Palestine, Boycott, and Academic Freedom: A Reassessment Introduction
Bill V. Mullen
The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on land home to generations of Arab Palestinians is the contemporary world’s most egregious instance of settler colonialism. This ethnic cleansing, which included the displacement of 750,000 people in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, has engendered one of the longest-standing campaigns of resistance by an occupied people to permanent political and economic subordination by another nation.
Since the end of the second intifada against Israeli occupation, Palestinian resistance has been buttressed by a global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. In 2004, Palestinian civil society formed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Modeled on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against South African apartheid rule, PACBI called for a boycott of all Israeli
I have complete respect for ALL speech … tea party extremism and right wing racism included. However, this goes beyond the pail because it is flying under the cover of academic free speech and especially the AAUP. I do not think we can have peace if academics spread this sort of propaganda in a journal intended to celebrate the rights of frees speech with the rigor of academic respect for facts.
The assertions are talking points, as wrong minded as if the AAUP were to publish talking points from the right wing parties in Israel that claim there is not a Palestinian people. For those who do not know history, these sorts of big lies violate central principles of the academy,
The facts of this history are messy but clear. Fir those who care, you can read
Edward Said‘s version. This brilliant man was the major historian of the Palestinian cause. His history is pretty accurate, even when he uses to support the Palestinian cause, Said tells of a part of Syria called Palestine since the Romans applied that name (pronounced “phillistia or Phillistine still in Arabic) as a way of utterly destroying Judea after Vespasian’s ethnic cleansing of the Jewish state. Since then the ONLY peoples to call themselves “Palestinians” were the Christian citizens of the crusader state. After that, until Arrafat and Nasser took the term to create a nationality for the Arabs of the coastal plain between Jordan and the Mediterranean, the only people to go by this name were the Jews. Even in WWII, the Jewish forces from the Mandate were called “Her Majesty’s Palestinian Brigade.”
Said, however ALSO notes that the concept of nationalism and national (as opposed to Arab) identity was alien to any of the peoples living in the Turkish province of Syria that included today’s Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Jordan. Arafat and Nasser’s brilliance was in creating nationalism of the Arabs as tool to undermine Jewish nationalism, that is Zionism.
Even then the existence of this very modern nation of Palestinians, something any fair person knows exists today, was opposed by Jordan who claimed this coastal plain and its Arab citizens as part of the Jordanian people .. itself a creation of the Brits to show their gratitude after WWI to the Saudi family.
In 1948, while some Arabs did flee the war, the invaders were not the Israelis …, the invaders were the Egyptians and especially the Jordanians, citizens of what was then called “Transjordan,” who intended to annex the what is now Israel and what should be Palestine into their “Jordanian” state.
While it is true that some of the Arabs living in what is now Israel had lived there for generations, that is also true of Jews whose roots go much deeper. As Said describes himself, his roots were as much in Cairo as in Jerusalem. ASrabat himself was born an Egyptian. What Said does explain is there is NOW a people called the Palestinians and they have been forged in cauldron fueled by European concepts of nationalism, the Holocaust and the ambitions of politicians like Arafat, Nasser (both Egyptians), and the non-Palestinian King of Jordan.
— Stephen M. Schwartz Pathology