In 2016 the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions for their involvement in the illegal occupation of Palestine both gathered significant steam and faced a huge roadblock. In the United States, the country that largely underwrites and funds the Israeli occupation, the call to boycott initiated in 2004 by Palestinian civil rights organizations movement has had some impressive successes, with eight associations endorsing it thus far, notably in academic fields that challenge Eurocentrism.[1] The movement continued to grow last year as scholars across disciplines learned more about the Israeli occupation and its consequences. Several larger academic organizations discussed or voted on the boycott call, including the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA). As criticisms of the Israeli state and Zionist ideology spread, backlash intensified.

We are part of the diverse group of anthropologists of different backgrounds, including Israelis and Palestinians, who have organized a movement to convince the AAA membership to adopt the boycott. For several years, we have worked to educate our colleagues about both Israeli violations of Palestinian rights and the boycott as an effective tactic by which to support those rights. We’ve done this through panels, roundtables, dozens of op-eds, videos, webinars, teach-ins, email outreach, and canvassing on the floors of various anthropology conferences. As the MLA begins its discussions of the boycott, we offer this retrospective on the AAA vote last spring.

In late March 2016, two weeks before the full AAA membership was to vote on the boycott resolution, we gave a talk on our recent book, Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The book examines the political and economic pressures that shape how US-based scholars, across generations, have researched and taught about the Middle East since World War II, through the lens of anthropologists’ struggles with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism. We ended that talk on a positive note, suggesting that perhaps our discipline was finally on the verge of meaningful change. Our cautious optimism, as we put it then, was based in part on our experience of the November 2015 AAA business meeting. A preliminary vote on the boycott took place that evening, at what was by all accounts the best attended business meeting in AAA history. 88% of attendees voted to support boycott and place it on a ballot for the full AAA membership to endorse. We ended our talk at Berkeley with a hopeful sentiment that this preliminary success signaled the demise of the kinds of gendered and raced prejudices against the Middle East and Middle Easterners that we discussed in our book, as well as an end to earlier understandings of anthropology as an objective apolitical science. “There may well be a major seachange in anthropology,” we said, “We wonder whether, and hope that, the same is the case for academia at large.”

Our colleague Saba Mahmood was in the audience and offered what would be the most prescient comment of the day. She said that she did not share our optimism about the upcoming boycott vote, and that there was still a “sleeping giant” at the heart of the discipline whose head had not yet been cut off – a sleeping giant characterized by politically inert liberalism. Two months later, she was proven right. What began as an 88% victory among over 1000 business meeting attendees (approximately 10% of the AAA membership) became a narrow, 0.8%, 39-vote loss, as the approximately 5000 (or 50%) the Association’s 10,000 members who chose to vote were split essentially down the middle.

So what happened? As supportive colleagues reeled in shock from this unexpected loss, the first explanation they proffered was that direct outside interference must have sabotaged the vote. Indeed, there is significant evidence for this meddling, even at the top levels of the Israeli government. The Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs, Gilad Erdan, said that “intensive publicity work and groundwork with members of the association” led to the defeat. He linked the AAA outcome to other anti-boycott efforts globally, suggesting a coordinated and possibly state-led campaign to defeat the boycott movement. The chairperson of the Association of University Heads of Israel wrote to chancellors and presidents of major US universities, asking them to issue statements opposing the proposed AAA boycott before the vote. Many did just that in a joint letter publicized right after the AAA voting period opened, signed by the Chancellors of all ten University of California campuses plus UC President Janet Napolitano. Pro-Israel groups, led by Eugene Kontorovich, a Northwestern law professor and Israeli settler, filed a lawsuit against the members of the Council of the American Studies Association who had endorsed the boycott in 2013. Timed to coincide with the early days of the AAA boycott vote, this lawsuit seemed designed to intimidate AAA voters.

Other intimidation tactics marred the voting period as well, including blacklists and targeted harassment campaigns. For instance, the AMCHA initiative, which seeks to define any activity critical of Israel as anti-Semitism, created a blacklist of anthropologists supporting the boycott. It then sent systematic and repeated harassing emails to untenured scholars on this list, knowing full well that such faculty, with little job security, are especially vulnerable to outside political pressure on this issue. The AAA boycott threat appeared to spur the development of a new group, called the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), which then mobilized its non-anthropologist members to convince anthropologists to vote against the boycott. It proudly lauded the vote outcome as one of its achievements on its website, stating that it “amplified and distributed” messages from anti-boycott groups. Outside money mattered too. A Zionist advocacy organization called AMEINU provided direct support, including funding channels, to the primary anti-boycott group of anthropologists. And the Schusterman Family Foundation funded AEN as well as at least one anti-boycott anthropologist’s AAA membership fees, enabling them to vote; there is speculation that it funded many more.[2]

While the boycott certainly prompted greater Israeli state and institutional involvement in pressuring scholars, and amplified these efforts through the financial and organizational involvement of groups like the Schusterman Family Foundation, AMCHA, AMEINU, and AEN, such pressure on academics to be silent on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is not particularly new. Since at least the 1970s, academics who research or teach topics against the grain of dominant U.S. narratives about Palestine have taken significant career risks, and have been accused of bias and even treason in their teaching and public lectures and targeted by blacklists and hate mail. These pressures and risks have intensified this century with the War on Terror, the increase in numbers and reach of right-wing “watchdog” organizations, and the development of technologies which enable greater surveillance and public targeting of scholars. For decades scholars have been pressured to avoid public association with Palestine; opposition to the boycott in the form of letters from university presidents and chancellors and multiple harassing emails from other faculty members, brought these pressures to the foreground.

And while these tactics are familiar to Middle East scholars, many non-Middle East anthropologists were caught entirely off guard by them. Over the past three years of discussion about Palestinian rights and the boycott, many anthropologists whose work does not relate to the Middle East were exposed, for the first time, to these pressures. Colleagues frequently expressed to us surprise that graduate students or pre-tenure faculty were scared to publicly support the boycott or feared negative reprisal if they did. Unbeknownst to many of them, Middle East anthropologists’ early career experiences regularly socialized them into this highly politicized world.

But it is critical to recognize that such pressures, and evidence of a massive and coordinated anti-boycott campaign are not the only reason the resolution did not pass in the full AAA membership vote. They alone cannot explain why an 88% victory transformed into a loss, albeit razor thin. Put differently, why didn’t the outcome of a vote among the 10% of the AAA membership that attended the 2015 business meeting reflect the outcome when the full Association voted? Anthropology’s Politics reveals the other, less blunt but no less insidious, reason why the boycott movement stumbled in anthropology. Put simply, this is the longstanding fissure between scholars who understand politics and academia to be intertwined and those who believe they are separable. Many who were surprised by the vote outcome overestimated the degree to which the progressive perspectives visible in the business meeting represent the discipline as a whole.

The professional practice and demographics of anthropology embody both the post-World War II shift in U.S. domestic politics towards an emphasis on civil rights and the inclusion of female and minority perspectives, as well as the backlash against these shifts and continued reproduction of structural inequalities and discriminations. Many anthropologists think that their discipline champions (or should champion) the voices and perspectives of the marginalized, yet some of its practitioners have colluded with colonial and state power. Anthropology has become a heavily feminized discipline since the second wave feminist movement and attracts many non-elite scholars, yet it remains largely white, like academia in general. Anthropology is the most resolutely international of the social sciences in its breadth of research sites and privileging of fieldwork done “elsewhere,” yet anthropologists based in the U.S. mainly cite their colleagues working in U.S. institutions. And anthropologists frequently identify as politically left leaning and critical of capitalism, yet continue to work in increasingly corporatized university environments.

There is a demographic component to these tensions. Most of the scholars who became anthropologists before the 1990s because they thought the field was conducive to politically committed academic engagement in and about the Middle East were women and/or those with family or heritage ties to the region. With some notable exceptions, white men trained before the 1990s tend to hold on to notions of anthropology as an objective science, and of activism as compromising academic integrity. This is sometimes expressed in overt or microaggressive sexist or racist judgments of female colleagues or anthropologists of color. These demographic patterns of linking or delinking academia from political commitments were on full view during discussions of the boycott at the AAA.

The outcome of the full membership vote can thus best be explained by a combination of the pressures exerted by external, often Israeli-led, organized opposition to the boycott and to the lingering mythology that anthropological scholarship – and by extension, anthropologists and their scholarly associations, like the AAA — can and should be “objective” and apolitical. These two sources of anti-boycott pushback parallel the two forms that such objections took: Organized pressure against the boycott often drew on spurious accusations that the criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic or redirected discussions away from Palestinian rights to concern for how the existing academic freedom of Israeli colleagues would be affected, in an attempt to shift the terrain of the discussion towards “scholars like us.” Anti-boycott voices also championed assertions that anthropology, as a scholarly discipline, had no business making political statements or taking political action. But the AAA has passed numerous political statements about other issues and places and people. It is only when Israeli violations of Palestinian rights are the issue that the latter argument is so vehemently deployed, as happened in response to numerous earlier attempts within the AAA to make statements in support of Palestinian rights. The coexistence and co-construction of these anti-boycott arguments remind us that we must understand the vote outcome as due to both external interference and pressure and longstanding dynamics within anthropology and the academy. The latter represent what Mahmood so presciently called the sleeping giant of the discipline.

This combination of dynamics explains why dozens of boycott supporters signed the boycott pledge anonymously and avoided publicly advocating for boycott in their departments and with colleagues. They explain why managers of AAA-related websites and publications always insisted to us that pro-boycott essays be paired with the same number of anti-boycott essays for “balance,” though the same stipulation did not apply to anti-boycott materials. They explain why the panels of anthropologists opposed to the boycott were made up of disproportionately older white male speakers as compared with the striking diversity of speakers on panels supporting the boycott. By the last year of boycott discussion, these anti-boycott speakers had moved from raising the old canard of anti-Semitism to questioning whether or not a boycott was acceptable academic practice, drawing on longstanding notions of anthropological “objectivity” or redirecting concern to academic freedom for Israelis, despite the fact that the boycott doesn’t target them in their individual capacity and that there were dozens of Israeli anthropologists who supported it. While certainly bolstered by “outside forces,” these tactics and positions go way back in the discipline of anthropology.

