10/18/07 - Campuses Have Become Poisoned by an Atmosphere of Surveillance and Harassment

Academic Freedom is at Risk in America

SAREE MAKDISI

Counterpunch

"Academic colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist
Martin Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those
obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the
Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also
posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at
night."

Kramer's warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the
U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.

This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only
threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our
capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially
catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans
urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and
intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from
doing so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has
terminated careers, stymied debate and shut down dialogue.

Over the past few years, Israel's U.S. defenders have stepped up their
campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as Campus
Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus
Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the
Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and
bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By
orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely
raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted
media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their
cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free
function of which once made American universities the envy of the
world.

Outside interference by Israel's supporters has plunged one U.S.
campus after another into crisis. They have introduced crudely
political -- rather than strictly academic or scholarly -- criteria
into hiring, promotion and other decisions at a number of
universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard and
DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar
Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded
by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel's most ardent American defenders.

Our campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and
harassment. However, the disruption of academic freedom has grave
implications beyond campus walls.

When professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay
critical of the effect of Israel's lobbying organizations on U.S.
foreign policy, they had to publish it in the London Review of Books
because their original American publisher declined to take it on. With
the original article expanded into a book that has now been released,
their invitation to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was
retracted because of outside pressure. "This one is so hot," they were
told. So although Michael Oren, an officer in the Israeli army, was
recently allowed to lecture the council about U.S. policy in the
Middle East, two distinguished American academics were denied the same
privilege.

When President Carter published "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" last
year, he was attacked for having dared to use the word "apartheid" to
describe Israel's manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.

As that case made especially clear, the point of most of these attacks
is to personally discredit anyone who would criticize Israel -- and to
taint them with the smear of "controversy" -- rather than to engage
them in a genuine debate. None of Carter's critics provided a
convincing refutation of his main argument based on facts and
evidence. Presumably that's because, for all the venom directed
against the former president, he was right. For example, Israel
maintains two different road networks, and even two entirely different
legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish settlers and the other
for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts were studiously ignored
by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused him of a "blood
libel" against the Jewish people.

That Israel's American supporters so often resort to angry outbursts
rather than principled arguments -- and seem to find emotional
blackmail more effective than genuine debate -- is ultimately a sign
of their weakness rather than their strength. For all the damage it
can do in the short term, in the long run such a position is
untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché rather than hard facts.
The phenomenal success of Carter's book suggests that more and more
Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics that are the only
tools available to Israel's supporters.

But we need to be able to have an open debate about our Middle East
policy now -- before we needlessly shed more blood and further erode
our reputation among people who used to regard us as the champions of
freedom, and now worry that we have come to stand for its very
opposite.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at
UCLA and a frequent commentator on the Middle East.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English at UCLA, is the author of
Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity
(Cambridge University Press, 1998) and William Blake and the
Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
His new book, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," is
forthcoming from Norton. Makdisi can be reached at:
makdisi@humnet.ucla.edu