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MESA has received absolutely no public condemnation of its boycott from the AAUP, AAU, or ACE. Not a peep. And except for
Brandeis University and
NYU, no other university leaders have spoken out publicly against MESA’s boycott.
Where’s the moral outrage?
To answer this question, it’s important to understand what the AAUP, AAU, ACE, and 250 university presidents failed to grasp about academic BDS, even as they forcefully condemned it eight years ago, and to consider the deeply disturbing turn that academia has taken since then.
Not one of the hundreds of condemnatory statements acknowledged the biggest casualty of academic boycotts: students on US campuses who want to study in or about Israel, or to openly express their support for the Jewish state.
Even a cursory examination of the boycott’s
guidelines reveals this to be true.
Academic BDS’ fundamental rejection of “the normalization of Israel in the global academy” demands that faculty work towards boycotting educational programs in or about Israel at their schools; refuse to write letters of recommendation for students wanting to participate in such programs; and endeavor to cancel or shut down pro-Israel events and activities on campus.
The guidelines also promote a “common sense” boycott that encourages the censuring, denigration, protest, and exclusion of pro-Israel individuals, including students who use their free speech to advocate on behalf of Israel. These boycott-compliant actions simply cannot be carried out by faculty without directly and substantively hurting their own students, revealing such behavior to be both morally repugnant and indefensible.
But in limiting their condemnation of ASA’s boycott to its negative impact on an abstract concept of “academic freedom,” without condemning, or even mentioning, the very real and intolerable harms that the boycott’s implementation would inflict on vulnerable students, the AAUP, AAU, ACU and 250 university presidents ceded the moral high ground to boycott-supporting faculty, who
claimed that their“academic freedom” was being violated by the condemnation.
More importantly, by primarily framing academic BDS as a violation of academic freedom principles rather than as an egregious transgression of institutional standards of faculty conduct, higher education leaders effectively gave faculty boycotters a free pass to continue privileging their political animus towards the Jewish state over their professional responsibilities to their students and university. And unfortunately, that’s a gift that has kept giving.
Within the last eight years, the number of faculty who have publicly expressed support for an academic boycott of Israel has more than doubled, with over 3,000 faculty boycotters currently employed on more than 450 campuses nationwide.
Accompanying this dramatic uptick in faculty support for academic BDS is a documented increase in the willingness of faculty boycotters to bring their support for BDS into their
classrooms and departmentally sponsored campus
events.
But a new line was crossed last May, following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war. More than 150 academic departments took the unprecedented step of issuing or endorsing blatantly anti-Zionist
statements, more than half of which called for or endorsed some form of BDS, including an academic boycott of Israel. Shamefully, all of the statements positioned their anti-Zionist political stance squarely within their disciplinary missions, a disingenuous maneuver to provide academic cover for departments to use their institutional status to advance a purely political agenda.
Against the backdrop of these unprecedented departmentally-endorsed statements, the MESA vote to adopt academic BDS has become a defining moment, not just for the organization or even the discipline, but for the entire academy and its future.
Middle East Studies, until recently, sought to project a strictly scholarly, non-political image. That is, until 2017, when the organization quietly eliminated the adjective “non-political” from its online mission statement and official bylaws, just in time to
voice its first-ever opposition to pending federal legislation: the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act.”
Then, in December 2021, as the association
voted to advance the academic BDS resolution to its full membership, the “About MESA” webpage was once again
updated with a new section entitled “Vision Statement” and a
link to MESA’s “Strategic Plan 2021 – 2025,” both of which contained a radically new characterization of the association’s mission: “The strength of MESA lies in its
dual commitment to scholarship and advocacy.”
Conveniently, academic BDS now fell squarely within MESA’s newly minted mission.
It is important to point out that since MESA began issuing full-membership
resolutions in 1993, Israel is not just the only country in the Middle East that has been targeted by a MESA resolution for an academic boycott, but it’s the only country in the region to be targeted by that group for any punitive action. This, in a region that includes such flagrant human rights violators as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iran – countries that routinely engage in human trafficking, execute members of the LGBTQ community, and turn a blind eye to honor killings – as well as soaring
levels of antisemitism, which are two to four times higher than in any other region of the world.
Yet instead of punishing these countries with boycotts, as it has done to Israel, MESA defends them from boycotts.
For example, six months after Iran’s Supreme Leader
released a video denying the Holocaust, and just a few weeks after the Iranian government
funded its Second Holocaust Cartoon Contest showcasing hundreds of cartoons denying or mocking the Holocaust, MESA’s Board sent a
letter to US legislators urging them to review the government’s “long-standing network of Iran sanctions … to take care not to continue imposing restrictions on the free flow of ideas and knowledge.”
When a professional organization with a decades-long reputation for non-political, high caliber scholarship radically redefines its organizational mission and, by implication, the mission of the discipline its members have largely shaped — for the express purpose of carrying out politically motivated and directed advocacy and activism that unfairly targets the only Jewish country in its purview (and in the world) — it can’t help but have at least five devastating consequences.
(full article online)
A Palestinian boy looks on near graffiti boycotting Israel in Bethlehem, November 3, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Stephen Farrell/File Photo. Hours after …
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