by Mitchell Bard
This session's intellectual weakness and politicized composition are illustrated by the fact that only two of the six panelists -- belong to the professional society of scholars in that field, while at least four (and possibly all six), support the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
[Text differs slightly from the Algemeiner's.]
Israel studies are rarely centerstage at annual conferences of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), but when they are, one can be certain they'll be the subject of criticism.
Consequently,
my expectations were low when in late November I joined approximately
seventy attendees in an awkwardly arranged conference room at the
Washington Marriot Wardman Park Hotel for the panel "Navigating Jewish
Campus and Community Debates on Israel/Palestine in the Age of Trump."
The
panel featured Shira Robinson of George Washington University (GWU),
Liora Halperin of the University of Washington (UW), Stanford's Joel
Beinin, Joshua Schreier of Vassar, his brother Benjamin Schreier of Penn
State, and independent scholar Sarah Anne Minkin.
This
session's intellectual weakness and politicized composition are
illustrated by the fact that only two of the six panelists complaining
about Israel studies belong to the professional society of scholars in
that field (the Association of Israel Studies), while at least four (and
possibly all six), support the anti-Semitic Boycott Divestment
Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
Robinson, a BDS supporter, set the tone in her paper abstract,
which complained that supporters of new positions in Israel Studies
have been driven by "an explicitly ideological rather than intellectual
mission" and that "existing faculty have responded to the expansion of
Israel studies on North American campuses with suspicion and questions."
Shira Robinson
|
Let's unpack her claims starting with the assertion that funders have an ideological mission.
I
can speak to this directly because she attacked my organization's
visiting Israeli professor program as politically motivated. Over eight
years, the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) has brought
more than 100 visiting Israeli professors to seventy-two different
universities. In its evaluation of the program, Brandeis scholar Annette Koren concluded:
As a result of AICE initiatives, Israel has moved from its place as an isolated "extra-curricular" topic into mainstream classrooms and core curricula. In addition, the way Israel is discussed on college campuses has shifted. AICE programs have succeeded in incorporating rigorous scholarship and debate into discussions on Israel that were previously dominated by polemical hyperbole.
The
program succeeded because AICE professors were all scholars in Israel
studies chosen by the universities, including many elite schools
(Berkeley, Michigan, Stanford, UCLA, Yale) according to their own
criteria for hiring. Numerous schools asked AICE for visitors on
multiple occasions and many of the professors were so successful they
were asked to stay for an additional year or more.
The
pinnacle of panelists' hypocrisy was ignoring the $1.4 billion in Arab
money that has flowed to universities. Instead, panelists focused on
investments in Israel studies, which Robinson intimated was part of a
Jewish conspiracy to fund the creation of chairs, programs, and centers
that advocate for the Israeli government.
Anyone
who understands Israeli academics, however, knows they have no interest
in advocating for the government. Robinson even admitted her own
position was created by donors, but these were presumably "good"
philanthropists, as opposed to the nefarious ones supporting Israel
Studies.
Unmentioned
was that the necessity of strengthening of Israel studies was prompted
by the refusal of Middle East studies professors to teach courses on
Israel, and their proclivity for injecting their political biases into
the classroom.
That
Robinson and others at MESA refer to themselves as teachers of
"Israel/Palestine" demonstrates their bias for the non-existent state of
"Palestine" against the very real nation of Israel. She and the other
panelists favored this nomenclature and opposed the term "Israel
studies" because, she claimed, students might not want to take a course
that refers only to Israel. In contrast to their supposedly objective
approach, they also intimated that anyone teaching "Israel studies" was
biased and incapable of nuance.
Robinson's
ignorance of Israel studies was further reflected in her insistence
that Israel and Zionism cannot be understood outside the conflict with
the Palestinians. The conflict has not been solely with the
Palestinians, nor is Israel studies restricted to the narrow prism of
the conflict. The "Israel/Palestine" paradigm is rooted in a one-sided
critique of Israel.
As
to Robinson's concern for "Balkanized student enrollments," the truth
emerged when she admitted that Jewish students were enrolling in GWU's
new Israel studies courses, while Palestinian and "solidarity students"
were attending her Israel/Palestine classes. She inadvertently exposed a
likely reason for this when she said "I really enjoy engaging all of my
students on their own terms and making them feel like they have a stake
in the discussion, not least because of the tax dollars that the U.S.
gives to Israel."
Ironically,
the two panelists sitting on either side of Robinson who joined in
denouncing the influence of donors were beneficiaries of an AICE Israel
Scholar Award program that helped forty graduate students pursue their
doctorates. Liora Halperin received $55,000 and Sarah Anne Minkin got
$30,000. Robinson was speechless when I asked if she thought Halperin
and Minkin should return the money they received from what she had
asserted was a tainted source.
