The Modern Language Association and the 2017 Vote on the Academic Boycott of Israel

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Jan 18, 2017 Palestine-Israel
Still image from "The MLA and the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions," via Vimeo Still image from "The MLA and the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions," via Vimeo

The Modern Language Association and the 2017 Vote on the Academic Boycott of Israel

By : Salah D. Hassan

Ten years ago no academic association in the United States, with the possible exception of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), would have been motivated to make public statements critical of Israel. Over the last decade, many members of associations across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences have taken a stand in support of Palestinians. One way in which this stand has taken form is through resolutions in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The heated debate and the vote on academic boycott at the 2017 convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) is only the most recent indication that solidarity with Palestinians has emerged as a crucial political movement among professors and students in the US. Regardless of the results of the Delegate Assembly vote on academic boycott, the simple fact that a resolution to endorse the boycott of Israeli academic institutions was debated before the elected body of the largest association of humanities scholars indicates the legitimacy of Palestine solidarity as a political concern for academics.

The academic boycott movement began to achieve noteworthy successes among professional organizations in 2013 when the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) voted in favor of a boycott resolution, which was then followed later in the same year with the American Studies Association (ASA) and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) endorsements of academic boycott. In the ensuing years, from 2014 to 2016, the African Literature Association, the Association for Humanist Sociology, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, the National Women`s Studies Association, and the Peace and Justice Studies Association all passed resolutions in favor of the academic boycott of Israel. In late November 2015, the American Anthropological Association voted at its business meeting overwhelmingly in favor of academic boycott, but the resolution was voted down by the smallest of margins when it went before the full membership.

The ASA vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions was an unmitigated victory and can be viewed as a watershed moment; the ASA received the most media attention and that victory spurred significant blowback from pro-Israel organizations outside of the academy who are suing the association and some of its individual members. Support for academic boycott and expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are overwhelming among scholars in the fields of race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global and postcolonial studies. The academic boycott movement is an international response to the Palestinian call to de-normalize relations with Israeli universities, but it also can be understood as a challenge to the persistence of white, masculinist, and elitist hegemony in the US academy. From this perspective, academic boycott is one of the key issues distinguishing radical forces of change working to wrest control of the academy from the guardians of a conservative status quo.

Nowhere was this line of political differentiation more evident than at the 2017 MLA Convention  in Philadelphia, where MLA Members for Justice in Palestine, aligned with the Radical Caucus and various forums within the association, faced off against MLA Members for Scholars Rights, an Israel defense group within the association with the backing of ten former MLA presidents, non-MLA Israeli academics like Dan Rabinowitz, and Israeli institutions such as the Committee of University Heads in Israel. (See the letter and video.) Gabriel Noah Brahm, associate professor of English at Northern Michigan University and a vocal member of the “Scholars Rights” group, exposes how opposition to the academic boycott of Israel goes hand in hand with retrograde understandings of the humanities. Brahm, who is also a Senior Research Fellow at the pro-Israeli front group Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), wrote an article for The Jerusalem Post on the MLA vote, deriding students and scholars who critique Israel from a critical race, postcolonial, or Marxist perspective: “Political correctness in academia puts knee-jerk support for certain preferred ‘victim groups’ over everything else. The self-righteous politics of selective outrage associated with ‘p.c.’ makes vacuous expressions of indignation over abstractions like White Privilege, Western Colonialism, Neoliberalism or Global Capitalism more important than concrete scholarship rooted in reasons and evidence.” He reads the MLA Delegate Assembly vote against the academic boycott as “a victory for scholarship over political correctness,” “a victory for facts over trendy ‘post-truth’ epistemology,” and no less than “the end of ‘identity liberalism’ in American life more broadly," which he interprets as "a new and exciting trend toward affirming Western civilization’s universal values both in the academy and at large.” Brahm asserts that the defense of Western civilization against the politically correct barbarians that have invaded academia begins with a defense of Israel: “Perceived as an ‘outpost of the West,’ Israel came in for criticism by BDS at MLA. By the same token, putting a stop to BDS meant putting the brakes on postcolonial theory’s radical-chic opposition to universal Western values basic to liberal democracy.”

Perhaps Brahm is correct in his view that in 2017, the MLA, under the influence of groups like MLA Members for Scholars Rights, has returned to its conservative origins, recommitting to “Western civilization’s universal values.” Yet how is it possible that the MLA, which elected presidents who advocate for Palestinian rights, such as Edward Said, Houston Baker, and Margaret Ferguson, and also endorsed several resolutions on behalf of Palestinians, made what appears to be an about-face in 2017?

