Palestinian activism grows at US universities

Washington. By the third evening of the American Studies Association’s national conference, a petition calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions had garnered some 850 signatures. An opposing petition had just over 50.Still, there was quite a bit of controversy when on December 4, the National Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) endorsed a boycott condemning the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. In American academia, criticising Israel has often come with a heavy backlash, including lawsuits and claims of anti-Semitism. Yet American professors and students are increasingly critical of what many have called Israeli apartheid, comparing the current segregation of Palestinians to that faced by black South Africans prior to 1995.Recognising the divisiveness of the issue, the Association held a town hall attended by several hundred members on November 22 . During the open question-and-answer section, Lena Ibrahim, a first-generation Palestinian American student living in Virginia, took the microphone. Ibrahim had recently returned from a trip to visit family and friends in Palestine.“I went to Palestine and looked around, and I was so depressed, thinking peace will never come.” But she was heartened by the scholarly discussion. “This is how peace will come,” she told the audience. The ASA’s membership now has until December 15 to vote on whether the organisation will adopt the resolution.The boycott that the ASA’s council signed off on includes all Israeli academic institutions, and follows a similar move last April by the Association for Asian American Studies. Some ASA members took to the organisation’s website to criticise the move (one threatened to cancel his membership), and 50-some scholars, most of whom did not attend November’s conference, signed a counter-petition rejecting the boycott.Opponents were chiefly concerned with the question of why single out Israel rather than other countries with records of human rights abuses, such as the United States. Claire Potter, a history professor at New York’s New School who blogs under the name “Tenured Radical” wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “putting the question of why Israel’s human rights violations are being singled out as especially gruesome, given US complicity in the repression of many peoples across the globe, the ASA also runs the risk of isolating progressive colleagues in Israel by passing this resolution.”