. We call upon the university to exercise its responsibility to protect Professor Sharoni’s right of free speech and to defend her academic freedom.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA 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.

Following an interview conducted on March 5, 2016, in which Professor Sharoni expressed her support of the BDS movement, an inflammatory campaign of tweets and email messages was launched against her, including threats to her physical safety. On April 28, 2016, Professor Sharoni contacted a number of university leaders, including SUNY Plattsburgh’s president and provost, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the chair of the Faculty Senate and officers of the faculty union to inform them about these threats and to ask that the university publicly affirm its commitment to academic freedom and to the protection of the safety and well-being of all its students and employees. According to Professor Sharoni, she has not received any official response from university administrators.

On September 6, 2016, Professor Sharoni received an email message from Sean Brian Dermody, Assistant to the Vice President for Administration and Director of Management Services at SUNY Plattsburgh, informing her that an individual had made a series of FOIL requests for records pertaining to her hiring and continued employment at SUNY Plattsburgh, and her participation in academic conferences. Mr. Dermody informed Professor Sharoni that he was reviewing the FOIL requests, and asked her to locate the requested records and be prepared to turn them over to him. Another email message from Mr. Dermody dated the following day asked Professor Sharoni to turn over all correspondence in her possession related to her being hired at SUNY Plattsburgh.

It appears to us that these FOIL requests are part of the continuing campaign to harass and intimidate Professor Sharoni because she has expressed certain political views. MESA has no official position on the BDS movement or its demands; we believe that everyone should be free to advocate for or against BDS as they see fit, and more broadly to express their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as on any other issue of public concern without fear of harassment, intimidation or sanction. We also believe that SUNY Plattsburgh has a clear responsibility to defend Professor Sharoni and all of its other employees from threat and intimidation, in keeping with the constitutionally protected right of free speech and with the principles of academic freedom.

We therefore call upon university officials to exercise extreme caution and responsible judgment in reviewing and approving FOIL requests for records pertaining to Professor Sharoni, so as not to be complicit in furthering the campaign of harassment being waged against her. We also call on SUNY Plattsburgh’s leadership to publicly and vigorously affirm its commitment to the principles of free speech and academic freedom as well as its intention to defend Professor Sharoni and other faculty members against harassment and threats by politically motivated individuals and groups based outside the university community.

Sincerely,

Beth Baron                                                                            
MESA President                                                                  
Professor, City University of New York

Amy W. Newhall
MESA Executive Director
Associate Professor, University of Arizona 

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