- [Host] Good morning everyone.
Can you hear me in the back?
Okay, great.
Welcome, thank you for getting up early
to attend our session.
This panel responds to
the call from over 170
Palestinian Civil Society organizations,
including the largest
teachers' and professors' union
to support the boycott of
Israeli academic institutions.
Current events confirm, once again,
the urgency of the need
to end the occupation
and its colonial expansion
as well as the Apartheid laws that violate
Palestinian rights.
That includes home demolitions,
as well as an escalation
of Israeli settler and army
violence against Palestinians,
just this fall as we've seen.
I want to call your attention
to the report of the
Triple A Task Force on Israel/Palestine,
which provides a devastating
account of the human rights
situation in Palestine.
If you haven't taken a look at that,
it's very accessible on
the Triple A website.
The report,
and I will quote this
one part of it, states,
"There is a strong case for
the Association to take action
"on Israel/Palestine."
The report also stated
that censure alone is
quote, "an insufficient course of action."
We here, today, want to talk
to you about why we think
academic boycott of Israeli institutions
is the best way to take
action at this time.
We are advocates of resolution number two,
which will be voted on
at the business meeting
tomorrow night, Friday, at 6:15 PM
in the Convention Center,
in the Mile High Ballrooms
number two and three.
We urge you to vote Yes on resolution two
and No on resolution one.
We can always go through
some of the differences
of those in the Q and A
if any remaining issues
remain unaddressed, but the
way that I am explaining
it to people who wonder
about the difference
and have read resolution
two that we support,
say, well, "How am I going
to remember one or two?"
And so I'm going with the synophone.
Ours goes further,
so think of resolution
number two as in T-O-O.
Too.
There are flyers in the back of the room
with more information
about our resolution,
as well as frequently asked questions,
a guideline, and highlights
from the Task Force Report.
I want to note that the cameras
that you see rolling now
have been approved
by the Triple A S press policy.
They're authorized recordings
and we ask that there be
no unauthorized recordings.
The Trip A S Press Policy forbids them.
I just want to have a,
take another couple minutes here to
highlight a few issues,
before I turn it over
to Roberto who will
introduce our panelists.
I have been very active
in academic boycott,
pardon me,
in academic boycott
since the founding of the U.S. campaign
for the Academic and
Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Which was founded in the
midst of Operation Cast Lead
in those weeks covering late-2008,
early-2009.
And the American Studies
Association Academic Boycott
Resolution emerged from a small delegation
that I was a part of in January, 2012,
with Neferti Tadiar, Nikhil Singh,
Robin D.G. Kelley and Bill Mullen.
And it was a USACBI Delegation.
Again, USACBI is the U.S. campaign
for the academic and
cultural boycott of Israel.
But, the ASA was not the first association
to pass an academic resolution.
It was the Association
of Humanistic Sociology
that passed the first
resolution in the United States
and that was in 2013.
The, after that,
the Association for Asian American Studies
passed the next resolution,
followed by the ASA,
and then, just a few weeks later,
the Council of the Native
American and Indigenous Studies
Association declared an endorsement
for academic boycott,
and I can speak in the
Q and A if there's time,
and people have specific
questions about sort of what
that process looked like,
within the American Studies
Association and NAISA,
the Native American and
Indigenous Studies Association,
but one of the things
that I want to highlight
is that connection around a
critique of U.S. imperialism
in the region,
as well as settler colonialism
there and here, right?
So not exceptionalizing
American domination
nor Israeli domination.
One of the things that I found fascinating
in terms of the work of academic boycott
is a two-pronged charge.
One is that it violates
the academic freedom
of Israeli academics,
and that it's punitive.
And I want to just speak
to that very briefly
in my introductory remarks here.
When people have charged academic freedom
or the violation of it,
I have yet to hear an actual example
that constitutes academic freedom.
I endorse USACBI as an individual,
and that's different than
our boycott resolution,
which doesn't bind any individuals at all.
It's institution to institution,
so it's the institution of the Triple A,
in relation to academic
institutions in 48, Israel,
but let's use the individual
example for a moment.
There's nothing to say
that I couldn't or wouldn't
co-edit a book or an article
with a colleague at Ben-Gurion University
or Tel Aviv University.
I regularly have actual academic exchange
and intellectual collaboration
with scholars who do
come to NAISA and ASA,
and so, the idea that
my withholding of my presence
at those institutions
as an individual scholar
somehow constitutes a violation
of their academic freedom,
to me seems quite twisted,
and then you couple that with
the notion that it's punitive,
and I think, wow, people
are really feeling
violated and punished if I
don't go to Tel Aviv University
and give a lecture on
Hawaiian sovereignty?
You know?
I'd like to think I'm a good lecturer,
but I don't want to think
that that would, you know,
be really a hardship for
someone if they didn't
hear me give a talk.
So, you know, why do
people see it as a form
of punishment, rather than a withholding?
You know?
What if we frame this
as an issue of consent?
Right?
That I will withhold my
presence in the institution.
I don't consent to
actually partaking in this
in that way,
and for that reason, I
do see academic boycott
as moving beyond merely symbolic politics.
I think of it as important
work of anti-normalization,
even as it's grounded in
normative international law,
and I think anti-normalization
is where it's at,
and I think it's also important to recall,
or for those of you who may be unfamiliar,
to note that the BDS Committee,
the Palestinian Civil
Society call for BDS,
broadly, for boycott,
divestment and sanctions
comes a year after the call
for academic and cultural
boycott.
Academic and cultural boycott
precedes the broader BDS
call by one full year,
and so if we're paying
attention as anthropologists
to what people on the ground,
as people like to point out,
on the ground, are asking
the rest of the world to do
is to honor that academic
and cultural boycott
and now, as a broader part of BDS.
Lastly, for now, I want to
read something very brief.
I received an email this morning at 6AM
as I was waking up,
making my hotel coffee,
and I need to not identify the sender
but this is someone who
is based in an Israeli
academic institution,
one of those subject to
the call for boycott.
They wrote, "I hope all is well with you.
"I'm sending this to you
assuming that you're at
"the Triple A right now.
"I wrote a brief statement, see below,
"that I hope you might be
willing to distribute in relation
"to the business meeting on Friday.
"I want the statement to
reach people who might not
"want to vote for the resolution
"that you're advancing."
That's resolution number two.
"Since this action constitutes
a violation of Israeli law
"on my part, I ask for
strict confidentiality.
"If you decide to distribute
or share it with others,
"it must be absolutely anonymous,"
and this is that statement
that they wrote.
"Some people are reluctant
to support the academic
"boycott of Israeli universities
because of the common
"belief that it might
hurt progressive forces
"within these institutions,
"who should instead be
strengthened so they could
"transform Israeli society from within.
"I am an Israeli academic
closely familiar with
"progressives in Israeli academe.
"Time and again, in the face
of systematic violations
"of Palestinian rights within
the Academy and beyond it,
"almost all progressive
academics here have chosen
"to protect their own institutions,
"rather than use their positions to reform
"these institutions and
the wider Israeli society.
"Particularly in the context
of Palestinian rights,
"Israeli progressivism functions
more like a badge of honor
"than as commitment to
action-oriented political stance,
"thus, Israeli progressives
should not be seen as victims
"of the academic boycott.
"Rather, they have much to gain from it
"because external pressure
will encourage them to choose
"between loyalty to the
state and substantial action
"for human rights.
"The defensive progressive Israelis,
"much like the charge of anti-Semitism
"is used to stifle debate
and perpetuate the status quo
"and it should be recognized as such."
End quote.
Thank you.
I'll turn it over to Roberto now
who will introduce our panelists.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you.
This morning, in my introductory remarks,
I will give some background
information about the current
situation in Israel/Palestine,
and then offer my thoughts
about the significance
of the proposed academic boycott
of Israeli institutions.
Afterwards, I'll introduce our speakers.
Let me begin by saying that
violence does not occur
in a vacuum.
It emerges from specific
historical and cultural contexts.
In Israel/Palestine, violence
is rooted in Israel's
decades-long military occupation
of Palestinian territories,
and the expansion of Jewish
settlements in these areas,
including East Jerusalem.
Military occupation and
settler colonialism are,
by definition, coercive,
and in Palestine, these
processes have often been brutal.
Over the years, dozens of UN
Security Council resolutions
have criticized Israeli
violations of the Geneva
Conventions, the UN Charter,
and other international laws.
The past 18 months have been marked by
intensified violence.
In July and August, 2014,
Israeli attacks on Gaza
killed 2,300 Palestinians
and injured 10,000 more.
According to the UN, more
than 2/3 of the casualties
were civilians.
71 Israelis also died,
the vast majority, soldiers.
The pattern by now is predictable,
death, destruction, reprisal,
counter-reprisal, and more
death and destruction.
The latest round of violence
began six weeks ago.
The corporate media would have us believe
that religious extremists
are inciting Palestinians
to attack Israeli Jews with
stones, knives, and cars.
These sources would also have us believe
that Palestinians are
angered by the possibility
that the Israeli Government
may soon allow Jews
to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
In the official narrative,
social media is an autonomous
force, radicalizing Palestinian news.
For those reciting the official narrative,
history only begins yesterday.
They ignore the longer range of history
that made it possible for
us to arrive at the current
situation.
The official narrative
minimizes or disregards entirely
the Israeli state's role
in creating the conditions
for violence.
Netanyahu's government,
like those before it,
has claimed that it has the
right to build homes for
Israeli Jews anywhere it wants,
including in East Jerusalem,
and it has.
The results have been devastating.
