[News] The right to educate - attacks for their activism exposing Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://mondoweiss.net/2016/09/the-right-to-educate/


  The right to educate

Nada Elia - September 15, 2016

The 2016-2017 academic year has just started in occupied Palestine, and 
with it come the hopes and dreams of young students, but also the daily 
challenges of walking to school past Israeli soldiers, or driving 
through checkpoints in the West Bank, or assigning a culturally and 
politically relevant curriculum in annexed East Jerusalem, where Israel 
is trying to impose an Israeli curriculum in Palestinian schools. For 
students in Gaza, the fear is always of another military assault, and of 
the severe shortage of all supplies, including electric power to study 
safely, away from candles. Launched in the 1970s, the Right to Education 
Campaign, a grassroots Palestinian movement based at Birzeit University, 
is testament to Israel’s longstanding assault on Palestinian education, 
and seeks to document, research and raise awareness about the issues 
facing Palestinian students, teachers and academic institutions under 
Israeli military occupation.

In the United States, we need to look at the flip side of the coin, 
namely a faculty member’s Right to Educate, to teach what they believe 
is truthful, relevant, and needs to be on a syllabus, as well as their 
right to be politically active off campus. Speaking at a protest rally 
should no more be penalized than playing a round of golf with a police 
chief.

Many of us are familiar with the egregious case of Professor Steven 
Salaita, a professor of American Studies who, after signing a contract 
for a tenured position in American Indian Studies at University of 
Illinois, was fired for tweeting about Israel’s war crimes during the 
2014 assault on Gaza. Salaita’s case rightly made national headlines, 
but he is not the only one to incur the wrath of Israel apologists, and 
pay a heavy price for speaking out about Israel’s crimes. Palestine 
Legal <http://palestinelegal.org/> has documented 300 cases of 
censorship of Palestine speech in 2014 and 2015, 85% of which were on 
university campuses.

In a 2009 article, Saree Makdisi and David Theo Goldberg wrote that 
there are “no fewer than thirty-three organizations” that are part of 
the “Israel on Campus” coalition, which monitors faculty teaching and 
organizing about the Middle East on US campuses. That number has grown 
since, to include organizations such as the Canary Mission, a secretive 
McCarthyist group devoted to blacklisting and seeking to ruin the 
employment opportunities of members of Students for Justice in Palestine 
nationally, as well as many faculty involved in pro-justice organizing.

In the past week, two faculty members, Professors Rabab Abdulhadi of San 
Francisco State University, and Simona Sharoni, of SUNY Plattsburgh, 
have also come under renewed attack for their activism to expose 
Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. Additionally, the AMCHA 
initiative, a Zionist campus watch group, has requested that a 
one-credit course scheduled to be taught at the University of California 
at Berkeley, “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis,” be cancelled.

Abdulhadi, who directs the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities Diaspora program 
at San Francisco State University, has just successfully negotiated a 
Memorandum of Understanding between SFSU and An-Najah University in her 
hometown of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, going through the various 
administrative steps to secure her institution’s support for this 
collaboration. In an emailed statement, Abdulhadi wrote me that the 
current campaign against her “seeks to whip up hysteria, Islamophobia, 
racism and xenophobia to divert attention from Israeli criminality 
against Palestinian education and cover up the complicity of the Israeli 
academy in furthering violations of Palestinian rights.”

“The McCarthyist attack by Campus Watch/Middle East Forum, led by Daniel 
Pipes and David Horowitz, [who are] named as leading Islamophobes by the 
Southern Poverty Law Center, is no more than a witch hunt campaign aimed 
as silencing me and our commitment to justice-centered knowledge 
production,” she told me.

Simona Sharoni, chair of the Gender Studies department at SUNY 
Plattsburgh, also views the attack against her as attempts at 
intimidating all faculty who teach about Palestine: “The fact that a 
senior scholar like myself — a tenured full professor with international 
reputation — is being subjected to such requests has a chilling effect 
on junior scholars,” she noted, in reference to five requests made under 
the Freedom of Information Law to release letters relating to her 
hiring, employment, and academic activities.

Support is quickly galvanizing across the nation in solidarity with 
Abdulhadi, Sharoni, and the hundreds of students listed on the Canary 
Mission website. In an email response to my query, Sharoni wrote: “The 
expressions of solidarity I received in the past few days from around 
the world, including from Jewish scholars employed by academic 
institutions in Israel, underscore the fact that BDS [Boycott, 
Divestment and Sanctions] is a diverse and vibrant, transnational 
solidarity movement. The support we have on college campuses is because 
unlike StandWithUs, AMCHA, and other such hate groups, we do not use 
harassment and intimidation as part of our educational efforts. Instead, 
we are committed to engaging issues and current events openly, 
critically, and respectfully. There is nothing controversial about what 
we do and how we do it. It is not surprising that Zionist groups, 
supporting a violent state, would use bullying strategies to silence 
debate; What is alarming is the silence of college administrators who 
seem more concerned with appeasing the bullies than with safeguarding 
the academic freedom of their own faculty and students. Responding to 
attacks on faculty and students with silence is a form of institutional 
betrayal.”

Abdulhadi, Sharoni, and other pro-justice teachers are courageous 
individuals struggling to educate their students in an extremely hostile 
environment, where job security is always at stake, regardless of merit 
or tenure status. The censorship they need to overcome, in order to 
practice their right to educate, and the retribution they face, as they 
speak truth to power, make a mockery of the hallowed concept of academic 
freedom in the US. There should be no “Palestine Exception to Free 
Speech,” not should striving for justice for the Palestinian people be 
considered “controversial,” let alone racist or hateful. Indeed, as a 
contemporary manifestation of resistance to settler-colonialism, 
struggle for indigenous rights, and organizing against a 
hypermilitarized apartheid regime, the question of Palestine can and 
should be included in various courses.

BDS, with its focus on denouncing Israeli abuses, has dealt a serious 
blow to the Zionist narrative of Israel as a thriving democracy 
threatened by anti-Semitic hordes. Universities, however, remain 
contested terrain, where a relatively small number of faculty and 
students who support Palestinian rights face a growing harassment and 
intimidation campaign to hamper their initiatives. Pro-justice faculty 
in various departments could include a discussion of Palestine in 
courses on decolonial literature, indigenous studies, gender, education, 
geography, environmentalism, the prison-state, and more. By doing so, 
the isolation of the few is broken, and support for Palestine becomes a 
visible critical mass, as faculty enact the Right to Educate, rather 
than maintain a false narrative of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian 
aggression.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20160915/98c4a3e5/attachment.htm>