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<div class="post_content" itemprop="articleBody"> <font size="-2"><a
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href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/10/no-sanctuary-for-palestinian-scholarship/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/10/no-sanctuary-for-palestinian-scholarship/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">No Sanctuary for Palestinian Scholarship</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by Diana Block - May
10, 2017<br>
</div>
<p><strong>Battleground San Francisco State University</strong></p>
<p>At a March 2017 conference of the National Association of
Ethnic Studies held at San Francisco State University (SFSU),
President Leslie Wong boasted about the University’s role as a
sanctuary campus. He referenced SFSU’s proud history of
engaged social justice scholarship going back to the <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World_Liberation_Front_strikes_of_1968">1968
Third World strike</a> by students which established the
first Ethnic Studies College in the country.</p>
<p>To Terry Collins, an alumnus of SFSU who was a member of the
Black Student Union that started the Third World strike, and
is the current Board President of <a
href="http://www.kpoo.com/about">KPOO community radio</a>,
Wong’s words rang hollow. “We fought for a radical vision of
what ethnic studies should mean,” Collins told me. “<a
href="http://college.usatoday.com/2016/05/22/10-day-hunger-strike-victory-for-sfsu-students/">Last
spring students had to protest and even hunger strike just
to keep Ethnic Studies alive after it was threatened with
major cuts. </a> They won a few crumbs but so much more is
needed. And Palestinian faculty, students and programs have
been under constant attack! Where’s the sanctuary for them at
SF State?”</p>
<p>Collins, an adamant supporter of Palestine since the sixties,
was referring to a series of incidents over the past year at
SFSU that have targeted the <a
href="https://www.facebook.com/GeneralUnionofPalestineStudents/">General
Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS)</a> ,<a
href="http://www.nationalsjp.org/rabab-abdulhadi.html">Professor
Rabab Abdulhadi</a>, and the <a
href="http://amed.sfsu.edu/">Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and
Diasporas (AMED)</a> program which she founded. Most
recently, racist, Islamophobic posters were plastered across
campus on May 3<sup>rd</sup> and to date there has been no
public denunciation of this hate speech by President Wong.
While such attacks are not unique to SFSU, they have been
escalating at a campus which has been a battleground for
social justice struggles of many types, including Palestine,
over decades.</p>
<p>In April 2016, the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat,
was invited to speak at SF State. A coalition of SFSU student
groups, led by GUPS, protested against his talk citing
Barkat’s extreme policies of expulsion and violence against
Palestinian residents, including home demolitions, evictions,
lock downs and collective punishment of entire neighborhoods
in East Jerusalem. The day after the peaceful protest, which
succeeded in interrupting Barkat’s speech, President Wong
ordered a full investigation of the protest, reportedly <a
href="http://www.jweekly.com/2016/04/09/sfsu-president-promises-full-investigation-after-protesters-disrupt-jerusal/">after
a telephone conversation with Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center</a> who urged this course of action. Hier
referenced the successful prosecution of the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/irvine-11">Irvine
11</a>, students who had interrupted the speech of Israeli
ambassador Michael Oren in 2010 and were convicted of
conspiracy to disrupt a public meeting in 2011.</p>
<p>Over the course of the next five months, GUPS members and
other students, primarily women, were not only subject to an
intensive, disruptive official investigation but were also
targeted by death and rape threats, and a vicious online
campaign by <a href="https://canarymission.org/">Canary
Mission</a> seeking to derail their academic careers. The
University investigation exonerated the students on most of
the charges in September 2016, but the students’ lives had
been turned upside down. None of the threats or harassment by
pro-Zionist groups were ever addressed by the University. In
their statement responding to the report, GUPs pointed out the
degree to which their education, lives and safety had been
compromised in the name of protecting pro-Israel free speech.
