US Academia and the Censoring of an Anti-Zionist Professor
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
In this essay, I will describe my activism on behalf of Palestinians’ human rights and their right to self-determination, from my graduate student days on a US campus, to the present in my position as a tenured full professor, and the ways in which I’ve experienced attempts at silencing and censorship. These attempts today are more blatant and worrisome than ever before on anyone speaking up for Palestine in the USA, in the wake of the deadly genocidal massacre and famine unleashed by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza after the Oct 7th 2023 attack by Hamas; an attack, which whilst condemnable for loss of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians, must be seen in light of the 75+years of ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people with far more dead, injured and imprisoned than Israelis to date.
When I arrived at Tufts from Pakistan at the end of the 1970s, as a graduate student in English, I was hardly aware of the outsize influence Israeli Zionist ideology exercised on college campuses, an extension of its hold on the halls of Congress and US politics in general. Like many who grew up in what was then called the Third World, especially a new country like Pakistan which for the decades I was growing up was very much in the US camp and through the influence of mass media (TV and cinema in those days)—my generation really bought into the vision the US presented of itself as the bastion of free speech, equality, and a haven for immigrants of all races, colors and creeds. The history of its genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African peoples to fuel its capitalist paradise for the few were of course, facts that were entirely obscured in the popular narrative of America as the Land of the Free and the Brave.
Very quickly after my immersion in my graduate studies in 1979, my political education began to be shaped by cataclysmic global events such as the Iranian Islamic revolution that succeeded in ousting the West’s puppet, Reza Shah Pehlavi, the Afghanistan debacle unfolding on the borders of my home country- yet another example of Big Power rivalry ruining the lives of millions of brown-skinned peoples- and the rejection, by the Arab Summit Conference’s General Assembly, of the Camp David Accords for failing to uphold the UN’s charter, that included the right of return, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine and participation of the PLO in all decisions pertaining to the future of Palestine.
Recognizing, with some of my other fellow international students from Lebanon and Iran, that most students were either quite ignorant of events and histories beyond the borders of the USA, or unaware of the biases of their news media toward the “third world”—we decided to focus on one particularly egregious example of this lack of information: the case of Palestine. Becoming a founding member of the first-ever Student-led Committee on Information about Palestine on my campus, I learnt first-hand how dangerous it was to speak out on behalf of Palestine and advocate for their rights when our event posters were torn down and threatening messages left on our answering machines (in the era before cellphones). Consequences we are seeing today for students and faculty protesting against Israeli genocide in Gaza are much worse, when people like myself and my comrades from Tufts would have been doxxed, our student group and its activities suspended or banned. Back then, the reactions to our efforts at presenting an alternative viewpoint on the question of Palestine were limited to messages meant to intimidate, but did not actually result in a loss of future employment as they have for many unfortunate student supporters of Palestine today.
My own professional trajectory proceeded fairly smoothly from finishing my graduate studies to landing a tenure-track position in the Department of English at Montclair State university a year after I graduated with my Phd. from Tufts. Aside from a few Visiting Professor gigs at places like Harvard, NYUAD and several higher ed institutions in my home country of Pakistan over the decades, my tenure home has remained Montclair State, which has gone from being designated as a College when I joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1987, to becoming a University. My 37-year career is, I contend, a study in surviving, at times even thriving in academia, despite the many obstacles small and large that are thrown into the paths of faculty like myself who dare to challenge the normative political narrative around Zionism, the singular issue that defies and denies all other progressive viewpoints.
First Rebellion
During my second year at MSU (then MSC)—I attended what was then an annual feature of our campus life: the annual Presidential Lecture. That year, our speaker was the famed New York intellectual, Susan Sontag, who was introduced a deferential group of administrators including the Acting President, and a leading member of our English Department faculty. The esteemed Ms Sontag spoke on the unit of the decade—what it is, what it signifies, how it came to be a temporal marker and so on—the usual arcane stuff intellectuals like to ponder. She honed in on a specific decade to provide some concrete examples to buttress her larger philosophical argument: the decade that the world witnessed the holocaust of the Jewish peoples in Nazi Germany, which was horrific in every sense. What got my goat, however, was the fact that this was the same decade—the 1940s—that also witnessed the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands and concomitant Nakba—catastrophe—visited on the Palestinian natives of those lands, thousands of them forced to flee the onslaught of Israeli forces, many who became victims of massacres and destruction of their homes, their olive and lemon groves, their villages, their past. When I raised this point as a question for Ms Sontag to comment on, as to why she had not alluded to this other group of people affected so badly during the decade under scrutiny—she started to tremble visibly on the stage, and ultimately responded with anger at the audacity of my question.
