Pro-Palestinian faculty band together to politicize academia
An inscription on the northern side of the gates of Pomona College in California bearing a quote from James Blaisdell, an American minister, theologian and academic administrator. Credit: Sdkb via Wikimedia Commons.
by Mitchell Bard
Students get all the attention because of their theatrics, but it is the anti-Israel and antisemitic faculty who have done the most grievous harm behind the protected doors of their classrooms and the shield of academic freedom. Now, however, thousands of professors have revealed their biases, and administrators appear helpless to prevent them from committing academic malpractice, politicizing the campus, demonizing Israel and intimidating Jewish students. It is not only students who suffer; parents are paying exorbitant tuition, and taxpayers are subsidizing a kind of Nazification of what we thought were educational institutions.
You are probably familiar with Students for Justice in Palestine, the student group that acknowledged it is a part of Hamas. Now we have Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters at some 120 campuses, including at the University of California system and Ivy League schools (Hamasvard’s has more than 100 members) and growing. The movement has expanded so widely that an FJP network was created to “further the cause of Palestinian liberation through education, advocacy and action.” It seeks to reshape academia into a platform for their political agenda rather than a place for balanced scholarly inquiry by endorsing the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, drawing attention to the history of Palestinian resistance (i.e., terrorism), and protecting and defending faculty and staff in the “pervasively anti-Palestinian campus environment.”
These faculty members are not merely expressing their opinions; they are actively shaping the academic environment to be hostile to both Jewish students and Israel while doing everything possible to prevent universities from taking measures to stem the surge of antisemitism. They insist that nothing they say or do can be construed as antisemitic while their behavior betrays their convictions.
Hamasvard’s FJP and two student groups apologized after reposting a 1967 cartoon that depicted a hand branded with the Star of David with a dollar sign at the center of the star holding a noose that circles the necks of two men who appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. That prompted The Harvard Crimson to publish a satire: “If you think about it really, really, really hard, it actually reflects rather well on our organization that we didn’t even think about the possible antisemitic connotations associated with dollar signs and lynching ropes. We just love Jews so much that we would never associate them with money, global domination, or — which other caricatures did the post play into … Do not, under any circumstances, allow the post to influence your perception of our coalition, my friends and me, or the anti-Zionist movement writ large.”
Do you think disciplinary measures were taken against the FJP, which includes the chairman of Harvard’s history department? Think again.
Long before the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, I said the last place any Jewish parent should send their child if they care about antisemitism and Israel is the Ivy League. Then I said that I wasn’t naive enough to think that many parents would care more about the Jewish people than the name on their child’s diploma, but things may be changing. For example, New York’s Ramaz High School didn’t send a student to Columbia University for the first time in 20 years.
Note that advocacy is part of the FJP mission, which suggests that its members are not scholars but activists who may use their classrooms to propagandize. Why would a Jewish student take a course from a professor who is at best anti-Israel and at worst an antisemite? Some may be unaware their professors are members of FJP and inadvertently put themselves in a position where they may be harassed, taught inaccurate or misleading information, have their grades reduced, or be encouraged or forced to attend an anti-Israel event.
FJPs guiding principles include the usual claptrap associated with intersectionality. At New York University, for example, the FJP “Principles of Unity” include recognizing that “the struggle for Palestinian freedom to be aligned with anti-colonial movements and struggles in many parts of the world. These include movements for indigenous land rights, black liberation, gender and sexual freedom and a livable and sustainable planet.”
In their Orwellian thinking, denying academic freedom to Israeli students and scholars and imposing boycotts on Israel and its institutions are consistent with their defense of freedom of expression, free inquiry, engaged pedagogy and open scholarship. FJPs do not believe in faculty accountability; hence, they object to “surveillance, criminalization and punishment.” Off-campus organizations supporting their righteous cause are welcome, but not “off-campus groups allied with unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli state.”
At the University of California, Berkeley, FSJP (they include staff in their name) said they support freedom of speech while justifying their protest against an Israeli speaker who they accused of responsibility for genocide. The group was apoplectic over the chancellor’s support for the speaker. “It reveals the administration’s central role in protecting and validating those complicit in settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.” Allowing the speech in their Alice-in-Wonderland view failed “to uphold UC Berkeley’s oft-proclaimed commitment to free speech.” This was after some 200 anti-Israel protesters broke glass at the entrance to the building where Ran Bar-Yoshafat was speaking and forced Jewish students and Bar-Yoshafat to flee under police protection. The FSJP called for an end to the criminal investigation and consideration of disciplinary measures.
