Lenora Hanson’s Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

This is the first in a series of statements written by graduate students and adjunct faculty that will be published over the coming months. Many of those statements will be published anonymously due to the professional threats students and contingent academics face by organizations like Canary Mission and a general imbalance of academic freedom extended to scholars who support BDS. The author of this statement has chosen to sign her name, despite that risk, in a small act of solidarity with the Palestinian graduate students and faculty who cannot avoid regular exposure to personal and professional harm.      

Lenora Hanson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently completing her dissertation with the support of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and is a graduate student member of the Executive Council of the MLA as well as a proud member of the Teaching Assistants’ Association (Local 3220, AFT/AFL-CIO).

What is the relationship between the MLA, as an academic organization with a focus on languages and literatures, and Israel’s occupation of Palestine? Many MLA members have been asking this question as our organization approaches the 2017 Convention, where a resolution to boycott Israeli institutions will be debated.

As someone who is nearing a bid for an academic career in the midst of the adjunct crisis, I have been considering that question in a different way. I have been asking myself: How do we come to decide which political conditions we are responsible for as professionals?

I have been thinking through this question intensely since returning from a ten-day long trip to Palestine with fellow MLA members this summer. During that trip, we met with Palestinian students and faculty inside and outside the West Bank in order to hear from them why the call for an academic boycott has been issued and why they support it. One student at Bir Zeit University made an important intervention that prompted my reflections: “If you are a Palestinian student, your life is about politics. You cannot separate the two.” For Palestinian students, politics—the political—cannot be divided from the mundane elements of academic pursuits. Every moment of their education—from the checkpoints they cross to get to school, to the fear that they will be imprisoned for protesting the occupation—is affected, limited, and enclosed by Israeli state policies and actions. This is to say nothing of the Palestinian faculty and graduate students in MLA-represented fields whose academic freedom and mobility is routinely denied in practice as we debate the definition of those terms at annual Conventions—frequently in the absence of our Palestinian colleagues. 

Apartheid in South Africa and Israel: A Radio Interview with Margaret Ferguson

Margaret Ferguson is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.  A scholar of the Renaissance, with many awards and honors to her name, Professor Ferguson  was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and is a recent past-President of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Her 2015 MLA presidential address can be read here.

While she was president of MLA, there was significant discussion of actions that the association might take to show support for Palestinian scholars and students as well as to support American academics who have been denied entry into the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. The MLA is currently considering a resolution to endorse a Palestinian call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, on which its Delegate Assembly will vote in January 2017 during the annual convention.

Click this link to listen to or download the podcast of the radio interview with Margaret Ferguson in which she discusses Israel and apartheid states.

Fred Moten’s Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

TIntype by Kari Orvik

Fred Moten is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study with Stefano Harney (2013) as well as Hughson’s Tavern (2008), B. Jenkins (2010), The Feel Trio (2014), The Little Edges (2016) and The Service Porch (2016). He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Sign the “Open Letter” calling on the MLA membership to endorse a resolution in support of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Only the signatures of (former or current) MLA members will be included.

I’ve been learning something recently as the rhetorical energy surrounding the idea and actuality of an academic and cultural boycott of Israel—which is the least those of us who are still concerned not only with human life in Palestine but also, and more generally, with unsettled, non-colonial life can do—has increased and intensified. Two ploys are often used in anti-boycott rhetoric and are, therefore, deserving of special notice. One takes the form of a radical refusal/inability to distinguish between individual and institution that emerges as essential to the defense of Israeli academic freedom. The other is the suggestion that an academic and cultural boycott of Israel is legitimate if and only if it is accompanied by similar action directed at every regime structured by the selective application of brutality upon populations under its control or, more specifically, at every settler colony including, and most specifically, the United States of America.

Those of us who are trying to organize and agitate for BDS, both within the Modern Language Association and outside of it, remark, rightly, that those who argue against it in the name of Israeli academic freedom exhibit no concern whatsoever for the far more debilitating and absolute assault on Palestinian academic freedom that Israel has carried out, as a matter of policy, for many decades.

The Malevolence of Occupation

David Lloyd, professor of English at the University of California, Riverside gave a talk in Dublin in the summer 2016 about boycott in general and also about his recent visit to Palestine with MLA colleagues.  Now he has published an essay titled “The Malevolence of Occupation” in the Dublin Review of Books, one of Ireland’s best literary reviews. The essay provides background to the boycott movement among US academics, an account of the difficult conditions under which Palestinians must teach and study,  and also a call to support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

You can read Lloyd’s entire essay here. Below are selected quotations from Lloyd’s essay. 

Ania Loomba’s Statement in Support of a Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

Ania Loomba is Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes on early modern literature, race and colonialism, and South Asian literature and culture. Her books include Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (OUP, 2002), Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (Routledge, 1998; second edition 2005, third edition, 2015), Gender Race Renaissance Drama (1989), as well as several edited collections on South Asian and early modern feminisms, early modern race, and postcolonial studies.

Sign the “Open Letter” calling on the MLA membership to endorse a resolution in support of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Only the signatures of (former or current) MLA members will be included.

I urge you to support the MLA resolution in favor of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. I recognize that many of you feel a boycott of Israel is an extreme step, and others may feel that it is likely to be ineffective, or that it is divisive for a body like the MLA to even discuss academic boycotts. Precisely the same arguments and hesitations accompanied the boycott of apartheid South Africa, and like that earlier movement, the BDS movement is not an attempt to muzzle academic or artistic freedom, or contact across borders, or a clampdown on individual rights, or an expression of anti-Semitism, as its opponents allege. On the contrary, it is a plea to recognize that intellectual, personal and religious freedoms simply cannot be exercised alongside the systematic brutalization of an entire people.