I remember how several junior faculty approached me as we streamed out of the auditorium asking what I was thinking, and wasn’t I afraid of jeopardizing my tenure and promotion at the institution? The following day I received a summons to the Chair’s office, who proceeded to school me in the true meaning of Jews being the Chosen People of God, and why I had in a way, disobeyed God’s laws by questioning his favorite humans! It was an extraordinary meeting, and I was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, except that I knew it was a serious matter, that I had to proceed with caution if I was going to get through the next few years and past the tenure decision with success. Luckily for me, I had a wonderful defender in the person of a senior member of the department, a very well-respected colleague who had brought some major grant monies into the department and college. She wrote a very strong op-ed for the campus student newspaper, The Montclarion, defending my right to free speech and expressing disdain for a globally renowned author who could not respond to a fair question except by berating me for simply asking the question. In the weeks that followed, I was amazed to discover daily messages left in my voicemail by colleagues—both staff and faculty—whom I did not know, acknowledging my courage in speaking out on a topic that most are trained to fear touching.
Since these were the days before social media, I was protected by the fact that such comments like mine could not go “viral” and hence avoid what today would surely be some sort of “cancellation.” Several years later I did get my tenure—but no promotion. For that, I had to fight hard, to the point of threatening a lawsuit, but again, luck prevailed and I got promoted to Associate Professor level the following year.
Post-tenure Obstacles and Resistances
The politics of fear that I observed amongst non-tenured faculty especially and also amongst those aspiring to leadership positions in the department and institution, operated on the unspoken assumption that criticism of Israel was unthinkable, a sure way to end a career, and hence resulted in a self-imposed censorship on the part of the majority of faculty at the university. Only one other senior tenured faculty member of my department and I, were vocal in our support for the right of Palestinians to self-determination and we were the only two who would speak out against the increasingly obvious Israeli apartheid state policies and its massive and brutal military response to stone-throwing Palestinian kids during the 1st and 2nd intifadas.
After Hamas’ electoral win in Gaza in 2005—and it bears noting that Israel helped create it as an alternative to the secular PLO in 1987 after the First Intifada—Israel, despite agreeing to a truce that held for a number of years, staged a raid by the IDF on members of Hamas, killing six of them on Nov 4th, 2008. This led to retaliatory firing of rockets by Hamas, and on Dec 27, 2008, Israel attacked the Gaza strip by land and air in what it dubbed Operation Cast Lead, killing, over a 3 week period, a total of 1419 Palestinians of whom 1167 were civilians, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whilst Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem reported 1385 Palestinians killed. The use of white phosphorus bombs on civilian targets including two hospitals (Al Quds and Al Wafa), as well as on the UN compound in Gaza City, was declared a war crime by several human rights organizations such as Amnesty International as well as the Goldstone Report, as were family massacres conducted by IDF forces, and killing of Palestinian civilians fleeing homes holding aloft white flags. During Operation Cast Lead, total number of Israelis killed was 4: 3 civilians and 1 soldier, and 518 wounded.
When I tried to organize a day long teach-in with scholars and artists at my university to educate our student body as well as the larger community on the scale of atrocities being committed by Israel during Operation Cast Lead, allowing for debate and discussion on Zionism as a political ideology, the creation and role of Hamas in Palestinian resistance struggles as part of a rise in Islamist or political Islam which many countries in the grip of US imperialist policies, rightly or wrongly saw as a strategy of resistance–I was taken aside by certain department members who later held leadership roles, in an attempt to discourage me from inviting some of the speakers I had lined up—specifically, the anti-Zionist academic activist, Norman Finkelstein. When I asked why, I was told that “he is not a scholar.” This, despite the fact that even before being declined tenure at DePaul university, Prof Finkelstein had already published 3 books with major academic presses which most “scholars” would be honored to have their books published by: University of California Press, University of Minnesota Press, and Verso, plus a fourth book by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan Books—also very prestigious, being one of the oldest publishing companies in the US.