The MLA and the Changing Times

The MLA, founded in 1883, has grown into one of the largest international academic organizations based in the United States, with almost 24,000 members. Probably most well-known for the MLA guidelines on academic citations and the MLA database of scholarly publications in the humanities, the association’s original character and its mission have evolved in the last thirty years to reflect trends in literary and language studies; no longer limited to canonical European literatures and languages, the MLA has sought to keep pace with developments in scholarship and the academic culture of the humanities, and has often tied political engagements to its mission to develop academic best practices, professionalization, career development, and employment on the basis that those issues cannot be separated from racial and gender inequities in the profession or the messiness of US foreign policy. In the not-so-distant past, political resolutions on many topics have gone before the MLA Delegate Assembly. For example, in 2003, a member vote ratified a resolution calling for “the repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act because it infringes on the rights of members of the academic community and those whom they serve” (2003-3). In 2006, the membership ratified a resolution urging “that the phrase ‘undocumented workers’ be used in place of the abusive term ‘illegal aliens’ and that every state guarantee undocumented workers who live there in-state tuition” (2006-1), and in 2008, the MLA approved a resolution that endorses “teaching and scholarship about Palestinian culture, support[ing] members who come under attack for pursuing such work, and express[ing] solidarity with scholars of Palestinian culture” (2008-1).

Despite this remarkable legacy of political engagement, in its 2016-20 Strategic Plan the MLA seems to retreat from any political concerns other than those directly related to the profession. For instance, the Strategic Plan begins by announcing a commitment to “Advocacy,” implemented through “public activism,” but only in support of the humanities (see Strategic Plan page 10). The brief overview of MLA advocacy for the humanities is clearly responding to legislative hostility, decreased public funding for higher education, diminished job opportunities, and falling enrollments. But these important issues are not unrelated to neoliberal tendencies in US political culture, which dominate domestic and foreign policies.

The MLA today, like most literature and language departments, is marked by the contradiction of claiming to advocate for the humanities and, at the same time, disassociating from critical movements within the profession, which are directed against the very same neoliberal policies that have gutted higher education. This last point is related to Chris Newfield’s argument: “In 2017, universities will be tempted to follow a dual strategy: resist the Trump administration`s discriminatory agenda while adopting its underlying business model.” Newfield is a member of the Delegate Assembly and made the following points during the debate on the anti-boycott resolution, emphasizing the connection between academic self-governance, academic freedom, and the right to boycott Israel:

We may all agree that teaching and research on language and literature depends on academic freedom. Academic freedom is not a set of established rules but the effect of ongoing acts of shared governance....Professional life depends on the capacity for collaborative self-determination. The whereas clause that wrongly claims boycotts are outside the MLA’s purpose denies us a mild form of support for Palestinian self-determination while also denying our ability to regulate our own academic freedom through self-governance.

Given the size of the MLA, it is uncertain to what degree the membership at large shares the politically reactionary inclination of the 2017 Delegate Assembly. I will return to this question, which is crucial to interpreting the significance of the MLA Delegate Assembly vote on academic boycott.  But first, a little more contextualization will be helpful to understanding the process by which the issue came before the Delegate Assembly.

Background to the 2017 MLA Vote on Academic Boycott

MLA Members for Justice in Palestine came into existence following the 2014 convention in Chicago. At this convention, the MLA’s Delegate Assembly voted in support of a resolution criticizing Israel for denying US students and scholars the right to enter the occupied territories. MLA Resolution 2014-1 reads: “Be it resolved that the MLA urge the United States Department of State to contest Israel’s denials of entry to the West Bank by United States academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.”

The debate around the “right to enter” resolution was intense, with misinformed pro-Israeli members of the MLA arguing as if the resolution proposed a boycott Israel. In fact, Cary Nelson (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne), Russell Berman (Stanford), Rachel Harris (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne), and other opponents had prepared and distributed anti-boycott flyers countering Resolution 2014-1. When Resolution 2014-1, proposed by Bruce Robbins (Columbia University) and Dick Ohmann (Wesleyan University), went before the MLA Delegate Assembly, sixty delegates voted in favor and fifty-three voted against. The resolution then went to the membership for ratification, and the results were announced in June 2014: 1,560 members voted in favor of ratification of 2014-1 and 1,063 voted against ratification, but according to the MLA bylaws, “[r]esolutions forwarded to the membership must be ratified by a majority vote in which the number of those voting for ratification equals at least ten percent of the association’s membership, which was 2,390 votes this year.” A significant majority of voting members supported the resolution, but they were too few to meet the ten percent rule, and the pro-Palestinian resolution was not ratified. Pro-Israel media reported the vote as a defeat of Palestinian solidarity within the MLA, while pro-Palestinian coverage emphasized growing support among MLA members for Palestinian rights.