But the giant’s days may well be numbered. Indeed, there are two ways to look at the very close vote outcome – as an absolute loss or as a victory in terms of how far the movement for Palestinian rights has come in the past decade. Today, younger generations of anthropologists are challenging the kinds of liberal politics of an older anthropology that often rests implicitly on subtle forms of racism and paternalism. They are contesting the notion that anthropology’s relevance is narrow, and that activism or partisan politics has no place in the academy. Mirroring new political movements outside the academy, they are also building coalitions among different progressive causes. This is half of the answer to why there was such a discrepancy between the 88% victory in support of boycott at the 2015 AAA business meeting and 50-50 split of the full membership vote. That meeting hall was the most diverse gathering of anthropologists we have ever seen. These were anthropologists with a progressive activist bent, who understood that the issue of Palestinian rights is an issue of human rights about which we should all be concerned, that Israel-Palestine is this generation’s apartheid South Africa, as some have put it. It was also a relatively young gathering, as younger scholars are more likely to attend Association conferences, as they are interviewing for jobs or giving papers to build their careers. The electronic ballot for the full membership vote was open for a month and a half, and one could vote from one’s own home. One can therefore read the difference in the two outcomes as diagnostic of the demographic shifts in anthropology and as a return of earlier moments of heightened political consciousness in the discipline. Older, whiter, male, Zionist, liberal scholars still outnumber those who dominated the business meeting.

The other half of the answer lies of course, as many colleagues immediately noted, in those extraordinary efforts made by anti-boycott organizations to defeat the resolution in the full AAA membership vote. It isn’t difficult to see the overwhelming victory at the business meeting as a challenge to those who fear the boycott, including Israeli government officials. The mere fact that external organizations are throwing funding and labor at thwarting the mobilization efforts of a group of US based anthropologists, not to mention the pride that was expressed in those organized efforts after the resolution’s defeat in the AAA, shows that they view this growing movement as a threat. The extent of their attention to the academic boycott, and their treatment of a US academic association’s debates and votes as worthy of comment and funding, actually highlight the success of the boycott movement in raising critical awareness about Palestinian rights and Israeli violations among an ever-growing numbers of U.S. scholars. Perhaps we should understand this backlash as a sign that the boycott movement is doing something right. Perhaps the narrow loss of the AAA vote was not quite a loss at all.

[1] These include the Asian-American Studies Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, the African Literature Association, the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and the Association for Humanist Sociology, and the American Studies Association.

[2] See Anthroboycott’s synopsis of the entire opposition playbook here.

Lara Deeb is Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. Jessica Winegar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Together, they are co-authors of Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2015).

We learned that Boycott supporters felt silenced and intimidated by the anti-Boycott sentiment in their departments while on the other hand anti-Boycott supporters felt silenced and intimidated by the Boycott sentiment in their departments.

We learned that the AAA could deal judiciously with a difficult topic or
We learned that the AAA’s curation of Israel’s “World Anthropology” was biased

we learned that everyone cared because turn out was at an all time high or
We learned that no one cared because only half the association votes
(but then again fifty percent is an F
even with grade inflation.)

We learned the other side couldn’t see how far right it was unless
The other side couldn’t see how far left it was.

The boycott was against anthropology’s commitment to relativism, tolerance, and dialogue and
The boycott was part of anthropology’s commitment to social justice.

We learned that the only reason the other side won is that they bought cookies to the business meeting
or
they purchased extra memberships just to vote.

We learned we couldn’t talk because politics is when the time for talking is past and
We learned should have talked more because talking is what politics is.

We learned that Israel is different than some have been told although
We learned the country is gravely misunderstood by others

We learned that we have the same values, just differently ranked or
have the same values, but believe different things are true
or
have different values, and differently rank what we think is true
but we don’t
have the same values and believe the same things
since
that is not the proper role of scholarly associations
unless
this is the most important thing a scholarly association can do.

We learned that never again
means
‘never again’
or might mean
‘never again’
Because Jewish rights are human rights
and human rights are Palestinian rights
which are human rights which
is why never again means
what it does
unless

#anthroboycott matters because we learned
we learned #anthroboycott matters because

Because we learned #anthroboycott matters

Matters learned because we #anthroboycott

we #anthroboycott because learned

learned because we #anthroboycott

we because #anthroboycott

learned matters

because

we

In the end an astounding 51% of its 10,000 members participated. The resolution failed by exactly 39 votes: 2,423-2,384 (50.4%-49.6%)—a statistical dead heat.

David Palumbo-Liu, Steven Salaita, Charlotte Silver, and Elizabeth Redden have all written excellent postmortems about the vote. Having read all four, it strikes me that there are three important points to be made: The first is that the AAA is still moving ahead with a statement of censure of the Israeli government and other actions. The second is the role played by outside groups that sought to influence the vote. And the third is the status of the BDS movement after the vote. Read on for my take on each of these three points…

AAA statement of censure and other actions

An email sent out by the AAA after the votes were tallied states that:

AAA members are generally in agreement that serious threats to academic freedom and human rights have been noted in Israel-Palestine as a result of Israeli government policies and practices, and that AAA should respond to these threats.

Elizabeth Redden’s adds more from AAA President Alisse Waterston:

she noted that each of the two formal resolutions put forward at the November business meeting — the one in favor of boycott that proceeded to the full membership vote and one against boycott that was voted down by business meeting attendees — both express concerns about Israeli government policies and practices, including Israel’s occupation of territories captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

“There is disagreement around the academic boycott, but there is a general consensus on the rest,” Waterston said.

I think this is incredibly important. The AAA largely disagreed about the the use of an academic boycott as a tactic but still expressed broad agreement over the injustice of the occupation.

The actions being taken are listed in full on a the AAA website. In addition to the statement of censure of the Israeli government they also include “a letter to relevant authorities in the US government identifying the ways in which US resources and policies contribute to policies in Israel/Palestine that violate academic freedom and disenfranchise Palestinians” and “ways to provide active resource support for Palestinian and Israeli academics as well as visiting scholars in the region.”

Role Played by Outside Groups

One of the most contentious issues raised by these postmortems is the role played by outside groups. Charlotte Silver states that “Gilad Erdan, the Israeli minister of public security and strategic affairs, credited Israeli and US-based lobby groups with the defeat of the resolution.” David Palumbo-Liu elaborates:

And finally, it now seems that even the state of Israel took part in the campaign of this U.S. professional organization. Upon news of the defeat of the resolution, Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan declared, “This is a dramatic shift stemming from the intensive publicity work and ground work with members of the association.”

But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Steven Salaita’s summarizes:

The organizers of the resolution managed these feats despite a general opposition to boycotts of Israel that includes governors, financiers, university presidents, and heads of state.

I think the tremendous resources mobilized to oppose the boycott are a sign of the effectiveness of the boycott as a tactic (ironically, one of the things that opponents called into question). I also think that the organizers of the boycott deserve tremendous credit for how close the final vote was given such opposition.

Despite the evidence of outside influence, I personally suspect that their total effect upon the vote might not have been that great. While outside forces may have encouraged some people to vote who don’t normally vote, I also think this probably was true of the pro-boycott voters as well. I know it seems strange that the AAA passed the initial resolution by such a large margin (1,040 to 136) and the final vote was so close, but as someone pointed out on Facebook, the wider AAA membership is generally older and more conservative¹ than those who attend the meetings.

Still, it would be nice if the AAA would release some more detailed numbers so that we could better understand whether outside groups had outsized influence. Was there an unusual jump in new AAA memberships compared to previous years? How many people joined (or re-joined) just to vote and what the breakdown was of these new (or renewed) voters? Releasing these numbers might assuage concerns about outside influence over the vote.

State of the BDS movement after the vote

It is important to understand that the AAA vote was part of a much wider battle. Elizabeth Redden lists other scholarly associations that have approved Israel boycott resolutions since 2013:

the African Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

This, and other actions taken as part of the wider BDS movement have provoked a backlash. Steven Salaita summarizes some recent developments:

This month, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered state agencies under his control to divest themselves of BDS-affiliated organizations and companies, a move that many legal scholars consider to be unconstitutional. Various colleges have sought to conceptualize criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism and thus a type of hate speech. Those in support of BDS, in other words, are not merely in conflict with colleagues; they have run afoul of institutions capable of doing serious harm. Even those who oppose academic boycott should be mindful of the forces now using it as pretext to intervene on campus.

Charlotte Silver adds evidence of some of the intimidation tactics being used against BDS supporters:

The ultranationalist group Im Tirtzu purportedly outed the 22 Israeli academics, though their allegations were based on flimsy evidence.

Im Tirtzu has also called on Israeli universities to fire employees who support the boycott or demonstrate any criticism of Israel.

These are worrying developments and belie the idea that opponents are genuinely interested in “dialog.”

Conclusion

I think the fact that the final vote was so close shows that the AAA was not ready for a full fledged boycott. Nonetheless, the numerous discussions occasioned during the run-up to the vote certainly educated a lot of people about the state of academic freedom in the Middle-East. I know I personally have had some very productive private conversations over this topic. A few years ago it was much harder to have a civil debate about Zionism. In an important sense then, the call for a boycott was itself an important force in fostering dialog. As I sated above, the debate within the AAA was largely over the choice of tactics. Increasingly, everyone agrees that the status-quo is unacceptable.

For those who missed it, earlier I wrote three posts laying out my argument in support of the boycott: here, here, and here.