Obviously, the issue had little to do with whether he was or wasn’t a scholar; rather, as a son of holocaust survivors, the fact that he was writing exposes of Israel as a fascist, apartheid state, with a book entitled the Holocaust Industrystriking a blow to the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust as sui generic and untouchable by any sort of critique, followed by another on the “mis-use of antisemitism and abuse of history”—well, the Zionist industry had to silence him and unfortunately that was the effect my colleagues’ persuasive tactics resulted in; in the end, I invited Joseph Massad, a scholar of Palestinian history at Columbia, who at that point in time, hadn’t yet become the target of Zionist student attacks demanding his ouster for teaching, in their opinion a “one-sided” perspective on Israel-Palestine, effectively smearing him as an anti-semite in the process.
I want to be clear here that the colleagues in question are themselves respectable scholars in their respective fields, and have been kind and gracious in their dealings with me through the decades. I’m sure they wouldn’t recognize or even agree that what they were doing was a form of censorship by invoking the dreaded spectre of antisemitism. Their approach to censoring opinions like mine are far more sophisticated than the more outrightly course and obvious intimidation of some other colleagues, like, for instance, a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist who was Chairperson of our College’s department of Religion and Philosophy for many years, and had affixed to his office wall, a large Confederate flag. For displaying an obviously racist emblem extolling the virtues of a slaveholding past in the South, this colleague was never sanctioned or told he couldn’t fly the flag in full view of students (and faculty) walking past his office, many of whom were surely intimidated or felt harassed or unsafe by in the presence of such a symbol. Yet in recent days after the Oct 7th 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel that immediately resulted in Israel’s massive deadly assault on Gazan civilians and which was clearly genocidal in intent—the little Palestinian flag I affixed to my office door (courtesy the Students for Justice in Palestine on our campus)—drew notice and condemnation from several faculty members, including my current dept chair(one of the two colleagues who in 2008 had argued against issuing an invitation to Norman Finkelstein) who told me during a private exchange that he was hurt to see this display of support for Palestinians so soon after Hamas attacked Israel; never mind that as I pointed out in our friendly exchange of views, and without endorsing Hamas actions, that there really was no comparison in terms of number of lives lost—27,000 vs 1200 to date—nor had the attack resulted in damage to civilian infrastructure on the Israeli side anywhere close to what Israeli counterattacks on Gaza’s schools, hospitals, homes delivered in retaliation. The sign on his door, announcing his office as a safe space for all students experiencing “anti semitism, anti Zionism, Islamophobia,” has, by equating anti-semitism with anti-zionism, opened up a dangerous space that encourages attacks from students on those of us who proffer critiques of Zionism as a racist nationalist ideology that is unacceptable to many people of the Jewish faith too. Sure enough, a student in one of my classes this past semester brought a charge of anti-Semitism against me, which I managed to effectively debunk because of meticulous record-keeping I have learnt to do precisely to ward off such attacks. Whilst within a week of my putting up the little Palestinian flag in a display of solidarity, it was gone, vandalized, my Chair’s sign remains on his door. Despite our cordial relationship, I cannot get him to see how the fallacious conflation it endorses, poses a grave threat to freedom of speech in our classes. The passage of HR 3016 into law recently will have a similar chilling effect.
To return to my Christian Zionist colleague, who is now long-since retired—back then he was a very powerful faculty member, who headed up for over a decade, our college’s committee that decided annually who would be awarded the prestigious University Distinguished Scholar award. It would be an important recognition legitimizing the kind of schol-activist work I had been doing, combining literary with cultural critique to avowedly advance a social justice agenda. And I believe that was precisely why it was important for the neoconservative cohort to deny me such recognition, which could open the door to many other scholars (and students)—to follow this path.
