American campuses and the Israel-Palestine conflict

“I had just turned eleven in 1948 when the Zionists occupied my hometown, Beisan. We had no army to protect us. There was no battle, no resistance, no killing; we were simply taken over, occupied, on Wednesday, 12 May, 1948.” –  Rev. Naim Stifan Ateek, “Justice, and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation”

My earliest memories are punctuated by events from what was always termed, reflecting the American (and European) imperial perspective, “the Middle East”. My family are avid news watchers and readers, so some of my earliest childhood memories are of seeing shells exploding in Beirut on the evening news. The Iranian Revolution and the hostages in the US Tehran embassy dominated the first US Presidential election that I clearly remember, from 1980. All through the 1980s, my memories are punctuated by events such as the assassination of Egyptian President, Mohamed Anwar Sadat, in 1981, the Beirut Marine barracks bombing in 1983 and the 1st Palestinian Intifada’s eruption in 1987.

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My first year as a university student was marked by the 1st Gulf War, and I joined the thoroughly ineffective protests against that US military action. Within several years, my general interest in literature and history turned into a specific focus on Arab literature and the Eastern Mediterranean’s history. Subsequently, I spent the 1996-1997 academic year studying in Cairo, Egypt.

The 1990s US campus and the Israel-Palestine conflict

For those reasons, I was aware of the fraught debates around the conflict in Palestine from an early age. In 1995, while attending a university in the US north-west, I even wrote a letter on the issue to the university newspaper’s editor. I do not remember much about the letter, other than it was a response to another article or letter on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and that I quoted Naim Ateek’s book on the subject.

At that time, the Israel-Palestine conflict did not affect US university campuses in the manner that it does today. Columbia University’s Edward Said was the most influential intellectual, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Noam Chomsky had been a strong supporter of Palestinian rights for 20 years already. Their stance ensured the Palestinian viewpoint had legitimacy on American university campuses.

At the same time, however, a pro-Israeli think tank called Middle East Forum was established in 1990 and was already notorious for its activities, as well as those of its founder, Daniel Pipes. Bernard Lewis, resident at Princeton from the mid-1970s and then Cornell in the late 1980s, anchored the pro-Israeli academic community.

Since that era, Edward Said and Bernard Lewis have passed away. Norman Finkelstein’s stance as Israel’s primary US academic critic was established in the past 20 years. The Middle East Forum launched its Campus Watch initiative in 2002, which engaged in what would now be called “doxxing” – encouraging students to file reports on professors they deemed “anti-Semitic”, which would then be published on social media or the Internet. Stanford’s Joel Beinin and others have engaged in disputes with Pipes over Campus Watch’s activities. Two of the US’s most esteemed political scientists, the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt, also published a study on pro-Israeli lobbying groups in 2007. Thus, in terms of the Israel-Palestine issue’s academic debates, not a lot has changed as pro and con camps continue to argue, often in a highly acrimonious manner.

Not the 1990s anymore

What has changed is the environment in which the US academy exists. The first vital difference between the 1990s and now is the rise of social media, the intense polemics that rage on certain social media platforms, and the so-called “cancel culture” that it has engendered. Social media makes information far more readily available, but information that is often de-contextualised, incomplete or simply inaccurate. As most social media users are aware, social media debates are characterised by fury and slander, not by calm, informed, reasoned discussion.

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Second, is the further rise of Political Action Committees (PACs) and various lobbying groups, as the richest Americans continued to accumulate stupendous wealth in the 20 to 30 years after the Reagan Revolution. The unprecedented luck that the “Donor Class” now enjoys enables them to influence politics more directly than was the case previously, especially through donations to PACs.

Additionally, the rise of ultra-wealthy Americans was paralleled by a decline in university funding from public resources. The stagnation or withering of public funding for universities forced educational institutions to increasingly turn to private donors in order to meet rising costs. The result is that some donors can use their wealth to get their names on university buildings, while others prefer to exert influence over a particular university’s internal policies.

Third, is the rise of the extreme US Republican Right. A decade ago, this trend was associated with the Tea Party Republicans, but is now embodied by former President Donald Trump. A main component of this political trend is Evangelical Christians, who generally support Israel and can be termed Christian Zionists.

Politicians, donors, power…

The above 3 developments are key to understanding the scenes witnessed over the past 3 months on US university campuses and in Congress. The most striking example was the US House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on 5 December, during which New York Republican, Elise Stefanik, grilled the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) on whether anti-Semitic speech or conduct was tolerated at their institutions. Their evasive responses, obviously designed by their lawyers, were attempts to avoid any sort of potentially compromising answers.

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A video of the hearing went viral on social media, and the resulting controversy cost the UPenn and Harvard presidents their positions. Their antagonist, Stefanik, is not Jewish; she is a Harvard graduate who rebranded herself as a fervent Trump supporter during the past 5 years. Until Stefanik’s defence of Trump’s attacks on the 2020 US Presidential election result, Stefanik was a member of Harvard’s Institute of Politics board. The manner in which Stefanik conducted the inquiry was McCarthyesque; she forced the presidents to utter shibboleths by redefining pro-Palestinian slogans, and even the term “Intifada,” as anti-Semitic calls for genocide.

Donors were also on the scene. According to a NYT article cited above, one UPenn donor withheld a $100 million gift because of the controversy. A Harvard graduate and donor was an integral part of the public controversy surrounding whether Claudine Gay should continue in her position.

… And lobbies

The influence of lobbying groups, especially PACs, in US politics has been blamed for the US’s continued, massive support for Israel. PACs have been a part of US politics since WWII, but only in the 1970s did they begin to have vital influence; the dawn of “Super PACs” in 2010 only exacerbated the situation. Lobbying is, ultimately, buying influence by providing money to political parties for campaign use, i.e., a type of corruption that is also fundamentally anti-democratic because it grants greater political influence to the wealthy. This practice was long ago legitimised in US politics, and political scientists even developed the term “pluralism” to provide the lobbying system academic credibility.

In the past 3 months, AIPAC (the American Israel Political Affairs Committee) garnered media attention for its role in influencing US Congress members into supporting pro-Israeli policies. I am not sure exactly why AIPAC received so much attention at this particular juncture, but TikTok influencers seem to have had a role.

AIPAC is neither new, nor alone. AIPAC was already an important PAC by the 1970s. By the late 1980s, Noam Chomsky could already mention AIPAC’s role in US politics in a speech at Tel Aviv University. Other pro-Israeli PACs have different policy positions, such as J-Street, which supports the establishment of a Palestinian State. But the largest pro-Israel PAC is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which claims 10 million members and has been in existence for less than 20 years.

CUFI represents all of the essential developments mentioned above. Christian Zionists, though present in US society for many decades, especially gained stability as the Republican extreme right rose to political prominence in the past 25 years. They claim many extremely wealthy donors attuned to political issues in American society, as well as on American campuses. Politicians such as Elise Stefanik appeal to the Christian Zionists. Her main constituents are the pro-Trump Republicans, not Jewish Zionists.

Today, if I were to consider writing a letter to my university paper’s editor supporting the Palestinian perspective, I would be more hesitant than 30 years ago. Then, at the worst, a public argument carried out through the paper might break out, but would quickly end. At the worst, the university administration might have gotten involved. Today, writing such a letter risks being doxxed and blacklisted on social media, globally, with careers blighted early and positions lost.

But that would be absolutely nothing compared to what the Palestinians themselves have suffered.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.