Because so many faculty have conducted no scholarly research and know nothing about the Middle East, they parrot the demands of Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The University of Massachusetts-Boston FJP demands that Israel end the colonization of non-existent Palestine and “Arab lands” (?). They want the security wall that has reduced terror attacks against Israelis and Arabs by over 90 percent torn down. They demand that Arab citizens of Israel be given equal rights that they already enjoy. They misrepresent U.N. Resolution 194 and expect Israel to commit suicide by allowing nearly 6 million (according to bogus UNRWA statistics) refugees to return to their non-existent homes. Equally ignorantly, they want Israel’s universities — the country’s most liberal institutions — to end their supposed complicity in persecuting Palestinians and have used that specious claim to justify opposition to study abroad programs in Israel.
Faculty are not just cheerleaders and instigators for lawbreakers and harassers; they are also participants. Individual faculty members participated in many of the protests last semester; at the New School, they set up a pro-Palestinian encampment in the college’s lobby.
They not only endorse student calls for divestment but make their own. At least three faculty senates — Pomona College in California, the University of Michigan (which passed 38-17 with five abstentions) and Amherst College in Massachusetts — have called on their universities to divest. At Amherst, Ashwin Ravikumar, an assistant professor of environmental studies (clearly an expert on Israel) said college bylaws allowed a group of eight faculty to call a specialty faculty meeting, and 22 did so to vote for divestment. Ravikumar urged other institutions to do the same.
“I have an obligation to speak and act loudly, given the privilege I have as a tenured faculty person,” said Fida Adely, director of the predominantly Arab state-funded Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington. Adely, who holds a chair named after an ambassador for the virulently anti-Israel Arab League, has accused Israel of “pernicious policies of ethnic cleansing.”
If you want to know why the State Department is dominated by Arabists who have been trying to destroy Israel from the time of partition and continue to seek to turn the United States against it, you need to look no further than Adely, who is one of the Israel-hating faculty at the School of Foreign Service. She is not content with training Arabists; she wants to see them share her anti-American ideology. “Are we going to be a school of U.S. Empire?” she asks. “Are we going to be a school that promotes U.S. foreign interest in the world?
Note that Adely mentioned having tenure. What chance would any graduate student sympathetic to Israel have of getting a job or a junior faculty have of getting tenure in a department dominated by members of FJP like Adely?
Speaking of graduate students, one of the most alarming aspects of the FJP phenomenon is that chapters include them. They will have no trouble getting jobs and tenure from their colleagues and mentors. These individuals will form the next generation of faculty, perpetuating the degradation of the university and ensuring that future students suffer the way students do today under the repressive environment of anti-Israel ideologues.
Faculty at the University of California recognize the danger. More than 500 called on the Board of Regents to hold faculty and departments accountable for “promoting anti-Israel activism and inciting antisemitism.” It said that “anti-Zionist activism not only brazenly denies Jewish students and faculty their academic freedom, but alarmingly, seeks to purge them from campus life altogether.” The faculty letter specifically singled out FJPs for promoting BDS, which violates “the academic freedom of students and faculty who want to study in or about Israel” and has had “a devastating impact on Jewish students and faculty who identify with the Jewish state.”
The letter cited a study by the AMCHA Initiative that documented how FJP members abused their positions on multiple UC campuses to demonize Israel. To give just one example, the FJP at UC San Diego created a “Faculty & TA Guide” to “help faculty members, professors and teaching assistants better support Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students amid the ongoing genocide and violence in Palestine.”
The UCs and other colleges have policies prohibiting faculty from engaging in political indoctrination, but they are not being enforced.
Let’s stop pretending that colleges care about Jewish students. I’ve said in the past that they are the only place in America where antisemitism is tolerated. But it goes beyond that. They have not only normalized antisemitism but have also begun to actively promote it.
Mitchell Bard is a foreign-policy analyst and an authority on U.S.-Israel relations who has written and edited 22 books, including “The Arab Lobby,” “Death to the Infidels: Radical Islam’s War Against the Jews” and “After Anatevka: Tevye in Palestine.”