I had to apply 10 years in a row before I got it—and that was only once I brought a complaint against my self-proclaimed Christian Zionist colleague, insisting he be relieved of his chair’s position on this committee as no one is supposed to serve continuously for that length of time. To demonstrate how egregiously biased this individual was and yet managed to control the actions of a diverse body of faculty in his attempts to prevent an award/recognition I had clearly earned through my numerous publications when I started applying for this award, I will share the following point of information. One year, the committee under his leadership, decided to vote for another faculty member who had applied for this award so as to prevent me from being in the running, which proved to be such a ridiculously partisan decision that even the university President (no supporter of mine)—that year was forced to deny their decision, with the humiliating result that NO ONE was awarded this honor that year. How do you vote for someone to be given a Distinguished Scholar recognition when they haven’t published anything of note—except a few newsletter entries and an article in a non-peer-reviewed journal? Thanks to someone with a sense of justice on that committee, I managed to have a look at this other faculty’s application dossier (all of 2 pages long!)—and used the information I gleaned to later write to the President as well as the Dean of my College to let them know I wasn’t going to abide the current Chair of the Award Committee being allowed to serve another term. In that letter, I detailed the decisions taken over the past 10 years which according to what I knew about research and publication records of applicants including myself, had wronged me by refusing to acknowledge both the breadth and depth of my scholarship.
The next year, sure enough, with the threat of legal action by me as well as perhaps, a few awakened consciences—I got what by rights I should have received a decade earlier. Perhaps because my scholarly publications have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine issue, I was helped with a strong case made on my behalf by my department representative to the Awards committee, the same colleague who is in disagreement with my anti-Zionist views.
This is where things get trickier and murkier.
People obviously have/should have, a right to their views, but when holding a particular set of views puts someone’s career in danger, and brings them into the line of censure and censorship, then dangerous precedents curbing free speech are being set.
In the cases I experienced involving the two colleagues described above, one has been very subtle in this area of curbing my right to free expression through a soft “guidance”, at times even by helping me advance certain career goals, whereas the other made blatant attempts to deny me a platform of visibility and scholarly prominence due to my views on a particular issue with which he was in disagreement. The real problem is that these two very different types of censoring actions, one within the bounds of friendly collegiality the other not—are united under the banner of a shared Zionist ideology that has huge clout in academia and politics and works to isolate people like me in an effort to curb our ability to grow in numbers and strength. As an illustration of the latter claim I’m making, despite pleading for the past two decades to my department colleagues to back a request to the upper administration for a tenure-track line in Arab and Arab American literature and culture, or hire even another postcolonialist like myself who could teach within my areas of interest such as the course I created called Images of Muslim Women and which currently gets offered only when I am available to teach it—my requests have been effectively sidelined. Hiring another brown South Asianist like me or an Arabist has proved impossible over the past 37 years, and we remain a white-dominated dept.
In the case of the more blatant approach, it led my Christian Zionist colleague in the aftermath of 9/11, to posting outrageously racist and xenophobic comments about me on a 3-4,ooo strong faculty and staff listserv, such as “Go back to the caves you crawled out from”—when I insisted on historicizing the 9/11 tragedy, bringing to the fore arguments being made by activist writers like Arundhati Roy about the many 9/11s that preceded what happened on US soil, in so many countries of the global south thanks to unrelenting military and economic interference by the US’s military-industrial imperialist complex. Part of my own historicizing argument was to link unqualified US backing of the Zionist colonial-settler Israeli apartheid nation to the state of general distrust and dislike of the US by the majority of the world’s brown and black peoples. I also published an anthology of writings by Muslim women called Shattering the Stereotypes in which I made these links between US’s destructive imperialist policies around the globe, including its egregious support for land theft and killing of native Palestinians by Israel, to the rise of Islamist extremism as a form of opposition to what its sympathizers and followers perceive as the unchecked hegemony of the western bloc of nations led by the US of A.
Making such links obviously did not go down well with people like the former Chair of Religion and Philosophy at Montclair. Accordingly, he made vocal and visible attempts to silence me, but in effect, this just exposed his bias ever so clearly, to the chagrin of more sophisticated minds, some of whom may have shared similar reservations about my politics and point of view.