UPDATE: On June 24, 2016 AAA President Alisse Waterston released a statement stating, in part, that:

AAA has closely monitored membership patterns to assess irregularities, especially year-over-year changes from January 1 to June 1. There has been absolutely no evidence of a spike in either direction regarding membership. AAA has seen a slow but steady increase in membership since 2014 (Jan-June 2014, 1% increase; Jan-June 2015, 1% increase; Jan-June 2016, 1% increase). This consistency has remained.

Accept Palestinian scholars as our colleagues and vote today. Answer their call to us to support boycott. Instructions to support the boycott vote are here.

***

Are Palestinian Scholars Our Colleagues? Boycott and the Material Limits of Friendship

Alireza Doostdar

The debate over the AAA motion to boycott Israeli academic institutions has centered on questions of justice and academic freedom. Proponents of boycott argue that the exhaustively-documented injustices that Israel metes out on the Palestinian people, which includes systematic denial of their academic freedom, warrants a boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in the state’s crimes. Opponents argue that even though Israel may be oppressing the Palestinians, this should not be cause for curtailing the academic freedom of Israelis, which they see as amounting to unjust collective punishment.

Implicit in these arguments are a set of unexamined attitudes toward collegiality and reciprocity. Briefly, I want to argue that the decision whether or not to support boycott turns on whether one is able to imagine Palestinian scholars as colleagues and friends. This imagination is a product not just of our individual cognitive capacities, but of specific material conditions.

At a very basic level, the motion to boycott Israeli institutions is an explicit response to a call by Palestinian civil society (including academics) to exert nonviolent pressure on the Israeli regime to end the occupation. Whether or not we consider Palestinians to be our colleagues has a direct bearing on whether we think we should respond to this call, and indeed, whether we have the capacity to hear the call at all.

One of the reasons I became an anthropologist is Munir Fasheh, a Christian Palestinian educator born in Jerusalem whose home was expropriated by Israelis when his family was expelled from his land. When I was a college student, I read an article by Munir that dramatically altered my view of academic life, setting me on a course away from engineering (my undergraduate field) toward education, and eventually anthropology. I later met Munir and we became friends. He is one of the most beautiful and remarkable souls I know. Another Palestinian friend of mine is a very talented anthropologist living in the West Bank with his two children. His wife, an architect, works in Jerusalem. The two have different kinds of IDs (a product of the elaborate Israeli system of apartheid), and so only the wife can access Jerusalem, which means they cannot live together and are forced to maintain two households.

When I think about boycott, I think of Munir and my anthropologist colleague and the many debts I owe them as friends.

The question of boycott is fundamentally about reciprocity. I mean this in two interrelated senses. On the one hand, there are the structures of reciprocity that constitute our academic practice – everything from peer-review to letters of recommendation. When we feel compelled by professional obligations and sense the warmth of collegiality and friendship, we are in effect feeling the pushes and pulls of these structures of reciprocity. On the other hand, there are material relations without which our work as academics would be impossible. These are also constituted by structures of exchange, not so much in the sense of academic circulation of ideas, as in terms of funding, institutional relations, ties to government and industry, and so on. The fact that we enjoy collegial relationships of a certain sort, that we are able to exchange “gifts” with our colleagues, has to do largely with these material determinations. But what this means is that our inability to establish collegial connections with some scholars may be similarly predetermined.

To get very concrete: That we have Israeli colleagues but not Palestinian ones is a product of material limits. The shape of these limitations is very complicated, but it includes brute structures of violence and constraint: Palestinian universities are bombed or are regularly raided, they have Israeli-imposed financial restrictions, academics are harassed or jailed, and movement is systematically curtailed. All of this occurs with the direct material support of the United States.

The injustices that Palestinian academics suffer are partly enabled by the fact that they are not, in any real sense, our colleagues. We do not cite them. We do not exchange ideas with them. We do not read their books or articles. For all we care, they might not exist. But this is not because Palestinian academics are not intelligent. It is because certain material relations make it near impossible for them to work, and when they do produce excellent scholarship, it makes it impossible for us to see it. We are directly implicated in these material relations. Boycott is supposed to help change this.

On the flip side, the reason it is painful to boycott Israeli institutions is that we have colleagues, in a real sense, who depend on these institutions for their work. But again, the fact that Israeli anthropologists are our colleagues has to do not just with the fact that they are good scholars, but that certain material relations bring us together and make collegiality possible. Boycott is supposed to exert pressure on these relationships.

The boycott movement is aimed at altering our structures of reciprocity: making it possible for us to be colleagues with people with whom we are not colleagues now, people whom we have trouble acknowledging as friends in distress (and in whose oppression we are complicit), by exerting pressure on the collegial relationships we already do have.

It strikes me that the opponents of boycott often ask: Why boycott Israel and not Syria, Russia, Iran, and so on? This is a revealing question not only for the usual reasons, but also for its selection of offenders: The ones whose academics are not our colleagues. We have an easier and less painful time imagining Syrians, Russians, and Iranians as boycottable because they are for all intents and purposes already set apart from us by the material economy that structures our relations.

For those of us who are situated in American universities and are considering whether to vote in favor of boycott, it may be useful to engage in a simple thought experiment: How many Palestinian scholars based in Palestine can we name as our colleagues and friends?

Voting is open at the AAA until May 31. To vote “yes” to have the AAA adopt the institutional boycott, follow these instructions.

***

Violating the Right to Education for Palestinians: A Case for Boycotting Israeli Academic Institutions

Thea Abu El-Haj & Fida Adely

During the 50 day Israeli War on Gaza in the summer of 2014, the Israeli military killed 1462 Palestinian civilians, 495 of whom were children. Israeli forces destroyed or severely damaged the homes of over 100,000 Gazans and over 200 schools. Among the most egregious events of this 50 day siege were the bombings of three UN schools that were sheltering internally displaced persons (IDPs). According to Human Rights Watch, 45 Gazans, including 17 children, were killed in these attacks on schools. Those killed had believed that UN facilities—particularly schools—would offer protection from rampant shelling.

The Israeli bombing of UN schools became a focus of much international condemnation—a flagrant violation of human rights. Moreover, Gazans continue to feel the effects of the destruction of so many schools because the nearly 10-year Israeli blockade of Gaza has greatly hampered reconstruction, leaving the region in shambles.

Behind the high visibility of the destruction of UN schools hides the much wider, systematic, and routine violation of the rights of Palestinian children and youth to education. Whether within Israel proper, in the West Bank, or Gaza, the rights of Palestinian children and youth to an equitable education are tremendously restricted and their ability to develop and grow in safety and security is systematically violated. Frequent school closings across the Occupied Territories mean that Palestinian children and youth often do not have a right to any type of education at all.

Shelled school in Gaza. Source: Human Rights Watch

As anthropologists of education and educators committed to social justice, we want to call attention to the routine and systematic violations of Palestinians’ right to education—violations that are imbricated with, not accidental to, Israel’s unjust and oppressive treatment of Palestinians. These violations of the right to education are one of the key reasons we support the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions and we urge our colleagues to vote in favor of the AAA resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

The Persistent Violation of the Right to Education in the Occupied Territories

“When universities and schools are bombed, when students and teachers cannot reach their classrooms due to military checkpoints, an apartheid Wall, and U.S.- supplied tear gas, when supplies and books cannot clear Israel’s control of Palestinian mail, when students are taken as prisoners in Israeli jails, and when international lecturers are routinely denied entry to the Occupied Territories by Israel, the odds are stacked against Palestinian students and educators.” (Atshan, p. 6)

Numerous impediments constrain the most basic right to education for Palestinians living in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The separation wall and a system of checkpoints and by-pass roads restrict access to educational opportunities. The Israeli military frequently closes schools and universities across the Occupied Territories. Educational opportunities in Gaza are compromised further by the closure of the entire Gaza Strip, the virtual imprisonment of its inhabitants, and the extensive destruction and damage of Gaza’s infrastructure (the result of three Israeli military campaigns against Gaza in less than ten years). Throughout the West Bank children are the targets of violence by settlers and Israeli Defense Forces. The violence is particularly acute in East Jerusalem and Hebron where settlers regularly harass and attack students and teachers.

University students are not immune from these restrictions and violence. Israeli forces regularly raid university campuses, destroy property, and arrest student activists.[1] During Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2015, at least three universities were bombed, in one case killing 22 people. Because of the blockade, Gazans are unable to travel to the West Bank to attend university and only a small number are allowed to go abroad. In 2008, the US state department withdrew Fulbright fellowships from eight Gazans because Israel refused to allow them to leave the Gaza Strip.

Occupied East Jerusalem

In East Jerusalem, educational exclusion and deprivation have been part of a larger set of administrative policies and practices that are systematically driving Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem from their ancestral homes and community.[2] These policies have dire consequences for the access, continuity, and quality of education for Palestinian children. According to Ir Amim, a Jerusalem-based human rights organization, Palestinian children face extreme shortages in access to education with a current gap of over 2000 classrooms needed to educate Palestinians in Jerusalem. In a 2015 report, Ir Amin researchers conclude:

“The gaps reviewed in this report have intolerable repercussions for tens of thousands of children who have no place in the official educational system and are forced to study in recognized but unofficial institutions. In most cases, this situation affords only a substandard level of education, in an overly congested environment; in all too many cases, resulting in a complete dropout from the education system.”

Thus, in addition to practices that directly drive Palestinians out of their homes (such as removal of residency rights, or settler takeovers of homes), the infrastructure and services needed for a decent quality of life are significantly lacking.

Palestinian Students in Israel

Palestinian citizens of the Israeli state (20% of the population) suffer systematic discrimination. Their second class status is enshrined in law and in practice. In the educational sector, “Arab” schools are underfunded with the Israeli state providing three times as much funding to Jewish students. The result is large classroom sizes, poor facilities, and an overall decrease in educational quality in schools. It is no surprise then that Palestinian citizens of Israel are underrepresented in higher education. This bias in the educational sector is in keeping with the Israeli state’s policies of neglecting and under-funding public services in Arab towns and villages.