In 1995, there were
approximately 150,000 Jews
in East Jerusalem.
Today, there are more than half a million.
Palestinians are being
squeezed out of their homes
by Israeli policies that
limit family reuinification,
redraw Jerusalem's municipal boundaries
and expand Jewish settlements.
Jeff Halper calls it a matrix of control,
a web of infrastructural, bureaucratic,
and ideological mechanisms
that are incrementally
undermining the viability of Palestine.
But beyond matrices of control,
beyond Kafka-esque rules and regulations,
beyond violations of international law,
behind the Orwellian silent
transfer of Palestinians
are human beings.
Extreme criminality and
violence make it easy to forget
just who is being affected.
While keeping track of
statistics and body counts
is important,
it's also important to keep
individual lives in focus.
Perhaps the most shocking
thing about the events
of the last six weeks is not
the fact that most victims
are Palestinian.
That, after all, has been
a consistent pattern,
but that approximately half
of the victims have been
teenagers.
The last six weeks have
been, among other things,
a war on Palestinian youth.
The median age of the
88 Palestinians killed
by Israeli military police and settlers,
since October 1st, is 19 years old.
To put a human face on the
Israeli defense force's
disproportionate attacks,
we could talk about
the youngest victim,
2 year old Rahaf Hassan,
who was killed on October 11th,
with her mother when that
family's house collapsed
following an Israeli air
strike near Gaza City.
It's a stark reminder of the
unevenness of the two sides,
the life of an innocent
toddler cut short by a missile
launched from a U.S. made, U.S. financed
General Dynamics F-16 fighter plane
from thousands of feet above.
I would like to spend a moment
reflecting upon the life
and death of another Palestinian youth,
16-year old Isaac Badran,
who was fatally shot by
Israeli police on October 10th.
I think it reveals much
about how daily injustices
and indignities of occupation
drive a cycle of violence.
Most Israeli and western
media outlets predictably
wrote him off as a terrorist
because he stabbed an Israeli man,
but the story is more complex.
Isaac Badran, a resident
of East Jerusalem,
was an 11th grader in an
Israeli vocational high school
who enjoyed soccer and swimming.
He was the oldest of six children.
Isaac was deeply upset
by an incident in which
an Israeli settler attempted
to remove the hijab
of a Muslim woman in Jerusalem's Old City.
According to his father,
Isaac spoke to his mother
about the incident and cried,
saying, "No one is defending these women."
Isaac prayed at the
Muhammad al Fatih Mosque.
After his death, the
Mosque's moisen remarked
that young people like Isaac,
who were born after
the 1993 Oslo Agreement
that established Palestinian self rule,
but failed to end Israeli occupation,
are something of a lost generation.
In his words, the U.S., Britain, Israel,
and the Palestinian authority
thought that in the last
20 years, these children
would adapt to their ways,
that they would contain them,
but this did not happen, he said.
The justice motive can sometimes override
even the most hegemonic
controlling processes.
Using the sociological imagination,
we can come to a better understanding
of the biographical
details of Isaac Badran's
truncated life, as they
intersected with historical facts
beyond his control,
that were decades in the making,
a half century of military occupation,
the slow motion process
of ethnic cleansing,
institutionalized racism,
and economic subjugation.
Isaac Badran was, in other words,
a boy who witnessed intolerable insults,
indignities, and injury,
and at some level, internalized this pain.
Children learn what they live,
not just in the United States,
but also in East Jerusalem.
None of this is to deny that Israeli Jews
are also experiencing death,
devastation, and pain,
but it is important to
understand that their experiences
are just as much the
result of a vicious circle,
originating in Israeli military occupation
and settlement expansion.
In the time that I have
left, I want to address the
question of why our
Association should support
the boycott of Israeli
academic institutions.
First, we are at a
crucial historical moment.
The BDS movement, now
in existence for more
than a decade, is accelerating globally.
A growing number of student governments,
including the Associative
Students of my own
San Jose State University,
have passed resolutions
calling for their universities
to divest themselves of
investments in Israel.
In Spring, 2013, the Association
for Asian American Studies
voted to support a boycott
of Israeli institutions,
followed by the American
Studies Association
in December, 2013.
If the Triple A votes to approve
a pro-boycott resolution,
that is, resolution number two,
it would become the largest
academic association
to do so in this country.
The rationale for such
boycotts is straightforward,
and we'll get into that
later this morning.
First, Israeli universities
and other institutions
function as key components in a system
that has denied fundamental
rights to Palestinians.
Students and faculty who
protest Israeli policies
are subjected to
surveillance or retaliation
or worse, while Palestinian
students routinely face
discrimination.
Furthermore, Israeli academic institutions
have remained silent
about military occupation
and new settlements.
A second reason we should
support the boycott
against Israeli academic
institutions is because
we are an American
anthropological association.
Most of our organization's
members are U.S. citizens
and taxpayers and our Government
has been deeply complicit.
Since 1949, Israel has
received more than $120 billion
in foreign aid, far more
than any other country.
In the last fiscal year,
Israel received more than
$3 billion in U.S. foreign
military financing,
and it has been widely
reported that in his visit
to the U.S. earlier this month,
Benjamin Netanyahu was seeking an increase
to $5 billion, annually.
To the extent that the Triple
A is an American institution,
we should support the boycott.
Finally, the boycott
resolution is in keeping with
the Triple A's commitment to human rights.
It is in this spirit
that the Triple A members
passed a resolution condemning
the Iraq War in 2006
and other resolutions since then.
In 1999, the members of
the Association adopted
the Declaration on
Anthropology and Human Rights,
which among other things, states, quote,
"As the professional
organized of anthropologists,
"the Triple A has long been
and should continue to be
"concerned whenever
human difference is made
"the basis for the denial
of basic human rights.
"The Triple A founds its
approach on anthropological
"principles of respect for
concrete human differences,
"working on a definition built
on the Universal Declaration
"of Human Rights and other treaties
"which bring basic human
rights within the parameters
"of international law and practice."
End quote.
As we engage in this round
table discussion this morning,
I hope that we can keep our
Association's commitment
to human rights in mind.
And now, I would like to
introduce our speakers
this morning.
First, we will have Nadia Abu El-Haj.
Nadia Abu El-Haj is
Professor in the Departments
of Anthropology at Barnard College
and Columbia University,
and Co-Director of the
Center for Palestine Studies
at Columbia.
She is the author of two books,
"Facts On the Ground:
Archaeological Practice
"and Territorial Self-Fashioning
in Israeli Society,"
and "The Genealogical
Science: The Search for Jewish
"Origins and the Politics
of Epistemology."
She will speak about
academic freedom as a way
of setting up a framework for
our discussion this morning.
Lisa Rofel is our second speaker.
She is Professor of
Anthropology at the University
of California, Santa Cruz.
She is also Director of the
Center for Emerging Worlds.
She has published and
edited five books including
"Other Modernities:
Gendered Yearnings in China
"After Socialism," and "Desiring China:
"Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality,
"and Public Culture."
She is currently working
on a set of essays
about rethinking Zionism,
ethnonationalism, and settler colonialism.
Our third speaker will be David Lloyd.
David Lloyd is Distinguished
Professor of English
at the University of
California, Riverside,
and a founding member of the U.S. Campaign
for the Academic and
Cultural Boycott of Israel.
He has published several
books including most recently,
"Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity:
"The Transformation of Oral Space."
He has also published many
articles on Palestine/Israel,
including, "In the Long
Shadow of the Settler:
"On Israeli and U.S. Colonialisms,"
co-written with Laura Pulido,
and "Settler Colonialism
and the State of Exception:
"The Example of Israel/Palestine."
And with that, I will turn
the microphone over to
Nadia Abu El-Haj.
- Good morning.
Okay, it's really bad not
to have printed things, but,
I'm not sure I'm gonna entirely
fulfill my duty of focusing
entirely on academic freedom,
but I will do a job.
Okay.
Academic freedom.
That is one of the calls of BDS.
That is, it is a call for academic freedom
for Palestinian university
students and scholars.
As the Anthropology
Task Force's own report
documented in detail,
today there is no such thing.
Universities are raided
on a regular basis,
students arrested on campus,
permits and visas denied.
To Gazan students wanting
to study in the West Bank,
to foreign scholars
wanting to come to teach
at Palestinian universities,
and to Palestinian scholars and students
who wish to go abroad.
There are material reasons
why BDS has taken up,
or put the Academy as one
central note in its struggle.
The effects of destroying
education are long-term.
But I would also not
underestimate its symbolic value.
At the end of Apartheid,
various critics went back
and revisted the question
of the academic boycott
and argued that research itself went along
largely unaffected.
By implication, the academic boycott was,
as people referred to it,
merely symbolic.
As anthropologists, however,
we know well that the symbolic,
that the symbolic does not
carry the weight of the mere.
It too has powerful material effects.
So I thought I would begin
today by recalling some of,
by recalling the anti-Apartheid struggle,
and what the parameters
of their call for academic
and cultural boycott entailed, was.
So the ANC had already
started calling for a boycott
of South African institutions
and its economy in 1958.
It was a long time before that
movement took global hold,
especially in the U.S.,
but once it did, it became a powerful tool
against the Apartheid regime.
So what were the demands of the cultural
and academic boycott?
I will not re-rehearse all of them here,
but I want to point to some key ones
that are very different
than the demands put forward
by BDS.
And I focus on those because
so much of the argument
against the boycott,
here, at the Triple A,
as well as elsewhere,
seems to either misunderstand the call
or to deliberately misrepresent it.
