Israel occupies Academia. posted by Richard Seymour

You may remember a quite comical attempt by US right-wingers to impose quotas in the US academia for political allegiance, on the grounds that Marxists and liberals were over-represented, while conservative viewpoints were marginalised. I'd call that an instance of sound discrimination, but these were quite serious proposals, backed by the strenuously reactionary Senator Rick Santorum. He tried to reform Title IX of the Higher Education Act so as to ensure "ideological diversity", vocally supported by David Horowitz, for whom hyperbole has become a kind of first language.

More commonly known about are the attempts by the same right-wingers, often backed by pro-Zionist groups, to sully and smear academics who are not quite grovelling enough. Campus Watch, run by the egregious anti-Muslim bigot Daniel Pipes, has launched a number of these attacks. It has a special web-page inviting students to rat on professors who don't quite imitate the media circus with sufficient zeal. Anyway, I was speaking some months back to co-blogger Mark Elf of the excellent Jews Sans Frontiers, and he suggested inter a bit of alia that one reason why some young students feel they are encountering a pro-Palestinian bias is because the gulf between what is agreed by scholars about Israel-Palestine and how the story is represented by the media is so vast. At the same time, the issues surrounding Israel-Palestine are becoming more urgent, while at the same time a decades-long pro-Israel consensus is eroding. This has produced a climate in which pro-Zionists and right-wingers feel compelled to try and rein in academic discourse. Examples of which are abundant - Professors Rashid Khalidi, Joel Beinin and Joseph Massad have all been targeted in the US, while an induction into this particular kind of colonisation of academic discussion in the UK can be found in the case of SOAS student Nasser Amin.

At any rate, while I was reading some material on this, I found an excellent article by Joseph Massad, which sums the point up expertly:

All respected scholars in the field agree that most or all Palestinians who became refugees in 1948 were expelled directly or indirectly by Israel. The debate that exists is about whether all Palestinian refugees were physically expelled by the Israeli army or that the Israeli army expelled the majority while a minority of refugees fled, not as a direct result of physical force but as an indirect consequence of actions taken by the Israeli army and government which might, or might not, have been deliberately intended to expel them. In contrast, media and popular ideological knowledge in the US still insists that the Palestinians fled on their own, or worse, were called upon to do so by Arab leaders (despite Israeli false claims that Arab leaders called on Palestinians to flee, research has shown that they called upon them to remain steadfast in their homeland) while the Zionists begged them to stay!

Established scholarship enumerates all the racist laws and institutional racist practices in operation in Israel which discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, granting Jews differential rights and privileges over non-Jews, and rendering Israel a racist state by law. Popular and media knowledge, in contrast, depict Israel as a democratic liberal state that treats all its citizens equally. It is also established in scholarship that Israel discriminates against non-European Jews (the majority of the country's Jewish population) and also against recent Russian Jewish immigrants, and has engaged and continues to engage in a racist discourse about them and in unofficial institutional discrimination against them (witness the most recent case of discrimination against Ethiopian Jews in admissions to Israeli universities). In contrast, popular and media knowledge depicts Israel as a place where all Jews are equal. Scholarly knowledge addresses the question of Israel as a quasi-theological state, where religious law governs major aspects of Jewish life and that only Orthodox Judaism is allowed to have religious authority over Jewish citizens to the exclusion of Reform and Conservative Judaism, let alone other Jewish denominations. In contrast, media and popular knowledge depict Israel as a secular state. These are only a few examples of how scholarly knowledge is drastically different from and contradicts media and popular knowledge about key issues regarding Israeli society and history.

The positions and enunciations of the Israeli state are to become the common currency of the academia, in both the US and Britain if they can manage it. Not that I consider these crude attempts on the life of academic discourse likely to succeed: they tend, rather, to reek of despair. It's just that it will involve an arduous combat, one that is increasingly likely to spill across the Atlantic. As Harold Pinter once pointed out: The big pricks are out./ They'll fuck everything in sight./ Watch your back.