Without going down the path of assuming I know what lay in the hearts and minds of colleagues as well as administrative leaders, I can attest to the fact that a strange confluence of pressure built up around me in the decades after 9/11, wherein I became the “Muslim Woman” made to emblematize both the exception to the rule of Muslim fundamentalism in western academic locations, as well as to be looked at with suspicion for harboring sentiments which, because they were at odds with the US-Zionist machine of Empire, rendered me unpatriotic (hence a traitor) in the eyes of many. Several students especially in classes where I taught Palestinian writers like Ghassan Kanafani or Arab feminists like Nawal el Saadawi who also exposed the links between Zionism, US imperialism, patriarchy and racial capitalism, as well as so-called Islamic fundamentalism —called me anti-USA, complaining about me in student evaluations. At times some Jewish students expressed anger at my views, although in more recent years, the number of Jewish anti-Zionist students has grown exponentially on campus, as a result, perhaps, of exposure to oppositional views of Zionist discourse taught by people like me. In any case, the net result of the confluence of both admiration as well as distrust for what I stood for, for the views I espoused unambiguously in my teaching and my writings, exposing the links between all manner of pieties, combined to result in a number of eventualities.
The first of these was the discovery that my name was on the AMCHA list of professors “inimical to Israel” and hence to be avoided and denounced. Here is what the Amcha Initiative’s website announcement of their stated objectives:
IMPORTANT: Share this list with your family, friends, and associates via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or word-of-mouth.
As the fall semester begins, many students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict. AMCHA Initiative has posted a list of 218 professors identifying themselves as Middle East scholars, who recently called for the academic boycott of Israel in a petition signed. Students who wish to become better educated on the Middle East without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering. (my emphasis)
From MSU, apparently, I’m the only such signatory listed:
Montclair State University
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Professor and Director, Women and Gender Studies
During the 2016-2017 academic year, after a semester teaching abroad at NYU in Abu Dhabi, I returned to MSU and because of a sudden departure of the woman who had succeeded me as Director of Women and Gender Studies after I’d completed two terms in the position, I was requested by colleagues teaching in the program, and at the behest of the then Provost, to take up the post once more so as to keep the program running smoothly. I agreed to do so for one year, stating that we needed to find someone else to take on these leadership responsibilities as I had done my duty and had agreed to resume my position only for a year to ensure that a program I had built up over the past 6 years and in whose success I was invested, would not fall apart. Over the summer months preceding the Fall term, I then worked pro-bono to restore some order in the program prior to moving into the AY, which included finalizing the hiring of 2 new adjunct instructors to teach several of our required courses which were already at capacity with registered students. One of these new instructors, who had already met with, and whose credentials had been vetted by, the outgoing Director, who had offered both him and the other instructor jobs for the coming year, apparently had tweeted a comment sometime over the past year, expressing his disgust at President Trump and stating, “Trump is a f—ing joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright.” I did not know of these political opinions of said instructor or about this social media posting expressing a strong wish to see the current President of the US dead, but even if I had, I would have treated it as his right to free speech particularly in off-campus fora. A few weeks prior to the start of the Fall term, I was asked to meet with the Dean of my college, who informed me that I had been relieved of my position as Director of the program.
The reason I was given for this ignominious “firing” from a leadership position that I had been invited to—nay begged—to fill, was that a letter had been sent to the President of the University, from an outside source asking how someone calling for the assassination of our country’s President, had “slipped through the cracks” in the hiring process without being properly vetted. Since I was the Director in charge, the barb was clearly pointed at me, and as such, had its desired effect: not only the instructor in question, but I too was relieved of our positions. Here is how I saw what happened, as I outlined in an article published soon thereafter in CounterPunch.
I believe strongly that my “firing” was in response to the Islamophobic rant sent to the President, Provost and Dean of my university by right wing columnist James Merse (who writes for a rag called the Daily Caller in NJ)—and on which he also copied me. In this email he threatened the university, claiming he and his “cohort” of right-wing supporters would have marched in protest onto the campus had the admin not fired Allred! He kept asking in that email “how did Allred’s hire slip through the cracks” (he had previously stated such things publicly)-and since I was the new Director in charge of the Program at this time, the question was obviously pointed at me. Now all the administrators knew I had had nothing to do with hiring this Allred guy—so why remove me then? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these right-wing nuts like Merse knew of my public writings exposing their outfits and the individuals that head them and that right now in the US, these scary folks are exercising their financial and political clout to pressurize university administrators to fire or otherwise silence voices like mine who are anathema to them.