The AAA Vote to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

There are numerous reasons to support the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, many of which have been discussed by colleagues on this site and elsewhere. One of the main reasons for our support is the systematic deprivation of Palestinian rights to education and academic freedom—a status quo that has been well documented by local and international human rights organizations, the United Nations, as well as AAA’s own Task Force on AAA Engagement on Israel-Palestine. While many who oppose the boycott do so on the spurious grounds that it will violate the academic freedom that Israeli scholars currently enjoy, we call on colleagues to make use of their privileged academic freedoms to stand against the systematic deprivation of Palestinian rights to education. What greater constraints on academic freedom can there be than those routinely faced by Palestinian students and teachers.

1. See Right to Education Campaign Bir Zeit for more information on the oppression of Palestinian students.

2. In 1980, Israel has formally annexed East Jerusalem and declared a unified Jerusalem as its capital. However this annexation is in full violation of international law and has not been recognized by any other nation. Policies aimed at expelling Muslim and Christian Palestinians from East Jerusalem work to try and legitimize this illegal annexation by creating new facts on the ground.

Last November anthropologists attending the AAA business meeting in Denver voted by an astounding 1040-136 to endorse the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, but this was just a resolution to put the boycott to a vote, not an actual endorsement of that boycott by the entire AAA membership. The actual voting is now taking place by electronic ballot. It started on April 15th and lasts until May 31. For this reason it is crucial that all AAA members, whether or not they support the boycott, vote to make their voices heard in this historic decision. Because each update to the AAA website seems to make it even more difficult to navigate, please read this useful guide on how to vote.

It’s in the Resolution

What do we mean by an academic boycott anyway?

What if I told you that the answer can be found in the the boycott resolution?

First and foremost, it can’t be emphasized enough that the boycott only applies to institutions, not to individuals.

Israeli scholars will still be welcome to participate in AAA meetings, use funds from their institutions to attend the meetings, publish in AAA journals, and take part in other AAA activities in their individual capacities. The boycott does not preclude communication and collaboration with individual Israeli scholars. Indeed, one of its goals is to encourage dialogue about human and academic rights in Israel/Palestine grounded in a set of shared principles of justice.

Secondly, AAA members will still be free to “make their own decisions about whether or not to support the boycott in their own professional practice, such as whether to accept Israeli grants, attend conferences in Israel, or publish in Israeli journals.” That’s right, even if the boycott is passed, AAA members are personally free to pretty much do whatever their conscience dictates.

The same isn’t true for the AAA itself, which will not be able to include Israeli institutions in programs such as AnthroGuide, the Departmental Services Program (DSP), the Career Center, and the Graduate School Fair. It also restricts the AAA from accepting advertising from, or selling Anthrosource access to Israeli institutions. Individual Israeli academics, however, would still be able to access Anthrosource by becoming AAA members.

Wait a minute. This sounds like rather weak tea. Why even bother? Is this just about making ourselves feel good without actually doing anything difficult?

Yes, it is largely symbolic, but you’d think that of all people anthropologists would understand the power and importance of symbolic action. Although the boycott is not itself an act of civil disobedience, the political logic that motivates the boycott is similar to other forms of nonviolent protest.

For one thing, while it it may be true that the boycott doesn’t ask much of most AAA members, speaking openly in defense of the BDS movement is certainly not without risk. A recent report documented how “the application of intimidation, spying, and surveillance on US campuses is increasing” in response to the boycott movement.

But more importantly, just as civil disobedience works by exposing the hypocrisy of unjust laws, the boycott challenges the principle of ‘academic freedom’ in order to highlight the gap between such a principle and the lived experience of Palestinian academics. As Palestinian anthropologist Dina Omar put it: “academic freedom is the ability to go to school without being shot.” Israel presents itself as a “shining city upon a hill“:¹ open, democratic and free. The boycott, by challenging what it means to have academic freedom under occupation, seeks to expose the truth behind the shiny facade.

Here’s what the boycott resolution says about Palestinian “academic freedom”:

Whereas Israel has obstructed Palestinians’ right to education by destroying Palestinian universities and schools in military strikes; periodically raiding and forcing those institutions to close; preventing Palestinian anthropologists from freely studying their own society; preventing Palestinian archaeologists from accessing, studying, stewarding, or protecting their own cultural heritage; and restricting Palestinians’ movement which limits their ability to attend and work at universities, travel to conferences, and study abroad; and

Whereas the Israeli state and universities systematically deny Palestinian students in Israeli educational institutions rights and resources equal to their Jewish Israeli counterparts; and

Whereas Israeli scholars and students who criticize Israeli state policies and who support the academic boycott of Israeli institutions do so under threat of sanction; and

Whereas Israel routinely harasses and imposes severe restrictions on foreign academics seeking to attend conferences or conduct research in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as on scholars of Palestinian origin who wish to travel to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories; and

Whereas Israeli academic institutions have been directly and indirectly complicit in the Israeli state’s systematic maintenance of the occupation and denial of basic rights to Palestinians, by providing planning, policy, and technological expertise for furthering Palestinian dispossession;

Read “Israeli Violations of Palestinian Academic Freedom & Access to Education,” or the final report of the AAA Task Force on AAA Engagement on Israel-Palestine (PDF) for more detailed documentation of these claims. (You can read my summary of the Task Force Report here). And, for those seeking a more ethnographic account which gets at the stories behind these depressing facts and figures, you should read anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran’s powerful piece about Palestinian Universities and Everyday Life under Occupation.

OK. OK. I’ve read the resolution, and all the supporting documentation. I get the logic, I really do. But what do you really hope to accomplish? I’m still not sure how this is supposed to change anything.

In the first post in this series I explained that “I supported the boycott resolution because I felt that it would open up a public space that would allow for questioning of . . . deeply ingrained assumptions.” By challenging the legitimacy of Israel’s image as a “shining city upon a hill” the boycott has already made a difference. As the pseudonymous ben Alek wrote on this blog:

Israeli sensitivity to this kind of international criticism is a result of a very long history . . . Israel’s colonial apparatus, both within and beyond the Green Line, depends on securing sufficient assent from world powers. From its inception, Israel has paid a great deal of attention to debates about its actions.

In his post ben Alek documents some of the reactions that the boycott movement has already provoked. For instance, a year ago, “Israeli President Reuven Rivlin held an ’emergency’ meeting… to discuss the academic boycott, which he described as a ‘strategic threat.’”

Ben Alek also makes a point that often gets ignored by those who question the utility of the boycott: our collective silence sends a signal of tacit approval since “The lack of international criticism is crucial also to explaining the settlements and continuing occupation . . . ”

While it is true that a boycott by the AAA on its own wouldn’t count for much, if approved the AAA boycott be part of a larger movement. We would be joining the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), the American Studies Association (ASA), and a growing list of international institutions and individuals supporting the boycott.

Thus concludes my brief series of posts on why I voted for the boycott. I know that these arguments may not be enough to convince everyone, but my goal has only been to explain why I personally find them persuasive. I haven’t addressed many of the common objections to the boycott which, in my last post I called “squirrels.” I don’t, for instance, see any evidence in the boycott resolution that any of this is motivated by antisemitism. But if you are still on the fence you might want to read two articles that do take the time to patiently respond to such objections: Dialogue vs. BDS? Responding to arguments against an academic boycott of Israel, and Myths and Facts About the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. If even these posts fail to move you, I hope that you will still take the time to make your voice heard by voting before the end of May.

Voting is open at the AAA. Don’t be on the wrong side of History.

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A Moment of Truth: On the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions

Mick Taussig, Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

Yesterday an ex-student forwarded me an apparently widely diffused email against the boycott from my friend Michael Fisher. Echoing an argument central to the debate, Michael thinks the boycott is likely to have a deleterious effect on Israeli anthropologists critical of the Israeli state and that it goes against the principle of academic freedom. These are tough issues which everyone I know supporting the boycott takes very seriously.

I myself don’t see why the boycott as defined should hinder critical work by Israeli anthropologists and some have come out in favor of the boycott anyway. I wish to support them as much as I can.

As for academic freedom, to my mind the boycott would actually strengthen it, emerging as it does from all that is praiseworthy in US anthropology with its concern, especially since the war in Vietnam, with colonialism and state coercion. Academic freedom remains a mindless mantra unless exercised against oppression and censorship. To me the boycott is the most effective way anthropologists in the USA can draw attention to the terror exercised daily by the Israeli state against Palestinians, with, be it noted, the connivance of the US government, Congress and mainstream media. As regards the latter, consider the amazement and consternation that Bernie Sanders’ recent remarks have caused in the US despite their mildness.

As for the terror, the AAA Task Force on this issue of Palestine/ Israel, sedate and measured as it is, provides the evidence if such be needed. Imagine! Our very own AAA!

You don’t have to be a literary critic to discern in that report the wide-eyed disbelief and shock at the calculated sadism that employs a maze of conflicting laws to demolish Palestine homes and Palestinian lives and then in mock disbelief wonder why these people retaliate.

Why, indeed?

To that add the brutal policing, torture, check-points, apartheid pass-system, and the unstoppable advance of walls and settlements as the new normal. Thinking of my own relatives who ended up in Auschwitz it is all too reminiscent of 1930s Germany, putting us now in a “moment of truth” situation as to what we should do, how will we vote, how will History judge us now that we anthropologists are actually able to weigh in? It is every inch a moral decision.

Work by radical Israeli anthropologists is welcome, indeed, but infinitely more of an impact will be achieved by a US-inspired academic boycott because that exerts a dramatic effect here where the crucial support for the Israeli state exists; crucial and blind.

