With tensions between Israelis and Palestinians escalating after this week’s terrorist attack on a Jerusalem synagogue, one scholarly group, the Middle East Studies Association, appears unlikely to escape conflict anytime soon.
Yet, after a year in which many of its members have been publicly accused of anti-Israel bias or even outright anti-Semitism, the group, known as MESA, is not showing any signs of shying away from controversy. In addition to having published strongly worded attacks on its members’ accusers and lodged protests against Israel’s shelling of Palestinian educational institutions, the association plans to wade right into hot-button debates related to Israel at its annual conference, which begins here on Saturday.
Steven G. Salaita, the scholar who became a cause célèbre among academe’s critics of Israel last summer, will headline a panel discussion of “new assaults on academic freedom.” The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign responded to Mr. Salaita’s inflammatory social-media posts denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians by withdrawing an offer to hire him as a tenured professor. Many academics protested that decision.
Campus Watch, which was established by the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank, and monitors Middle East studies programs for speech it deems hostile to Israel, last month denounced the planned panel as stacked with critics of that nation.
But Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who will be completing a two-year term as MESA’s president, argued this week in an email that the planned panel discussion was “about the Salaita case, not about Israel.” He added, “I am not clear why anybody would care to check the balance of political positions represented on what is at most an issue of tangential relevance to the discussion.”
The MESA conference also has come under fire for including a reception being held by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Virginia-based group that has been accused of ties to Islamist radicals.
Also planned for the MESA conference is a debate on whether MESA should at least consider following the lead of scholarly groups such as the American Studies Association by boycotting Israeli educational institutions. Many supporters of Israel have alleged that such boycotts are motivated by anti-Semitism; more broadly, the boycott movement has been criticized as representing the same sort of threat to academic freedom that MESA routinely denounces.
MESA has rejected such boycotts until now, although it strongly defends the right to discuss them. In a September letter to his organization’s members, Mr. Brown said MESA’s Board of Directors last spring advised its Committee on Academic Freedom “that the issue was sufficiently controversial within our own ranks that it was probably best not to attempt to speak with a collective voice on the call to boycott institutions.”
In an interview conducted via email because he was in Belgium, Mr. Brown said the organization will be voting only on a member-proposed “resolution asking for a discussion of the issue,” and not any formal motion to academically boycott Israeli institutions.
No Stranger to Conflict
Accusations of hostility to Israel are nothing new to the Middle East Studies Association, an Arizona-based organization with more than 2,700 members interested in the Middle East or North Africa, and nearly 40 affiliated groups.
MESA describes itself as “a non-political association.” But seven years ago, some scholars established a separate counterweight to it—the much smaller Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa—motivated by perceptions that MESA was overly politicized and hostile to conservative thought.
Over the past year, tensions between American colleges’ critics and supporters of Israel have flared as the global movement calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has gained a foothold on U.S. campuses. In addition, Israel’s military actions in Gaza last summer were denounced by some American academics so strongly that their rhetoric prompted debates over where to draw the line between anti-Semitic statements that create a hostile environment for Jewish people on campuses and valid criticisms of Israel protected by academic freedom.
In September, several MESA members ended up on a list of 218 professors that the Amcha Initiative, a group supportive of Israel, accused of displaying anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic bias by signing a petition calling for colleagues in Middle East studies to join an academic boycott of Israel.
Thirty Jewish-studies scholars responded by issuing a statement that condemned the list and accused the Amcha Initiative of using a definition of anti-Semitism “so undiscriminating as to be meaningless.”
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of the Amcha Initiative, this week called allegations that her group had attempted to somehow blacklist professors “ridiculous” and said she had simply distributed information from a published list of petition signatories that “everybody has a right to know.”
Mr. Brown, MESA’s president, said this week his organization and its members had been experiencing “a worrying wave of intense political criticism.” In some cases, however, he has appeared to court such controversy.
In October, for example, Mr. Brown sent the hosts of an international conference on the reconstruction of Gaza a letter that accused Israel of the “indiscriminate bombardment and destruction of Palestinian educational institutions” conducted as part of “an ongoing, intentional attack on education by Israel in the context of continued military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”
He argued that paying for reconstruction without condemning Israel’s military occupation “relieves Israel of responsibility and allows it free rein to continue its attacks.”
In other cases, MESA has been responding to outside criticism that clearly appeared to threaten its members’ work. In September, for example, after several groups supportive of Israel issued a report accusing federally supported programs in Middle East studies of betraying anti-Israel bias, Amy W. Newhall, MESA’s executive director, accused the groups of themselves being politically motivated and trying to “shut down open discussion of issues of public concern.”
Mr. Brown sent the lead organization behind the report, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a letter calling the report “replete with false or misleading assertions” and rejecting its argument that the federal program that supports Middle East studies needed to be overhauled.
Kenneth L. Marcus, president of the Brandeis Center, said in an email this week: “Our intent is not to suppress any point of view but rather to ensure that more views are included in Middle East studies outreach programs. If MESA cares about academic freedom, they should join in our call for diverse perspectives.”
