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WHY ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP ON ISRAEL AND PALESTINE THREATENS WESTERN
ELITES  
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Joseph Massad

Middle East Eye
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_ No institution in the liberal West is safe from pro-Israel
repression, especially universities whose knowledge production has
dismantled the official consensus _

US House Representative Elise Stefanik questions Northwestern
University President Michael Schill during a congressional hearing in
Washington, DC, on 23 May 2024, Rod Lamkey/CNP via Reuters

 

Since the 1980s, there has been a growing gap in the principal western
countries between academic knowledge and the mainstream media
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Middle East, especially on the topic of Palestine
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The gap is most apparent in the United States
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Between the early 1950s and late 1970s, academic knowledge and media
coverage of this issue had largely converged in their support for the
Zionist state. Israel's crimes against the colonised Palestinians were
often suppressed or even justified.

There were some exceptions, of course, like journalist David Hirst's
1977 classic _The Gun and the Olive Branch_
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Released by a mainstream commercial publisher, the book made the
previously little-known histories of the Palestinian struggle and
Zionist settler-colonialism accessible to a broader audience.

However, it was not until the 1980s that the momentous academic
production on the subject of Israel and Palestine occurred.

Edward Said's _The Question of Palestine_
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in 1979 and Noam Chomsky's _The Fateful Triangle_
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in 1983 were early doses of what the new academic scholarship on
Palestine and Israel portended and had reached larger audiences on
account of the fame of their authors.

While neither Said nor Chomsky was a Middle East specialist, both were
distinguished academics in their respective fields of comparative
literature and linguistics.

Since then, the shift in the field from its erstwhile pro-Israel
position to more critical scholarship has created a wide chasm between
the academy and the media.

A critical shift

Before the 1980s, attempts by Palestinian scholars in the West to
provide alternative histories remained limited in scope, especially in
view of the pro-Israel euphoria that overtook the right and the left
after the 1967 Israeli conquest of three Arab countries.

Examples include the most valuable books of historian Abdul Latif
Tibawi
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who published between the late 1950s and late 1970s, and other studies
by Sami Hadawi
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and Fayez Sayegh
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Other scholarship includes the crucial documentary history edited by
Walid Khalidi, _From Haven to Conquest_
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and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's edited _The Transformation of Palestine
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Both books were published in 1971 but remained ghettoised within a
small circle of Arab and Palestinian readers in the West and their
small circle of supporters. This was also the case with Sabri Jiryis's
definitive 1976 book _The Arabs in Israel_
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which detailed the apartheid system under which Palestinian citizens
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suffered.  

The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in which slaughtered Palestinian
and Lebanese civilians received rare western news coverage
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also allowed for more academic production that was critical of Israel.

In this new context, the first half of the 1980s saw the publication
of Lenni Brenner's books on Zionist cooperation
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with the Nazis in the 1930s. Studies by Helena Cobban
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and Alain Gresh
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on the history of the Palestine Liberation Organisation were among the
earliest books not to demonise the national movement.

During the same period, the revolutions and counter-revolutions in
Central America and the upheaval in southern Africa inspired several
books, including works by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
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Bishara Bahbah
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and Jane Hunter
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on Israel's alliance with and arms exports to these repressive
right-wing regimes.

New and valuable books on the Palestinian diaspora also proliferated,
like Pamela Ann Smith's 1984 _Palestine and the Palestinians_
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and Laurie Brand's 1988 _Palestinians in The Arab World_
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In addition, new histories of Palestinian nationalism, including
Muhammad Muslih
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authoritative work and Philip Matar's biography
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of Amin al-Husayni, were published the same year in 1988.

'New Historians'

The emergence of Israel's New Historians, who began publishing books
in English in the second half of the 1980s, was another major
contribution to the field.

This new crop of Israeli historians included Benny Morris, Tom Segev,
Ilan Pappe [[link removed]] and Avi
Shlaim [[link removed]], among others,
whose research was based on recently released Israeli archives about
the 1948 war and after.

Not only did they confirm long-standing Palestinian claims about
Zionist and Israeli colonial crimes, but their books also documented
them from official Israeli sources with extensive details about the
scope and goals of Israel's historical crimes.

Some Israeli scholars teaching in the US and Britain began to
increasingly publish their own contributions, further exposing Israeli
crimes and the nature of its society.

Scholars like Ella Shohat
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revealed the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli state's massive
discrimination against Asian and African Jews, and the dominant
orientalism of Israeli cinema
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and cultural production about the Orient more generally.

Other studies on the nature of military occupation, resistance and
revolt, and the expansion of Jewish settler-colonialism in the
occupied territories emerged following the first Palestinian uprising
in 1987.

A plethora of scholarship exploded from the 1990s to the present, with
massive works on every aspect of Israeli and Palestinian histories and
societies since the late 19th century. These studies by Palestinian,
Arab, Israeli, American and European academics are mainstream in the
field.

Media cliches

There is no respected scholar of the Middle East today in the western
academy who would deny Israel's massive expulsion of the Palestinians
in 1948 and 1967.

Equally, no academic expert could deny that Zionism was always a
European settler-colonial movement
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allied with the imperialist
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countries or that Zionism had always espoused racist
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views of the Palestinians and cooperated with other settler colonies
extending from South Africa
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to French Algeria
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and beyond.

