July 18, 2012

Israel courts US academics as it bombs Palestinian universities.

(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

In late June, articles began appearing in the Jewish press announcing a visit by US university presidents and chancellors to a seminar in Israel planned for 1-9 July. According to a statement issued by the seminar organizer, Project Interchange, the reported aim of the one-week delegation was to “explore opportunities for academic and research collaboration, learn about state-of-the-art research initiatives, and study the unique academia-industry ties that have turned Israel into the ‘Start Up Nation’” (“Leading US university presidents to explore innovation and academic cooperation with Israel,” 29 June 2012).

Among the scheduled delegates were Randy Woodson, chancellor of North Carolina State University; Linda P. B. Katehi, chancellor of University of California-Davis; Karen Haynes, president of California State University-San Marcos; Elliot Hirshman, president of San Diego State University; Dorothy Leland, chancellor of University of California-Merced; Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College; Lawrence Biondi, president of St. Louis University; Harvey Perlman, chancellor of University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Louis Agnese, president of University of the Incarnate Word.

Charles Schusterman, whose Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provided financial support for the delegation, describes Project Interchange seminars as vehicles for “unbiased study and reflection” that supply a “balanced foundation for understanding Israel’s history, diverse make-up, and strategic objectives” (“University heads assemble for Project Interchange reception,” Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, 16 November 2009).

Seminar participants have similarly described Project Interchange delegations as occasions for “unrestricted” dialogue and debate that promote tolerance” and “diversity” (“ASUN president brings ideas back from Israel,” Daily Nebraskan, 14 June 2006).

A close look at the facts, however, reveals an Orwellian thrust to the discourse. Project Interchange is sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, an unreservedly Zionist organization. It was founded in 1982 by the late Debra Berger, an Israel enthusiast committed to broadening international support for Zionism. Its major funder, Charles Schusterman, is himself an ardent Zionist as well as a pro-Israel philanthropist. Since its founding, Project Interchange claims to have invited to its seminars thousands of participants perceived as influential in areas that may serve to steer public policy, opinion formation and community action in directions favorable to strengthening Israel.

A Birthright tour for adults

Project Interchange organizes Birthright Israel tours for adults (Birthright Israel is a program supported by the Israeli government to provide free trips to Israel for young North American Jews). Project Interchange delegations meet Israeli politicians, academics, clergy, military and legal figures, scientists and health professionals, all of whom are keen on extending pro-Zionist sentiment worldwide. In what is clearly linked to the larger Israeli hasbara (propaganda) initiative to improve the faltering image of Israel internationally, Project Interchange has stepped up its efforts in recent years by recruiting more seminar delegates and encouraging them upon return to write articles, give interviews, enter into business deals with Israeli companies and forge ties with Zionist organizations in their home communities.

One such compliant delegate is Cornell University President David J. Skorton, now spearheading his university’s controversial arrangement with the Haifa-based Israel Institute of Technology (also known as the Technion) to build an applied science and technology campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island (“Professors question Cornell-Technion partnership,” The Cornell Daily Sun, 2 March 2012).

In exchange for his cooperation, the AJC recently presented Skorton with its Avraham Harman Leadership Award, given annually to an “individual who has dedicated significant efforts to strengthening ties between American Jews and Israel” (“AJC honors Cornell University President David Skorton,” American Jewish Committee, 21 June 2012).

Faustian pact

Upon his return from a 2010 Project Interchange delegation, Skorton and his wife, Cornell biomedical science professor Robin Davisson, posted several blog entries about their trip in the Chronicle of Higher Education. These made clear their ensuing commitment less to advancing humanistic education than to making a Faustian pact with the apartheid system central to contemporary Israeli policy.