With a boycott a crack appears in the hegemony. The taboo is tweaked. Precisely because it is a disturbing act carried out by a normally staid and quiescent bunch of people (meaning anthropologists), whose job-description centers on careful analysis of the human condition removed from the politicians and the media, the boycott invites, nay, impels critical reflection in many sectors of society as to the wisdom of further US support for a runaway regime. A boycott like this one shocks people into reconsideration. And if an academic boycott can seem morally fraught, then how much more so is the regime against which, in this case, the boycott takes aim?

Voting is open until May 31. Follow these instructions to vote for #anthroboycott.

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Why I have voted in support of BDS

From the 15^th of April and until the end of May members of the American Anthropological Association will be voting on whether to endorse the proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions as part of offering to support the Palestnians’ call for a Boycotts, Sanctions and Divestments (BDS) movement against the state of Israel. I have voted in support of the resolution. As the vote has been an occasion whereby AAA has initiated and encouraged a more public discussion of the pros and cons of the BDS movement, I wish to share my understanding of the nature of the opposition between those who are for and against BDS and why I personally, as a AAA member, support it.

To be sure, almost all of the anthropologists who are against the Boycott begin by stating their opposition to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories or the treatment of Palestinians inside the state of Israel. So the debate is not, nor one expects it to be, a simple debate between ‘critics and supporters of the state of Israel’. Yet, the difference between the two camps is quite pronounced and it begins to emerge in the very way those opposed to BDS declare their objection and opposition to the Occupation. In their very starting point there is a regressive attempt at shifting the grounds of the debate away from where the supporters of BDS have located it.

The starting point of those who support BDS is not that all those who do not agree with them are supporters of the occupation. It is that for a long time now there has been a groundswell of people critical of the occupation (inside Israel sometimes even more than outside of Israel). But this has not had any influence whatsoever on the occupation. Indeed the road to the settlements is paved with people deploring or being opposed to one aspect or another of the occupation, people calling for dialogue, deploring Israeli war crimes and even genocide, and calling for Israeli accountability or for investigations, etc… The BDS supporters’ argument is: so, given how useless all this sometimes quite radical ‘position taking’ has been, can we start something that has a slightly, even if minimally, coercive effect on the state of Israel rather than just something that is merely voicing a ‘critique’. Israel creates facts on the ground in its colonization and what is needed is an opposition that is not a mere opinion but one that also strives to create a fact on the ground. It is by looking at what is available in terms of peaceful and democratic strategies that can have such a factual effect that the idea of a boycott came into being. So to oppose BDS by calling for the very things that BDS is trying to supersede because proven ineffective, such as more critique or calls for dialogue, is disingenious to say the least. It is considered an implicit call for the continuation of the status quo. The same goes for mistaking the boycott for a ‘statement of extreme condemnation’ instead of seeing it for what it is: a strategically appropriate, and above all practical, technique of protest against a social force that might be vulnerable to such a technique. In this regard the people who exclaim ‘why don’t you boycott China, etc…’ fail to see how nonsensical such a position is. It is like saying that if you are opposed to both the British Prime Minister and the President of Syria and are calling for the democratic removal of the British Prime Minister, you are a hypocrite if you don’t also call for the democratic removal of the President of Syria. ‘Calling for democratic removal’ like ‘calling for a boycott’ works in one place and not in another.

There is no doubt that we the supporters of BDS have a more acute sense of the quantitative and qualitative degree of injustice and suffering that is being meted on Palestinians in Israel and the territories. For the opponents of BDS in the words of Marc Edelman writing for PoLAR, the outrage of BDS activists is excessive, ‘outsized’ as he put it, in that Palestinian suffering is comparatively not so great compared to that of others. According to him ‘in the spectrum of violator (ie, violators of human rights) states worldwide, Israel only attains middling status’. BDS people do not have such a relaxed view of what is happening in Israel/Palestine either quantitatively or qualitatively. They expect that most anthropologists would agree with them that thinking comparatively about, and ranking, states according to how much they ‘violate human rights’ is a homogenizing mode of thinking that mystifies the difference between forms of violation and erases the specific ugliness of colonial settler situations. Most anthropologists, especially those who are located in settler colonial settings themselves, are well aware that colonial injury goes way beyond the common understanding of ‘human right violations and abuse’: it includes appropriation and extraction of land and resources, ethnocidal politics that cannot be accounted for by counting the number of people killed, politicide (see Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling about this) that eviscerates a whole culture. And then there is the racialised violence that is also a very specific form of violence which impact is an equally specific and incomparably damaging shattering of the psyche. Not being able to experience affectively the urgency of the need to address what is happening in Palestine is nothing short of a professional failing.

There are also some who think that boycotting universities is not appropriate because one needs to maintain the autonomy of academic life from political processes. Wherever one is located in the world today, this is a rather fantasmic belief in this day and age where states and neo-liberal capitalist logic have eaten their way through university autonomy almost to the point of saturation. But it particularly lacks validity in a colonial context where the very nature of a university as an open democratic space is itself dependent on the very colonial violence that disallows and violently suppresses the possible existence of such an open space among those it colonises. Paradoxically, in a colonial-settler society, even the space from which one can be ‘pro-indigenous’ is dependent on the colonial violence that allows such a space to exist. As it happens, in Israel’s universities, the very idea of being pro-indigenous is quasi impossible, expressed only by a negligible minority. What there is instead is an academic indifference and obliviousness to the deadly, remorseless and excessive colonial violence directed at the Palestnians and their universities, the very violence that makes such indifference possible in the Israeli universities: so much for autonomy.

There is always a critique that one can and should address to any form of political action, which by definition has and will be found to have many weaknesses. But there are critiques aimed at enhancing a political practice and others aimed at paralyzing it. It is very easy to use some idealized, beautiful and full-proof conception of action to shelter from the imperfections of any actual struggle since the latter is guaranteed to be found always already wanting. It is possible to tell oneself: ‘I am not going to do anything since no action meets my unbelievably pure criteria of what needs to be done’. I don’t think it is coincidental that such an attitude ends up working to support the status quo. For those of us who do feel the urgency of dealing with Palestinian question this is not enough and we hope that most of my colleagues share our sense of urgency.

Last November anthropologists attending the AAA business meeting in Denver voted by an astounding 1040-136 to endorse the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, but this was just a resolution to put the boycott to a vote, not an actual endorsement of that boycott by the entire AAA membership. The actual voting is now taking place by electronic ballot. It started on April 15th and lasts until May 31. For this reason it is crucial that all AAA members, whether or not they support the boycott, vote to make their voices heard in this historic decision. Because each update to the AAA website seems to make it even more difficult to navigate, please read this useful guide on how to vote.

Squirrel!

A running joke in the 2009 movie Up is that the otherwise intelligent talking dog gets distracted by squirrels, forgetting everything it was saying whenever it sees one.

Opponents of the AAA resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions attempt to similarly distract progressive academics by shouting “Tibet!” or “Saudi Arabia!” whenever the topic of Palestine comes up. Judging from the posts on my Facebook timeline, it seems that academics aren’t much better at ignoring these distractions than the squirrel loving dog in Up.

But is this even an argument? Just think for a moment about how this logic would work if applied to other topics: Why are you brushing your teeth when your feet are still dirty? Why are you reading that book on Russia when there are books on Nigeria to be read? Why are you fighting against the gender pay gap among white collar workers when there are women workers working for next to nothing in Bangladesh? Why are you fighting for indigenous people’s rights in Canada when there are children dying of malnutrition in Haiti? While it is somewhat true that we necessarily prioritize our actions, we are not limited to taking one and only one form of political action at a time. Nor do we prioritize which action to take by weighing up all the various causes in the world and ranking them from least to worse. Progressive academics are often engaged in multiple struggles simultaneously (regular readers of this blog know about my concern with India’s DNTs and indigenous rights in Taiwan) and often engage in those struggles for a wide variety of reasons other than the gravity of the wrongs being committed.

But what really galls me about this line of reasoning is how selectively it is applied. It is only applied as an argument against challenges to the occupation, never as a reason for challenging those policies that help maintain the occupation. Where are these objections when reading headlines about how “Israel Receives More Than Half of US Global Military Aid“? (Which amounts to “American taxpayers giving Israel $10.2 million per day.) If peace in the Middle East is really such a low level problem, why are we giving them such outsized military support? Shouldn’t anyone genuinely committed to a world view in which political action ought to be allocated according to a ranked list of global issues be thus motivated to protest these extraordinary expenditures? Except they are not motivated by any such a belief system. It is just a diversion tactic. As the Middle East Monitor put it:

in reality, Israel is ‘singled out’, but for diplomatic protection and impunity, military partnerships and aid, preferential trade deals, and institutional and governmental cooperation.

Lost in all of this (deliberately so) is the fact that there is actually a very good argument to be made for boycotting Israel as opposed to every single other country whose policies we find objectionable: Palestinian peace activists have called for a boycott. That’s right, the BDS movement was called for by “a clear majority of Palestinian civil society“:

The BDS call was endorsed by over 170 Palestinian political parties, organizations, trade unions and movements. The signatories represent the refugees, Palestinians in the OPT, and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

This is enormously important to me for two reasons. For one thing, I don’t think boycotts can be effective if they are imposed top-down by outside groups. Boycotts are most effective when they work in support of, and in coordination with, grassroots movements, as was the case with the South Africa boycott which was called for by the African National Congress. Oh, and speaking of South Africa, does this sound familiar?

Why is South Africa so harshly condemned while completely different standards apply to black Africa? Despite human rights violations in Zaire, President Bush applauds Mr. Muboto for his contribution in the Angola talks, while mentioning the atrocities in South Africa.

The second reason why I believe the involvement of Palestinian civil society organizations is crucially important is in response to those who claim it is just a “feel-good” gesture that serves no purpose other than to sooth our own egos. But nothing could be further from the truth. Although it is impossible to tell what the long-term consequences will be (just as it is hard to tell how important the South African boycott was for the eventual overthrow of Apartheid), it is the tactic that was chosen by Palestinians and we are doing it to support them in their struggle.