As explained in an
article published in 1995,
the academic boycott of South
Africa was intended, quote,
"to isolate scholars in South
Africa by depriving them
"of the formal and informal
sources of information
"needed for their future research,
"and the conduits through
which they could bring
"their own work to the
attention of the international
"community," unquote.
So how is that to be achieved?
Not,
not only did the boycott ask
that international scholars
not travel to South African
academic institutions,
and yes, that is a key call of BDS,
but they also called for the following.
First,
that international
scholars and institutions
do not invite South
African scholars abroad.
Second, that they refuse
to publish South African
manuscripts in journals
and publishing houses,
et cetera.
Third, that they refuse to
collaborate with South African
scholars on research.
Fourth, international
conferences such as this one
bar South African scholars from attending,
and fifth, that institutions
abroad refuse to recognize
South African degrees.
As I know from a dear
friend who was involved
in the South African struggle,
exceptions for specific
individuals were at times made,
on the basis of effectively
a political litmus test.
But they were made as exceptions and only
under the authority of the ANC.
Now, let us be clear.
Those are demands that make no distinction
whatsoever between individual
scholars and their scholarship
and the institutions in which they work.
Palestine's BDS has made
a very different choice.
We can and do invite
Israeli scholars abroad.
While we are asked not to
publish in Israeli journals
or publishing houses,
Israelis will not be blocked
from publishing their
scholarship here.
Research collaboration can continue
and BDS has not even demanded
that Israeli scholars
refuse to,
refuse to use funds from
their own institutions
or government.
In other words, there is no demand here
that Israeli scholars boycott
their own universitites,
only that they respect the
call for others to do so.
In effect, this is a boycott
call that has bent over
backwards, as far as it possibly can,
to protect the academic
freedom and the scholarship
of Israeli scholars.
And let's be clear, it
has bent over backwards
to protect the academic
freedom of scholars
who already have it,
in a reality when
Palestinian scholars do not.
So where do we go from here?
In other words, how might
we want to think about
the disagreement between
those of us calling
upon the Triple A to
sign onto the boycott,
and those of us here at the Triple A
who have proposed an alternative.
I want to leave you with a few thoughts,
and they are thoughts
that reach not just to
political choices we
face, but to ethical ones.
The alternative being
proposed to the Triple A
puts forth what its authors
see as a more constructive
alternative to a boycott.
Although I personally think
it is just more of the
status quo.
But it strikes me that
neither my opinion nor theirs
is really the point.
No matter what we might
think of the productivity
or not of dialogue,
or the value of offering financial support
for Palestinian academics and students,
or for studying Palestine,
some of the proposals put forth by this,
the first resolution,
the anti-boycott resolution,
no matter what we might
think of those proposals,
that is not what is being asked of us,
by those suffering the
harms of Israeli's racial,
of Israel's racial regime.
In fact, to be very clear, it
is what is being asked of us
by those who benefit from that regime.
In other words, Palestinian
academics are firmly behind
BDS and they are asking us to
stand in solidarity with them.
Like South Africa before it,
the Israeli state and
its Academy has cultural,
intellectual, and
material ties to the west,
in general, and to the U.S. in particular
that renders boycotts effective
in ways that they would not
be vis-a-vis other regimes.
For example, I would be
all for boycotting Syrian
universities if a damn bit of
difference that could make.
And I would be all for
answering a call to stand
in solidarity with Iraqis and Afghans
if there were a movement
calling for a boycott
of U.S. universities,
that is, if we lived in a world
in which that might have an impact
on the reigning imperial
violence of the U.S. state,
but those are not the questions before us.
The question we face is clear.
As U.S. academics,
academics,
that is, as citizens or
residents in a country
whose exceptional relationship with Israel
enables its ever-spiraling
racial violence to continue
unchecked, are we going to
heed the call of Israeli
academics and their
supporters in the U.S.?
Even if they are critics of the regime?
To back their strategy,
even if theirs is a strategy
that is not supported
by those whose rights
they claim to be defending?
Or, are we going to heed the
call for an academic boycott
made by a broad, non-violent
Palestinian political
movement that has lost all
faith in the possibility
of dialogue or intellectual bridges
as a solution to the political crisis?
Second, nothing in the
boycott call precludes
the possibility of dialogue
or building intellectual
bridges or for that
matter, scholarly exchange.
And we talked about that already.
Our Israeli colleagues can
still publish in our journals,
as I said above,
come to conferences such as this,
and even do research and publish
with anthropologists elsewhere,
and they can do so on Israeli
University and Government
funding.
For that matter, the Triple
A can make a decision
to continue allowing Israeli universities
to have access to their
online publications
if that is a decision we make and support,
as anthropologists, as scholars,
as individual scholars
in the Israeli Academy.
And BDS is not hiding a deeper truth,
which is a lot of what we're
being accused of doing.
An understanding of
what an academic boycott
should and should not entail,
developed and shifted over the years
out of conversations
and arguments in which
many an academic both
here and in Palestine
were involved.
And in the end, the boycott
came to focus on institutions
and not individuals.
Yes, that is not a pure distinction.
Yes, there will be a small
price that individual
Israeli anthropologists will pay,
but I don't know what
it means to call oneself
a critic of the state,
or to claim to be a progressive
if one is not willing to bear any price
for one's politics.
Should the defense of privilege
really extend that far?
And before anyone accuses
me of being willing
to risk the academic privilege of others,
many a Palestinian academic in the U.S.
and many others, who
have written critically
about Israel and Palestine
have paid and continue
to pay a price here.
That is the risk one takes.
Third, perhaps we should all
have a little more humility
about the world historical
importance of our
scholarship and discipline.
There's a lot of the
anti-boycott call saying that
as anthropologists, what we do is
bring understanding to
the world, et cetera.
Yeah, what we do matters, maybe,
but perhaps it doesn't
matter all that much.
The call for a boycott
is a political call.
It's a call for us to think
about something that might
matter more than our discipline,
our research, and for that matter,
our academic careers.
I would hope that we would
have the abilty to stand
back and see the bigger picture.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- (clears throat)
Oh, this is it.
Oh.
Okay, I am sick and tired,
sick and tired of the
accusation of anti-Semitism
against those of us who
support the boycott campaign
and I want to speak to that accusation.
I support this boycott as a Jew,
as someone who grew up as
an Orthodox religious Jew
and as someone who was
taught by my socialist
Orthodox rabbi that Judaism
stands for social justice.
It's my passionate support of this boycott
comes from my belief that Judaism
now stands, at least as
represented by Israel,
stands for the opposite,
and it's my support for boycott
is my call to Judaism
to live up to its promise of
social justice, that
that's what we stand for.
It's taken me a long,
long, long, long time
to get to this position.
I grew up as an ardent
supporter of Israel,
no matter what.
We all had that position,
what I call Israel No Matter What It Does.
We were taught that
these, all of these Arabs,
we were not allowed to
call them Palestinians,
we didn't even use that term,
all these Arabs were terrorists.
We were taught that they were just Arabs
and could go to any of
the other Arab countries.
Why do they need Palestine?
Which was, in itself,
a perverted admission
that Israel was taking their land.
We were taught that they hated Jews
and that this was just part of a long line
of anti-Jewish racism that ran all the way
from the expulsion from Spain in 1492
all the way to the present,
one long line of anti-Semitism.
So, it's taken me a long
time to unlearn those
ideological messages
and to learn what actually,
actually is the truth
of what's going on on the ground
with the Israeli occupation,
and I have to say,
it's really personally,
extremely painful for me.
As a Jew, to change the
way you think about Israel,
as an American Jew, is not like deciding
to vote Republican instead of Democrat.
It's really about pulling your insides out
and rethinking what you thought you were
and what you think is going on there.
We were taught to identify
so closely with Israel
in all ways that we conducted our lives
as Jews in the United States,
and it's been a long
unlearning process for me,
and I feel really strongly that
we need, as Jews, to support the boycott,
certainly as American citizens
and certainly as anthropologists.
I cannot abide by what
this Israeli occupation
has led to.
The Task Force Report on the incredible,
what they called, petty,
bureaucratic cruelty,
in the ways that the
Israeli Government resricts
Palestinian academic freedom
is very eloquent, very eloquent.
Even books are hard to get a hold of,
let alone the fact, in 2014,
Israel took advantage of bombing Gaza
to bomb 141 schools,
some of them in the West Bank.
They've closed Birzeit University
for a total of nine years
over the past 15 years,
not to mention what they
do to Palestinian students
in Israeli universities.
All of this, in my
view, is unconscionable,
unconscionable.
We cannot live with this any longer.
Part of the charge of anti-Semitism
has to do with the idea that
why are we picking on Israel?
So that's a common refrain.
Why are we picking on Israel?
I've thought long and
hard about that objection,
and I feel that there are
several answers to that,
but the main one is, when people say,
"Why are you picking on Israel?"
They already assume we're
talking about a land
for Jews only.
And completely erasing the
presence of Palestinians
in that question.
This is an internal call for boycott,
internal to the Israeli occupation.
There's no part of Palestine, really,
that's not under Israeli occupation,
let alone Palestinians
living within the 67 borders.
This is an internal call, so when you say,
"Why pick on Israel?"
I want to turn the question around.
Those who object to why pick on Israel?
Need to defend the fact
that they want to continue
a regime of racial hierarchy,
that spawns racial violence,
a regime in which Jews have special rights
that others do not have.
I want to hear a defense of that regime.
