In Keeping with Conservative History, MLA Votes Down Resolution to Boycott Israeli Institutions

In Keeping with Conservative History, MLA Votes Down Resolution to Boycott Israeli Institutions

In Keeping with Conservative History, MLA Votes Down Resolution to Boycott Israeli Institutions

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This statement was released by MLA Members for Justice in Palestine on 9 January 2017.]

At the annual convention of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association (MLA), a resolution to endorse the Palestinian call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions for their involvement in violations of international law was voted down by 113-78. The Delegate Assembly is the representative body of the Association, and the resolution will not now move forward for consideration by the full membership, comprised of over twenty-five thousand scholars and teachers.

The MLA Delegate Assembly’s vote differs from that of a growing number of academic associations that have previously endorsed the boycott for Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality. In recent years over twelve associations and faculty unions have voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israeli institutions, including the American Studies Association, Native and Indigenous Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, and the National Women’s Studies Association.

Professor Rebecca Comay, one of the resolution’s sponsors, remarked, “The defeat of the boycott resolution is disappointing, of course, but it’s notable that forty percent of the Delegate Assembly actually voted in support of the boycott. To put this in context: the MLA voted against the boycott of South African universities in the 1980s —a movement that is now almost universally recognized as having been one of the contributing forces in bringing down the apartheid regime.”

“Associations that have endorsed the boycott have tended to represent scholars whose mission includes the study of race, colonialism, and culture. The MLA remains a conservative body that has shown itself over many years to be reluctant to take strong public stands on issues of justice and human rights,” said David Palumbo-Liu, MLA member and professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University University. “Nevertheless, the impact advocates of the boycott resolution have had on discourse in such a short period of time emphasizes the growing public support for the non-violent strategy of BDS.”

Unlike the boycott of South African academia during the divestment campaigns of the 1980s, which targeted all South African scholars, the Palestinian boycott exempts individual scholars and focuses on Israeli universities as institutions that have a documented track record of complicity in the Israeli government’s soon-to-be fifty years of occupation. Endorsing an academic boycott resolution does not prevent Israeli scholars from teaching, researching, traveling, or attending conferences such as the MLA Convention.

“Palestinian scholars and students suffer under daily restrictions on their right to education, from campus closures and detainment without charge to denial of visas to travel and restrictions on the import of books and materials. These restrictions affect them as individuals and institutionally,” says Salah Hassan, a professor of English at Michigan State University.

The resolution had been in front of the MLA for over two years, having originally been submitted, along with an opposing resolution, in October 2014, for consideration at the January 2015 Convention. It was then agreed to suspend both resolutions to allow the Association’s membership to hear a full debate on the topic of academic boycott. Since then there have been three Town Hall sessions, several panels on the issue, and an unprecedented number of panels dealing with Palestinian literature and culture that have done much to advance understanding of the conditions of Palestinians in Palestine and globally.

“While the resolution was not approved by the Delegate Assembly, it is notable that support for the boycott resolution grew incrementally over the period of debate and discussion. A broad segment of MLA members in almost every disciplinary area of the modern languages have expressed support for the resolution,” said Comay. “The resolution found strong and outspoken support among graduate students and contingent faculty, despite the documented possibility of retaliation against those who speak out for the equality and freedom of Palestinians. There’s a rising generation of scholars whose understanding of the humanities and of academic freedom embraces a commitment to honoring fundamental human rights everywhere.”

A counter resolution against boycotting Israeli institutions passed by a narrow margin of eight votes. The resolution must now receive ten percent of the MLA membership vote this spring in order to pass.

Noting the context of intimidation and retaliation that has dogged advocates of BDS, Cynthia Franklin, professor at the University of Hawai’I, noted that passage of the anti-boycott resolution “provides support for groups like Canary Mission and legislation criminalizing boycott.” Canary Mission is an anonymous website that posts personal information on professors or students who advocate for BDS.

Following the debate on these resolutions, the Delegate Assembly voted on an “emergency resolution” that expressed concern that the incoming Trump administration might threaten the academic freedom of US scholars. As David Lloyd, another sponsor of the boycott resolution, remarked during debate, “It is hard not to feel the hypocrisy of passing a resolution like this while denying our support to Palestinians who not only face a potential threat, but actually suffer the denials of academic and every other freedom that we are privileged to enjoy.” 

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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