This raises another important question, one that critics rarely bother to answer: what else could the Palestinians do? As Corey Robin put it:

The Palestinians have tried four decades of armed revolt, three decades of peace negotiations, two intifadas, and seven decades of waiting. They have taken up BDS as a non-violent tactic, precisely the sort of thing that liberal-minded critics have been calling upon them to do for years (where is the Palestinian Gandhi and all that). So now you say BDS is bad too. Fine. What would you have the Palestinians—and their international supporters—do instead?

In short, I believe that the boycott movement is one of the best tools available to Palestinians, and I believe the fact that they have called upon their allies to endorse this tactic is sufficient reason to do so. Assuming you support their cause, that is. Obviously not everyone does – but the concern-trolling criticisms addressed above are always made by people who claim to support Palestinians in their struggle.

In this post I have still not addressed one issue about the use of a boycott as a tactic which I think deserves serious discussion: the targeting of academic institutions by the boycott. While many of the most common objections to a specifically academic boycott have been covered in posts like Dialogue vs. BDS? Responding to arguments against an academic boycott of Israel and Myths and Facts About the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions, I think more can be said on the topic, so that will be the focus of my next post.

Last November anthropologists attending the AAA business meeting in Denver voted by an astounding 1040-136 to endorse the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, but this was just a resolution to put the boycott to a vote, not an actual endorsement of that boycott by the entire AAA membership. The actual voting takes place by electronic ballot starting today, April 15th, and lasts until May 31. For this reason it is crucial that all AAA members, whether or not they support the boycott, vote to make their voices heard in this historic decision.

While we have been posting extensively about the boycott here on Savage Minds, so far none of the full-time contributors have expressed their personal opinions on the matter. Over the next few weeks I hope to do just that, starting with a post about my own experience growing up as a Reform Jew in New York City. I have at least two more posts planned as well, including one on boycotts as a political strategy and another in which I try to round-up and summarize some of the writing which I have found most persuasive on the topic.

What follows is a very personal statement and intentionally avoids most of the issues that have already been discussed elsewhere. For those wanting more information I recommend looking through our own archives on the subject, or exploring the blog maintained by Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions, as well as the anti-boycott blog. But, above all, I recommend you read this post on “Myths and Facts About the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions,” Dialogue vs. BDS, and the Report on Israel/Palestine (PDF) prepared by the AAA task force.

David vs. Goliath

I was raised as a Reform Jew in New York City in the eighties and the Judaism we were taught at Hebrew School was little more than Zionist propaganda. As Lisa Goldman recently put it,

for Jewish-Americans, more so than ever for Jews in Israel, Zionism is a crucial element of their identity. The most important element is neither God nor religion but the Holocaust, with its heavy legacy of trans-generational trauma. The lesson of the genocide, many believe, is that Jews need a safe haven. A state of one’s own.

During my weekly Hebrew school classes, as well as related weekend activities and camps, we almost never discussed Jewish religion, ethics, or philosophy.¹ Instead, we were taught to think of ourselves as victims of historical persecution stretching back to the dawn of time. We were taught the importance of maintaining our ethnic identity in the face of this persecution.

Even as young children, we were encouraged to think of ourselves as little David’s standing up to Goliath. The holidays we celebrated were similarly built around such David and Goliath narratives: Purim celebrates the story of Esther who triumphed over the evil Mordecai Haman,² and Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of the Maccabees over the forces of Antiochus.

Only as we got older did we learn of stories in which the Jews failed to triumph against overwhelming odds: the Spanish Inquisition, Eastern European pogroms, and, of course, the Holocaust. Yet even when learning about war and genocide, there was always the promise of a new David emerging that might once and for all put an end to such historical defeats: muscular Jewish nationalism. The Warsaw Uprising may not have succeeded, but the Six Day War and the raid on Entebbe were another story. Israel’s success meant that Jewish children could sleep peacefully at night. It also meant that Isreal was all that was standing between us and the abyss.

I never went on any of the trips to Israel organized by the school, but we watched films about the wonders of life on the kibbutz. (We were, of course, carefully warned away from socialism with stories about the horrors of collective family life.) I also helped raise money to plant trees in Israel. We were told that the Arabs had not cared for the land properly, turning it into a desert; the implication being that they did not deserve the land because they had been poor caretakers. Such stories of neglect by indigenous inhabitants will be familiar to scholars of all forms of settler colonialism. (I have since heard ethnic Chinese say much the same thing about indigenous Taiwanese.) At the time, however, it evoked a powerful image of Palestine as a desert which was only able to bloom once the rightful owners had returned.

When I was twelve they took us on a weekend retreat where we watched the movie Ticket to Heaven about a man who gets “brainwashed” by a cult and has to be “deprogrammed” by his parents. But unlike that film, unlearning Zionism was not a simple process involving being locked in a room with a professional “deprogrammer.” It took years of reading, questioning, and talking to people who actually knew something about life under the occupation. Thanks to patient friends in college and graduate school, I began to question the simple narrative by which the Holocaust served to legitimize colonialism. I learned about the Nakba by which “led to the expulsion and displacement of the Palestinian Arab population.” I learned how life in Gaza was like living in a giant prison. I began to question the logic of the two state solution. I learned about the rise of right wing extremism in Israeli politics. And slowly, bit by bit, the stories I had learned as a child began to unravel a the seams, creating space for a much more complex story to take its place.

Even as I began to question my Zionism, however, certain habits and reflexes of thought still remained. I would find myself instinctively grasping at straws to support claims I had already come to realize were unsupportable. Recently I encountered similar reflexes while teaching here in Taiwan. We are starting to get exchange students from China and during one lecture, after I said something mildly critical of China, one of these students spoke up to challenge what I said. I was actually quite happy about this because Taiwanese students are usually so passive in class that actually getting challenged by a student felt refreshing. But after the lecture the student came up to me and introduced herself. She said that she actually agrees with what I had said about China and that she’d come to Taiwan precisely to get exposed to more critical views, but that defending China’s honor had become a reflex for her so she’d spoken up without thinking. Nationalism works upon is in very deep ways which talk of “imagined communities” often fails to grasp.

Zionist reflexes are not unique to Jewish kids from NY. They seem to exist at a more general level in European and American public discourse as well. I see non-Jewish politicians, media personalities, and even academics reflexively defending Israel, portraying anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism, unquestioningly accepting the necessity of a two-state solution, and refusing to engage in any way with Palestinian political aspirations. It is as if the slightest break in our collective resolve would open the door to the ultimate evil. “Never again” means you are either “with us or against us” and the failure to be “with us” is too horrible to contemplate.

At a very basic level I supported the boycott resolution because I felt that it would open up a public space that would allow for questioning of these deeply ingrained assumptions. I don’t expect those people on Facebook who write “Disgusting” every time I post about the boycott to change their minds, but my public support of the boycott, and of the BDS movement more generally, has already sparked dozens of conversations with people who are genuinely curious and open-minded. In this sense the boycott resolution and the resulting discussion have already done a lot of the work I hoped they would, but I still think AAA members should vote for the boycott. In my next post I will try to explain one reason why I think an actual boycott, and not just this discussion about the boycott resolution, is still important.

I am grateful to Charles Hirschkind, whose intelligence and thoughtfulness I’ve always appreciated, for his sharp observations on my essay in Anthropology News. I argued there that voting on whether or not to have the American Anthropological Association officially approve the boycott of Israeli academic institutions was a form of symbolic violence, an occasion for the precipitation of identities through multiple calls to order. I apologize for the number of times Charles had to read the essay in order to find hidden messages which were never actually there.  So I will try to articulate its point more clearly below. His own exercise in eisegesis helps immensely with that task, because it works by attributing to me a set of political positions I do not hold, thereby pointedly illustrating the process I described.

Charles characterizes my essay as a smear in disguise, using a string of terms indicating that it is code for something else. My argument is a cryptic, confused smokescreen, a “set of rhetorical feints disguised as an analysis,” “hypocrisy and gleeful wickedness” resting behind a “thin and misleading veneer” of impartiality. My central goal, he writes, is to ridicule and malign the supporters of the boycott initiative about to appear on the AAA’s Spring ballot by assaulting their credibility and making “claims [about] their true, base motivations.” But it is also, in the end, a coded call on Palestinians specifically to abandon their struggle for liberation and their hopes to be recognized as a nation.

These are remarkably creative claims on his part. Disguises are troublesome things. When they are successful they are seen but misinterpreted. When they fail, we talk about them as being “transparent.” But when we’re on the lookout for disguises we can perceive any surface as a screen behind which something nasty lurks, and the search for covert meaning is always likely to find something.

I’m not interested in questioning or deriding anyone’s motivations or intentions, least of all those of the boycott initiative’s supporters. Their goals and motivations are both admirable and straightforward: to find ways to release Palestinians from Israeli oppression. This is a vital and widely shared goal.

But personally, I don’t think that the tactic of academic boycott can succeed either in its proximal goal of forcing Israeli academic institutions to denounce their government’s manifold policies of theft, violence, exclusion, and immiseration, or in its ultimate prediction that such denunciation will alter Israeli policy toward Gaza or the West Bank (or its policy toward Lebanon or Iran, or anything else). I have no objection at all to people engaging in whatever kind of academic, political, or economic boycott of Israel they wish. But I do think that voting to have the AAA endorse academic boycott is likely to cost the association what little political influence it has rather than to exert it.

Some of the boycott initiative’s supporters seem to have become increasingly open to stating publicly that an academic boycott by anthropologists is not likely to work the way it was designed, to prompt political change by raising the political cost of the Occupation. For example, one scholar writes, it “may not change Israeli policies, and . . .may appear as merely ‘symbolic’ as the defenders of Israel’s policies never fail to tell us. However, as any anthropologist will know, symbols and symbolic action are at the heart of human life and can change things, albeit often slowly and indirectly—just as the academic boycott of South Africa worked slowly, symbolically and indirectly.”