Inspired by the ASA endorsement of academic boycott in 2013, the growing wave of boycott endorsements among other professional associations, and the relative success of the “right to enter” resolution, David Lloyd (University of California-Riverside) and Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto) proposed an MLA academic boycott resolution in October 2014. At the same time, a pro-Israel group, MLA Members for Scholars Rights, headed by Russell Berman but also organized by Cary Nelson, proposed an anti-boycott resolution. Given that the two resolutions were directly opposed to each, the MLA executive and the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee suggested that the proposers withdraw their resolutions until 2017 to allow the MLA members to be educated on the issues. Accordingly, the MLA created space in the annual convention and provided online groups for each side to present their positions. In 2015, 2016, and 2017, numerous panels, two public debates and a town hall meeting took place under the aegis of the MLA. For three years, the question of academic boycott was a central political concern of the MLA Conventions.

Finally, after the two-year delay, the academic boycott resolution went before the MLA Delegate Assembly on 7 January 2017, as did two anti-boycott and anti-Palestinian resolutions. Given the Delegate Assembly’s past support for the “right to enter” resolution and other indications during the 2017 convention, it appeared that the academic boycott resolution had a good chance of passing the Delegate Assembly. In the lead-up to the 7 January vote, especially during the 5 January Town Hall meeting, chaired by MLA president Kwame Anthony Appiah, who is on the record as opposing the boycott, dozens of MLA members lined up to pronounce their support for the academic boycott resolution; given the remarkable show of support, it seemed unlikely that the Scholars Rights anti-boycott resolution could win enough votes to pass. Furthermore, even if the Delegate Assembly did not vote in favor of the academic boycott resolution, it seemed unlikely—even unfathomable—that it would vote against the principle of the boycott, particularly given the results of the 2015 Delegate Assembly straw poll on boycott, as noted in David Lloyd’s piece in Mondoweiss: "the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly affirmed in a straw poll by forty-eight votes to twenty-six that boycotts help to protect academic freedom. By sixty-six to zero, they also endorsed the idea that the MLA should roundly condemn retaliation against scholars who speak out publicly on matters concerning Palestine and Israel.”

Participation was very low in the 2015 straw poll, but over the last several years, every resolution that has concerned Palestine, Muslims, or other issues having to do with Middle East matters has been supported by the Delegate Assembly—notably the right to enter resolution (2013) and an anti-Islamophobia resolution (2016). It would appear that the approximately thirty-three percent turnover of Delegates from 2016 to 2017 produced a much more politically conservative Assembly.

Palestine at the 2017 MLA

Three resolutions relating to Israel-Palestine were debated at the 2017 MLA Convention:

Resolution 2017-1, calling on the MLA to “refrain from the boycott”

Resolution 2017-2, calling on the MLA to “endorse the boycott of Israeli academic institutions”

Resolution 2017-3, calling on the MLA to "condemn attacks on academic freedom in Palestinian universities, whether they are perpetrated by the Palestinian Authority or by Hamas.”

Resolution 2017-1 was successful, with 101 votes for and 93 votes against.

Resolution 2017-2 went down, with 79 votes for and 119 votes against

Resolution 2017-3 was indefinitely postponed.  

Delegates debated Resolutions 2017-1 and 2017-2 for twenty-five minutes each and then voted on both before the results were revealed simultaneously. This process was unlike previous practice at the MLA, which historically was similar to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Business Meeting, where discussion and voting was sequential, with Resolution 1 being discussed and voted on before moving on to Resolution 2. The MLA rules for the academic boycott resolutions were exceptional and little explanation was given for treating these two resolutions differently, for the time limits on the discussion, or for setting aside Resolution 2017-3. Perhaps an opportunity was missed to raise questions about the process, which might have changed the results, but in the midst of the meeting, no objections were raised about the rules.

The pro-boycott resolution (2017-2) was discussed first for twenty-five minutes, with mostly anti-boycott speakers standing at the mics and insisting that an academic boycott is a violation of academic freedom. They also emphasized how the resolution put the association at risk of lawsuits. They questioned why the MLA should single out Israel, when so many other countries violate human rights, including the United States. They even went so far as to claim that it was not in the interests of Palestinians, but rather served merely the interests of self-serving US-based scholars. Arguments in favor of the boycott resolution emphasized the importance of international solidarity within the MLA, advocacy for Palestinian educational rights, the role of the United States in supporting Israel, and the need to stand with scholars and students engaged in BDS activism. When the anti-boycott resolution (2017-2) came up for discussion many of the same arguments were made by both sides. At the conclusion of the discussion, the vote was taken electronically with clickers and the results were projected on a large screen. An audible sigh could be heard through the Grand Ballroom of the Philadelphia Marriott, deflation for those of us who had argued in favor of boycott, relief for those arguing against.

With little delay, the Delegate Assembly then turned its attention to Resolution 2017-3. Berman, a proposer of Resolution 2017-1, moved that Resolution 2017-3 be indefinitely postponed. Significant discussion of Berman’s clever motion to postpone ensued nonetheless because many MLA members, including some delegates, wished to expose the colonialist and racist nature of the pro-Israeli resolution, which could now be seen as a tactic to provide a second chance to the pro-Israel faction within the MLA in the event that the anti-boycott resolution failed. But finally, as many delegates left the hall, the assembly voted to indefinitely postpone Resolution 2017-3, which held the Palestinian Authority and Hamas singularly responsible for violations of Palestinian academic freedom.

