Six days after its membership voted to implement an academic boycott against
Israeli universities, the American Studies Association’s Caucus on Academic and
Community Activism on December 21, 2013 hurriedly issued a defensive appeal for
support bemoaning, in the wake of a tsunami of backlash and censure against the
boycott, what it defined as a “campaign of intimidation against the
ASA.”
Instead of taking responsibility for the significant and profoundly
damaging action it collectively took by approving the boycott in the first
place, the ASA saw the wide-ranging negative response from the academic
community to their action, not as justifiable criticism of an
intellectually-defective boycott, but as an attack on the organization’s
integrity, its stated solidarity with the Palestinians, and its overall
credibility as an academic organization. The ASA also struck back with a
well-worn, fatuous tactic used by those individuals and groups who have
participated in the demonization and delegitimization of Israel before as part
of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign: instead of
acknowledging that any of the criticism was justified from the many individuals
and groups who immediately denounced the boycott, the ASA reflexively, and
disingenuously, accused “powerful and well-funded academic and non-academic
organizations” of “mount[ing] a public campaign aimed at destroying the
Association.”
The paranoid notion that “powerful and well-funded”
interests had any desire to even notice, let alone seek to destroy, the ASA, is
ridiculous. More troubling is that this statement reveals that ASA members
naively believed that they could institute a broad academic boycott against
Israel, call for Jewish academics to be shunned from the community of world
scholars while simultaneously singling out and attacking the Jewish state as an
illegal, colonial occupier on stolen Palestinian land, and tar the reputation of
Israeli scholars by making them complicit in, and responsible for, the actions
of their government in perpetrating what the ASA defines as an “illegal
occupation” without anyone with opposing views answering back these slanders
with counter-arguments and opposing views.
The ASA claimed that the wide
condemnation came after the boycott vote, not because the boycott’s concept was
intellectually defective and ran counter to academia’s values, but “because it
dared to express criticism of Israel.” In other words, for the ASA, the issue is
not that the boycott itself was based on historical distortions, post-colonial
guilt, half-truths, and a misreading of law, politics, and facts; instead,
asserted the ASA, presidents and faculty members from many of the world’s finest
universities, other academic associations, Jewish organizations, and other
clear-thinking people from around the world who loudly denounced the decision to
call for an academic boycott did so, not because they actually thought an
academic boycott was morally and intellectually wrong, but because they were all
only interested in deflecting criticism of what the ASA sees as Israel’s many
and chronic transgressions.
More significant is that, in singling out
Israel, and Jewish academics, to be boycotted, many, including former Harvard
president Lawrence Summers, observed that the ASA boycott was possibly
ant-Semitic, “if not in intent, then in effect.” “These organizations falsely
accuse the ASA membership of being anti-semitic [sic],” the ASA message said,
“bent on the destruction of Israel. But the goal of the boycott is to show
solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinians, who have been subject to decades
of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
The motivation of the
boycott may well have been to “show solidarity with the beleaguered
Palestinians,” but several working definitions of anti-Semitism, including those
by the U.S. State Department and the European Union Agency for Fundamental
Rights, suggest that such actions, in targeting Israel and holding it to a
different standard of behavior than all other nations – something which this
boycott clearly does—is one criteria by which speech and actions can be
considered anti-Semitic, which of course the ASA vigorously
denies.
Whether or not the ASA feels it is being anti-Semitic is not
relevant; anti-Semites rarely admit to their behavior, or to the consequences of
their actions and speech. And the ASA’s accusation that outsiders attacked its
boycott, not on its own merits, but in a furtive attempt to stifle criticism of
Israel was also consistent with a pattern that David Hirsh of Engage in Britain
has termed the “Livingstone Formulation,” part of which is “the
counteraccusation that the raisers of the issue of antisemitism do so with
dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation
is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the antisemitism card’ rather than to
relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.” So not only did
the ASA reject some of the claims of underlying anti-Semitism in the boycott
itself, it also decided that those organizations and individuals who made
efforts to expose that anti-Semitism were not authentic, but merely attempts to
promote their own, pro-Israel agenda. “Intimidation and frivolous legal
arguments against boycott,” the ASA appeal claimed, “are part of a long-standing
history of repression of Palestinian human rights activism in the United
States.”
