{"id":264976,"date":"2024-06-24T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=264976"},"modified":"2024-06-21T05:02:59","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T04:02:59","slug":"why-academic-scholarship-on-israel-and-palestine-threatens-western-elites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/why-academic-scholarship-on-israel-and-palestine-threatens-western-elites\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Academic Scholarship on Israel and Palestine Threatens Western Elites"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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)<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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18 Jun 2024\u00a0<\/em>– The gap is most apparent in the United States<\/a>, but also in Britain<\/a> and France<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There were some exceptions, of course, like journalist David Hirst’s 1977 classic The Gun and the Olive Branch<\/em><\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine<\/em><\/a> in 1979 and Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle<\/em><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

A critical shift<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The West’s\u00a0commitment to Israel runs so deep that it is willing to destroy not only academic freedom at universities, but all notions of international law and human rights<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Examples include the most valuable books of historian Abdul Latif Tibawi<\/a>, who published between the late 1950s and late 1970s, and other studies by Sami Hadawi<\/a> and Fayez Sayegh<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other scholarship includes the crucial documentary history edited by Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest<\/em><\/a>, and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod’s edited The Transformation of Palestine<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em><\/a>, which detailed the apartheid system under which Palestinian citizens<\/a> of Israel suffered.<\/p>\n

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

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

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<\/a>, Bishara Bahbah<\/a> and Jane Hunter<\/a> on Israel’s alliance with and arms exports to these repressive right-wing regimes.<\/p>\n

New and valuable books on the Palestinian diaspora also proliferated, like Pamela Ann Smith’s 1984 Palestine and the Palestinians<\/em><\/a> and Laurie Brand’s 1988 Palestinians in The Arab World<\/em><\/a>. In addition, new histories of Palestinian nationalism, including Muhammad Muslih<\/a>‘s authoritative work and Philip Matar’s biography<\/a> of Amin al-Husayni, were published the same year in 1988.<\/p>\n

‘New Historians’<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This new crop of Israeli historians included Benny Morris, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe<\/a>\u00a0and Avi Shlaim<\/a>, among others, whose research was based on recently released Israeli archives about the 1948 war and after.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Scholars like Ella Shohat<\/a> revealed the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli state’s massive discrimination against Asian and African Jews, and the dominant orientalism of Israeli cinema<\/a> and cultural production about the Orient more generally.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Media cliches<\/h3>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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