The Assembly then considered an emergency resolution proposed by Michael Bérubé (Penn State University) concerning the threats to academic freedom posed by a Trump administration. Bérubé is among the former MLA presidents who signed a letter opposing academic boycott, and anti-boycott delegates enthusiastically affirmed their support with little concern for the academic freedoms of Palestinians. During the discussion of the emergency resolution, David Lloyd insightfully stated, "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.”

The results of the MLA Delegate Assembly vote could not have been much worse for MLA members seeking to express their solidarity with Palestinians. MLA Members for Justice in Palestine did good work, but the pro-Israel group MLA Members for Scholars Rights got the upper hand when it counted. The pro-Israel side managed to get control of the Delegate Assembly in the years between 2015 and 2017, using the time to populate the MLA elected body with anti-boycott members and persuade other Delegates that endorsing the boycott resolution would constitute a threat to the association. MLA Members for Justice in Palestine relied on the principles that underwrite international solidarity, engaged the process proposed by the MLA, did not try to stack the Delegate Assembly, and did not have the means to communicate directly with the entire Delegate Assembly.

The time-span of three years to vote on the academic boycott resolutions might have given the anti-boycott pro-Israel side the upper hand to organize, especially given that the MLA Delegate Assembly vote came months after the AAA membership vote and the same pro-Israel resources set in place to defeat that academic boycott resolution would be available to fight against the MLA Members for Justice in Palestine resolution. There is some evidence that the Israeli government, either through its Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which is committed to undermining BDS, or through other channels, has interfered in and influenced the MLA. Cary Nelson, perhaps the most zealous opponent of the MLA academic boycott resolution, traveled to Israel in 2014, where he gave an alarmist anti-BDS talk at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv; he compared the BDS activism on US campuses to the anti-Vietnam War movement. Ynet reported after the MLA Delegate Assembly meeting that Israeli officials actively coordinated with anti-boycott MLA members, naming Berman and Nelson as key operatives on behalf of Israel:

Following the vote, Prof. Tzvi Zigler [sic]—head of the The Committee of University Heads in Israel, a forum to combat academic boycotts—said "boycott attempts (against Israeli universities) have failed by and large due to the immense efforts of The Committee of University Heads in Israel vis-à-vis our counterparts abroad."

"In regards to the MLA decision, the fight was conducted within the Association itself, led by Prof. Nelson from the University of Illinois, and Prof. Berman from Stanford University. They were assisted by various Jewish organizations, along with The Committee of University Heads in Israel," Professor Zigler continued.

It is impossible to know exactly how much support Nelson, Berman, Brahm, and company received from Israeli agencies to mount their campaign, but there should be some concern among the Executive Council of the MLA that the anti-boycott resolution 2017-1 is clearly serving the interests of Israel and its war on US scholars and students who engage in BDS activism. The Electronic Intifada posted an English translation/summary of a Maariv article by Yossi Melman detailing the various measures employed to attack BDS activists: “Among the ministry’s activities are what Melman terms ‘special operations’ or ‘black ops’ which may include ‘defamation campaigns, harassment and threats to the lives of activists’ as well as ‘infringing on and violating their privacy.’”

Making Sense of the MLA Vote on Academic Boycott

There can be little doubt that external forces played a role in the results of the MLA vote, but it also may be the case that the MLA has swung to the right, and the Delegate Assembly anti-academic boycott position signals a backlash against the politicization of the association, even as it asserts the liberal principle of academic freedom in the face of the Trump administration. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar’s article “Why Anthropologists Failed to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions” provides a useful assessment of the various factors internal to the discipline of anthropology that certainly also played a role in influencing some MLA Delegates to vote against academic boycott: “Put simply, this is the longstanding fissure between scholars who understand politics and academia to be intertwined and those who believe they are separable.”

The 2017 Delegate Assembly that voted against academic boycott and in favor the American Association of University Professors statement on “Higher Education after the 2016 Election” is a perfect example of the contradiction of neoliberal values in the academy. Their opposition to the boycott and opposition to Trump is not unlike the posture of Hillary Clinton, who expressed in a letter to Haim Saban, a major contributor to her presidential campaign, her “alarm over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement, or a global effort to isolate the State of Israel by ending commercial and academic exchanges. I know you agree that we need to make countering BDS a priority.” But it is precisely on the topic of Israel that Clinton’s politics coincide with Donald Trump’s, as is evident in in his speech to AIPAC and his tweets in response to John Kerry’s UN speech on Israeli settlements.

