Academic
Freedom At Risk On Campus
By Saree Makdisi
18 October, 2007
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
"Academic
colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist Martin
Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure
articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and
they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also posted, will
be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night."
Kramer's warning inaugurated
an attack on intellectual freedom in the U.S. that has grown more aggressive
in recent months.
This attack, intended to
shield Israel from criticism, not only threatens academic privileges
on college campuses, it jeopardizes our capacity to evaluate our foreign
policy. With a potentially catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon
and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans
urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and
intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing
so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers,
stymied debate and shut down dialogue.
Over the past few years,
Israel's U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing
a network of institutions (such as Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the
David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and the disingenuously
named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) dedicated to the task of
monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical
of Israeli policies. By orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning
campaigns, falsely raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often
grossly distorted media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians
to their cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the
free function of which once made American universities the envy of the
world.
Outside interference by Israel's
supporters has plunged one U.S. campus after another into crisis. They
have introduced crudely political -- rather than strictly academic or
scholarly -- criteria into hiring, promotion and other decisions at
a number of universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard
and DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar
Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded
by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel's most ardent American defenders.
Our campuses are being poisoned
by an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment. However, the disruption
of academic freedom has grave implications beyond campus walls.
When professors Stephen Walt
and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay critical of the effect of Israel's
lobbying organizations on U.S. foreign policy, they had to publish it
in the London Review of Books because their original American publisher
declined to take it on. With the original article expanded into a book
that has now been released, their invitation to speak at the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs was retracted because of outside pressure.
"This one is so hot," they were told. So although Michael
Oren, an officer in the Israeli army, was recently allowed to lecture
the council about U.S. policy in the Middle East, two distinguished
American academics were denied the same privilege.
When President Carter published
"Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" last year, he was attacked
for having dared to use the word "apartheid" to describe Israel's
manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.
As that case made especially
clear, the point of most of these attacks is to personally discredit
anyone who would criticize Israel -- and to taint them with the smear
of "controversy" -- rather than to engage them in a genuine
debate. None of Carter's critics provided a convincing refutation of
his main argument based on facts and evidence. Presumably that's because,
for all the venom directed against the former president, he was right.
For example, Israel maintains two different road networks, and even
two entirely different legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish
settlers and the other for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts
were studiously ignored by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused
him of a "blood libel" against the Jewish people.
That Israel's American supporters
so often resort to angry outbursts rather than principled arguments
-- and seem to find emotional blackmail more effective than genuine
debate -- is ultimately a sign of their weakness rather than their strength.
For all the damage it can do in the short term, in the long run such
a position is untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché
rather than hard facts. The phenomenal success of Carter's book suggests
that more and more Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics
that are the only tools available to Israel's supporters.
But we need to be able to
have an open debate about our Middle East policy now -- before we needlessly
shed more blood and further erode our reputation among people who used
to regard us as the champions of freedom, and now worry that we have
come to stand for its very opposite.
Saree Makdisi
is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent
commentator on the Middle East.
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