This is, indeed, the heart of the matter. Once we identify the tactic of boycott as a symbolic gesture, the question is no longer “will the boycott change Israeli policies?” The question is that, if all we can do, or all we are willing to do, is to make symbolic statements or gestures, then what specific statements or gestures should we be making, and who should be their audience? If freeing the Palestinians through academic boycott is not really what we expect to happen, then what is our goal, and how can we best achieve it?

What I’ve seen at the AAA for the last two years has largely been a series of segregated panels arguing either for or against the moral and practical necessity of boycott, and for or against the initiative to have AAA endorse the boycott as a matter of institutional policy. In my essay I criticized the move for AAA endorsement both because of the binaries such a vote generates, and because if the vote is in its favor it will focus the country’s attention primarily not on Israeli crimes, but on the association itself. I don’t think this is what our symbolic gesture should do.

Charles has had the opposite experience. He writes that he and others have been engaged in enlightening interactions in their own departments regarding the boycott initiative. That’s good to hear. But if he can point to any new insights that these panels, AAA reports, or departmental discussions have produced–anything we haven’t already known for years–I’d be happy to know what they are. He writes that “rather than a closure of thought, the [boycott] initiative has precipitated an unprecedented outpouring of critical exchange on the situation of Israel and Palestine. This exchange has seen contributions by many leading voices in the field, essays written with both acuity and passion on the complexity of the issue, and on the factors that eventually inclined an author in one direction or the other.”

The difficulty is that in the end, and despite its good intentions, the dynamic of the enterprise has boiled down not to the phrase “the complexity of the issue,” but to the phrase “inclined an author in one direction or the other.” The boycott initiative has crystallized within the AAA a set of antagonistic interest groups engaged in a zero-sum effort to recruit votes and endorsements. And in doing so, the complexities one might discuss are forced into a binary division between yes and no, supporter and opponent.

The terms of the debate are set. The lines are drawn with the expectation that the most thoughtful among us will labor long and hard to break “in one direction or the other.” The text is fixed, the task of the voter is to identify oneself with respect to it. This is in itself an interpellation, a form of symbolic violence. The notion that it somehow represents an opening up of debate, a deepening of perspective, a better apprehension of the case, or a better grasp of what we might best do to create justice in the world, is hard to maintain.

The muddling effects of this forced-choice enterprise are easy to see. In the statement quoted above on the symbolic efficacy of boycott, for example, we read both that symbolic action lies at the heart of human life, and also that the labeling of the boycott as a symbolic action is specifically a position belonging to boycott opponents (what those people say in order to try to discredit us). When legendary critical theorists explain their support for the boycott initiative by pointing out–even in an ironic register–that the “collateral damage” we are willing to see inflicted on one set of innocents is not nearly as bad as the collateral damage our opponents have prescribed for another, we might satisfy ourselves with evaluating the comparison and nodding in assent.

But in becoming enmeshed in such calculus we lose the capacity to call into question the terms of the debate itself. In what sort of discursive field are we engaged when our primary query of a text is “what kind of person could possibly write such a thing?”  “Admittedly,” Charles concludes,

the last three lines of [Starrett’s] essay do suggest that the inadequacy of the framework has something to do with an overemphasis on nation and state, a failure to recognize that “there are ways of thinking and living beyond the state and beyond nationality.” But how are we to read this abrupt and cryptic call, pasted on to the end of this no holds barred indictment of the boycott resolution and its proponents? Clearly he is not advocating that Israelis should abandon their state, or “move beyond” their attachment to a Jewish national identity. No. This call, one reflecting what Starrett identifies as “some of the most important contributions our discipline can offer,” can only be meant for Palestinians, a people who don’t have a state, and whose nationality is not recognized by the country that claims control over their lives and territory. It is they, we are left to conclude, who are being called upon to abandon such anthropologically unenlightened goals as having a state or being recognized as a nation.

This may be the strangest and most telling part of Charles’s reading. My dissatisfaction that the AAA has spent two years essentially debating the legitimacy of nationalist claims and a specific prefabricated remedy for resolving them, rather than using that case to further the analysis and critique of nationalism as such, is taken to be an indication that I am “clearly” not advocating that Israelis abandon their state or their sense of nationhood.

How has this become clear?  In fact, Israelis abandoning their ethnonational state might be a splendid idea. It is one that Hannah Arendt recommended decades ago, and one that many Israelis have discussed and sometimes acted upon. Today in Palestine/Israel there are numerous voices calling for one state with equal rights for all its people to end the Occupation and its suffering. These kinds of discussions of national identity and the role of the state take place all the time among those directly involved.

When one recognizes the dangers of ethnonationalism, one recognizes that over the long term those dangers do not apply to one side or another. But I was not advocating one thing or another with respect to Israelis or Palestinians. It wouldn’t matter if I did. What I was lamenting is that anthropologists have missed an opportunity to transcend the terms in which we are forced to speak when we adopt the discourse of nationalism itself and craft yes-or-no votes about whether and how  a complex and fragmented organization should position itself.

What is clear is that in treating my–admittedly exaggerated–description of some of the dilemmas of the boycott initiative as an attack on its supporters’ motivations and character rather than as a critique of the dynamics of their policy proposal, Charles has neither produced a very cogent analysis of my essay, nor succeeded in disagreeing with it.

Instead, his insistence on divining and defining my true position vis-a-vis Palestine and Israel is an instantiation of the problem about which I was writing: the fact that humans are often more concerned with assembling groups and embroidering them with imagined contrasts than with questioning them. His relentless effort to translate my essay into the terms of a closed framework that can generate only one question from any of those groups–are you with us or against us?–ends up illustrating my point. For that I thank him.

Voting on the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions is open to all AAA members from April 15 – May 30. You can watch an informative webinar covering the basics of the boycott at this link — featuring anthropologists Ilana Feldman, Lisa Rofel, and Nadia Abu El-Haj. You can also read the AAA’s Israel-Palestine Task Force report here.

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A Smear in Disguise: Comments on Starrett

Charles Hirschkind

In “The Symbolic Violence of Choice” (Anthropology News, March 2, 2016), Gregory Starrett denounces the Resolution to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions currently being considered by AAA members on numerous grounds. Despite a thin and misleading veneer of impartiality, the essay is unequivocal both in its condemnation of the proposed resolution and its disparaging assessment of those who support it. Having read the piece a number of times now, I find it profoundly confused, a set of rhetorical feints disguised as an analysis. But given the timing of its publication, just before AAA members must decide on the boycott initiative, I feel that a serious response is necessary.

Starrett begins his essay by identifying the boycott initiative under consideration by AAA members as a form of symbolic violence, in his words, a “good example” of how “symbolic violence is accomplished.” The violence enacted by the initiative, and by the “structure of domination” that he claims it puts into place, stems from the way it “chain[s] the possibilities of thought to the imperative of duty.” By interpellating interlocutors to one side or the other of the debate—a discussion radically polarized, we are told, via an “irresistible vocabulary of justice and complicity, loyalty and betrayal, virtue and sin”—the initiative “effectively shuts down critical thought.”

Starrett is certainly right when he states that the concepts of justice and complicity have played an important role in the assessment of the initiative by anthropologists. This is not at all the case, however, when it comes to the next terms in his series—“loyalty and betrayal, virtue and sin.” Debates on the initiative within anthropological fora have been almost entirely devoid of such language, with very few exceptions. Moreover, rather than a closure of thought, the initiative has precipitated an unprecedented outpouring of critical exchange on the situation of Israel and Palestine. This exchange has seen contributions by many leading voices in the field, essays written with both acuity and passion on the complexity of the issue, and on the factors that eventually inclined an author in one direction or the other. It has also seen anthropology departments around the country stage open discussions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict involving both students and faculty. In my own case, I have learned a great deal over the last year about how my colleagues view the situation in Israel/Palestine, about why they feel the boycott initiative should or should not be supported, and about the moral quandaries it raises.

Yet, in stark contrast to this actual productive discursive engagement, Starrett’s essay presents us with an image of the conversation as something on a par with the Republican primary debates, bereft of intellectual content and reduced to vicious ad hominem attacks. The problem here goes well beyond a matter of misinterpretation. For the essay does not simply describe a debate stultified by a moralizing and vituperative language, it performatively enacts the very symbolic violence that it excoriates, the same violence that it blames the supporters of the boycott initiative for having imposed on the anthropological community. That is to say, while the piece assumes a critical perspective on such polarizing and belligerent discourse, its own rhetoric works through exactly the same argumentative style, its primary tactic being to repeatedly mock and ridicule proponents of the initiative.

In order to bring attention to what he sees as the morally questionable motivations of the boycott supporters, Starrett introduces the claim that, appearances to the contrary, the resolution anthropologists are being asked to vote on “isn’t actually about working to end the suffering of Palestinians.” Why is this the case? The short and rather odd answer goes something like this: because “the boycott of South Africa proceeded without AAA endorsement,” then the participation of the AAA in political boycotts—including the one at hand—cannot be seen as a condition for their success; if it cannot be the success of the political boycott, therefore, that justifies such participation, then the real reasons for supporting such an initiative must be sought elsewhere. While this argument is strained, to say the least, it serves simply to open the door on what quickly becomes the essay’s central goal, the effort to malign and discredit supporters of the initiative through ridicule.