From the perspective of MLA Members for Justice in Palestine, the three-year process leading to the vote was viewed as an opportunity to talk about Palestinian rights as part of the official MLA agenda. The question of Palestine solidarity and academic boycott were prominently addressed in convention sessions during the period between 2015 and 2017. From a certain perspective—given the general character of the MLA, which did not support the boycott of South Africa in the 1980s, and the largely marginal place of Palestine within the association—this attention to an activist initiative was a win in and of itself. Despite the outcome of the vote, one should not overlook how much work has been done to galvanize discussion of the academic boycott at the center of the MLA, which has always been structurally conservative and whose membership is largely politically disengaged, white, and elitist, despite the fact that some MLA members past and present are among the most radical intellectuals working in the humanities. See for examples the video produced by MLA Members for Justice in Palestine.

Not only was the MLA made to engage with the rights of Palestinians in a consistent and critically significant manner, through debates, panels, online forums, and town hall meetings. Pro-boycott activists achieved a certain level of national prominence by making the MLA, one of the largest and most important academic associations, vote on an academic boycott of Israel. MLA Members for Justice in Palestine consists of ten or so graduate students and professors, with no institutional support and little free time; nevertheless, without any external funding, this group produced an informative and well coordinate campaign within the association, as is evident from the website. Over 450 members signed the MLA MJP open letter. The public achievements of the academic boycott campaign probably garnered more attention outside the MLA than it did among rank and file members—judging by the 5,885 unique visits to the website in January 2017 and the more than 37,000 page views of the website over the last year. 

Despite the achievements of MLA Members for Justice in Palestine, the anti-boycott faction is now poised to achieve its goal of ending debate over the academic boycott of Israel within the association. The 2016-17 Delegate Assembly not only opposed the boycott by voting down Resolution 2017-2, but revealed itself to be a protector of Israel through the adoption of the anti-boycott resolution (2017-1) that seeks to stifle discussion of academic boycott. If passed by ten percent of the membership, resolution 2017-1 will, in essence, prevent any future attempts to promote BDS within the MLA or efforts to pass resolutions in defense of BDS activists.

The MLA Delegate Assembly under the influence of Berman and Nelson has now positioned the association as an ally of those state legislators and university administrators who seek to prohibit, indeed criminalize, BDS activism. Should the anti-boycott resolution gain the support of the membership, the MLA will become the most reactionary professional association in the US, aligned with Canary Mission, an online site committed to defaming students and faculty who support BDS, and other pro-Israeli instruments of intimidation. As the MLA moves Resolution 2017-1 forward to the membership vote, MLA Members for Justice in Palestine will now have to develop a new campaign, directed at challenging the legitimacy of the resolution and mobilizing members to vote en masse against this attempt to make the MLA a reference point for anti-BDS academic organizing.
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Jan 9, 2017 Lebanon
Anthony Alessandrini By :
Anthony Alessandrini

The MLA and BDS—or, Comedy and Resistance

This weekend, the Modern Language Association`s (MLA) Delegate Assembly voted against a detailed, closely-argued, and voluminously documented resolution to support the boycott of Israeli academic institutions (79 for, 113 against). A few minutes later, the same body proceeded to pass a brief, four-paragraph anti-boycott resolution (101 for, 93 against), which did little more than assert that “the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel contradicts the MLA’s purpose to promote teaching and research on language and literature.” Barring anything unexpected, the latter resolution will now go to the MLA’s full membership for a vote; should it receive majority support and approval from at least ten percent of the organization’s approximately 24,000 members, it will become the formal expression of the MLA’s membership. The MLA, in other words, is on the verge of joining the odious company of Canary Mission and various federal and state legislators working to make certain that even the discussion of the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement will be banished from educational institutions.

Of course, within moments, the word went out: "DEFEAT for BDS!" But even in light of these results, I am going to insist, however perversely, that something substantial was accomplished at the MLA Convention this past weekend. It is not every day that a large and influential institution like the MLA—which claims to represent humanist values and actually does represent, as a professional organization, scholars of language and literature from throughout the world—declares publicly: no, in fact, we don`t mind being complicit with injustice. In fact, we like our complicity so much that we are willing to embrace it and endorse it. And no, in fact, we do not care about our Palestinian colleagues—or rather, we care more about protecting the rights and privileges of ourselves and people we consider to be like ourselves, even at the expense of the rights and privileges, and if need be the lives, of those we consider to be, for whatever reason, different from ourselves. There is a word for this sort of thinking. It is called racism.

In other words, it is not every day that a professional organization like the MLA declares its allegiance to upholding injustice and structural racism. These sorts of moments of revelation are extremely rare, and only ever come in response to struggles in the name of justice, carried out by groups such as MLA Members for Justice in Palestine, which worked tirelessly for several years to draft, put forward, and rally support for the boycott resolution. The veil is lifted. It`s up to all of us now to decide how we choose to interact with such an institution.

Please don’t just take my word for it. The words of those who opposed the boycott resolution and advocated for the MLA to refuse its support to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel condemn them out of their own mouths. Two quotes from an article claiming to cover the MLA’s “boycott debate” (which in fact served largely as a mouthpiece for anti-boycott arguments) will suffice.

