It is no secret that Palestine is taboo in US academia. Harvard’s recent denial of tenure to renowned race scholar Cornel West is the most recent instance.
For decades, Arab American faculty have faced tenure denial or termination; students have been reprimanded and some even criminally charged; and Middle East studies programmes are under constant threat of defunding. All based on the fallacious claim that teaching, research, and activism that brings to light Israel’s rampant violations of Palestinian human rights is axiomatically anti-Semitic.
Big donors, alumni, and well-funded legal advocacy groups unabashedly command university administrators to cancel classes and programmes aimed to provide students with the experiences and voices of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Never mind that cowering to such demands undermines a university’s most fundamental tenet: academic freedom.
As they become ever more dependent on private donations and external grants to cover operational expenses, university administrators often oblige.
University leadership perversely proclaims the importance of civility and inclusion to justify silencing and exclusion. That is, exposing students to the systems and experiences of Palestinian oppression by Israel is allegedly so divisive that they should be stifled because otherwise Jewish students will feel unsafe and unwelcome on college campuses.
These same administrators do not seem to care that Arab American, Muslim American, and Palestinian American students experience hostile environments on account of stereotypes that Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are terrorists. As I explain in my book, The Racial Muslim, Orientalist and Islamophobic stereotypes are due in large part to how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is erroneously taught in schools and depicted in mainstream media as between violent, anti-Semitic Palestinians and a blameless, democratic Israeli state.
— Read the full article published on July 23, 2021 on The New Arab here.