Recently, at a conference at UCLA,
Saree Makdisi said that he
feels much more comfortable
being in conversation with Israeli Jews
who are quite willing
to admit what's going on
on the ground, but still support
a Jewish state,
that they're much more
honest than a lot of
American Jews who hear
no evil, see no evil,
speak no evil,
that we live in an
ideological bubble in which
we refuse to recognize
what is actually going on
on the ground.
Once you recognize what
is actually going on
on the ground,
if you then want to support a Jewish state
that is a democracy for Jews only,
that's a racial hierarchy,
then that's a position you take.
But this is not about picking on Israel.
This is actually
the fact that because of U.S. support,
we have been unable to criticize Israel,
unable to make anything happen,
and that's why we have
come to this boycott.
This is a grassroots, ground up,
international campaign to finally, finally
make Israel recognize
full Palestinian rights,
both within the 67 borders,
outside, but within the occupation,
and the right of refugees to return.
This is a grassroots
campaign mainly because
of the role the U.S. Government has played
in supporting whatever
it is that Israel does,
under the name of dialogue,
since the Oslo Accords.
Dialogue has been that
way of maintaining the status quo.
Recently, as some of you know,
I do research in China.
Israel has been becoming very close,
the Israeli Government to
the Chinese Government.
They've been selling
them a lot of weapons.
So I want to,
I have been trying to start
a conversation in China
to let them know about
this boycott campaign.
So, I had a small meeting with a few of my
intellectual friends who
are on the left in China,
recently, to discuss
how I could start this
conversation going in China,
just to let people know what
is actually going on here,
which is not getting reported
in the Chinese press,
and, one of those people
then interviewed me
and wanted to publish that interview,
but another person who
is on the left in China
then, after I left China and
came back to the United States,
told her not to do that
and that they can't discuss
the boycott issue in China.
And, so, now we're thinking
of other ways to do this,
but what was so eerie about
that is that it really
echoes what's going on in Israel,
so they have criminalized
speech about boycott.
So I found the resonance, with China,
completely (chuckles) telling.
And eerie.
So, I support the boycott.
I've come to this position over many years
and I think it's really clear to all of us
that this is the only way to really put
international, non-violent
pressure on Israel
to end its violation of
Palestinian human rights.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you and thank you to
the organizers of this panel
for inviting me to be here.
Particularly, thank you to those members
of Triple A
who have moved this boycott resolution
in the way that you have.
We are moving a similar resolution
through the Modern Language
Association right now
and I can tell you that we are leaping
to emulate your example and
the extraordinary cogency
with which you proceeded.
It's almost to the day, six years,
and two further violent incursions
since Israel's Operation Cast Lead rained
the firepower of one of
the world's most advanced
military forces on the
open air prison of Gaza.
Then, some 1400 Palestinians,
mostly civilians were killed
in that act of collective
punishment, and at least
23 educational institutions
were destroyed or severely damaged.
In response to this
extraordinarily disproportionate
offensive, the U.S. Congress
passed a Senate resolution
in support of Israel
that was a tissue of
mendacity and half-truths.
Only four very courageous
representatives dissented.
In the summer of 2014,
after a campaign that
killed 2400 Gazan residents,
none dissented.
Appalled at the brutality of Cast Lead,
and observing the utter
closure of the political sphere
to any serious criticism of
Israel's policies and practices,
a number of U.S. academics
concluded that it was
time to endorse the Palestinian
call for the boycott
of Israeli academic and
cultural institutions
and invited their
colleagues to do likewise,
as you heard, (inaudible) was part of that
organizing commencement.
Where the political process is blocked,
by money, power or influence,
we have no option but to
activate a civil society movement
to educate and change the discourse.
The divestment movement
did that in the 1980s
when the Reagan administration
was committed to what
it called constructive
engagement with South Africa.
Now, six years since Cast
Lead, several scholarly
associations, as you know,
including the American
Studies Association,
the Association for
Asian American Studies,
and the Native American and
Indigenous Studies Association,
together with my religious
groups and now trades unions,
have endorsed that call for boycott
and begun to prove the effectiveness
of such a grassroots movement.
In the furious response
to such endorsements,
with a resort to authoritarianism,
intimidation and spurious legal threats,
what the boycott actually calls for
has been misrepresented,
as you've already heard,
sometimes deliberately and maliciously,
but you will know whether
you've read the ASA statement
or those of PACBI itself,
or those now produced
by the Triple A's boycott proponents,
that what is called for is
a boycott of institutions
whose complicity in Israel's
regime of discrimination,
occupation, and dispossession,
is a matter of very
well documented record.
Complicity is not a vague charge
but a description of the
operative involvement
of Israeli institutions of all kinds,
but not excluding its universities,
in the maintenance and
furthering of occupation,
dispossession, and discrimination
against Palestinians.
Universities do not and
should not get a free pass
in the name of an academic freedom
they neither respect nor uphold,
when it comes to Palestinian
scholars and students.
None the less, as you've heard,
the boycott does not call
for and does not espouse
the bocott of individual faculty in Israel
or anywhere else.
Not only does it not prevent intellectual
and scholarly exchanges,
it positively encourages them.
Indeed since the movement
for an academic boycott
has gained visibility,
public discussion and debate
about the issue that was
too long the third rail
of academia, as well as of politics,
has become not only
possible but even normal.
Is it this discussion that
Israel and its supporters
see as such an existential
threat, as they call it?
In the short time that I have,
I don't wish to defend
the boycott movement,
a non-violent, human rights-based movement
for freedom, equality, and justice,
one that opposes a regime
of exceptional and systemic
inequity, exclusion, dispossession,
and brazen colonial
expansion, needs no defense.
But I do want to say what
I think this movement
actually represents.
The call for BDS issued by
the overwhelming majority
of Palestinian civil
society movements in 2005
takes seriously the
fundamental moral and political
priciple that rights
cannot be doled out in full
to some and only partially to the others,
whether on the basis
of ethnicity, religion,
or any other ascription of identity.
Accordingly, BDS seeks the recognition
of the human and civil
rights of all Palestinians,
those in the occupied
and blockaded West Bank
and Gaza,
those within Israel,
and those in exile in the diaspora.
The furious outcry that
insists that to turn to
the time-honored strategy of boycott
infringes on the academic
freedoms of Israeli scholars
serves to disguise what
should be the glaring outrage
that the freedoms of Palestinians,
and not only their academic freedoms,
are daily violated to
maintain the privileges
of one ethnoreligious group.
More insidiously, on
account of this simple
and surely unexceptional
demand to be considered
fully human and therefore
deserving of rights,
BDS has been accused of covertly
intending the destruction
of the State of Israel
with all the connotations
of genocide or expulsion
that that phrase more
or less openly invokes.
But if a state cannot exist
without the denial of those
rights, as even liberal
Zionists now admit,
then surely, it is for that
state to justify itself,
and not for the movement
that pursues those rights
to do so.
But it's no secret
that what BDS seeks is no more and no less
than Israel's transformation.
It asks Israel actually to
be what it pretends to be,
a normal democracy,
a state of and for all its people,
and a state that respects its obligations,
under international law
and human rights norms.
It does not ask anyone to leave
or to accept less than equal rights.
It asks only the Jewish citizens of Israel
be willing to live on equal
terms with non-Jewish citizens,
with the Palestinian
citizens of that state,
whether Muslim, Christian, or secular,
and to live in a land that
belongs to all its citizens,
free of legalized racial discrimination.
That would be real belonging,
rather than colonial settlement.
This is an invitation, not a threat.
It's an invitation to Israelis,
and indeed to all people,
to realize the emancipatory
potential embedded
in every struggle for justice,
and in every act of local
or international solidarity
with those struggles.
It's an invitation to free
oneself from the painful
contradiction of advocating democracy
and defending and supporting oppression.
It's an invitation to
step out of the meshes
of a colonial Zionist project
that has become a nightmare,
ever more rigid and repressive,
and to embrace the
possibilities and the risks
that true democracy entails.
It is, for all of us, an
invitation to bring home
the lessons of the Palestinian struggle,
for the right to education, freedom,
and justice, and to fight
for those here also.
Settler colonialism is a system
of differential privilege.
We should recall that for
any peace process to begin,
white South Africans had to stand down
from their exclusionary racial privileges.
In Northern Ireland too,
Protestants had to relinquish
their monopoly on rule
in order for peace processes to begin.
Some have called these
the costs of peacemaking.
Perhaps it would be better
to think of them as the gifts
peace brings to those
willing to contemplate
cohabitation in a just society,
based on real equality.
Furthermore, in my experience
over the last few years,
to receive that gift has
already been an intellectual
as well as a political lesson.
Over and over again, working
in and with the boycott
movement has confirmed
something that one already knew
if only as a supposition,
activism is not only the
extension of thinking
into the world,
but the reciprocal
transformation of our thought
by an active engagement with that world.
A movement like BDS that is growing
and adapting, even in the
face of increasingly ugly
efforts to repress it
and all it stands for,
obliges invention and creativity.
It becomes, as I have
witnessed again and again,
and am witnessing once
more, here at Triple A,
the crucible for new thinking
about ends and outcomes,
possibilities and potentialities.
Unlike Zionism, BDS is not
becoming ossified and rigid
but continues to reach beyond itself,
to critique its own suppositions,
to imagine what it could be,
not only for Palestinians,
but for all of us to live otherwise.
Such for me is the full
meaning of the boycott.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you so much,
to all our panelists.
I also would like to acknowledge and thank
Lara Deeb, who organized this session
and is listed in the program.
We can now move to Q and A.
There's a microphone in
the middle of the room.
I'll ask that people
please identify themselves
and speak up so that everyone can hear,
and to please keep comments to a minimum
and questions short.