A particular article I had published a few years prior, also in Counterpunch, traces precisely this money-trail of funders of Islamophobia which I argued in the article, is quite clearly linked to Zionist and pro-Israeli sources and conservative think-tanks. My research into these links was prompted in the fall of 2012, by seeing huge billboards appear at my Hudson Valley town’s train station, touting nakedly Islamophobic ads. I wrote:
I was stunned to see an ad on a billboard staring me in the face from across the train tracks stating the following:
19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism.
The ad was paid for by two organizations called “Jihad watch.org” and “Atlasshrugged”. Jihad Watch is a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and its Director is a man named Robert Spencer who is the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). According to the Jihadwatch website:
Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community. Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Regnery), is a supposed “expose” of how jihadist groups are advancing their agenda in the U.S.
Spencer was joined in weaving his web of anti-Muslim (and more specifically, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian) conspiracy theories—which are still being taught to and ingested by the US military forces—by his colleague Pamela Geller, an acolyte of the early 20th c. writer Ayn Rand, a libertarian conservative and uber-capitalist—hence the name of the blogsite she sponsors, Atlasshrugs.com. which today has become https://gellerreport.com/ and is spewing forth venomous stories repeating unsubstantiated Israeli hasbara claims about Hamas ‘ rapes of Israeli women (which have been proved to be utterly factitious, relying on uncorroborated accounts of two unreliable witnesses belonging to a very suspect and morally compromised militia group called ZAKA, which in Israel itself prior to Oct 7th, had been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it).[1]
As I was researching the links between Islamophobic content of Spencer and Geller’s work and their support for Israel, it became clear that theirs was a racist agenda that also appealed to neoconservative white supremacists in Europe. So I pointed out how
The attacks on Muslims and those thought to be Muslim which … are linked to racism in general, are hardly confined to the US. The terrible massacre of innocent children at summer camp in Norway by Anders Brevik a few years ago can be linked to the hate-speech of bloggers Geller and Spencer who are cited as important influences by Breivik in his Manifesto.
As I argued in the conclusion of that essay, there was (still is!)–a confluence of several dangerous discourses that coalesced in August 2012 in the anti-Muslim ads such as those posted on MTA train stations in NY. Jihadwatch and AtlasShrugged were also behind another series of ads posted on municipal buses in San Francisco and on municipal buses, and here is what these proclaimed:
In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.
Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.
The equation of “civilized man” with the State of Israel, the “savage” with that of the absent Arab, is lifted verbatim from a 1974 lecture by American author Ayn Rand, which have been echoed by Golda Meir and other past and present leaders of Israel:
The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.
(lecture delivered in 1974)
Connecting the Dots
What I’ve tried to do throughout my academic career, is to connect the dots between phenomena the academy wishes to keep separate and de-linked via its erection of disciplinary walls, zealously guarded, even when lipservice is given to the virtues of interdisciplinarity. Most of all, drawing connections between Zionism, US militarism, racialized capitalism and exposing, as I have, how these disparate formations are threaded together in ways that permeate and inform the hallowed halls of academia, is clearly the kind of display of disobedience to the norms of our profession that must needs be punished.
It was, therefore, no surprise that the University President took the occasion of a threat toward the campus made by the reporter for the Daily Caller (a Fox News affiliate, founded by Tucker Carslon and Neil Patel), who stated in an email to the top brass that he had been prepared to “organize and lead significant peaceful-but loud—protests and campaigns” to hold the university accountable had it not terminated the adjunct instructor’s position– to not just fire that adjunct, but also “punish” me by publicly dismissing me from my position as Director of WGS. Doing so can be read as a decision made possible by a serendipitous confluence of factors, to appease a university President wary of someone espousing my politics “leading” and setting policy and curricula goals for a small but thriving program with a reputation for disobedience, as well as to do the kind of damage control needed to prevent conservative donors allied to the individuals, media outlets and think-tanks the Daily Caller reporter had links with, to withdraw their financial support.
