US Secretary of State John Kerry, April 18, 2013: I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting. I think we have some period of time – a year to year-and-a-half to two years, or it’s over. (h/t Yousef Munayyer) Between now and April 18, every single reporter should be asking Kerry how much closer Israel and Palestine are to reaching a two-state solution, and what the US will do differently if, as seems likely, it reaches the date when by his own word the window for achieving such a solution has permanently closed.

Members of the British government are trying to dershowitz* Southampton University: Eric Pickles has warned Southampton University against “allowing a one-sided diatribe” as the become [sic] the most senior politician yet to intervene in the growing row over a major conference into the legitimacy of Israel. The Communities Secretary’s comments come as a senior Jewish leader called for the event, hosted by the institution’s law school, to be reconstructed or cancelled. … “Given the taxpayer-funded University has a legal duty to uphold freedom of speech, I would hope that they are taking steps to give a platform to all sides of the debate, rather than allowing a one-sided diatribe.” Board of Deputies vice-president Jonathan Arkush will head a delegation to […]

Of the war on terror, Christopher Hitchens once said: I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost. Now comes Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, when asked by Jon Lee Anderson why he supported the intervention in Libya, says: Why? I don’t know! Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah… Never underestimate the murder men will commit, the mayhem they will make, just to escape their boredom. But every enthusiasm has a shelf life. Even imperialism.

UMass issued the following announcement today: The University of Massachusetts Amherst today announced that it will accept Iranian students into science and engineering programs, developing individualized study plans to meet the requirements of federal sanctions law and address the impact on students. The decision to revise the university’s approach follows consultation with the State Department and outside counsel. “This approach reflects the university’s longstanding commitment to wide access to educational opportunities,” said Michael Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement. “We have always believed that excluding students from admission conflicts with our institutional values and principles. It is now clear, after further consultation and deliberation, that we can adopt a less restrictive policy.” Federal law, the Iran Threat Reduction and […]

These are just some of the kinds of students that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has decided will no longer be allowed to apply (h/t Ali Gharib): They were teenagers living in Tehran when the Twin Tower’s fell at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, but what they saw haunted them even 6,000 miles away. Now as doctoral students at the University of Massachusetts, Soroush Farzinmoghadam with the help of Nariman Mostafavi and others have designed a tribute to that day – an installation that will be on display in the Campus Center through Feb. 27. Farzinmoghadam created “UMass 9/11 Intervention” for his master’s thesis in architecture. He is also a doctoral student in regional planning. The installation’s dimensions […]

From The Washington Post (h/t Marilyn Young): “It’s a childish story that keeps repeating in the West,” smiled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in an interview with the BBC last week. He was dismissing allegations that his regime is attacking Syrian civilians with barrel bombs, crude devices packed with fuel and shrapnel that inflict brutal, indiscriminate damage. “I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots,” Assad said, and then repeated when pressed again: “They’re called bombs. We have bombs, missiles and bullets. There [are] no barrel bombs, we don’t have barrels.” If you think Assad doth protest too much, you’re probably right. The Post not only cites evidence supporting the claim of the Syrian regime’s “frequent use of barrel bombs in densely packed […]

My sister Melissa just sent me a piece from today’s Boston Globe on the UMass Iranian student situation. The big blockbuster in the piece is this: The college’s new policy, which appears to be rare if not unique among US universities, appeared to catch the US State Department by surprise… The State Department had no idea that this policy was in the offing, and more important, seems to believe or suggest that the policy may be unnecessary. A US State Department official said that the department was aware of news reports about the UMass decision but that there had been no changes in federal policy regarding Iranian students and he could not say why UMass would change its policy. The department will […]

This announcement was recently posted on the website of the graduate school of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: The University has determined that recent governmental sanctions pose a significant challenge to its ability to provide a full program of education and research for Iranian students in certain disciplines and programs. Because we must ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the University has determined that it will no longer admit Iranian national students to specific programs in the College of Engineering (i.e., Chemical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering) and in the College of Natural Sciences (i.e., Physics, Chemistry, Microbiology, and Polymer Science & Engineering) effective February 1, 2015. The full announcement and reasoning (US sanctions […]

For centuries, Jews have watched, helplessly, their synagogues burned to the ground. Now, with state power, comes this: In the clearest indication of the growing dangers threatening Al-Aqsa Mosque, in an opinion piece published on Saturday, Haaretz discussed a group of rabbis who met to discuss the scheme for the establishment of the Third Temple on the ruins of the mosque. The newspaper published a photograph of a number of rabbis and engineers studying a map of Al-Aqsa Mosque. In a piece written by Professor Ronnie Ellenblum entitled “Bells are ringing for the ultra-Orthodox and Secular” [hebrew], the paper discussed the future of Al-Aqsa Mosque which Jews refer to as the Temple Mount. Although the paper did not identify the […]

Joseph Levine, a philosophy professor at U. Mass., is one of the most thoughtful and thorough philosophical voices on the Israel/Palestine conflict and how it plays out in the US. By thoughtful, I don’t mean to do what others in this debate so often do: namely, to identify as thoughtful or judicious or subtle and probing someone who agrees with them on the substance. Levine and I happen to agree, but I agree with lots of folks on this issue whom I wouldn’t call particularly thoughtful. It’s just the case that Levine is especially searching when it comes to this issue, particularly about his own positions. Which is why the New York Times was so smart to have him weigh […]