<a
href="https://medium.com/@sfsugups415/gups-statement-on-independent-review-of-april-6th-2016-99d3c5b722c1">“Not
only were we subjected to this hate monger [Barkat], but we
were investigated for months and publicly smeared as violent
and anti-Semitic.”</a></p>
<p>Shortly after the report exonerating the students was
released, another front of assault was opened against
Palestinian scholarship at SFSU. An online petition was
launched by the Middle East Forum (MEF), an Islamophobic,
pro-Israel group led by Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz,
calling on President Wong to terminate a Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU )with <a href="https://www.najah.edu/en">An-Najah</a>
University in Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank. The MOU
was established in 2014, initiated by Dr. Abdulhadi ,with the
stated purpose of encouraging exchange and partnership between
the two universities and with the AMED Studies program. The
petition accused An-Najah of “incitement to violence,
anti-Semitism and the glorification of terrorism.” The
vilification of An-Najah, which is consistently ranked as a
leading academic institution in the Arab world, was
accompanied by a specific attack on Dr. Abdulhadi who was
condemned for initiating the MOU and for her “record as an
anti-Israel activist.” Some of the examples given included her
role as a founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic
and Cultural Boycott of Israel and her service as faculty
advisor for GUPS.</p>
<p>The catalyst for this attack was a conference, <em>Freedom
Behind Bars,</em> held at An-Najah in March 2016. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/13/reflections-on-a-delegation-to-imprisoned-palestine/">This
author attended the conference as part of the Prisoner,
Labor and Academic Solidarity delegation</a> to Palestine
convened by Dr. Abulhadi. To the delegation, the conference
was an exciting model of what international academic exchange
between activist scholars should be. To the MEF authors of
the anti-An-Najah petition, the conference was a threatening
example of the powerful potential of unfiltered exposure to
Palestinian scholarship taking place in occupied Palestine.</p>
<p>Our delegation immediately issued an open letter in response
to the petition, calling on President Wong to uphold the
importance and validity of the MOU with An-Najah, to reject
the defamation of Dr. Abdulhadi and to expand institutional
support for the AMED program. Wong’s office issued a lukewarm
response, endorsing all of the University’s exchange programs
without specifically upholding the one with An-Najah. As
our open letter was rapidly gaining signatures by students and
faculty at SFSU and around the country, an even more egregious
act of hate speech occurred on the SFSU campus as well as at
UC Berkeley and UCLA.</p>
<p>On the morning of October 14, 2016, students arrived at SFSU
to find numerous posters with racist caricature portraits
plastered all over campus, defaming Professor Abdulhadi and
Palestinian student leaders by name and labeling them “Jew
Haters” and “terrorists.” The posters were signed by the
Horowitz Freedom Center, a virulently anti-left and
Islamophobic organization. Students immediately went across
campus tearing the posters down while University
administration did nothing for hours. President Wong finally
issued a statement calling the posters “bullying tactics” but
did not even mention that the Horowitz Freedom Center was
responsible for them or label them a hate crime.</p>
<p>In response to these posters, numerous articles, statements,
and petitions were issued by a wide variety of media and
organizations including Palestine Legal, Arab Resource and
Organizing Center, UAW Local 2865, International Jewish
Anti-Zionist Network, Jewish News and the Jewish Studies
Department at SFSU. They called on Wong to pursue an
investigation of the posters as a hate crime and to defend
GUPS, AMED, Dr. Abdulhadi and the Arab and Muslim community at
SFSU. To date none of this has happened.</p>
<p>As Terry Collins points out, the incidents of the past year
are just an intensification of long time problems facing the
AMED program and the Palestinian and Arab communities at SF
State. Dr. Abdulhadi was recruited to SFSU in 2007 from the
University of Michigan, Dearborn. Her recruitment was part of
the implementation of the recommendations of a
campus/community Task Force that was formed at SFSU in order
to address a backlash against Palestinian and Arab students in
the post 9-11 era. According to Dr. Abdulhadi, she accepted
the position at SFSU in order to create a program whose
explicit purpose was the production of knowledge for social
justice. Given the history of social justice engagement at
SFSU, the large Arab and Palestinian population in the Bay
Area, and the progressive political climate in the region, she
believed that it would be an ideal place for her to develop
this type of program. In her recruitment contract she was
promised two additional faculty positions for the program as
well as administrative support. However, none of these
contractual obligations have ever been met.</p>
<p>A year after Dr. Abdulhadi was recruited in 2008, the
Department of Jewish studies at SF State received a gift of
$3.75 million from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund to
create an endowed chair in Israel studies, which SF State
boasted put it “<a
href="http://www.sfsu.edu/news/2008/spring/22.html">at the
forefront of an emerging new academic field.</a>” Since
then Israel studies has continued to grow, while the AMED
program has never expanded beyond Dr. Abdulhadi. Recently Dr.
Abdulhadi was told by President Wong that due to budget
constraints, the only way that the two promised faculty
positions could be added would be if the program itself could
bring in large gifts or grants.</p>
<p>The problems confronting the AMED program have developed in
the context of nationwide attacks on Palestinian scholarship
including employment termination, disciplinary actions,
suspension of student groups and cancellation of course
sections. As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)
movement has gathered momentum on college campuses across the
U.S., the Israeli government and its allies have prioritized
the targeting of all scholarship and activity that includes an
anti-Zionist, anti-colonial, pro-Palestinian perspective.