What I had argued several years prior to my wrongful dismissal–that a confluence of interests in the US political and cultural sphere threatened to overcome the polity with hatred, zenophobia, Islamophobia, racism—these same factors came together a few years later to ensure the following outcome in my professional life: as a brown Muslim woman who had painstakingly exposed links between Zionism and these other ills, I would not be given a public-facing position that might result in persuading others to what is clearly anathema in US discourse. Here is what I had written in 2012, following the Islamophobic and anti-Palestine poster campaign orchestrated by Geller and Spence:
What this uncritical support and valorization of the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens leads to, as the world has seen in the past 60 years or so since Israel was founded and Palestine reduced to a series of occupied settlements, is ongoing war between unequal opponents in Israel/Palestine. Such a state of affairs based on injustice toward the Palestinians who have been refugees in their own lands since 1947, with more than 4 million of them displaced in the Palestinian diaspora, has contributed to many of the troubles we face today as the world becomes a full-scale conflict zone from East to West, North to South. The mentality of the Gellers and Spencers of this world has infected the good sense of people on all sides of this and other related debates on human rights worldwide, and exerted undue influence on the foreign policy of the USA; it has shaped presidencies and policies, and now, if unchecked, such a mentality could bring together discourses of racism, zenophobia, class and gender politics together with Islamophobia, that may push the electorate into voting for people who would lead the country back into the Dark Ages of a second McCarthy era.
Well, as it has turned out, whether you are Trump or Biden—the Palestinians remain as fodder to be served up to the Israel lobby.
Where I Am/ We Are Today
We are obviously all under surveillance and today we are seeing the terrible consequences of speaking truth to power affecting students and faculty across our campuses who dare to condemn Israeli genocide and show empathy with Palestinian civilians being butchered in the thousands.
Once again, with a handful of other faculty on my campus, I am active on our campus discussion list in posting analysis and information beyond state-sponsored media narratives. Once again, we are the victims of name-calling and one of us on my campus has been publicly silenced due to complaints against him of “creating a hostile work environment.” I have in recent months, published an essay outlining this outrageous turn of events.
While dangerous moves to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are afoot as witnessed in a US Congressional Resolution passed last December, the temper of the masses has changed. This has been unambiguously on view as millions of people many of them of the Jewish faith, across the world continue to take to the streets in protest of the Israeli genocide–a word that following the ICJ’s ruling, will now forever be attached to the Israeli state.
On US campuses, as well, while firings and suspensions of untenured faculty who are vocal in their support of Palestine are on the rise, as is the doxxing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students from many of whom job offers have been rescinded, this is all being countered by many more of us than ever before, refusing to be silenced or intimidated. Helped by several colleagues, I am proud to announce that we have joined FJP National with the creation of our university’s chapter of the same, and are slowly seeing numbers of members rise, though many have requested anonymity.
While I have at times elected to, and at others been deliberately sidelined in the decision-making apparatus of university life, I believe that justice will always prevail in the end. I am proud of having remained a disobedient voice, of questioning the norms that compel us to be compliant to the norms of authority in, or outside of, academe. Indeed, I am currently the plaintiff in a case to investigate and discipline my Dean who at a public event in February of this year, refused to greet me or my husband civilly when I walked up to him to say hello, and instead launched into a hostile diatribe against what he claimed were antisemitic remarks I had made on the campus listserv.
I’d like to end by citing a passage from Steven Salaita’s latest essay, in which he pulls no punches regarding the compromises we as scholars working for remuneration and rewards make; at the same time, he exhorts us to do the right thing, to embrace disobedience and class disloyalty, in order to refuse compliance to a genocidal world order:
Maybe it’s time for scholars to disobey our own compunctions—that we’re important or even indispensable, that our education gives us special insight, that innovation would die if we suddenly went away. Our main compunction, as with all the professions, is to obey class loyalties. Disobedience should be introspective, then. We have to disrupt the norms and procedures that advantage the compliant. How can this be done? It’s hard to say. But that it needs doing is by now beyond doubt.
(“Customs of Obedience in Academe,” Feb 12, 2024))
Steven paid the ultimate price for disobedience—he was fired from his faculty position even before setting foot on the campus that had hired him, for a series of tweets condemning Israeli slaughter in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. I am lucky I managed to get tenure, and within the constraints and privileges afforded by it, have tried and will continue to try to speak truth to power—including going after those, like my Dean, who think they can get away with abuse of power in their attempts to silence us.
Notes.
[1] See Nadine Sayegh, “Israel’s ‘purple-washing’ and the dehumanisation of Palestinian men and women.” The New Arab. Feb 8, 2024. https://www.newarab.com/features/purple-washing-and-abuses-against-palestinians
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