Six days after its membership voted to implement an academic
boycott against Israeli universities, the American Studies Association’s
Caucus on Academic and Community Activism hurriedly issued a defensive
appeal for support bemoaning, in the wake of a tsunami of backlash, what
it defined as a “campaign of intimidation against the ASA.”
Instead of taking responsibility for the significant and profoundly
damaging action it collectively took by approving the boycott in the
first place, the ASA saw the wide-ranging negative response from the
academic community as an attack on the organization’s integrity, its
stated solidarity with the Palestinians, and its overall credibility as
an academic organization. The ASA also struck back with a well-worn
tactic used by those individuals and groups who participate in the
demonization and delegitimization of Israel as part of the boycott,
divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign: the ASA reflexively, and
disingenuously, accused “powerful and well-funded academic and
non-academic organizations” of “mount[ing] a public campaign aimed at
destroying the Association.”
The paranoid notion that “powerful and well-funded” interests had
any desire to even notice, let alone seek to destroy, the ASA, is
ridiculous.
More troubling is that this statement reveals that ASA members
naively believed that they could institute a broad academic boycott
against Israel, call for Jewish academics to be shunned, and tar the
reputation of Israeli scholars without anyone with opposing views
answering back these slanders with counter-arguments and opposing views.
The ASA claimed that the wide condemnation came after the boycott
vote – not because the boycott’s concept was intellectually defective
and ran counter to academia’s values, but “because it dared to express
criticism of Israel.”
More significant is that, in singling out Israel and Jewish
academics to be boycotted, many, including former Harvard president
Lawrence Summers, observed that the ASA boycott was possibly
ant-Semitic, “if not in intent, then in effect.” The ASA responded by
saying “these organizations falsely accuse the ASA membership of being
anti-semitic [sic],” and “bent on the destruction of Israel.”
The ASA members may not like being accused of exhibiting
anti-Semitic behavior, but several working definitions of anti-Semitism,
including those by the U.S. State Department and the European Union
Agency for Fundamental Rights, suggest that such actions, in targeting
Israel and holding it to a different standard of behavior than all other
nations—something which this boycott clearly does—is one criteria by
which speech and actions can be considered anti-Semitic.
Protestations and defenses aside, the issue is far more obvious
than the members of ASA care to realize, and much less insidious. Those
who speak back to ideologues do so not to suppress criticism of Israel;
academic freedom grants the professors the right to spew forth any
academic meanderings they wish, but it clearly does not make them free
from being challenged for their thoughts.
The core issue is that just as the pro-Palestinian activists within
the ASA have the right under the umbrella of academic free speech to
express their views—no matter how factually inaccurate, vitriolic, or
repellant they may be—those within and outside academia with opposing
views also have the right, under the same precepts of free expression,
to question the ASA’s views, and to call them anti-Semitic, or racist,
or genocidal, or merely historically inaccurate or incorrect. It is
naïve and unrealistic, at best, for the ASA leadership to think it could
call for such a potentially damaging boycott, which seriously violates
fundamental academic principles, without any response from a great many
people with opposing views about the wisdom of such an action.
That the academics of the ASA do not understand, or choose to
ignore, such a fundamental concept is troubling, and yet more evidence
that universities have become, as Abigail Thernstrom has described them,
“islands of repression in a sea of freedom.”
Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
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