Rather than exposing true facts about the wall Israel is building in the West Bank, Jewish-only roads and towns, illegal settlements, collective punishment, second-class Palestinian citizenship, and Israel’s countless other violations of international law, Skorton and Davisson spent significant time denouncing the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and insisting that US universities reject calls to boycott Israeli academic institutions. “It is hard for us to imagine a scenario in which a boycott … would be constructive and helpful, as opposed to divisive and destructive,” they wrote (“Skorton and Davisson blog from Israel on higher ed’s role in Middle East peace,” 23 June 2010).

Skorton and Davisson’s views are echoed by University of Miami President and former US health secretary Donna Shalala, who told The Jerusalem Post, “I joined the presidents of the major American universities to denounce the boycott of Israeli academics. I sent a personal letter to the presidents of universities here, as did the other presidents, promising there would be no boycott in the United States and that Israeli scholars would always be welcome” (“‘There will never be a boycott of Israel’,” 12 July 2010).

Shalala has referred to such initiatives as anti-Semitic, stating: “Whether it’s divestment or a boycott against Israeli academics [sic], it’s inappropriate and not worthy of any educational institution. I know of no American university that would support such a boycott” (“OSU President Ray among delegation of university heads on Israel visit,” Oregon State University blog, 15 July 2010).

Blaming Palestinians

Project Interchange’s calls for “balanced” understanding and “unbiased” study are thus deceptively one-sided. This disingenuousness is further evidenced by the limited exposure Project Interchange delegates receive to Palestinians. Rather than being exposed to Palestinian suffering, the delegates are encouraged to think of Palestinians as the aggressors. For example, they are taken to the Israeli town of Sderot “to view the city that has been under fire from rockets from Gaza” (“US college heads visit Israel, seek collaboration opportunities,” JTA, 4 July 2012).

It is little wonder that Cornell President Skorton upholds Project Interchange’s bald assertion that Israel is a “modern, Western, Middle Eastern, democratic, Jewish state,” and that he has been willing to propagate the pro-apartheid view that Jews and Palestinians are “two increasingly separated communities [whose] differences of perspective and narrative … may be intractable.” Accordingly, not only will the conflict never be resolved, but for 2012 delegate Louis Agnese, it is all the Palestinians’ fault. Thanks to the trip, he said, “I have a better understanding of why the peace talks collapsed in 2000. The Palestinians do not want to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state” (“US Catholic college presidents connect with colleagues in Israel,” The Boston Pilot, 6 July 2012).

Although Project Interchange purports to foster “cultural diversity,” “dialogue” and “tolerance,” then, its underlying objective is to dissimulate legitimate criticism of Zionism and Israel and discourage support for Palestine solidarity and resistance.

Fundraising opportunity

US university leaders are conducive to the Project Interchange agenda, not necessarily because they are unfailing Zionists, but because Project Interchange’s pitch for collaborative “entrepreneurship and innovation” promises, if inconclusively, to help resolve massive budgetary crises facing many US institutions of higher learning. The military industry so integral to the Israeli academy, comprising disciplines ranging from physics and nanotechnology, pharmacology, molecular genetics and opthalmology to water and agricultural “security” studies, communication and counter-terrorism studies, is seen as a potential source of funds.

Writing in the aforementioned article published in Yeshiva World, North Carolina State University Chancellor Woodson aptly demonstrates the cynicism of this approach: “Sharing information on the strong ties between higher education and industry will provide meaningful examples for NC State’s continued efforts to support a strong economy in North Carolina.” The fact that Israeli industry is complicit in ethnic cleansing and other human rights violations and contraventions of international law, doesn’t seem to matter to Woodson and his colleagues — for whom profit and greed have apparently trumped all sense of ethics and social justice.

Project Interchange’s agenda is seductive, though, with major CEOs and venture capitalists as well as the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities jumping on the bandwagon in pursuit of contracts with Israeli academia and industry. Their cooperation conveniently dovetails with Israel’s desperate drive to prove the necessity of its devastating domestic policies, as it becomes further isolated economically and politically on account of growing international condemnation of its harsh treatment of Palestinians and of its self-serving manipulation of US foreign policy, all in the wake of the Arab uprisings and increasing petrodollar instability, which have challenged the sustainability of US and Israeli regional hegemony.

