Statement of Opposition to the 'Israel Anti-Boycott Act' by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Statement of Opposition to the "Israel Anti-Boycott Act" by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Statement of Opposition to the "Israel Anti-Boycott Act" by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued by the Middle East Studies Association of North America on 27 July 2017 in response to the Congressional move to enact a "Israel Anti-Boycott Act" law.]

The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) expresses its strong opposition to the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act” (S. 720 and H.R. 1697), currently under consideration by Congress. If enacted into law this bill would impose criminal and civil punishment on individuals and businesses – and potentially other entities, including academic organizations – simply because they express a particular political belief, in this case advocacy of a boycott of Israel. It thus threatens the constitutionally protected right of free speech and has very dangerous implications for the academic freedom of faculty at institutions of higher education across the United States.

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

This bill would amend the Export Administration Act of 1979 and the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945 so as to prohibit U.S. persons (including businesses) from supporting boycotts directed against Israel conducted by international governmental organizations such as the European Union and the United Nations. (The bill`s provisions apply both to Israel within its 1967 borders and Israeli settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.) Violators could be subject to up to 20 years in prison, a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and a minimum civil penalty of $250,000. The apparent intent of the bill is to prevent U.S. individuals and businesses from participating in, supporting or complying with current efforts by the EU and some UN agencies to, for example, require products made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank – illegal under international law – to be labelled as such, and to compile information on companies doing business in or with these settlements.

As the American Civil Liberties Union noted in its July 17, 2017 public statement on this bill, a great many U.S. businesses and individuals do no business with Israel or its West Bank settlements for many different reasons. “Under the bill, however, only a person whose lack of business ties to Israel is politically motivated would be subject to fines and imprisonment – even though there are many others who engage in the very same behavior. In short, the bill would punish individuals based solely on their point of view. Such a penalty is in direct violation of the First Amendment.”

In addition to punishing persons who choose to exercise their constitutional right to free speech by supporting an international boycott in order to protest Israeli government policies, this bill poses a grave threat to academic freedom. It is not difficult to envision its provisions being used to punish faculty, students, student groups and/or academic organizations who advocate for some form of boycott of Israel, as well as the colleges and universities which house and partially fund them. It would thus have a chilling effect on the free and open exchange of opinions and perspectives at institutions of higher education and severely compromise their educational mission.

We therefore call on the members of the Senate and House of Representatives who have agreed to sponsor S. 720 and H.R. 1697 to immediately withdraw their sponsorship, and we call on all members of Congress to oppose this appallingly unconstitutional bill. We further call on the members of Congress to refrain from all legislative action which threatens the right of U.S. persons to exercise their constitutional right to free speech and political expression, including through advocacy of boycotts.

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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