Tag: Israel/Palestine

I was the target of a private Israeli intelligence firm, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

In September 2017, I got a “cease and desist” email from an organization called outlawbds. They informed me that because of my activism around BDS, I had been put on a “blacklist”—yes, they used that word, twice—and that I had a limited window of time to change my tune on BDS in order to get my name removed from the blacklist and avoid the legal consequences of my advocacy. “You have been marked,” the email warned me. “You have been identified.” Turns out the whole thing was part of an operation of an Israeli intelligence firm called “Psy-Group.” Whose activities have now been exposed in The New Yorker. Here are just a snippet of the items that might be of […]

If you’re willing to support a boycott of US academic conferences over Trump’s ban, why not BDS?

Over 6,000 academics across the world have announced that they will boycott any academic conference held in the US until Trump’s travel ban—on refugees, and on men and women from seven Muslim-majority countries—is lifted. This has drawn widespread and mostly positive attention in the media. Even the more critical responses have been self-questioning and exploratory rather than hostile and negative. This is all to the good and as it should be. It should also answer what I always found to be one of the stranger critique of BDS: namely, people ask me and other supporters of BDS, if you think Israel is so bad, why don’t you support a boycott of the US? As if proponents of BDS like myself would suddenly, in the face of an academic boycott of […]

January Journal

As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]

My Colin Kaepernick Moment: On not standing for the State of Israel in shul

With every passing year, the Israeli propaganda machine whirs more vigorously at shul. Israel gets praised more, soldiers get mentioned more, and Israelis in the congregation get featured more. Occupation becomes an abstraction, Palestinians an absence, oppression a metaphor. At Yom Kippur services today, Avinu Shebashamayim, the prayer for the State of Israel that is recited every week, took on a weird liturgical fervor, the kind I usually associate with the medieval piyyutim and prayers we recite. Avinu Shebashamayim features lines like these: Guide its leaders and advisors with Your light and Your truth. Help them with Your good counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our Holy Land. Deliver them: crown their efforts with triumph. Pretty profane stuff. Yet in the way the prayer was orchestrated today—led by […]

Anti-Semitism at CUNY? At Brooklyn College? In the Department of Political Science?

Last spring, in response to claims and complaints of several pro-Israel groups, CUNY hired two attorneys, a former federal judge and former federal prosecutor, to investigate alleged anti-Semitism at CUNY. After six months of investigation—and God knows how many billable hours (partners at the firm where the two investigators work charge up to $1,000 an hour)—the investigators have issued their report. Among their findings: what anti-Semitism there is at CUNY (and some of the incidents documented here are genuinely anti-Semitic) has nothing to do with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Given that accusations against SJP were the main impetus for the complaint—the Zionist Organization of America, along with 35 New York elected officials, called for SJP to be suspended or banned from all CUNY […]

CUNY and NYS hypocrisy on academic freedom: okay to boycott North Carolina and Mississippi, but not Israel

The graduate students at CUNY voted today to support the call for an academic boycott of Israel. Good for them. The vote was greeted with unsurprising opposition from the CUNY Graduate Center administration and from CUNY Chancellor James Milliken. The Graduate Center stressed in a public statement that the vote is “not a resolution supported by the GC nor the university as a whole” and that the center is “opposed to academic boycotts which “directly violate academic freedom.” “We are disappointed by this vote from one student group,” a statement from CUNY’s Chancellor James B. Milliken read, “but it will not change CUNY’s position.” … In the lead up to the vote, Milliken already made clear that he opposed the doctoral […]

Another Victory for BDS: Doug Henwood Refuses To Sell Translation Rights

My friend Doug Henwood has refused to sell the translation rights of his book on Hillary Clinton, My Turn, to an Israeli publisher. Because of BDS. Good for him. I believe Doug’s going to be writing something more about this decision in the coming days, so let me focus instead on this comment from the Israeli publisher: Boycotts, silencing people, or refusing to acknowledge different opinions go against the very nature of the publishing world. Freedom of expression trumps everything….In the publishing field, the freedom of speech is the most appreciated value. In this boycott, the author is acting with an hypocritical attitude. He himself is expressing views in the free world, but preventing others from sharing them. Note the irony. Had Doug turned […]

How to Honor the Settlement Between UIUC and Steven Salaita

There’s a lot of Friday morning quarterbacking going on about whether Steven Salaita should have accepted his settlement or not. I can’t tell you how distasteful I find this conversation: people who never bore the sacrifices Steven has borne—and who, as far as I can tell, would never bear those sacrifices—are now lecturing him to play the part of the sacrificial lamb, to essentially do the work that they have not done so that they can continue not doing the work that they have not done. Such calls strain the bounds of political decency. I was going to issue a pissy edict, something along the lines of: Before you criticize Steven Salaita for not being the martyr you want him to be, get […]

UIUC Reaches Settlement with Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have reached a settlement. According to a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which helped represent Steven, Salaita will receive $875,000 from UIUC. According to this press report, he’ll receive $600,000 plus legal fees. Perhaps the $275,000 discrepancy is for the legal fees. I don’t know. The UIUC has already spent $1.3 million in its own defense. All told, this effort to silence an outspoken critic of Israel has cost the university nearly two and half million dollars. Many of us had hoped that a settlement would include Steven getting his job back. For his sake and ours: to vindicate principles we all hold dear. I would be less than honest […]

Sam Fleischacker’s Followup

Sam Fleischacker, whose guest post last week in response to the Israeli election garnered so much attention and reaction, has a followup piece. Sam has asked me to post that followup here. I disagree with a fair amount of it, but because I posted his original statement here, I feel some obligation to post this clarification and elaboration now. I trust that readers of this blog know my views, and that my posting this statement will not be construed as an endorsement of what it says.  * * * * * Here is a follow-up to my post last week after the Israeli election. I’ve been a bit taken aback by the extent of the reaction to it, and uncomfortable about the degree to which I have been […]

British Government Tries to Dershowitz Southampton University

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 […]

Because you were strangers in the land of Egypt

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 […]

NYT Weighs in on Civility and the Salaita Case

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 […]

“True, it all happened a long time ago, but it has haunted me ever since.”

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 […]

Three Thoughts on Liberal Zionism and BDS

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 […]

Why are you singling out my posts on Israel/Palestine?

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?

Israel, Palestine, and the “Myth and Symbol” of American Studies

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 […]

Is the Boycott of the University of Illinois Illiberal?

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 […]

It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Cover-up

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 […]

Chronicle of Higher Ed Profiles Me and My Blog

Marc Parry has written a long profile of me, this blog, and my work and activism in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some excerpts: The Salaita Affair has riveted academe. One story line that has drawn less attention is the role played by Mr. Robin. For more than a month, the professor has turned his award-winning blog into a Salaita war room, grinding out a daily supply of analysis, muckraking, and megaphone-ready incitement. … “A lot of people see him as an intellectual leader,” says Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of the magazine Dissent. “He can be counted on to battle people.” (Those people include Mr. Kazin, who crossed swords with Mr. Robin last […]