Neither
Halperin nor Minkin volunteered to return their awards and Halperin had
the audacity to complain that the funds she has to allot to her
graduate students is "Israel studies money." Had I not mentioned their
grants, the audience would have been unaware of the duo's hypocrisy in
participating in such a panel.
In
fact, Halperin, who denounced donors' "pernicious pressure for
pro-Israel advocacy," holds a chair in Israel studies funded by a $5
million gift by Becky Benaroya. When UW received the endowment
Halperin's UW colleague Noam Pianko hailed it as an opportunity "to
create academic relationships with Israeli institutions, to support
opportunities for students to study in Israel, and to facilitate
scholarly interchange between Israeli academics and UW faculty." This is
an example of how little influence donors actually have, and how the
positions they fund may be given to people whose views toward Israel
diverge from their own.
Panelists
were frustrated that their embrace of anti-Israel positions or
organizations was not seen as a legitimate expression of their academic
freedom. Minkin, for example, complained that the
Boycott-Divestment-Sanction movement (BDS) is considered "non-kosher" by
the Jewish community. She also saw no problem in associating with
groups promoting anti-Semitic positions such as Jewish Voice for Peace
(JVP). Rather, she said, it should be enough for liberal Zionists to
love Israel without having to disavow JVP.
Minkin's
grievances were not limited to donors and faculty: she was particularly
unhappy that Jewish students dare to arrive on campus prepared to
defend Israel. Lamenting that identity-building programs are teaching
advocacy, she claimed outside NGOs manipulate students by advising them
to "play up their emotional pain" and "to cry a little bit at divestment
hearings."
Joel Beinin
|
Instead,
he acknowledged that he now teaches Palestinians and students involved
in Palestinian activism. He did not note that the Stanford Review
student newspaper once ran a "Beinin Watch" column after he was
"accused on numerous occasions of speaking out in support of terrorist
organizations and of spearheading anti-Semitic practices at Stanford."
The
session's one voice of sanity came from audience member Ilan Troen,
founding director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at
Brandeis University and immediate past president of the board
of the Association of Israel Studies. He countered the panelists' myths
with the fact that Israel studies has spread around the world to places
as far-flung as China, India,
Romania, the Czech Republic, and Poland because of widespread and
genuine interest in Israel. "Some of these places have no Jews or Jewish
money coming in," he argued. "The power of the donors is much
exaggerated; Jewish donors may try to shove and push, but they are not
on promotion committees."
Such
facts did not sit well with the MESA crowd. A woman from the audience
interrupted Troen to accuse him of sophistry and ignoring empirical
data, an absurd claim given that Troen was the only authority on Israel
Studies in the room and the only contributor of anything other than
anecdotal whining.
Joshua
Schreier, who teaches Jewish studies at Vassar, was more concerned with
outside groups that hold faculty accountable and have the temerity to
publicize their findings. He was especially upset with a group of alumni
that formed "Fairness to Israel" (the correct name is Alums for Campus
Fairness), which circulated his openly biased
syllabus. He said the alumni assumed students might have a problem
taking courses from professors with strong political positions without
the alumni knowing what really goes on in the classroom.
Joshua Schreier
|
Panelist
Benjamin Schreier, Joshua's younger brother, a Penn State professor
with no expertise in Israel studies, attacked Hillel. He was outraged
that Penn State's Hillel director expressed concern about a program he
had organized on the 2015 stabbing intifada. The director "freaked out"
about the one-sidedness of the event and wanted to balance the panel
politically with a speaker whom Schreier disparaged as "an intellectual
for hire from one of the groups Daniel Pipes works with; not Campus
Watch—the more legitimate one [the Middle East Forum]," apparently
unaware that CW is a project of the Forum. "This guy I guess had a
Ph.D., so the Hillel director thought that would pass muster," Schreier
added, bragging that he shot the idea down. Schreier also castigated
Hillel for simplifying the discourse on Israel by dividing it into
supporters and opponents of the country's government.
These
panelists, like MESA in general, believe that critics of Israel are
protected by academic freedom, while scholars remotely sympathetic to
Israel, or given to challenging the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel dogma
are not.
The
good news is that MESA's members are clearly panicked that they no
longer have a monopoly on teaching about the Middle East. The study of
Israel naturally belongs in Middle East studies, but the ideologues who
either wish to exclude it or relegate it to one-sided criticism, made
the creation of a separate field of Israel Studies necessary. Now, on a
growing number of campuses, students have the option of taking courses
with scholars who are not only knowledgeable about Israel, but have some
affection for their subject.
The
bad news is that the room was full of professors and graduate students
committed to ensuring the continued dominance of their distorted,
ideologically-driven, anti-Israel views.
Mitchell Bard, a Campus Watch Fellow, is the author/editor of 24 books, including the 2017 edition of "Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict"; "The Arab Lobby"; and the novel "After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine."
Source: https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/12/21/middle-east-studies-association-panel-reserves-outrage-only-for-israel/
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