And, I'll stay up here but
I just want to remind people
there are copies of the resolution
as well as FAQs or frequently
asked question sheets
in the back,
as well as a sheet with
highlights from the Triple A
Task Force Report.
Anybody want to step up?
- [Voiceover] My name
is Mark Westmoreland.
I'm at Leiden University.
- Say again?
Sorry, your name?
- [Voiceover] Mark
Westmoreland, Leiden University.
I'm an advocate for resolution number two,
but when I speak with
certain friends who are not,
one of the questions I get is,
or the comments is that
this will have no effect,
that, and even maybe,
playing off a little bit
of what Professor El-Haj said,
as anthropologists, do we
really make a difference?
So I'm wondering how the
panelists might respond
to the effect that we might
have with such a resolution.
Thank you.
- Mmm hmm.
I can add to whatever too.
- There you go.
- Hello, is it on?
Oh.
First of all, I want to be
clear that what I was talking
about is the defense of sort
of substantive scholarship,
that what we can contribute
by continuing research
and kind of coming to
understand a situation
is more important than
taking political action.
Look, I,
the Triple A on its own,
making a decision to boycott
Israeli academic instituions,
of course, would have no effect.
There are two things that
I would keep in mind.
It's part of a growing movement,
and more and more associations
have been doing it,
and I think what has
really struck me about BDS
over the past decade
is it has had a cumulative effect,
and it's beginning to have a momentum
that I would never have predicted.
So, if we were the one
institution making this decision,
who cares?
But it is part of a movement
that is,
that I think is very powerful politically
and symbolically,
because if nothing else,
it's really beginning
to be able to shift the
public conversation, right?
Can we really talk
critically about Israel?
Can we think about
Israel as a racial state?
What does that mean?
And what kinds of obligations we have,
particularly from sitting in the U.S.,
towards that?
The other thing I wanted to say is
there, in the last few days,
it's quite extraordinary.
The Israeli press has picked this up.
Channel 10 had this long report about it.
This morning, Haaretz
has an op-ed about it.
Part of it, I think is
being placed strategically,
but there is a sense that,
there is a sense of panic about this,
and it's certainly a panic,
I mean, the Netanyahu Government has about
the movement as a whole,
but in that panic,
they're not excluding the academic boycott
as insignificant versus the other things.
Clearly, an economic divestment will have
much more profound impact,
if it every happens, substantively,
but it is part of
sort of a,
it is part of a movement
to think about what it
means to isolate the state,
and for them to feel isolated,
even if, primarily,
symbolically, from an academic
point of view, so, I don't
actually think it has no effect
and I think if it really had no effect,
we wouldn't be getting the
pushback we're getting.
- [Host] David?
- Let me just endorse
everything that Nadia just said,
and add a couple of things,
starting with what she last said.
You can measure the effect of any movement
by the amount of coercion
that is directed at it
in order to silence it.
The Israeli Government,
and not just American
Zionist organizations
have targeted BDS,
Netanyahu's cabinet elevated BDS
to a strategic threat about a year ago,
placing it second only
after a nuclear armed Iran
in terms of so-called
existential threats to Israel,
and that's not to sort of say,
look how mighty we are.
On the contrary, but what it is to say
is that the argument that
it's merely symbolic,
and again, I refer back
to what Nadia said,
is very misleading.
The impact of the sports
boycott on South Africa
may in fact have been
psychologically far more important
than the economic boycott,
because it was through
sports that South Africa
felt itself to be connected to the world
of western European democracies
and other settler colonial enterprises
like in the Commonwealth,
and the cutting off of
relationships to sport
was really crucial.
Israel's self image,
its sort of ego ideal, if you like,
is intimately wrapped up
with its academic prowess
and its integration in the
research and scholarship
world of western democracies.
To go after that is actually to
impose a caution
on Israeli scholars of
a very, very deep kind,
and indeed on Israeli society as a whole.
And one of the points
about a boycott movement
is that it can only really be applied
to societies that believe
that they actually have
an open democratic sphere.
There's no point in
trying to boycott China
because, you know,
it is ruled from the top down
and it has therefore very
little impact on a civil society
that could affect anything.
That may change,
and you know, we may be
engaging in a boycott of China
over Tibet.
At the moment, as Nadia said,
that's really not effective.
Israel's having a democratic society,
or at least believing it
has a democratic society
even as it infringes
every tenet of democracy,
means that to be
integrated in that western
democratic cultural sphere is crucial,
so the symbolic effect is
actually profoundly practical
in this instance.
- [Host] And I would just also add,
I personally agree with
both of those points,
but also, this is why I
mentioned the fact that
PACBI, the Palestinian
Academic and Cultural Boycott,
that is the campaign that responded to
in response to this day
to Palestinian civil
society's call for academic
and cultural boycott,
predates the broader BDS
call by a year, right?
So PACBI was founded in 2004
and the broader BDS campaign in 2005.
That tells us that Palestinian
civil society has identified
this as a priority,
and so that question around
effectiveness also, I think,
shortcuts or sort-circuits a recognition
that Palestinian people themselves
have asked for this and
they've thought it through
and so, in a sense, who are we to say
what's effective or not?
And I do agree with the,
the issue around the
charge of merely symbolic
is really just kind of
a joke at this point,
if you looked at even just the backlash
against the American Studies Association.
You've got Netanyahu's legal response,
you also had three different states
trying to move immediately
in their legislatures
to produce punitive, right?
Who's really doing the punishing, right?
Who's really breaching academic freedom?
But the punitive piece is really intense
and that's a response,
but I think the effectiveness, again,
who's looking at whose authority in this?
To identify what they think
actually needs to happen
on the ground.
Other questions?
And people can line up,
that's fine if you want to come up.
I see people back there.
- [Voiceover] Hi, I'm Les Field
from the University of New Mexico,
and I want to thank the panel.
I think this an amazing panel.
I'm a supporter of BDS,
but I think the panel
did an extraordinary job
of making the case, in
a much more profound
and much more thoroughgoing
and really thought-provoking manner,
for all sorts of aspects of BDS
and the challenges to it,
and so, in that light, I
want to ask this question,
and I'm also a person raised in a,
on the borderline between
Conservative and Orthodox
Judaism, and
I really appreciated Doctor
Rofel's remarks about
what that takes to challenge that and,
and how that process takes place and so,
I guess what I'm asking about is a process
in Spanish we call (speaks Spanish),
"consciousness raising," whether the panel
could share with us
in their conversations with other people,
people who react to BDS negatively
or who are pro-supporters of Israel,
what have been that moments
of consciousness raising?
What have you experienced that,
those moments when people
have changed their minds?
And how that has worked?
For me, it was my work in Latin America,
starting in Nicaragua in the late 1970s
and seeing the affects
of Israeli foreign policy
in Latin America,
and the alignment between Israel
and the right-wing regimes
in Argentina and Guatemala
and Nicaragua, et cetera.
That's what brought me
to a different level
of consciousness about Israel
and brought me to Palestine, really,
and so I'm wondering if the
panel could share with us
moments in their interactions
with other people
of consciousness raising
and how that worked.
Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Do you want to say something?
Oh.
- [Host] I have things
to say too, but please,
I defer to the panelists.
- Thank you, Les, that was
a really good quesiton.
The people I talk with
don't often come back to me
to tell me exactly how they have shifted,
but I can see, by who's
been signing the pro-boycott
resolution that people I have talked with
have shifted, and I have to say,
both for Jews and not,
non-Jews,
most, a lot of people
were not paying attention
and for a long time, unless
you actively sought out
information about the Israeli occupation,
there was not a lot of reporting
and so I can't
thank enough the
Anthropology Association's
Task Force for doing a thorough reporting
about the effects of the occupation,
but, so that's within the Association,
people can now have that information.
But in general, I think what has happened
since I've been talking to
people is that they have
sought out the information,
they simply did not know,
and that is a huge shift,
huge, that they seek out the information,
and they actually pay
attention to what's actually
going on on the ground,
and then, as I say, if
they still want to support
a regime for Jews only,
that's then a position they take.
But, once you find that information,
I've seen a lot of
anthropologists in particular,
shift their position
from being against boycott
to signing the boycott,
pro-boycott resolution,
from being uncertain to being supporters
and this has happened
increasingly, so yes,
I agree.
Consciousness raising can't,
there can't be enough of it.
Recently, David Lloyd
organized a conference
at UC Riverside
on the question of
academic freedom in relation
to Palestine/Israel,
and there were two rabbis in the audience
who came up to talk to me afterwards,
and the shift that I see,
among that group is that
they want to try to recover
the liberal Jewish position
within the United States,
which I find really interesting,
and that's symbolized by J Street,
so they're not in favor of the boycott
but they're starting to feel
the pressure to speak out
in favor of a position
that was also silent
and I don't think that position,
I think the time's over for
that position to be effective,
but, I actually praised the person who
belongs to J Street because
they're trying to lobby
the U.S. Congress to
put pressure on Israel
to end the occupation.
They still want to support a state for,
where Jews have special rights, but,
at least they've moved,
so I think the boycott
campaign has made those Jews
speak out to,
so that they also feel
that Judaism stands for
social justices and not
the way it's increasingly
with Israel's Government
being seen these days.
So, I see that as an,
also a positive effect
of the boycott campaign.
- [Host] I would just add briefly,
when I think the,
the narration of one's own turnaround
is really important,
and I really appreciate
people who have been
super honest about that,
I think about Judith Butler for example,
who's, if you look at YouTube,
I mean, there's actual video
where she speaks publicly
about her own resistance
to academic boycott,
and BDS, and what her turnaround was,
and I think those moments,
when people have to do that
kind of self-confonrtation
and self-reflexivity are
really important because
they show where the gaps are.