The pro-Zionist promotion of collaborative US-Israeli projects is indeed but one manifestation of hasbara. Another is a largely neoconservative effort to ensure that US dominance in the Middle East — especially over diminishing oil reserves — retains a strong Israeli component.

While scholars as diverse as Cheryl Rubenberg, James Petras and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have argued that alliance with Israel is essentially unnecessary to US national interests, neocons and their followers are dubbing Israel the techno-scientific “Start Up Nation” with the aim not only of making Israel more attractive to potential investors but of realigning and reintegrating the Israeli national interest with that of the 21st century United States as envisioned by the neocon purveyors of the Project for the New American Century.

Complicity

With respect to the US academy, this scenario presents compounding problems. Project Interchange’s collaboration with Israel willfully implicates universities, their faculty and students in the illegal practices of apartheid and war criminality. One may now refer to Cornell as an accomplice in the development of drone technology (a specialty of the Technion) and in structural discrimination against non-Jews (a feature of all Israeli universities). Such collaboration will also likely exacerbate the longstanding suppression of campus speech critical of Zionism, not to mention capitalism, at participating institutions.

Corporate donors do not take well to criticism and tend to use their financial clout to silence and intimidate students and professors who question their practices. Pro-Zionist funders are especially vigilant against scholarship that would expose and criticize their ties to unsavory Israeli military practices, and they do not welcome Palestinian, Arab and Muslim perspectives generally.

The current epidemic of US academic freedom violations against anti-Zionist and pro-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) professors is directly connected to such conditions, as is the growing influence of youth-oriented and campus-based hasbaragroups like Birthright, Israel on Campus Coalition and Campus Watch, whose mandates are, at least in part, to train pro-Zionist students to spy on their professors.

It is surely no coincidence that four such cases involve universities within the California system: almost half the delegates to Project Interchange’s 2011 University Presidents Seminar were from California institutions, and an entire April 2012 delegation was comprised entirely of faculty from University of California-Irvine.

With calculated candor, these universities have tried to justify their negative actions in the name of corporate personhood or the fight against renewed anti-Semitism, as did the Technion when suing Google last year for hosting a blog critical of the university’s medical program (“Technion takes Google to court to shut down blog critical of medical program,” Haaretz, 6 May 2011).

Because the hasbara movement is exceedingly well-funded, we can only expect to see this pattern continuing unless the collaborations are halted. Whereas it may be unrealistic to issue a boycott call against complicit US institutions, it may be possible to censure the most egregious violators. The BDS movement, working with Students for Justice in Palestine and like-minded campus groups, might launch such an effort by helping raise consciousness among students and faculty nationwide, like during the campaign against South African apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s.

Demonstrations, teach-ins and negative publicity and letter-writing campaigns could be organized, imploring administrations to reject project collaboration with Israel and to reverse the institutional privatization facilitating it. In addition to galvanizing Palestine solidarity on campuses, these prospective efforts offer a golden opportunity for providing the wider, more sustained public education about Zionism and Israel so eminently necessary if Israel is to be prevented from continuing unheeded along its present, highly destructive path.

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article wrongly attributed the statement “Martin Luther King’s ideals of equality, integration, peace, collaboration and the value of education” to Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum; it has since been removed. The Electronic Intifada apologizes for the error.

Terri Ginsberg is a film scholar and activist based in New York City. She holds a doctorate cinema studies and has taught at numerous US institutions of higher learning, including NYU, Rutgers, Dartmouth, Ithaca College, and Brooklyn College. Her publications include Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (2010), Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (2007), A Companion to German Cinema(2012), a special film/media issue of International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies (2009), and a special Middle East teaching issue of Arab Studies Quarterly(2011). In 2008, she was fired from North Carolina State University for supporting Palestinian and Muslim perspectives. Her essay on Palestinian women’s cinema will appear shortly in the first-ever book on that topic, to be published by Shashat and Birzeit University Press in Palestine.