Meanwhile, in the same period as online harassment and
academic investigations were occurring at SFSU, students at
An-Najah and other Palestinian universities have been subject
to a mounting wave of raids and arrests. Since it is illegal
for Palestinian students to organize protests on campuses, and
campus political organizations are banned, there is a constant
pretext for the Israeli military occupation to arrest students
arbitrarily. The increasing criminalization of speech and
activism about Palestine on U.S. campuses represents a move in
the same direction.</p>
<p>Yet despite the election of Trump, the acceleration of openly
Islamophobic policies, and the appointment of ultra-Zionist
David Friedman as U.S. ambassador to Israel , the colonial
reality of Palestine is breaking through the American wall of
denial in unprecedented ways. On April 16, 2017 the New York
Times published a searing <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/opinion/palestinian-hunger-strike-prisoners-call-for-justice.html?_r=0">op-ed
by Marwan Barghouti</a>, a Palestinian leader and political
prisoner, indicting the Israeli colonial prison system and
announcing a hunger strike by over 1,500 Palestinian prisoners
which has continued into May. A week later, <a
href="https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/25/bds_leader_omar_barghouti_dedicates_his">Omar
Barghouti</a>, a co-founder and leader of the BDS
movement, accepted the Gandhi Peace Award at Yale University
after an international outcry pressured Israel to reverse a
travel ban it had imposed on him. And on April 27<sup>th</sup>,
the Washington Post <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/27/a-thousand-palestinian-prisoners-are-on-a-hunger-strike-this-woman-is-fighting-for-their-rights/?utm_term=.59ad59d9f991">published
an interview with Palestinian parliamentarian and former
political prisoner Khalida Jarrar</a> in which she explains
her support for the prisoner hunger strike and highlights the
particularly cruel conditions to which Palestinian women
prisoners are subjected.</p>
<p>Not surprisingly at the same time, the backlash has been
escalating at San Francisco State. In the beginning of April,
Cinnamon Stillwell, the West Coast representative of Campus
Watch and a graduate of SF State, accelerated the call to
revoke the MOU between An-Najah and SFSU <a
href="http://www.meforum.org/6633/san-francisco-state-university-still-partnering">by
denouncing the inclusion of former prisoners</a> in the U.S.
delegation that participated in the An-Najah conference. And
Nir Barkat, intensified the pressure on President Wong when he
canceled a speaking engagement at SFSU claiming that SFSU
hadn’t sufficiently publicized the event and therefore was
continuing its <a
href="http://www.jweekly.com/2017/04/05/jerusalem-mayor-angrily-cancels-sfsu-appearance/">“marginalization
and demonization of the Jewish state. “</a></p>
<p>On May 3, students once again found dozens of
anti-Palestinian posters plastered around campus, vilifying
Palestinian feminist <a href="http://justice4rasmea.org/">leader
Rasmea Odeh</a>, <a href="http://www.nationalsjp.org/">Students
for Justice in Palestine</a> and a <a
href="https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/">Jewish Voice for
Peace</a>. In an urgent message to Wong, GUPS responded
clearly, ““Once again SFSU administration has failed to
protect us and provide a safe work and study environment for
students, faculty and staff. Claims of being a sanctuary
campus must be evidenced in deeds not in words. This applies
equally to Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians as it applies to
everybody else.” Their email included numerous pictures of
the racist posters before they were taken down. In a
Kafkaesque response, Wong responded the next day with an email
claiming that he couldn’t do anything because the campus
police “were unable to find any of the posters.” He
encouraged students to call the police and campus counseling
if they felt unsafe.</p>
<p>2017 marks the tenth anniversary of the <a
href="http://www.sfsu.edu/news/2007/fall/84.htm">Edward Said
mural</a> which was created at SF State in a collaborative
effort between students, artists and community members to
honor this preeminent Palestinian scholar. Like everything
related to Palestine at SFSU, the mural has been the subject
of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/event-honoring-edward-said-prompts-zionist-smear-campaign-against-san">ongoing
bitter controversy</a>, fanned by outside Zionist
organizations. The SFSU administration cites the mural as a
symbol of its commitment to “healthy debate,” and “respectful
solutions.” To Terry Collins, the battle at SF State has
never been about healthy debate or free speech. “They’re
trying to make an example of the students, GUPS, the AMED
program because they’re standing up for Palestine’s freedom,
just like the BSU stood up for Black freedom back in 1968,”
Terry stresses. “It’s up to those of us in the community to
have their backs!”</p>
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<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Diana Block</strong>
is the author of a novel, Clandestine Occupations – An
Imaginary History (PM Press, 2015) and a memoir, Arm the
Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AK
Press, 2009). She is an active member of the <a
href="http://www.womenprisoners.org/" target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.womenprisoners.org&source=gmail&ust=1463177050177000&usg=AFQjCNG6bf2y3Z0ARzPRIghHmb27ukbk3w">California
Coalition for Women Prisoners </a>and the <a
href="http://www.curbprisonspending.org/"
target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.curbprisonspending.org&source=gmail&ust=1463177050177000&usg=AFQjCNFsrq3c-lEsaHyMf_SQUn7bxifv1w">anti-prison
coalition CURB. </a>She is a member of the editorial
collective of <a
href="http://womenprisoners.org/?page_id=1061"
target="_blank"
data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://womenprisoners.org/?page_id%3D1061&source=gmail&ust=1463177050177000&usg=AFQjCNF5kajIIMwWiTOgqG8hNnYfB5F3Zg">The
Fire Inside newsletter</a> and she writes periodically
for various online journals.</em> </p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
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