The Wall Street Journal reports on an Israeli novel about the liquidation of a Palestinian village during the Nakba, which was published 65 years ago and has been translated into English for the first time. My friends Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole had a major hand in commissioning and editing the translation. In 1949, the publication of a short novel “Khirbet Khizeh,” about the forceful evacuation of a Palestinian village by Israeli soldiers, created a stir in the newly established state of Israel. Now, 65 years later, the controversial Hebrew classic by S. Yizhar is taking on a new life in English. On Tuesday, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a new edition of the book’s first English translation, by Nicholas […]

So this is an interesting development. A group of prominent liberal Zionists—including Michael Walzer, Michael Kazin, and Todd Gitlin—is calling for “personal sanctions” against “Israeli political leaders and public figures who lead efforts to insure permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and to annex all or parts of it unilaterally in violation of international law.” The personal sanctions they’re calling for include visa restrictions imposed by the US state. Three thoughts about this move. First, good for them. It’s limited and makes several assumptions that I don’t accept, but it ratchets up the pressure. That’s great. Second, it shows just how aware these intellectuals are of the power of BDS. There’s little doubt that without BDS—especially the ASA academic boycott—this […]

1. Thirty-four heads of departments and academic units at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote a scorching letter to the University of Illinois’s new president. With some startling information about the effect the boycott is having on the University: More than three-dozen scheduled talks and multiple conferences across a variety of disciplines – including, for example, this year’s entire colloquium series in the Department of Philosophy – have already been canceled, and more continue to be canceled, as outside speakers have withdrawn in response to the university’s handling of Dr. Salaita’s case. The Department of English decided to postpone a program review originally scheduled for spring 2015 in anticipation of being unable to find qualified external examiners willing to come to […]

Whenever I post about Israel/Palestine, I get insinuations and complaints about how I’m not posting about other struggles around the world. But when I post about a labor conflict—say, at the University of Oregon—no one asks or speculates about why I’m not also posting about labor conflicts in Tibet. So today I’m starting a new meme: Why are you singling out my posts on Israel/Palestine?

Steven Salaita and Katherine Franke spoke at Brooklyn College tonight; I moderated the discussion. Three quick comments. First, the event happened. We had an actual conversation about Israel/Palestine, BDS, Zionism, nationalism, academic freedom, civility. Students offered opposing views, tough questions were posed, thoughtful answers were proffered, multiple voices were heard, there was argument, there was reason, there was frustration, there was difficulty, there was dialogue, there was speechifying, there was back-and-forth. There was a college. Going into the event, the usual voices mobilized against it. Politicians tried to shut it down. Alan Dershowitz complained he wasn’t invited. I told him to calm down: “In all the years that Professor Dershowitz was a professor at Harvard Law School, he and his […]

Lisa Duggan, president of the American Studies Association, has an excellent oped in the Los Angeles Times on the organization’s recent convention in Los Angeles and how the ASA has fared, academically and politically, in the year since it announced its boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Lisa’s oped reminds me of a point that’s been bothering me for some time. One of the frequent criticisms that opponents of the ASA boycott make is this: What in the world is an American Studies organization doing concerning itself with the affairs of another country? As one American Studies scholar (to whom Lisa is in part responding) put it in the LA Times: Ostensibly devoted to the study of all things American, the […]

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, when men and women did the exact same thing in Berlin, it was heralded as the dawn of a new age of universal progress and civilization. Let’s see how this incident in Israel today is reported, if it’s reported at all.

On Twitter tonight, The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, whose book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century I discussed on Memorial Day, was tweeting about the protests that greeted the Met premiere of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Here are just some of Ross’ tweets.   Giuliani concedes that John Adams is “one of our great American composers” but declares that his opera “supports terrorism.” #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Ben Brafman says, “This may not be Auschwitz, it’s Lincoln Center,” but suggests that another Holocaust could happen. #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Melinda Katz, Queens Borough President, says that she is “personally offended by the play.” #Klinghoffer — […]

I’m hearing whispers that some liberal-ish academics think the boycott of UIUC is illiberal and censorious. So let me get this straight. Is the underlying idea that, as an academic, you’re obligated to accept every single speaking invitation you receive? (Let’s recall the terms of the boycott: simply that we will refuse to accept an invitation to speak, or otherwise participate in an event, at the UIUC, until Steven Salaita is reinstated.) Or is it that you’re allowed to say no if your reasons are strictly careerist—i.e., the institution is not high-prestige or the honorarium too low—but not if your reasons are moral principles? Or is it that you think careerism is not only a moral principle but the only […]

In the latest turn in the Salaita affair, Ali Abunimah has filed a public records request with the University of Illinois, which the University has not complied with. Raising suspicions of… Here’s Ali: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign says it cannot find a key document that may shed light on donor pressure and organized efforts to convince top administrators to fire Steven Salaita for his criticisms of Israel. The Electronic Intifada requested the document – a memo on Salaita’s views handed to Chancellor Phyllis Wise by a major donor – under the Freedom of Information Act. However, an 18 September letter from the university informed The Electronic Intifada that “no records responsive to your request could be located.” Under […]