And no scholar today could earnestly question that the Israeli state
is an institutionally racist and Jewish supremacist state
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- enshrined in law - or deny the history of Zionist terrorism
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in the region, let alone the turmoil and violence Israel has visited
on
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the entire Middle East since its establishment in 1948.

The problem, however, is that the media seems oblivious to this
massive corpus of academic knowledge. So are academics in the
professional schools of business, engineering, law and medicine, or
even in the natural sciences or some of the social sciences who obtain
their information from the mainstream western media.

Aside from the scant sympathy
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expressed for the Palestinian and Lebanese victims of the 1982
massacres in Lebanon or the Palestinian civilians killed during the
First Intifada, western media
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tired cliches of the 1960s and 1970s.

The myth that Israel is a David fighting a Palestinian and Arab
Goliath intent on destroying it because it is Jewish and that the
Palestinian struggle is "antisemitic
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anti-colonial, persists
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narratives today amid Israel's genocidal war on Gaza
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Other cliches include framing Israel as a "democratic
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liberal and peace-loving country and that European Jewish settlers in
Palestine are fantastically descended
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from the ancient Hebrews, which somehow gives them the right to
colonise the country and expel its indigenous population.

These views are not limited to the media, but are embraced by the
American and Western European political class - whether it is those
serving in office or the lobbyists who help get them elected.

Since US President Ronald Reagan's administration
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the ruling political class in the West became officially attached to
these views, which became further entrenched after the 9/11 attacks
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What particularly shocked this class, both in the aftermath of 9/11
and with renewed passion since 7 October, is that their peculiar
orientalist views were not shared or adopted by the academic
community.

It is this outrage that precipitated the repressive crackdown on
universities
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Political repression

The campaign to fire professors and expel recalcitrant students was
launched more than two decades ago.

In 2003, the US House Subcommittee on Select Education decided to
"probe
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the field of Middle Eastern studies, extending to the dangers
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that Said's seminal 1978 book _Orientalism_
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constituted and how it might have led to 9/11, with lobbyists urging
Congress to cut off funding
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universities and academic programs that teach Said's work or
scholarship critical of Israel.

Such campaigns have continued unabated. Just last week, the
Congressional House Committee of Ways and Means held a hearing
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about antisemitism at universities and invited several witnesses to
push the anti-academic freedom agenda targeting Middle Eastern
studies.

 
Police line up outside the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) campus after clearing a new pro-Palestine student encampment,
in Los Angeles, California on 23 May 2024 (Frederic J Brown/AFP)

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Since 7 October, the ruling political class has recognised a notable
shift in mainstream attitudes towards Israel and Palestine, especially
at universities.

Sustained pro-Palestine campus protests proved to this class that its
decades-long efforts to compel or collude with university
administrators to quash dissent were insufficient. Maintaining the
pro-genocide status quo
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would require backup from the corporate world and police state, with
larger doses of governmental repression
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Seemingly wielding every repressive tool at their disposal,
politicians have forced McCarthyite congressional hearings
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"antisemitism", and business leaders have threatened
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to punish offending universities financially
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and deny employment
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to their graduates.

Such drastic measures speak amply to the level of danger and threat
these influential people attribute to the production (and consumption)
of academic knowledge that veers so far from the received ideas in the
corridors of political and corporate power.

That universities now invite the police
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to repress their own students and openly threaten and investigate
their faculty for thought crimes (as this author has been especially
targeted) exposes the vulnerability
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of pro-Israel policies and media coverage, which have remained
steadfast
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no matter which savage Israeli crimes are exposed.

If "experts" condemned
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_academics in congressional hearings 20 years ago, now university
presidents and board of trustees members have stooped to condemning
their own faculty - on false grounds
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no less - and declaring they would have hypothetically denied their
tenure
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But it is not only universities, professors
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and students that are targeted for criticism of Israel. Human rights
organisations
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are being similarly attacked
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for their assertions that Israel has been an apartheid
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state since 1948 and the documentation of its continued war crimes
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The latest threats are targeting the International Criminal Court and
could move next against the International Court of Justice
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ruling against Israel.

The West's imperialist commitment
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to Israel runs so deep that it is willing to destroy not only academic
freedom and freedom of expression at universities and other cultural
institutions, but all notions of international law, human rights and
the institutions that uphold them.

Even US and Western European human rights organisations, which had
served these countries very well during the Cold War and long after,
are now disposable.

Indeed, no institution in the liberal West is safe from this
repressive and punitive campaign, especially universities whose
knowledge production has upended
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the official western consensus on Israel and Palestine to a point of
no return.

For that, the powerful have decided that universities must uphold
official state propaganda as their knowledge base, destroy the field
of Middle Eastern studies, and no longer produce scholarship that
threatens the interests of western imperialism and corporate power.

Otherwise, they will be punished, defunded and their reputations
destroyed.

_The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye._

_===_

Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual
history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of many
books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include
Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan; Desiring
Arabs; The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism
and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books
and articles have been translated into a dozen languages.

* Israel and Palestine
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* Media Coverage; Israel and Palestine US Universities; Human
Rights;
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