As teachers and students of literature we deal with the most controversial of issues, and we cannot shy away from this one. I teach and study histories of race and colonialism. It is impossible for me to do so and not see how Palestinians today are an unfree, colonized, and thoroughly oppressed people.

Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

Tom Sperlinger, a Reader in English at Bristol University, has published an account of the five months during which he taught literature at the Palestinian Al-Quds University, under conditions of occupation. His memoir Romeo and Juliet in Palestine chronicles the time he spent with Al-Quds students and faculty, and the difficulties he faced teaching English literature to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. His memoir challenges those in the humanities who consider life in Palestine irrelevant to the kind of learning we undertake when we study literature.

His University of Bristol website, notes that “Romeo and Juliet in Palestine, was published by Zero Books in June 2015 and has been reviewed in The Observer, the Electronic Intifada and SCTIW Review. It is about a semester [Sperlinger] spent teaching at Al-Quds University in 2013.”  See the interview with Sperlinger about the book for the Bristol Festival of Ideas and for the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper in Brazil.”

Defend Campus Free Speech: Oppose Canary Mission’s Blacklisting of Students and Scholars

For over a year, a growing number of students and faculty have become the target of the Canary Mission (CM), a clandestine organization that is devoted to monitoring and harassing anti-Zionist activists and critics of Israel on university campuses (see here and here and here and here for recent coverage).  The organization, which operates anonymously, has been linked to and endorsed by well-known defenders of Israel, such as David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes. Horowitz’s Freedom Center maintains the Discover the Network page which lists individuals, among them an odd assort of academics, on the ostensible American Left. Pipes is associated with the controversial 2002 Campus Watch blacklists. Akin to Campus Watch, which focused primarily on Middle East Studies scholars, who questioned US policy in the Bush era, Canary Mission project is both more specific and more general; it is more specific in its focus on campus critiques of Israel, but it is more general in not limiting the list to Middle East Studies scholars.

Canary Mission is nothing but a blacklist, pure and simple.

“Life and Death in Palestine”: A Radio Interview with Ben Ehrenreich

Ben Ehrenreich is an independent journalist, whose varied writings include a prize-winning article on death in Los Angeles in the Los Angeles Magazine and the story behind the murder of the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton.  Visit Ben Ehrenreich’s blog to follow his compelling coverage of stories that often do not appear in the mainstream press. In addition to his work as a  journalist, he is a creative writer, and has published two novels, The Suitors and Ether (City Lights 2011).

Ehrenreich has written for Harper’s Magazine on Israel’s water war against Palestine and this year published a new book, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin).

To listen to or download the podcast of the interview with Ben Ehrenreich who discusses with David Lloyd his new book on “life and death in Palestine,” click this link.

In early August, David Lloyd interviewed Ben Ehrenreich for the weekly SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) Collective radio show, which produces original programming for KPFK/Pacifica Radio 90.7 fm, Los Angeles. The discussion between Lloyd and Ehrenreich focuses on the current situation in Palestine-Israel, Palestinian resistance movements, the suspended peace talks, and prospects of the continuing Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation and apartheid. The interview originally aired on August 1, 2016 and was produced by Nyma Ardilan.

 

 

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) Platform and Palestine Solidarity

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a broad coalition of Black organizations, published in early August a resolutely inspiring platform, bringing into clear focus some of the most urgent political issues of our era, from the criminalization of Blacks and immigrants to economic injustice to inequality in education to the militarization of US society. The M4BL policy platform represents without question the most far-reaching attempt in the 21^st century to present the systemic nature of racial violence in the US, whose most spectacular and outrageous form finds expression in the police serial killing of Blacks, but which can be tracked to every sector of society.

Academic Boycott and Academic Activism

In her recent essay for Social Justice, Sunaina Maira provides analysis of the importance of academic boycott resolutions, both in their passage and in the spaces they create for dialogue, education, and democratization of the neoliberal university. She begins by noting, “Something unthinkable has happened in the United States in recent years: The boycott of Israeli academic institutions has expanded rapidly, with one major academic association after another endorsing the boycott or voting on boycott resolutions. Just as recently as in 2010, it was unimaginable for many, including Palestine solidarity activists and Palestinians themselves, that the academic boycott could win support in the United States. Our government, after all, is the most powerful ally of Israel and has provided unconditional military, political, and economic support to the Israeli state. Concomitantly, the issue of Palestinian liberation has historically been suppressed and subjected to censorship in the US academy and public sphere, representing what many describe as a new McCarthyism.” She goes on in this essay, found in full here to explore the significant role that the Palestine question and BDS have played in movements for social justice, and in challenging foundational colonial narratives. Maira also makes the case for the political principles that structure the boycott movement, and for the way it relies on autonomous grassroots mobilizing, done in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

She makes an argument that resolutions adopted by academic organizations are important not just for their outcomes, but because they create an important intellectual and political space, that contributes to the struggle to democratizing the neoliberal university. She concludes, “The boycott is thus central to the contemporary culture wars, and is an important site for academic activism and struggles for emancipation.”

As MLA Members for Justice in Palestine partake in this struggle with a boycott resolution—and build on the space for dialogue and education created by the Right to Enter Resolution passed at the 2014 Delegate Assembly—a resolution that received the majority of votes without reaching MLA’s required 10 percent threshold—Maira’s analysis of the importance of this campaign is timely and inspiring.