Member Writings and Interviews

I have, over the past year, slowly put together a video using my archive of recordings of BBC Global and CNN International’s news broadcasts. It portrays a mindset among journalism that has them “in the name of the ‘whole world’,” misinforming the whole world by reciting Palestinian war propaganda as news. “Everybody knows it’s Israel’s fault” that there’s no peace settlement.

Shortly after Jewish Voice for Peace got word of “a truly terrible case of the suppression of Palestinian scholarship,” the coordinator of its Academic Advisory Council fired off an urgent dispatch to scholars around the world. As a prominent organizational supporter of the BDS movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, JVP sounded the alarm that “Pro-Israel advocacy groups” had torpedoed the search for the Edward Said Professorship of Middle East Studies at Fresno State University because all four finalists for the position had focused their research on Palestine. Something had to be done.

A true paradox of this age of 24-hour news cycles and big data, where everything is verifiable and every moment is captured on smart phones, is that news itself is being called “fake,” with facts casually disputed as lies.

The Trump Administration is now exploring the possibility of renewing the Palestinian-Israeli talks. This is a noble goal and consistent with U.S policy in the Middle East in the last 43 years.

To all appearances, Michael Chikindas was a reasonably successful professor in the Department of Food Science at Rutgers University, but that was before the website Israellycool.com discovered that his Facebook page was plastered with anti-Semitic cartoons.

This weekend Israel published a list of 20 mainly European and U.S.-based pro-BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) organizations whose senior members will be automatically barred from entering the country. The list is a follow up to Israel’s decision last March to amend its 1952 Entry Into Israel Law so that foreign nationals who support a boycott would be prevented from abusing tourist visas.

On January 5, Modern Language Association Members for Justice in Palestine hosted a meeting at New York University entitled “Palestine and the Future of Academia.”

The Modern Language Association (MLA), the largest academic discipline-based faculty organization in the US has been debating resolutions to boycott Israel or its universities since 2007. I have been involved in fighting this movement both then and since.

The large room at the Marriott Wardman Park was filled to overflowing on Sunday afternoon for a special session billed as “Thinking Palestine Intersectionally.”