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<h1 id="reader-title">The right to educate</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Nada Elia - <span> </span>
<time class="entry-date" datetime="2016-09-15T09:45:35+00:00"
pubdate="">September 15, 2016</time></div>
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<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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. <a href="http://palestinelegal.org/"
class="sizeable">Palestine Legal</a> has documented
300 cases of censorship of Palestine speech in 2014 and
2015, 85% of which were on university campuses.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.”</p>
<p class="sizeable">“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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.”</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
<p class="sizeable">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.</p>
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