Is Palestine going mainstream in British politics?: The Electronic Intifada

Asa Winstanley

The Electronic Intifada

17 July 2012

Are British lawmakers prepared to go beyond merely condemning Israeli colonization and oppression?

(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

On Wednesday, 4 July, a public meeting took place in the British Parliament’s Grand Committee room. Speaking on the panel of members of parliament were a Conservative former career soldier, a senior minister in two previous Labor governments, and a member of Labor Friends of Israel. What could they all possibly have had in common?

They had assembled to speak at a meeting about the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. This followed a trip they had participated in, organized by the Council for Advancing Arab-British Understanding.

Earlier that same day, during a Westminster Hall debate, the Foreign Office minister responsible for relations with the Middle East had — for the first time — strongly hinted that a ban on importing goods made in Israeli settlements could be on the way.

The events of that day were only the latest examples of how views critical of Israeli policy have entered the mainstream of UK politics.

Israel’s “martial law”

The Conservative MP on the panel was Colonel Bob Stewart, an interesting, and in some respects eccentric, figure. Newly elected to Parliament in 2010, Stewart spent 28 years in the British army. He became quite well known in the 1990s after his time as UN commander of British forces in Bosnia.

After leaving the army, he joined the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton as a consultant. According to his own website, his clients at that time included Egypt duringHosni Mubarak’s regime. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was part of British army intelligence in the northern Irish city of Derry. He is also a member of the British-American Project, a cliquey Atlanticist group whose origins lie in the Cold War.

But at the CAABU meeting, he spoke in the tradition of British army Arabists that stretches back to the early twentieth century. He recounted a little of his life growing up in a military family in Jordan and Yemen during the British colonial era, and visitingJerusalem at times. He said “my father was [an officer] with Glubb Pasha in Amman,” referring to the British army general who commanded Jordanian forces until 1956.

Stewart said he was “deeply upset by what I saw” in the West Bank. He spoke passionately against the “martial law” Israel imposes on Palestinians there, and against the system of unequal Israeli laws for Palestinians and Israeli settlers who live in the same territory. He seemed genuinely outraged by what he had seen. He said thatHebron (occupied in its city center by militant Israeli colonists) had reminded him of places he had been in the Balkans.

At a debate on Palestine in the parliamentary chamber earlier in the day, he had concluded his speech with an odd rhetorical flourish “by asking God to bring back King Solomon. He was respected by Jews and Muslims equally, and my God, we need his wisdom now” (“House of commons transcript,” 4 July 2012).

“We are funding the occupation”

Also speaking on the CAABU panel was John Denham. Denham resigned from a ministerial post in Tony Blair’s government in opposition to the Iraq war, and is a strong supporter of Labor Friends of Palestine. On the panel he said that during the visit there had been “a sense of the normalization of the occupation” compared to his previous visits to Palestine.

Denham once thought UK aid was investing in a process that would lead to a two-state solution, but now he questioned that. “If all I am paying for now and all my constituents are paying for now is simply the maintenance of an occupation .. can I keep going back asking them for money? Surely there has to be an impulse for change … we are funding this occupation,” he said.

Denham also said there was a great danger of just repeating the “mantra of two-state solution as though it’s something that always remains open.”

Shift in Labor

Ian Lucas was the representative of Labor Friend of Israel on the panel. He is the shadow minister for the Middle East in the main opposition party. His presentation was somewhat more circumspect, and he seemed to be hedging his bets, with his political career in mind. He too noted the “normalization and improved security” during the CAABU delegation, but did so positively.

Interestingly, he said that some Palestinian Authority officials he spoke to were “gravely concerned about how long the situation can actually continue without an upsurge and reaction that could only end in violence.”

Although Lucas did not name these PA officials, the delegation is known to have met with “Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad, [“chief negotiator”] Saeb Erekat … the head of external affairs of Fatah and the governor of Hebron,” according to an article by Denham (“John Denham MP writes about his visit to the occupied territories,” Labor Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, 21 May 2012).