I spoke with a sociologist
who I won't identify
him without permission,
because he hasn't been public,
but he said that for him,
and actually going back to Nicaragua,
I asked him how he did a turnaround
because he was raised Orthodox and
Israel at all costs,
or for all reasons,
and what he said was
that he was left-aligned
on every single issue except,
really, in support or
solidarity with Palestinians,
and he said that, year
after year, through,
you know, decades, literally,
he said that he kept just
pushing it to the side
and pushing it to the side
and he said it was wrapped up very tightly
and he knew he had put it aside
and he knew he'd have to go look there,
and then one day,
he actually was willing to do that.
But I think that's important work,
I think of Joel Kovel's
work, "Overcoming Zionism,"
really talking about
what it means to do that
and the kind of confrontation and rupture
that it can cause people's lives.
In terms of the,
the consciousness raising and
moments of identification,
I would just add too
that within the context
of the Native American and
Indigenous Studies Association,
a lot of scholars, whether
they themselves are
indigenous or not, really understood,
it really resonated when looking beyond
the occupation to settler colonialism
and the settler colonial roots of Israel,
and really pressing to think
about Christian Zionism
and how it undergirds all
our laws in this country.
I mean, Christian Zionist laws,
Johnson v. M'Intosh of 1823
has never been overturned,
it's cited in every single
Native legal case to this day,
and it's totally grounded
in the Papal bulls.
I mean, we're living by
Christian Medieval law
to govern the domination
of indigenous peoples here
and I think about Steven
Newcomb's important work
of talking about it, not just
as a doctrine of discovery
but the doctrine of Christian discovery
and that for that reason,
the separation,
or the claims of the
separation of church and state
in this country are actually a farce,
if you look at indigenous politics
and indigenous sovereignty and land.
And I think,
the other thing I just
want to call attention to,
again, thinking about
who's being punished,
where's the punitive here?
You know, we look at
Steven Salaita's case,
the scholar who was dehired
a year and a half ago
for his Twitter feed that had been
policed really,
and the Israeli,
the supporters of Israel,
the donors at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign that put pressure
on the Board of Trustees to dehire him,
you know, you've got to make that link,
it's, people have rallied
around him on the basis
of academic freeom,
he's called attention to the expansion
of the neoliberal university,
and then there's the Palestine piece,
but there's also the American
Indian Studies piece, right?
He was hired to be in
American Indian Studies,
they were changing the
name to Indigenous Studies,
and it's his work that has
really been the linkages
between U.S. and Israeli
settler colonialism
that are looking at that ideology,
the political ideology of divine right
as a justificatory narrative
for domination of indegenous peoples.
Next question, hi.
- [Voiceover] Hello, my name is Dina Amar.
I'm at Yale University.
I'm a PhD student.
Thank you, all, for your
comments and insights.
And also for being incredibly forthright
about the limitations and
the possibilities that BDS
envisages.
So my question is related to something
that Lisa Rofel had mentioned about
growing up and
saying, or characterizing the situation
as something between Israelis and Arabs.
And how that maybe relates to the sort of
symbolic
power that BDS has.
So,
as a supporter of BDS,
I'm always struck by
talking about it and then
realizing that we don't,
like, me and the person
who may be averse to BDS
or doesn't agree with BDS,
we don't share the same grammar, right?
And so I will say,
"Well, okay, so what
about what's happening
"to the Palestinians?"
And they'll respond by saying,
"Oh, well, the Arab-Israeli
conflict, XYZ,"
or, characterizing
something that's happening
in Jerusalem as, "Okay,
well, kids are terrorists
"and they have knives"
and so on and so forth.
And so, there's kind of this
strange
conflict of reality, right?
And I'm just wondering how
you guys have seen BDS
sort of change the grammars,
and that sort of transform
the symbolic violences
in terms of the way that we talk about
this particular case?
And,
yeah, so that's my question, thank you.
- Thank you, Dina.
- You pose an interesting
and a difficult question.
I think that
from the outset, those of us who supported
the boycott of Israeli
academic institutions
have recognized
that while we may or may
not win in particular
associations or while SJP may or may not
win divestment movements,
the very practice of
engaging with the goal
of boycott or divestment
is a means to educating
people so that the kind of
people that you're talking to
have at least a window
into the alternative world
that they're so busy denying.
It is also the case that
there are people with whom
one can have no dialogue,
and sometimes they call that dialogue,
because they're not willing to recognize
that the condition of
dialogue is to stand off
from the privileges that protect you
from hearing the other person,
but I,
even there,
there's some hope,
ironically, because, what
is actually happening
when people close off from dialogue
is that they are following the logic of
oppressive thinking and
of oppressive practice,
which is that as you get challenged,
you have nowhere to go,
if you are not willing to
stand off from that privilege,
but into greater and greater rigidity
and greater and greater violence,
so that,
in fact what we're seeing now, in Israel,
and among Israel
supporters in this country
is a greater and greater rigidity
which is not the sign of their power
but actually the sign of their weakness.
So that retrenchment into not hearing
is actually the sign of the end days,
if you get what I mean,
and so, there will be
occasions when we simply can't
engage in dialogue.
They will just want to shut us up
or they will just want to shut
their eyes and their ears.
But, that means, in fact that
they are being pushed away
from a position in which
they have completely
dominated reality,
and are actually being
forced to confront, for once,
what it actually looks
like from the other side.
I think in my experience that most people,
as they begin to have to
confront an uncomfortable
reality, resist, and hate it,
but the discomfort is
the beginning of thought,
and for many people,
that discomfort will
not make them snail-like
retract their feelers
and go into their shells
but actually become the
stimulus to thinking
of other potentials and other
possibilities in their world.
- Just want to say
something really briefly,
'cause David said it
much better than I will.
I want to say one thing
and then just point you
to a report that came out
recently.
I mean, I do think, I
mean as anthropologists,
we think a lot about, you know,
the notion of cultural incommensurability.
Right?
The radical alterity.
And I've thought a lot
about why we don't talk
about political incommensurability.
I mean, I think there
are moments where there's
a kind of radical impossibility
that one's starting from these
very different assumptions
and I think that,
for me, what BDS has done
is gotten that argument
out in the public domain,
in a way,
you know when I first moved to the U.S.,
it was kind of stunning.
I mean, I came for college,
that I,
there was not only just no conversation,
but I could barely tell
people I was a Palestinian
without people attacking me,
or assuming that that already
was a political statement,
an anti-Semitic political statement.
And things shifted off
and on over the years.
Clearly, but there has
been a kind of dramatic
conversation that has,
that has emerged over
the past several years,
and sometimes, ironically,
I think it's because the more that
those against BDS attack it in public,
they've made it into a
bigger and bigger movement.
In some sense, if they'd
shut up and ignored it
in the beginning, it
might not have mattered,
so just tactically, it was not smart.
But, what I wanted to point you to,
which I think is a sign of
the impact this is having,
is there's a group called Palestine Legal,
which is sort of an offshoot of the Center
for Constitutional Rights,
and they recently came
out with a long report
which is a documentation
of all the legal cases
that they have been involved in
that are in,
that involve trying to silence students
and scholars, on the
question of Palestine,
and a lot of it is focused on BDS.
I mean, a lot of those cases,
so Students for Justice in Palestine,
they get shut down by universities,
and it's kind of,
it's an extraordinary report
because it, I think, both shows,
it shows both the breadth of a movement
that this is but also a kind of hysteria,
the amount of effort
that is going into shutting this down,
through
sometimes legal channels, Title IX,
often by pressuring
administrations at universities,
is a sign that people are
worried about it, right?
I really would recommend
looking at that report.
It's actually very good.
- [Roberto] If I could, if
I could add to both of the
last comments,
one of the things that occurs to me
is that this where anthropology can really
make a contribution,
because one of the things
we're trained to do
is to be able to translate culture
to those who don't necessarily
understand concepts
from different societies,
so, I mean, in this, we have,
I think a very important role to play.
It,
I want to go back to Les
Field's question about
moments of consciousness changing
or raising,
and I think one thing that
almost everyone has hit on
is the question of ignorance,
and one thing that I'm stunned
to hear my colleagues say
over and over again as well,
I don't know much about it,
I'm a Latin American-ist,
or, I'm a Southeast,
ask me about Southeast Asia
and I can help you out,
and just on some very basic levels,
having to do with the
amount of U.S. funding
of the Israeli military and so forth,
so a part of our task is,
on the collegial level
and with students is to
really overcome that ignorance
that our media has done such
a good job of cultivating,
over the decades,
and I think it doesn't take much to see,
for people, once they
have that shroud lifted,
to really start to speak
a different language
and to see things in a
radically different way.
The other variable here
that I think's important
is that of fear.
It's, I think it's much easier
to be willfully ignorant
if there's a lurking sense of fear
in the background,
and there have been enough cases
over the years for people
to really understand that
although it's not something
that's often talked about,
not publicly, so,
I would say that helping
people to the extent
that one can overcome that sense of fear
which is often unspoken
is an important part
of getting them to speak
that different language
to which you were referring.
- [Host] I might just add briefly, too,
thinking about Bruce
Robbins' film, which you
can see in its entirety on his website.
It's called "Some of My
Best Friends Are Zionists."
He's a Professor at Columbia University,
and interviews artists and intellectuals
who are Jewish Americans
narrating their own
break with Zionist political ideology.
