UW JEWISH STUDIES TO HOST PROF WHO CALLS ISRAEL ‘COLONIZER’
Stumbling across the promo ad for an upcoming lecture at the UW, the words “A Half Century of Occupation” emblazoned across an ink stained map of Israel, one could be forgiven for assuming it is sponsored by an anti-Israel group on campus – it is in fact sponsored by the Stroum Center for Jewish studies.
Stroum Center promotion of Shafir lecture, via Facebook
Of Seattle’s Jewish institutions, few are as revered as the University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. Since its inception the center has maintained a robust engagement with the local Jewish community, offering popular lectures, programs and exhibits. The Stroum center’s Sephardic studies program under the leadership of Professor Devin Naar, maintains superb relations with Seattle’s Sephardic and wider Jewish community.
Thus some in Seattle’s Jewish community were taken aback by the Stroum Center’s hosting of an upcoming public lecture by Professor Gershon Shafir titled “Unsettling the Occupation“. In his books, classes and speaking engagements Professor Shafir promotes a single overarching theme of Israel as a “colonial enterprise”, the Jews of Israel being a foreign transplant. In the academic world such views are de-rigueur, as courageous as lauding the benefits of coffee in the Starbucks boardroom. But to the lion’s share of world Jewry the notion of the Jewish people as alien invaders in their indigenous homeland is considered both offensive and dangerous.
Prof. Gershon Shafir, via YouTube
In his lectures, available online, Shafir asserts that Israel maintains “a settler colonial framework” on “both sides of the green line”. Shafir labels the establishment of communities within the green line as “Judaization“.
Rejecting the wider BDS movement, Shafir instead champions a targeted boycott of selected Israeli politicians. Under the aegis of Scholars for Israel and Palestine, an organization of which he is a founding member, Shafir advocates that the U.S. and EU impose visa restrictions and freeze the foreign assets of those Jewish Israelis with whom Shafir and his cohort politically disagree.
Prof. Cary Nelson, via Facebook.
Cary Nelson, Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, sees Shafir’s targeted boycott as an assault on free speech, and harmful to prospects for peace. Nelson told Haaretz that “this proposal would take us down a route of increasing hostility that can only further isolate Israel from the world community and undermine efforts to build the cooperation necessary to a negotiated settlement”
At a time when many Jewish students feel increasingly unsafe to publicly support Israel on campus, some questioned whether promoting the portrayal of Israel as a hegemonic, colonial power was helpful. Adam Rozen-Wheeler, a Jewish Studies major at UW told TMR that he is “disappointed that Jewish Studies is providing a platform for this kind of view”. Earlier this year Rozen-Wheeler was manning an Israel information booth on Red Square when the display was vandalized by a student affiliated with one of the the anti-Zionist groups on campus.
The Amcha initiative has documented over two dozen anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic incidents at the UW in the past two years. Because of the frequency of such incidents the University of Washington was ranked seventh on a list of the 40 worst colleges for Jewish students.
UW student, Uri Zvi displays a vandalized poster ripped off of a UW campus, pro-Israel display.
For the most part, the Stroum Center’s public lectures have focused more on the cultural, historic and sociological aspects of Jewish studies, avoiding one-sided political expositions, but this may be changing. In 2015, the Stroum Center hosted a lecture by Sayed Kashua an advocate of the “one state solution” and supporter of boycott efforts against the Jewish state.
If these academic gatherings had any intellectual integrity, they would have invited people with opposite views. -JJ Surbeck
JJ Surbeck, via Facebook.
JJ Surbeck, a consultant on Middle East affairs, human rights and international humanitarian law and former legal adviser to the International Red Cross told The Mike Report that the Stroum Center’s Shafir lecture lacks balance and raises concerns of fairness. Says Surbeck “If these academic gatherings had any intellectual integrity, they would have invited people with opposite views in order to spur a real debate.”
The lecture titled “Unsettling the Occupation: Israel and Palestine in 2017” shares the theme of Shafir’s latest book “A Half Century of Occupation Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict” (currently at #204,951 on Amazon).
TMR reached out to Stroum Center Director Noam Pianko who declined to comment on the concerns raised in this article. Pianko serves on the Regional Advisory Council of New Israel Fund, an organization that funds groups and publications hostile to Israel.
Though it would help to do as the writer suggests and host the opposing view of guest lecturers speaking about Israel, I see it differently. If a writer or speaker cannot give historical or other facts to support their position, they should be considered as delivering propaganda. If a lecturer wants to be taken seriously as a scholar, or even as one with legitimacy, he or she should be able to substantiate every opinion or statement. The claim that Israel is occupying the state of Israel in entirely, and that Jews are a “foreign transplant”, is totally false. There are Jews whose families have been in Israel for centuries. I have one friend who can trace her family’s presence in Jerusalem back to the Spanish inquisition. Throughout the Roman and Ottoman occupations, Jews lived in “Palestine”, the label given the region for a few centuries pre-1948. The “Palestinians” however, themselves state that they are mainly from Egypt and Jordan and other Arab states. There is no history of Palestinian Arabs settling the land of Israel, ever. Appropriating the term Palestine does not constitute proof of anything. The facts are all readily available on the internet, so there is no excuse for poor scholarship and anti-Semitism masquerading as scholarship..
Thank you Cathy, a shame they donn’t have you lecturing at UW. Would be a refreshing change.
Absolutely inexplicable!
Elisa Azose