First: “It is a mistake to think that the vote [in favor of the boycott] is a way to express sympathy for the abuse of Palestinians because what is on the table is an academic boycott of Israeli universities, the institutions at which many Arabs gain their education,” declared Rachel S. Harris, associate professor of Israeli literature and culture in the program in comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In other words, according to Professor Harris, the mere fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel are “allowed” to attend Israeli universities (while suffering from the same sorts of discrimination and unequal citizenship as all Palestinians citizens of Israel) means that those who support the boycott of Israeli academic institutions do not really care about Palestinians. Apply the same reasoning to any oppressed minority group in the US—“They should be happy that we let them go to school here!”—and its explicit racism, not to mention its explicitly Trumpian overtones, become immediately clear. One can hardly imagine the same logic being used against those who—quite rightly—called for and supported boycotts of North Carolina and Mississippi after those states’ legislatures passed laws allowing discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. (“Well, LGBTQ people are allowed to attend school in North Carolina, so if you’re calling for a boycott of that state, you clearly don’t care about LGBTQ people”).

Second: “The key argument is it ain’t our business,” says Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Readers may recall that University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the university that was censured by the American Association of University Professors and forced to pay a nearly $1 million settlement for its violations of the academic freedom of Steven Salaita.) Nelson, one of the avowed leaders of the anti-boycott movement within the MLA who has displayed an attitude towards academic freedom that is selective, to say the least, should at least be given credit for honesty here. In openly declaring that the injustices being committed in our name and with our money against our academic colleagues in Palestine simply “ain’t our business,” he at least is straightforward enough to state the true grounding of the anti-boycott argument: certain sorts of injustice (against Palestinians) just are not worth bothering about, and the status quo will do nicely. It remains to be seen how history (not to mention literary history) will judge such callousness.

As it happens, I was at the MLA convention this weekend (though not the Delegate Assembly meeting itself, so I am indebted to the accounts of those who were in attendance there). I had the privilege, the day before the MLA vote, to take part in a panel with a number of valued colleagues, focusing on the issue of dispossession in West Asian literature and culture, with a particular focus on Palestinian and Kurdish film and literature. The fact that such a panel could exist amidst the sea of whiteness that still constitutes too much of the work of the MLA has to do with the struggles of many who have gone before, whose worked has helped to open up such spaces. Such struggles continue (although the question of whether the MLA is still worth struggling over, or whether our work now is to create alternative institutions to replace such corrupt ones, will become a major point of discussion for the future). Suffice it to say that for me, the idea of engaging in scholarship and teaching related to Palestinian literature and culture without doing whatever I can to support the call for the cultural and academic boycott of Israel put forth by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is unthinkable. The fact that my primary professional organization has chosen to violate and refuse this call represents, to me, a failure that is at once ethical, political, and intellectual.

My own few remarks at the conference were focused on the question of comedy and resistance in Palestinian and Kurdish cinema, with specific reference to two films: Bahman Ghobadi’s Half Moon (2006) and Elia Suleiman’s The Time that Remains (2009). “Comedy,” of course, is not a word that springs to mind when one considers questions of dispossession, statelessness, forced migration, apartheid, genocide—all of the tragic issues represented by Palestinian and Kurdish visual culture. And yet—or so I am prepared to argue—comedy, as both a cinematic and a rhetorical form, has been a powerful aspect of recent films by Palestinian and Kurdish filmmakers, and is well represented in these two films.

The paper I presented, and the larger work it represents, is an attempt to carry forward an argument that I have begun elsewhere, and has its genesis in a moment from the work of the great social theorist Theodor Adorno. In his essay “Commitment,” Adorno warns against works of art, even well-meaning ones, that “turn suffering into images” and thus cannot help but also turn this suffering into a form of enjoyment for an audience to consume at its leisure. In such sentimentally “tragic” works, the victims of suffering, Adorno writes, “are used to create something, works of art, that are then thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it.” What I am calling the comic mode is precisely a resistance to this mode of viewership.

The biggest danger for a complicit audience is that the sheer fact of viewing a film that represents suffering in a tragic mode can come to seem like an act that somehow addresses the suffering that has been represented. One goes to view suffering, one cries one’s share of tears at the “tragedy,” one goes home feeling cleansed and somehow superior to those too hardened or too unaware to view the latest representation of suffering in Palestine or Kurdistan, or in any of the many other sites of injustice on the earth. The laughter found in the films I identify as embodying a comic politics interrupts this too-easy tragic narrative, and disturbs the viewer’s desire for simple pathos, for a catharsis that allows one to return home feeling chastened but clean, ready to resume life as usual. In place of any comfort, even the comfort afforded by the simple, purging tears of tragedy, such films leave us shattered. They also present us with an ethical choice: while such films are as far from the didacticism of propaganda as can be imagined, they nevertheless demand from us some response, if only as a way to come to terms with the desolation of their effect.

