Earlier this year, Shirin Saeidi was at a dinner with three speakers who had been invited to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville center she directs when they told her something that surprised her. As part of the paperwork that would allow them to be reimbursed and paid for the trip, they had been prompted to sign a pledge saying they were not boycotting Israel. They told her it was something they would have liked to have known about beforehand.
Since then, other speakers invited to the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies have raised concerns about the pledge; at least one declined to talk at the university. Then this week, Nathan Thrall, the author of a new nonfiction book called A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, which tells the story of a tragic bus accident outside Jerusalem, posted on social media that he had declined to speak at the university because of the pledge.
Saeidi, who is also an assistant professor of political science, said she understood why Thrall and the other speakers had objected.
“Their decision resonates with me,” she wrote in an email explaining her thoughts on the episode. “I know this decision was hard for them, not because of the historical reality of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but because of their commitment to students. We are teachers, and anything that undermines our ability to connect with students is heartbreaking for us.”
The pledge exists because of a state law in Arkansas that says a public entity cannot enter into a contract with a company unless it certifies that it is not boycotting Israel. According to Palestine Legal, an organization that provides legal support to pro-Palestine activists, 38 states have some version of a law targeting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which aims to pressure Israel to end what its critics characterize as its oppressive policies toward Palestinians. The laws vary. Some outlaw investments in publicly traded companies that are participating in a boycott of Israel, for example, while others apply to contractors.
Many states have adjusted their laws in recent years in response to legal challenges, said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based organization that promotes peace for Israelis and Palestinians. In the new versions of the laws, the contractors must be companies with at least 10 employees and the contracts have to be worth at least $100,000.
“Those amendments were done specifically to make them harder to challenge in court,” Friedman said. The changes also mean that the laws are unlikely to apply to speakers at colleges and universities, according to Brian Hauss, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who has challenged several of the laws in court, including the one in Arkansas.
But Arkansas’s law does not have those stipulations, and a contract can be as little as $1,000 for the law to cover it. Still, Hauss questioned whether the law should apply to a university speaker. He pointed to language in the law saying that a public entity cannot enter into a contract “with a company to acquire or dispose of services, supplies, information technology, or construction” unless that company has certified it is not boycotting.
“I didn’t read it to apply to university speaking engagements,” said Hauss. “I think the University of Arkansas is not correctly applying the statute.”
The university did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Faculty members at Arkansas’s Middle East center are not only worried about university speakers. Joel Gordon, a history professor, is also worried about a $1,000 prize that the center awards to writers of Arab heritage for their first or second poetry book.
“It could kill a program like that,” Gordon said.
‘Lively Public Debate’
Several of the speakers who raised the issue of the pledge with Saeidi told her they had agreed to it because they did not want to let her or the center down. For Saeidi, the pledge creates a fundamental problem for the center.
“One of the foundations of international human-rights theory is the idea that people should be able to gather and talk about controversial topics in order to produce public debate,” she said. “As the situation currently stands for us, we are unable to offer this kind of lively public debate to our students.”
Saeidi did not want subsequent speakers to be surprised by the request for a pledge from her university. So more recently, she’s been telling potential visitors about it upfront. Thrall’s agent reached out to her and several other universities, saying that Thrall was available for talks via Zoom as part of his book tour. Saeidi responded on October 30 that she would like to have him, but there was a caveat.
For Thrall, the book tour has been more fraught than expected. His book was published on October 3. One day after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which left 1,400 dead, Thrall stepped off a plane in Britain into a changed world, particularly for the people his book is about. Suddenly events in several cities were canceled, he said in an interview with The Chronicle.
“I wasn’t unique,” he said. “It was anything that had Palestinian in the title was targeted.”
Thrall’s book closely follows a Palestinian father whose young son was involved in the bus accident. But he tells the stories of many people at the scene, including an Israeli settler. Thrall said that some left-leaning journalists have asked him if he worried that he had portrayed the Israeli settler too sympathetically.
“I, of course, was glad to be asked that question because it was my ambition in writing the book that everyone would be presented in three dimensions,” he said. “Everybody’s motives and perspectives would be explicable.”
Thrall’s post about the pledge went viral. Even the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, has reposted it with a message supporting the law.
Saeidi and Gordon said they hope their university will share more information about the law and what it means. What happens, for example, if someone doesn’t sign but still gives a talk? What if someone is paid less than $1,000, or not paid at all? The issue, they suspect, will keep coming up.