Nevertheless, the fact that Lucas even went on the CAABU delegation speaks volumes. So does the fact he addressed the Labor Friends of Palestine annual reception in May.

As Martin Bright of the Zionist weekly paper The Jewish Chronicle noted: “There was a time when an ambitious young member of the Labor Party was well-advised to join Labor Friends of Israel, but from Monday’s turnout it is now clear that Labor Friends of Palestine is the place to be seen” (“Labor Palestine group comes of age,” 17 May 2012).

Shazia Arshad, an executive committee member of Labor Friends of Palestine certainly agrees with Bright on that last point. Speaking to The Electronic Intifada, she said mainstream members of the Labor party had in fact long been appearing at the group’s events, including Gordon Brown, the former prime minister.

Arshad said that “mainstreaming the issue [of Palestine makes it] … more accessible. It’s about getting the issue heard at all levels” and that politicians play a different role than activists. “If you look back ten years, or even five years ago, the issue of Palestine, it wasn’t mainstream. But more than that it was kind of a bit scary,” and perceived as a fringe left-wing issue. But, she added, “there are now politicians that are not afraid of talking about Palestine.”

All three panel members had attended the Westminster Hall debate earlier the same day. It had been most notable for the strongest hint yet by Alistair Burt, the coalition government’s minister for the Middle East that a UK ban on products originating in Israeli settlements could be on the way.

Burt had said the issue was “under active consideration in London and in Brussels.”

Lucas, Burt’s shadow in the opposition, said at the CAABU meeting later that day that the comment was unprecedented. “Investigating the legal status of goods that are produced in the occupied territories … the government has actually, I think for the first time, today said something concrete about those types of actions in relation to specifically the occupied territories,” Lucas said.

Having followed the push to ban settlement goods for about four years, Arshad is cautious about Burt’s comment. Arshad thinks the Foreign Office will have little choice but to make some sort of change to the law, but said “I don’t know how stringent it will be” since the Conservative-led government has “diplomatic considerations” with Israel.

During the debate, Lucas said that “‘settlements’ is a very misleading word, because they are huge estates and developments; they do not appear temporary at all.” However, he was vague on concrete action, talking rather airily of a “need for a different attitude from the parties to the dispute,” and concluding that the “two-state solution is under threat.”

One state with equal rights for all: not utopian?

Bob Stewart noted that “unless the settlements stop, there can be no chance whatever of a two-state solution, and the only alternative … is a one-state solution — one state where Jews and Palestinians recognize one another as equals. Surely that is not totally utopian.”

Ben Bradshaw was more forthright on the issue of action. A previous minister for culture and sport in Gordon Brown’s Labor government, Bradshaw is no longer on the opposition front benches. He was insistent that the UK and EU should “move beyond the ritual criticism and condemnation that we always make of the Israeli authorities, and sue them for damages” because of their “illegal demolition of [Palestinian] infrastructure that has been built with British, UK, EU or international money.”

Michael Deas, coordinator in Europe with the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), told The Electronic Intifada that Burt’s comments were “hopefully a sign that European governments are starting to realize that they must do more than simply condemn Israel’s relentless colonization of Palestinian land. However, Israel and Israeli companies habitually mislabel settlement produce as ‘made in Israel,’ so it remains to be seen how a ban on settlement produce would be implemented,” Deas said.

“Furthermore, agricultural export companies like Mehadrin are directly involved in the colonization of Palestinian land. Avocados don’t commit war crimes, states and corporations do,” he added, explaining that the BNC calls for a ban on trade with companies complicit with Israeli violations of international law rather than just settlement produce itself.

If it happens, a ban on exports from settlement goods would be a move in the right direction. It would certainly another sign that support of Palestinian rights is going mainstream in the UK.

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist from London who has lived and reported from occupied Palestine. His website is www.winstanleys.org.