Suleiman’s The Time that Remains—like his remarkable body of work as a whole—is particularly notable in this respect. Suleiman uses comedy to powerful effect, from broad slapstick to subtle visual comedy, as well as forms of in-jokes that call to different parts of his audiences in different modes and manners. Like the rest of his filmography, The Time that Remains represents not only the dispossession of Palestinians, but also various attempts to return. By using comedy to address the deadly business of dispossession and the struggle to return, Suleiman’s remarkable body of work manages to invoke a tragic past without falling prey to simplifying, idealizing, or sentimentalizing this past.

I have written about the film at length elsewhere, so here, as I did in my MLA paper, I will make reference to just one sequence that provides a fine example of Suleiman’s brilliant patchwork comic vision, in which comic timing exists uneasily alongside violence—violence which is always potential, except when it is actual. In this sequence, Suleiman’s eponymous character, identified in the credits only as “E.S.,” is observing life in Ramallah between visits to his mother’s hospital room, where she is approaching death. In doing so, the film captures the everydayness of the occupation, along with the everyday acts of resistance that make it possible to go on. Unlike Suleiman’s previous and best-known film, Divine Intervention, there are no ninja heroines here, but there is the matter-of-fact bravery of a young mother with a squeaky baby carriage facing down Israeli soldiers in Ramallah.  

The sequence culminates with a long scene in which the gun of an Israeli tank follows, at extremely close range, a young Palestinian man as he steps outside his house and takes a bag of garbage to a trash can on the opposite sidewalk. It is an incredibly evocative visual metaphor: anyone who has witnessed the work of the occupation in places like Ramallah can attest to sometimes feeling as though there is in fact an Israeli tank for every Palestinian.

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But Suleiman succeeds in turning what could easily have become a tragic scene into (also) brilliant physical comedy: as the man is about to step through his front gate, the musical ringtone on his cellphone sounds, and the tank gun is forced to follow him, bobbing and weaving, as he walks back and forth carrying on his conversation with a friend (“Where you been? Why don’t you call?...Listen, there’s a party at the Stones tonight….Everyone’ll be there. You should come.”) When he finally hangs up and goes inside, the tank gun swivels to take aim at the garbage can. But what at first sounds like shots being fired on the soundtrack is revealed to be, as this scene dissolves into the next, the throbbing electronic music of the party at The Stones.

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What is evoked by the comedy here is the power of youth culture, especially as embodied in music, which becomes increasing central as the story of The Time that Remains, which begins with the moment of the Nakba of 1948, moves into the present. We see it in the scene immediately following the one I have described, at The Stones, a club whose name simultaneously evokes pop culture and also the stone-throwing resistance of the intifada. Outside is the Israeli army, attempting to impose curfew, using essentially the same words as those we heard coming from the occupying army in Nazareth that first placed the city under military control at the beginning of the film. E.S.’s father and his young comrades resisted curfew, as did the young E.S. and his friends; the partiers at The Stones offer their own form of resistance. If you spend all night dancing in a club, are you obeying the orders to stay off the streets after dark, or are you resisting curfew in a way that the law and soldiers cannot quite name?

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But what does any of this have to do with the boycott? And why talk about comedy in the face of the MLA’s odious actions? What occurred to me, as I thought about the fact of presenting a paper on Palestinian cinema the day before the MLA was to vote on the boycott, was that in fact, the BDS movement, like Suleiman’s cinema, may indeed be an example of politics working in the comic rather than tragic mode. In part, this has to do with what its opponents refuse to acknowledge, which is that BDS represents a wholly positive, non-violent form of resistance, an attempt to both stand with our colleagues in Palestine and to break the horrific and violent form of stasis that defines the ongoing situation in Israel-Palestine.

But there is equally, for those of us who have been involved in the BDS movement from its inception, something absurdly comic, in the Suleimanian sense, about the way opponents have responded to the call to boycott. The 2005 call from Palestinian civil society groups came, it is probably fair to say, from a sense of desperation and desolation. It came in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) decision of July 2004, which declared that the wall being built by the Israeli government in the occupied territories was a clear violation of international law. Many of these same civil society groups had poured time and resources and enthusiasm into bringing this case to the ICJ, in hopes of achieving such an outcome. But in the event, this overwhelming decision by the principal judicial organ of the United Nations achieved exactly nothing: international law was not enforced, the wall went up to do its savage work, and no one was ever held accountable. The nothing which followed was palpable and painful.

When the boycott call went out exactly one year later, its underpinning—which is also the motivating force of the BDS movement, the thing that makes it an international grassroots popular movement—was the idea that we who constitute the movement have no one else to turn to but ourselves. No country, no international organization, no court, no law, no institutions of any kind have done a thing to end the occupation of Palestine and the immiseration of Palestinians. All we had, and have, are ourselves; we are a movement because we say so, and because we are willing to do what little we can to change things, including asking our professional organizations to end their complicity, as humanists, with the dehumanization of the occupation.