In its eagerness to deflect any further accusations of
anti-Semitism, the ASA also deployed another favorite tactic of those wishing to
act in an anti-Semitic way while disavowing any involvement with such behavior,
namely, trotting out Jewish fellow travelers, generally exhibiting paroxysms of
self-loathing, who support their mission—in this case, the boycott of Israeli
universities.
“Many Jewish members of ASA support the resolution,” the
appeal proudly announced. “These include Eric Cheyfitz, who posted this comment
to the ASA website: ‘I am a Jew with a daughter and three grandchildren who are
citizens of Israel.’” Cheyfitz, who seemingly is repulsed by both Israel and the
U.S. for their imperialism and genocidal impulses towards indigenous
populations, is a professor of American Studies at Cornell University and, not
coincidentally, one of the defenders of discredited academic fraud, Ward
Churchill. In his essay, “Why I Support the Academic Boycott of Israel,”
Cheyfitz articulated very clearly the prevailing ideology of the ASA – that is,
that America and Israel are imperialistic, militaristic powers who have and
continue to exploit Third-world victims, and that these countries’ self-pride is
misguided and undeserved. “It is worth noting in this respect that just as the
myth of American exceptionalism seeks to erase the genocide and ongoing settler
colonialism of Indigenous peoples here in the United States,” Cheyfitz
pontificated, “so the myth of Israeli exceptionalism seeks to erase Israeli
colonialism in Palestine and claim original rights to Palestinian
lands.”
Another Jewish supporter of the ASA boycott was the virulent
Richard Falk, whose view was that “The ASA outcome is part of a campaign to
construct a new subjectivity surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Falk,
former Princeton professor and now United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in the
Occupied Territories, has claimed that “to divest from companies profiting from
business with Israel... is to express solidarity with victims of massive crimes
against humanity and to call upon Israel to respect UN authority and the
elemental rules of international law by withdrawing from occupied Palestinian
territory.” Morally-incoherent views are business- as-usual for Falk, whose
repeated comparisons of Israelis to Nazis have made it quite clear that he was
clearly ideologically ill-equipped in his UN role as an impartial observer. “The
recent developments in Gaza,” Falk wrote in 2007, “are especially disturbing
because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and
its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions
of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a
holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments
of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent
these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective
tragedy.”
Falk constantly looks for ways to condemn Israel and accuse it
of perpetrating genocide. He is similar to professor Cheyfitz in one important
way: both have “in published word and action opposed settler colonialism
wherever it exists, including of course the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and
East Jerusalem.”
Protestations and defenses aside, the issue is far more
obvious than the members of ASA care to realize, and much less insidious. Those
who speak back to ideologues do so not to suppress criticism of Israel; academic
freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any academic meanderings
they wish, but it clearly does not make them free from being challenged for
their thoughts.
The collateral notion that, in siding with “Palestinian
solidarity,” the ASA can inoculate itself from any accusations of anti-Semitism
or even ill-advised academic behavior is another example of the defective
reasoning frequently used by those engaged in the cognitive war against Israel.
Feeling empowered by the moral self-righteousness they claim in pursuit of
Palestinian self-determination, in assisting the victim, they feel free to
malign Israel and accuse it of being the world’s primary purveyor of
evil.
The core issue is that just as the pro-Palestinian activists within
the ASA have the right under the umbrella of academic free speech to express
their views – no matter how factually inaccurate, vitriolic, or repellant they
may be – those within and outside academia with opposing views also have the
right, under the same precepts of free expression, to question the ASA’s views,
and to call them anti-Semitic, or racist, or genocidal, or merely historically
inaccurate or incorrect if, in fact, that is the case. It is naïve and
unrealistic, at best, for ASA leadership to think it could call for such a
potentially damaging boycott, which seriously violates fundamental academic
principles, without any response from a great many people with opposing views
about the wisdom of such an action. That the academics of the ASA do not
understand, or choose to ignore, such a fundamental concept is
troubling.
Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, author of Genocidal Liberalism:
The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, is president of Scholars for
Peace in the Middle East.