The other thing that I just
want to go back to briefly
and take the next question is,
going, like kind of intersecting
between Dina's question
and the first question
around effectiveness.
I think that what I hear you saying,
David and Nadia, around the resistance
and being able to kind of
gauge where things are at,
depends, you know, kind
of looking at the blowback
as a form of measure,
I think that's true, but also,
I think anti-normalization work in general
is hard to quantify, and so,
when I say anti-normalization,
it's that refusal to just
pretend everything's okay
and that dialogue will take care of it.
For me, that has included, you know,
actually, and as an individual,
if someone self-identifies as a Zionist,
I'm already not gonna
normalize it through dialogue.
I don't have dialogue in debates with
avowed white supremacists.
Why would I, with somebody
who's another kind
of supremacist?
And so I think the
anti-normalization piece,
we know what that's like
in all different levels
in the kind of pretend
game that everything's
sort of okay and that it can be rational,
and I think this is linked to
the, what you're raising, Roberto,
around people not knowing,
and I think that's part of the shroud
is that, you know, this
is some ancient religious
feud or ethnic conflict
that's been going on
thousands of years,
and how it's been able
to mask itself as that,
rather than looking at this
as a settler colonial project
that mobilizes occupation in the service
of settler colonialism,
mobilizes Apartheid policies,
it's in the service of
settler colonialism,
and I think once we actually
start getting at the roots
of that, we have to
actually deal with it here,
ethically as well, in this land.
- [Voiceover] Hi, my name is Randa Wahbe
and I'm a graduate student at Harvard.
Thank you so much for your presentation.
I wanted to ask if you
could elaborate a little bit
about Palestinian scholars who are housed
in Israeli academic institutions
and how the Triple A boycott
and academic boycott in general
can actually support
their academic freedom?
Thank you.
- Okay, so that's always the thing pulled
out of the bag.
Well, first of all,
Palestinian scholars at
Israeli institutions,
which I want to note
there aren't many of them,
will not,
nobody is boycotting them
individually as scholars
and the parameters of
the boycott don't change,
so I don't,
I guess I don't really know,
I don't really know what else to say.
I would also note that
Palestinian scholars
at Israeli institutions,
the majority of them that
I know support the boycott,
and it's not aimed at them
as individual scholars.
Anybody else want to say anything?
There you go.
- Just, one little thing
to add to what Nadia said,
which is that, as with
all Palestinian scholars,
we should be making our best endeavor
to bring them here,
to fund the more possible,
to give them access to our campuses
and to bring them out to give talks,
and so forth, because,
one of the most effective
organizing tools I've found
is to have people who come from Palestine,
whether we're talking about Israel proper,
as they say, or whether
we're talking about
the West Bank or Gaza,
to have them actually
speak at our conferences,
and then, when we've
arranged for them to come,
to make sure that they
tour at least the region
within which that conference is happening
and that's a way of offering support
and making the boycott proactive
and not merely, as it sometimes seems,
something that's negative and prohibitive.
- [Host] Do you want
to mention maybe Nadera
and Ahmad at the ASA...?
- Oh, yeah for example,
we've had at the ASA,
since 2009 actually,
Omar Barghouti, Lisa Taraki,
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,
Ahmad Sa'di, who's at Ben-Gurion,
you know, that was
actually over five years,
how we organized for
the boycott resolution.
- I think for those of
you who are concerned
about Palestinian scholars in Israel,
I would encourage you to
lobby the Israeli Government
to decriminalize speech about boycott.
That would help Palestinian scholars
in Israel.
For those of you concerned
about Palestinian scholars
in Israel, I would urge
you to urge Israeli
academic institutions to hire more than
not even 2% of tenured academics
are Palestinian,
whereas they're 20% of the population
within the 67 borders.
I would urge you to lobby
those academic institutions
to hire more Palestinian scholars.
For those of you who are concerned about
Palestinian scholars'
academic freedom in Israel,
I would urge you to lobby
Israeli academic students,
academic institutions to not criminalize
their Palestinian students'
speech about the Nachba.
For those of you who are concerned about
Palestinian scholars' academic freedom
in Israeli academic institutions,
I would urge you to urge
Jewish Israeli scholars
to start citing their work.
- [Host] One thing I'll add.
When I went on the USACBI delegation
in January, 2012, that I mentioned
in my introductory remarks,
we were primarily in East Jerusalem
and the West Bank,
with the exception of a day trip to Haifa,
to meet with Palestinian scholars
at Mada al-Carmel, which
is the only institution
in 48 that doesn't receive,
the only higher education institute,
it's a research institute
that doesn't receive
a cent of Israeli Government funding,
and the five of us,
we were hosted by Majid Shihadeh,
who co-organized the delegation
and he's a Professor who,
he holds Israeli citizenship
as a Palestinian from 48,
but teaches at Birzeit.
He said, "You know, you're gonna be,
"you're gonna be sitting
around the board table
"with scholars who are
Palestinian who teach
"in these institutions that
you're advocating boycott for,"
and we were,
and it was really kind of a switch
because up until that point,
most of us were board
members at that point,
or some became board members after,
those of us on the delegation,
and had been challenged around
why do you support this?
And had to answer to our role
within USACBI,
but here we were being asked
by Palestinian academics
at the institution subject to the boycott
and, you know, they definitely
put us on alert,
we were on the defensive
and we had to kind of answer
to their questions,
but as the discussion wrapped around,
one of the concerns that
they actually came to,
and this is about a dozen scholars,
which might just represent about everybody
in 48 in terms of how
few Palestinian scholars
there are,
they actually said that one
of the things that they were
worried about in terms of the call,
you know, the three prongs,
the tenets of international law that BDS
and PACBI call into, you know,
it's a principled stance,
when I say it's grounded in
normative international law,
to abide by international law
whether it's around
stopping the colonization,
further colonization of lands,
the question of de-occupation,
the question of equality,
and,
Apartheid laws and then the
question of the right of return,
all citing international law,
and one of the things that came
out of that long discussion
was that they worry
that it actually reified
the existence of Israel,
so they had a very radical critique,
and they insisted that
we go beyond, you know,
people use do-occupation as a shorthand,
even though BDS deals with
way more than just occupation,
but really, actually,
really wanted to get at the
settler colonial roots of that project,
so their critique was
actually quite radical
in wondering of, you know,
calling Israel into question
to abide by international law,
might it reify the actual State of Israel?
Next question.
- [Voiceover] Hi, my name is Susan Kahn,
thank you for your presentations.
I think I may be the
first person to not be for
the boycott resolution
to speak here today.
I'm am American Jew.
I wasn't brainwashed by my Hebrew school
because I never went to Hebrew school,
but this is,
and there's so,
there's so much to say, right?
But this is a point that
I'm really curious about
and hoping that the
panelists can respond to.
As an American,
forget as an American Jew,
as an American, who, where my government,
in my name, has committed so many
atrocities all around the world
and been responsible for so many
innocent people's deaths,
just in the last 15
years in the so-called,
you know, Wars on Terror,
sitting in, you know, in
an American university
with all of the benefits and
privileges that come with that,
I don't know how I can't
start at home first.
Right?
So, if my,
if Israelis, if boycotting
Israeli universities
is going to
help bring an end to,
I'm not,
I'm not blind to the fact
and I'm not not acknowledging
and I've spent time
in the region, that there are
horrible, oppressive injustice,
unjust things that are
going on on a daily basis
and people suffering on a daily basis
in ways I really can't imagine
because I have a pretty
good life in America,
but how can I,
how can we not start at home?
- Thank you for that question.
I find it a slightly strange question,
because it assumes that
working for the boycott
of Israeli academic institutions
is all that all of us do.
I mean (chuckles),
I don't know why you
assume that we didn't start
at home, and indeed as
several of the panelists
have already said, to
engage in the boycott
is to start at home, because really,
the homeland of Israeli
Zionism is actually America,
at the moment.
Memmi in his wonderful
"Colonizer and the Colonized"
comments that every settler
colony has a motherland
and that that motherland
is something that they
have to imagine in increasingly
conservative terms.
Well, we see that coming
home to roost right now
as Zionism and its flailing
attempt to beat the boycott
movement has turned back to try to convert
the United States into an
increasingly conservative polity.
Memmi, as so often, has an
incredible predictive power
in his analyses,
but the fact is that
international solidarity
doesn't work like that.
It really is not about starting at home
and then going elsewhere,
starting at the local and
moving out to the global.
We learnt that lesson in the Apartheid,
anti-Apartheid movement in the 1980s
when what we observed happening was
that people who engaged in what had become
a kind of moral struggle.
All politics in the United States seems
to have to work through
morality rather than
political analysis and the
anti-Apartheid movement
was no exception,
began actually to start
recognizing that there was
Apartheid in American universities,
and to a very large extent,
I think the multi-cultural
movement of the 1980s, with
all its limitations and faults,
grew out of the perception
of Apartheid on campus,
and I remember being at Berkeley
and watching the graduate
students beginning to come
to anti-Apartheid
demonstrations with those signs.
So, there's a kind of
lazy thinking in the idea
that one starts at home
and then moves into
international solidarity
because actually the process is reciprocal
and always has been, and, you know,
our colleague Robin Kelley
points out this very, very
powerfully in his analysis
of the relationship
of the black radical internationalism
to the Palestinian movement.
The black radical internationalism
integrates with the Palestinian movement
precisely because there has always been
that transaction between
contesting domestic oppression
in the United States
and, you know, contesting
opporession elsewhere
which the United States supports
as part of the atrocities that you named.
