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<h1 style="border-bottom-width:0; color:#444444;
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text-transform: none; padding-bottom: 0px;">Another
Association Backs Israel Boycott</h1>
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<p>The National Women's Studies Association becomes the latest
scholarly group to join the boycott, divestment and sanctions
movement against Israel.</p>
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<div class="pane-content"> December 1, 2015 </div>
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<h2 class="pane-title"><small><small>By</small></small><a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/users/elizabeth-redden"
title="View user profile." class="username"> <small><small><small>Elizabeth
Redden</small></small></small></a></h2>
<p><b><small><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/01/national-womens-studies-association-joins-israel-boycott-movement">https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/01/national-womens-studies-association-joins-israel-boycott-movement</a></small></small></small></small></b><br>
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<p>The National Women’s Studies Association is the newest
scholarly group to back the boycott, divestment and
sanctions movement against Israel.</p>
<p>In a vote that involved 35 percent of the association’s
total membership, 88.4 percent, or 653 individuals,
voted in favor of a boycott measure. Members of the
NWSA’s executive committee then took their own vote on
Friday to approve the membership’s recommendation that
the association support BDS.</p>
<p>The NWSA measure does not limit itself to a boycott
just of Israeli academic institutions, but rather
affirms the association's endorsement of "the 2005 call
by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and
sanctions (BDS) of economic, military and cultural
entities and projects sponsored by the state of Israel."</p>
<p>Simona Sharoni, one of the co-founders of Feminists for
Justice in/for Palestine, an ad-hoc group that sponsored
the pro-boycott measure, described the NWSA vote in
support of BDS as significant in positioning Palestinian
solidarity as a “feminist issue.” <a
href="http://www.nwsa.org/content.asp?contentid=105"
target="_blank">The text of the recommendation</a>
approved by the membership states, in part: “As feminist
scholars, activists, teachers and public intellectuals
we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of
oppression. In the spirit of this intersectional
perspective, we cannot overlook the injustice and
violence, including sexual and gender-based violence,
perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the
West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan
Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948
Nakba.” (“Nakba” is the term used by Palestinians to
describe their displacement by the creation of the state
of Israel.)</p>
<p>“We’re basically redefining feminism and putting
solidarity with Palestine into that definition of what
it means to be a feminist,” said Sharoni, a professor of
gender and women’s studies at the State University of
New York at Plattsburgh. “Or, to put it differently, the
vote of almost 90 percent of the members of the National
Women’s Studies Association in support of this
resolution underscores the fact that boycott, divestment
and sanctions can be or is seen by members of our
association as an example of expressing feminist
solidarity.”</p>
<p>BDS supporters within the NWSA described BDS as
reflecting “a commitment to the indivisibility of
justice” and used language that was notably more charged
than that which was common in boycott-related
discussions at last month’s American Anthropological
Association meeting, where attendees <a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/23/anthropologists-overwhelmingly-vote-boycott-israeli-universities"
target="_blank">voted overwhelmingly</a> in favor of a
resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
(That resolution now goes to the full membership of the
AAA for a vote.)</p>
<p>In a press release with quotes from BDS supporters,
Rabab Abdulhadi, an associate professor of race and
resistance studies at San Francisco State University,
described the NWSA resolution as being “a long time in
the making; it reflects broader changes within NWSA,
especially the browning [and the radicalization] of the
organization and the challenges it waged against white
supremacy [and neoliberalism] which went hand in hand
with Zionist influence in the women’s movement and
women’s and feminist scholarship.” In an interview,
Abdulhadi -- who amended the quote as written in the
press release to include the phrases included in
brackets -- said she was speaking of dominant,
"hegemonic" voices within the women's movement that
elevated Israel as a paragon for gender equality within
the Middle East while erasing, or "invisibilizing,"
Palestine.</p>
<p>About half a dozen U.S.-based scholarly associations in
the social sciences and humanities <a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/07/22/african-literature-association-endorses-israel-boycott"
target="_blank">have endorsed</a> the BDS movement
since 2013, the largest of these being <a
href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/17/american-studies-association-backs-boycott-israeli-universities#sthash.UflQqrzD.741lfY6k.dpbs"
target="_blank">the American Studies Association</a>.
Opponents of boycotts argue that they undercut core
values of academic freedom and free exchange, and the
American Association of University Professors is opposed
to organized academic boycotts for this reason.</p>
<p>Janet Freedman, a resident scholar at Brandeis
University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, spoke
against the boycott at the recent NWSA conference in
Milwaukee and penned <a
href="http://forward.com/sisterhood/325637/for-the-womens-studies-association-the-bds-vote-was-over-before-it-began/"
target="_blank">a piece that appeared Monday</a> in
the <em>Jewish Daily Forward</em>. In that piece she
writes among other things of “the egregious assault on
academic freedom found in the explication in the FAQs of
activities that would violate the boycott.” The FAQ
includes the following question and answer sequence:</p>
<p>Q: “What are some examples of activities that would
violate an academic/cultural boycott? For example, would
an invitation to an Israeli colleague to give a seminar
talk on my campus cross the line? What about calling her
or him on the phone?”</p>
<p>A: “A seminar talk in partnership with or sponsored by
an Israeli institution is subject to boycott. Free of
complicit institutional sponsorship or funding, Israeli
academic talks are not subject to boycott. By itself, a
phone conversation with an Israeli academic does not
constitute a violation of the boycott. However,
institutional partnership is subject to boycott;
therefore, we urge academics, in exercising their own
academic freedoms, to refuse all collaboration with
complicit institutions and their official
representatives.”</p>
<p>In an interview, Freedman, who described herself as
“pro-peace,” “pro-Israel,” “pro-Palestine” and as
“progressive in my politics,” said she sees the BDS
resolution as “inimical” to the peace process and a
two-state solution. “I don’t want to be a pariah and
seen as on the 'evil' side of an issue that doesn’t have
two sides,” she said. “It has 1,000 different points of
complexity.”</p>
<p>Samuel M. Edelman, the executive director of Academic
Council for Israel, a new organization that Edelman said
has faculty membership at more than 100 universities in
the U.S., described the NWSA measure as a “one-sided
indictment of Israel.”</p>
<p>“I feel like I’m in <em>Alice in Wonderland</em>
here,” he said. “One of the only places in the Middle
East that embraces the feminist ideal, has embedded it
within the very structures of the government and
education and public policy, is attacked while the rest
of the Middle East, which does none of that, is
ignored.”</p>
<p>The boycott measure follows on <a
href="http://www.nwsa.org/statements" target="_blank">a
solidarity statement</a> the NWSA issued in January
after a plenary at the 2014 conference “wherein there
was a strong show of support by a majority of more than
1,000 plenary attendees” for BDS.</p>
<p>“NWSA, the organization, has been engaged in the issue
for more than a year,” said Allison Kimmich, the
association's executive director. She said the
association has not yet resolved questions of how it
will implement the boycott.</p>
<p>The association’s president, Vivian M. May, said in a
statement that "the association's members are committed
to an inclusive feminist vision, to contesting
structural inequities on multiple fronts, and are deeply
engaged in anticolonial, antiwar and anti-imperialist
feminist scholarship, teaching and activism.”</p>
<p>May, who teaches at Syracuse University, added: “Given
these commitments, next year's conference in Montreal
shall be timely for the field, and for NWSA as it
continues to grow, with 'Decoloniality' as the
overarching conference theme.”</p>
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