Thus we are told that, while there is “little chance that anthropologists boycotting Israel will enhance the quality of life in Palestine,” it will achieve a more narcissistic aim, namely, to “make us feel like we are doing something,” “ makes us feel like agents of human liberation,” and “symbolically purify the discipline of the stench of complicity with Zionism.” This exercise in ridiculing supporters of the initiative for what Starrett claims are their true, base motivations reaches its most enthusiastic excess in his vignette of an imagined boycott supporter taunting his Israeli colleagues. Mimicking such a supporter, he writes: “Well of course you Israelis can continue to belong to our organization and subscribe to our journals…Such a shame, though, that so ‘surprisingly few [of you] have come out in solidarity with [your] Palestinian colleagues’… Tsk, tsk. And what a pity I can’t write you a recommendation. It’s not you, really, it’s an institutional thing….” With this short study in hypocrisy and gleeful wickedness, it is clear that we have left any semblance of intellectual engagement behind and moved into the theater of character defamation. Starrett creates this vignette in order to highlight what he identifies as the “intellectually dishonest claim” that the boycott will impact only on institutions and not on individuals, an issue he is right to raise, though also one that many of the boycott supporters have acknowledged and addressed. But his instinct here is not to engage substantially with the issue, but simply to ridicule his opponents for their alleged hypocrisy.

What is particularly disturbing about the style of writing found in this piece is the manner in which it repeatedly disguises its attack on the credibility of those supporting the initiative as an exercise in nonpartisan judgment. This method is nowhere more blatant than in a section ostensibly dedicated to showing the moral straitjacket that, in Starrett’s view, the initiative has imposed on both supporters and critics. The section begins: “If you vote “No” on the resolution, you will signal your approval of Jewish settler-colonialism in Palestine, the strengthening of violent ethnonationalism, forced segregation, deprivation of rights, direct and structural racism, land and resource theft, dehumanization, mass imprisonment, murder, and the hypocritical American foreign policy that supports it all.” Note, at the outset, that while Starrett is certainly wrong to claim that those voting ‘No’ on the resolution are signaling their “approval” of the violent policies and actions of the Israeli state—indeed, it is clear from all of the published commentary on this issue that most strongly disapprove of these measures—the Israeli polices and practices he describes conform closely to the findings of the AAA Task Force on Engagement with Israel/Palestine, findings that Starrett does not appear to question (he himself notes “the dire, chronic violations of Palestinian rights in Israel and its settler-colonial frontier”). Having thus described one pole of the debate in terms of a set of widely–accepted observations about the conditions Palestinians face under Israeli rule, he then moves on to describe the other pole, the ‘Yes’ voter, as someone who “identifies Jews as the cause of the worlds problems and seeks to destroy the state that protects them, who ignores liberal values of diversity, tolerance and dialogue, who unjustly lumps together progressive Israeli activists with the worst of their violent racist countrymen” and so on. Through this juxtaposition, positions we associate with the ravings of a right wing pundit—Palestinians supporters think Jews are the cause of the world’s problems, they want to destroy Israel, they oppose dialogue, etc.—acquire the same truth status as the observations about Israel’s oppressive treatment of Palestinians mentioned just above; as if the hypocritical and racist attitudes Starrett ascribes to boycott initiative supporters are the sort of thing that would show up in the report of an AAA Task Force, were one established to study the movement. Throughout the essay, this sort of rhetorical sleight of hand serves as a cover for an unrelenting vilification of the many anthropologists who, for a wide variety of reasons, have voiced support for the pending resolution.

As far as a substantive argument, Starrett makes a last ditch gesture toward one in his conclusion, when he refers to the “sadly inadequate framework” of the boycott initiative. In light of the fact that, up until this final paragraph, he has not referred to a single feature, nor cited a single line, of the actual framework of the initiative, this gesture cannot be interpreted as anything more than a smoke screen. The one sentence where he does refer to the “specific conditions outlined” as being “impossible to achieve,” he makes no mention of what those conditions are, other than to say that anthropologist Dan Rabinowitz and Noam Chomsky have discussed them.

Admittedly, the last three lines of the essay do suggest that the inadequacy of the framework has something to do with an overemphasis on nation and state, a failure to recognize that “there are ways of thinking and living beyond the state and beyond nationality.” But how are we to read this abrupt and cryptic call, pasted on to the end of this no holds barred indictment of the boycott resolution and its proponents? Clearly he is not advocating that Israelis should abandon their state, or “move beyond” their attachment to a Jewish national identity. No. This call, one reflecting what Starrett identifies as “some of the most important contributions our discipline can offer,” can only be meant for Palestinians, a people who don’t have a state, and whose nationality is not recognized by the country that claims control over their lives and territory. It is they, we are left to conclude, who are being called upon to abandon such anthropologically unenlightened goals as having a state or being recognized as a nation.

For more information on the upcoming boycott vote at the AAA, Friday November 20 at 6:15 pm, see Voting at #AAA2015 — What You Need to Know. VOTE YES on Resolution 2.

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Dialogue as Diversion

Fida Adely & Amahl Bishara

What types of engagement are needed to end decades of occupation and repression of Palestinian human rights? Some call for more dialogue and argue that if only those interested in peace on “both sides” talked to each other more, this conflict would end. However, dialogue by itself will never end occupation. Across academic, cultural, and political fields, calls for dialogue obscure the tremendous asymmetries between Israel and Palestinians. In this way many dialogue initiatives disguise the real issues of settler-colonialism, oppression, and occupation, and act as a kind of marketing tool rebranding the reality of separation and apartheid as a fantasy of “coexistence.”

At the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s annual business meeting in Denver this November, members will be asked to discuss and vote upon a resolution that calls upon AAA to boycott Israeli academic institutions. This resolution builds on a growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement led by Palestinian civil society.¹ Opponents of an academic boycott against Israel, who call themselves “Anthropologists for Dialogue on Israel/Palestine,” argue that boycott would shut down possibilities for dialogue. They have put forth a resolution calling for AAA members to “refrain from initiatives to boycott universities” and to promote “renewed dialogue among willing parties.”

As anthropologists of the Middle East, we have had decades of scholarly engagement on this issue, and we will continue to do so. However, the call to dialogue is riddled with contradictions and illusions. As Lisa Taraki (2011), a Palestinian sociologist at Birzeit University, succinctly argues:

Dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, which remains very popular among Israeli liberals and Western foundations and governments that fund the activities, has failed miserably… [It] presents the “two sides” as if they were equally culpable, and deliberately avoids acknowledgment of the basic coloniser-colonised relationship. Dialogue does not promote change, but rather reinforces the status quo.

Dialogue that takes place under the current system is simply not a free exchange of ideas.

The “peace process” is a paradigmatic example. The Oslo Accords were hailed as a prime instance of successful dialogue and mediation—a first step that many hoped would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Yet, what these accords actually did was to set in process more than two decades of intermittent negotiations that did not address structural inequalities between the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinians.

In the last 22 years of negotiations, Palestinians have suffered further loss of land and expansion of settlements, new and pernicious policies of ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, and the creation of an open-air prison in Gaza, among other grave violations. Continued negotiations under these circumstances has only meant an entrenchment of these policies. Meanwhile, since Oslo, tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in Western aid have been devoted to the support of a “peace industry” with the goal of promoting peace and coexistence through dialogue and conflict resolution programs.

Dialogue on the terms we operate under today marginalizes Palestinians. Palestinian academic freedom is severely compromised, as the recent report of the Task Force on AAA Engagement on Israel-Palestine found, and as elaborated by Magid Shihade, a Palestinian anthropologist with Israeli citizenship teaching at Birzeit University. Even within Israel’s 1948 borders, true dialogue is limited by systematic discrimination that frequently punishes university students and others for expressing their thoughts on Facebook, holding protests on campus, or even just for being Palestinian. These are the conditions of dialogue and expression that the academic boycott seeks to change.

Within the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the system of closure that Israel has built and intensified over the last 20 plus years serves as a limit on exchange. Palestinians cannot participate in many forms of dialogue because they are locked in an ever more draconian series of walls, checkpoints, and military operations. These include military operations against Palestinians on university campuses in both the West Bank and Gaza and shootings of journalists and protesters.

Furthermore while Israel’s defenders oppose boycott in the name of “dialogue”, the Israeli government itself is working hard to shut down the very discussion of boycott. In 2011, Israel passed a law to penalize people and organizations in Israel who call for boycott.

In the United States, too, possibilities for free expression and dialogue are compromised. Israel’s supporters have successfully pushed for U.S. legislation that targets those who boycott Israel. This legislation attempts to shut down non-violent protest through scare tactics. In the realm of interfaith initiatives, Omid Safi points to a pattern of excluding those who are critical of Israel. Safi himself was uninvited from an interfaith exchange because of his criticism of Israel’s brutal 2014 attack on Gaza. At the same time, another speaker was invited to speak, even though he defended Israel’s aggression with racist language. As Safi points out,

There is an asymmetry in the parameter of this dialogue. My experience is not isolated. Muslims are often excluded from these Abrahamic dialogues if they have made statements in support of Palestinians or critical of policies of the Israeli government, whereas the Jewish participants can have public records of staunch support for Israel.

Even interfaith dialogue takes place on uneven grounds.

The boycott as called for in the proposed AAA resolution is a boycott of institutions, rather than individuals. As such, it works to keep open possibilities for exchange. Still, it insists on highlighting the asymmetrical terms on which exchange currently takes place, and demands forms of engagement that seek justice. Israeli institutions of higher education are culpable, as recently argued by Nadia Abu El-Haj, and documented in the AAA Task Force report.

In contrast, the anti-boycott resolution proposes more of the same—dialogue, engagement, and research—without addressing the underlying systems of oppression or the urgency of this situation. The resolution assumes that there is a constituency of Israeli moderates empowered to act. Their primary proposal is a fund for “Scholarly Endeavors in Conflict Areas.” This fund makes no distinction between Israeli and Palestinian scholars and their different positions as colonizer and colonized. In any case, Palestinians do not need “aid” in expressing themselves. What Palestinians need is justice and equal rights, systemically realized.

Dialogue may sound reasonable and even progressive, but it cannot work alone to end colonial oppression. An academic boycott recognizes that exchange will not be free until Palestinians have their rights.