- I want to just say, briefly,
I also think it's,
I mean I think as an argument,
it is a sort of red herring to be honest,
because I do think the idea
that we are not involved
in other political
commitments and struggles
is just not true,
but I want to say two other things.
I mean, currently, I'm
actually writing a book
on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
but, I also think, yeah,
the U.S. is not only responsible,
I mean, is responsible for
extraordinary amounts of violence
around the world,
including the violence
that the Israeli state
inflicts upon its population.
I mean, upon the Palestinian population,
and so, this is a call for
Americans to be held to account
and there are movements at Columbia
and this started with the second intifada,
calling on Columbia to divest as well.
This is not just the,
I mean, in other words,
let us be clear.
In holding Israeli institutions,
academic institutions responsible,
one is saying
that as academics we are not
somehow outside of the social and economic
and political world in which we live,
and to make an exception
of academic institutions
and support the divestment
from other elements
of the economy is an incredible
statement of privilege.
In other words, we shouldn't be affected
but everybody else whose jobs might be
could be, and it is,
and we are doing it precisely because,
as American citizens, we
bear a very particular
responsibility for Israeli violence,
including us Palestinians
who are American citizens,
right?
So this isn't just some random,
I mean not only, on the one hand,
we're responding to a call,
which is a call for solidarity,
but it's a response to a
call that recognizes American
violence in the world
and recognizes how central Israel is
to the way,
America's support for Israel
is to the way in which
not just Palestinians
are living their lives
but the way in which
the entire Middle East
has been destabilized for 50 years.
The horrors of which we see now.
Right?
- I would just add that I think
that question, once again,
asks us to make an exception for Israel
and I'm not willing to
make that exception.
- [Host] I would just
also add that the flipside
of that same question is about assuming
that we're exceptionalizing
U.S. domination
in the globe,
and I think the home,
it begs a question of
what constitutes home,
and I think what the
comments have pointed out
is that Israel is part of that
sort of starting at home
because Israel is a client state.
I find this question to be so peculiar too
because usually,
what underlies it is sort of
an implicit charge of hypocrisy
and I always wonder what home
people are talking about.
I mean, I did get at the
actual roots of the domination
of indigenous peoples in this country.
If that's not home,
you know, we're on Cheyenne-Arapahoe lands
and we're in one of the
biggest Indian killer states
in this country.
This is a state of
complete ethnic cleansing
and indigenous removal.
You know, I always wonder,
is that what people are talking about?
So people want to,
do people really want to
attend to indigenous violence
here, or maybe occupation?
Should we look at Puerto
Rico, Hawaii, Guam,
the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa,
the Commonwealth of the
Northern Mariana Islands?
I do.
You know?
You want to talk about Apartheid?
Yeah, let's look at
anti-blackness and incarceration,
you know?
So, I don't know actually
people in this struggle
who aren't actually committed
to looking at all of that
including U.S. global wars of aggression.
- [Roberto] If I could just,
if I could just add briefly,
in this,
first of all, I appreciate the question
because I do think it's important
that we hear from people that are against
the resolution and
against, more broadly, BDS,
and I want to speak
not just to the boycott
but to BDS itself.
Yesterday, as I mentioned
in my portion today,
our Associated Students passed
a divestment resolution.
It was a difficult struggle
and it's the first in
the CSU system to do that
and hopefully, there
will be more coming soon,
but one of the things
I observed on my campus
is that this was not done
just in isolation.
This was not of one issue
dialogue that came about,
but the reason it passed
was not so much because
of Palestinian students at our university,
of which there are a good number,
or even activist students,
but students that are undocumented,
of which there are many,
or whose parents are undocumented,
are Native American students,
the Black Lives Matter
movement on our campus,
and what I've witnessed
on our university was
BDS serving as a kind of
vehicle for the coalescing
of these very different organizations,
most of which are dealing
with issues here at home,
so BDS, I agree with the other speakers,
the other comments that were made,
we're deeply complicit
in what's been happening
in Israel, from military support
on down the line,
but if you look at what's
happening on the ground
with the mobilization
around this movement,
it really is bringing
home a lot of the issues
and this is the way
organizations get built up.
If you think about, historically,
about coalition building in this country
and others,
it's when people who normally
are divided by issues,
divided among different issues
start speaking with one
another and coalescing
and making things happen
one step at a time.
- [Host] That's like at Wellesley
and divestment politics
have been linked with
prison divestment and
fossil fuel divestment,
so there's a three-prong campaign
and that's the students
making those connections,
epistemologically and politically.
- [Voiceover] Thank you, Chair.
And thank you panelists
for your interesting
interventions.
I particularly appreciate
the personal testimonies
that we heard.
- Can you speak up, please?
- [Voiceover] Yes, I'm Dan
Rabinowitz from Tel Aviv
University.
There's a lot,
a lot of what has been
said here I concur with,
and the analysis of
the situation in Israel
and Palestine,
I join them here.
I identify with Lisa's point
about how the anti-Semitism
argument is completely irrelevant,
and also, the singling out of Israel,
I don't think that it's really
interesting intellectually
or in any way contributes to this debate.
I also agree about the point that
BDS has propelled the debate and awareness
of Israel/Palestine in
a very positive way.
It's the leap of faith
and logic into the boycott
that I want to question here,
and I will only make here,
only a minor point,
not really a major one,
but one that I think is
worth thinking about,
and that speaks to something the panelists
said about many,
more than one of the panelists
said about the distinction
between individuals and institutions.
I'm wearing a badge and all of us are,
which carries my name and
the name of my university.
This is our,
this is our tag.
This is part of our identity,
not only in this conference but generally.
It is how we present
ourselves and how others
perceive us.
Their promotion procedure
and their credibility
of our universities seep
into our personal careers
and our,
and vice versa.
We build our universities in that way,
so, by boycotting our institutions,
we are also
creating a personal affront.
It's part of our identity.
I'm saying it in an emotional way.
I am feeling it right now.
And I take the point
that this is not about
our humble careers and lives,
but I just wanted to note it.
And to say that this is one of the ways
we have to complicate some of the
tenets of the boycott is this
distinction between the
individual and the institution.
My question to the panel is my
precise question is coming any moment,
I just wanted to say just
one more thing about this,
the need to decriminalize
speech about boycott.
It's unnecessary because
speaking about the boycott
is not a criminal offense in Israel.
It was legislated in
2011 as a civil offense,
making it very easy for one,
for an institution or a
person to sue another,
but they have to show that they
had the financial damage from it,
so nobody sued,
and it's not effective, but
it's not a criminal offense.
My question to the panelists,
especially since--
- We're overtime, so if you
could get to your question.
- [Voiceover] At 1:45 in this
room, there will be a panel
that will be presenting
another point of view.
Are any of you planning to attend it?
Thank you.
- It is a violation of Israel law.
I don't believe anybody
said it was criminal, right?
- [Lisa] I did say decriminalize.
- [Host] Decriminalize.
- Yes, well, you could technically
say it's not a criminal
offense, I do understand
what you're saying,
but it has silenced speech
and we've had that report--
- [Voiceover] (yells inaudibly)
- [Host] Wait, excuse me.
- Yes.
- [Host] Excuse me.
We're at 9:50.
This session is over time.
We're not in a place right
now where we're cross talking.
We're going to hear from
the panelists who want to
respond to this question,
and then we'll adjourn
and for those of you
that need to slip out now
to get to another session,
I want to remind you that resolution two,
which we urge you to vote yes on,
will be presented tomorrow
night at the business meeting
at 6:15 in the Convention
Center Mile High Ballrooms
number two and three.
Panelists?
- So I'm not really
answering the question of
am I going to that panel?
Because I'm actually on
another thing I have to be at,
but I want to say one thing about,
I mean, as I said in my comments
and I don't know if you were here,
clearly, there is no way
to completely draw the line
between institutions and individuals.
BDS has made,
done as many backwards
somersaults as it can
to not do what South Africa did,
and yes, there will be
a small price to be paid
and I think anybody who's progressive,
an Israeli Jew who
claims to be progressive
should be willing to pay a small price.
The question of personal identification
with one's university,
I don't
identify that way with my university,
and it just strikes me that
if that,
if you are that personally
identified with your university
that this is somehow, like, personally
an assault on you,
that's something you might
need to struggle with.
I don't think that's the problem of,
I don't think that's our problem
calling with the boycott.
That's a matter of really
thinking more critically
about your identification
with your university.
- Thank you, Nadia.
I'm not sure that many of us on this panel
identify deeply with our institutions.
That aside, let's be,
try to be a little clearer
about what academic freedom
guarantees and what it doesn't guarantee.
Academic freedom guarantees
the right to research,
publish, and to speak in public
and to teach.
It does not guarantee
you personal comfort.
It certainly does not
guarantee you privilege
in relation to other ethnic groups.
It does not guarantee you the right
to say that other
people's academic freedom
is less valuable than mine
because it makes me a bit unhappy
to be targeted by a
boycott, institutionally
or indeed, individually.
To be a settler colonial person, I know,
because I grew up in
Ireland as a Protestant,
is not a comfortable position to occupy
and it takes some work to
move from a settler colonial
defense of one's privileges
into a position where one agrees
it is time to live with
other people on equal terms
rather than holding onto my privilege.
Those are things that we have to do
but they're not protected
by academic freedom.
Academic freedom is very restricted
in what it respects.
- Yes, I'm planning to go to the panel.
- [Host] Roberto, any closing thoughts?
- I'll be there too.
- [Host] Please, we are due to vote yes
on resolution number two.
Thank you very much for
attending this session.
(audience applauds)