A decade and change later, and here we are, said to pose an existential threat to one of the greatest military powers on the earth, the object of congressional and state legislation and international opposition, addressed by name by US presidential candidates who say that stopping us ranks among their major priorities. Within the MLA itself, a dozen “Past Presidents” emerged from the privileged precincts of their named professorships and emeritus statuses to write an open letter opposing any attempt to stand with our colleagues in Palestine. As a supporter of BDS, one sometimes feels a bit like the Suleiman character whose movements are shadowed by the tank gunner. Are they really so scared of us? Do they really need such heavy artillery? The absurdity of it all—the rhetorical overkill, the money and political firepower brought to bear against us, the mischaracterizing of a people’s grassroots movement for justice as some sort of organized hate group, the blacklists, the fearmongering—if there weren’t so much at stake, one would be tempted to call it comic.

But BDS is politics in a comic mode in another way, one closely related to Suleiman’s cinema, in that it deals with the question of the everyday lived experience of Palestinians: not with the question of change at the macropolitical level, but with the question of lived justice—in our limited case, justice for Palestinian academics and students. The slow passing of time, the scenes where little or nothing happens, until something (almost always bad) does—this is what Suleiman’s comic vision represents. It rhymes with a question once asked by Slavoj Žižek: What goes on in Palestine when nothing goes on in Palestine? In other words, when Israel-Palestine is not in the news, as it has been of late—no new “peace initiative,” no UN resolution controversy, nothing that counts here as “newsworthy”—what is the lived experience of Palestine? The answer, of course, is the slow, painstaking, stifling, death by a thousand wounds that is settler colonialism. This is the level at which both Suleiman’s cinema and the BDS movement do their work.

Most importantly, BDS works in a comic mode because it does not generally fall back upon the tragic sentimental mode. Of course, it derives its basis from an enumeration of Palestinian suffering; otherwise, there would be no cause for justice. But it does not stop there, in the way that our usual politics—call it the politics of consciousness raising, of accumulating and disseminating alternative information, of fact-checking, of letting people know the “real story”—too often does. It does not let us take satisfaction in our willingness to simply look at suffering; it moves to the next step, by asking: What are you prepared to do to make these bad things end?

The BDS movement, and in particular the movement for a boycott of Israel academic institutions, started in many ways from a place of relative despair. And we humanists are all too ready to be pessimistic and self-deprecating about how little the things we do for a living really “matter” in the face of “real” politics. But the response that BDS has drawn, even if it leads to the delaying or defeat of particular proposals or resolutions at particular moments, is still ultimately hopeful—comic rather than tragic. It is a reminder that those of us engaged with what I choose to call cultural politics may indeed be more powerful than we think. It also suggests that we literary and cultural critics need to continue to fight to liberate the power that resides in cultural texts from the grip of those who see the work of criticism as by definition “apolitical”—which, of course, means the politics of endorsing the status quo. To “do literature” holds the potential to also do justice, if we choose to take up the fight to make this so.

All this rhymes, in fact, with the final scene of Suleiman’s The Time that Remains. As our attention shifts in the film’s final sequence, we pass from old age (E.S. and his mother) to youth. (So too, we must hope, will organizations such as the MLA, as the vampiric power of the generation that is at the forefront of the anti-boycott movement ultimately and inevitably gives way to a younger generation of scholars and students that is taking enormous steps towards bringing solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues to pass). The final moments of the film focus upon a group of three young men, recognizable partisans of hip-hop culture, who seat themselves on a bench at the upper right hand corner of the frame. Eventually, another young man walks into the frame and moves towards them, handcuffed to a much smaller and slighter Israeli policeman. His friends stand to greet him, and when he gets alongside them, he yanks on the handcuffs, forcing his captor to come to a halt while all four youths exchange pounds and hugs and cigarettes. Finally, after flashing a last V for Victory, he gives the policeman another yank to move him along, leading him as if the handcuff was a leash.

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Once again, we end, as does the film, on a moment of youthful resistance (accompanied by a soundtrack that emphasizes the will to fight on—as the screen goes black, we hear, in English, the opening lyrics of “Stayin’ Alive,” performed by Yasmine Hamdan). Watching the film five years ago, I was struck by how resonant this image was amidst the uprisings of 2011; today, in what feels like a much darker political moment, but one also marked by the real progress achieved over the past decade by movements for justice such as BDS, it seems even more so. One of the most recurring images from various liberation movements has been that of upraised arms breaking free of chains. Suleiman leaves us with a similar but slightly different image of resistance. If you find yourself chained to your oppression—whether that power is embodied by an occupying force, an authoritarian president, or an unaccountable and complicit institution—grab hold of your handcuffs and pull. It may turn out that you’re stronger than you thought.