Setting record straight

As someone who believes deeply in human rights for all, who has spent a great deal of time in Palestine and Israel and cares a great deal about the people there, and who is very concerned and grieved about the loss of life in Israel on Oct. 7 and the subsequent massive deaths since that date in Gaza, I was very excited about the opportunity to participate in a forum on the Gaza conflict, sponsored by the University of Arkansas Honors College, that was to be held on Nov. 8.

Unfortunately, the event was canceled after charges of antisemitism were leveled against me and the other scheduled speaker, Professor Joel Gordon. Subsequently, due to the atmosphere created by such claims, not a single public event dealing with the Gaza Strip violence took place at the state’s flagship university in fall semester 2023.

The charge against us was made by Jay Greene, a former University of Arkansas professor now at the Heritage Foundation, with Fayetteville-based Conduit News. Greene’s accusations played a major role in the decision to cancel the event. More recently, on Dec. 16, law professor Robert Steinbuch quoted Greene in published a column in this paper accusing me and Dr. Gordon of being the “most hostile to Jews” of all University of Arkansas professors.

Antisemitism is certainly a serious problem in the U.S. As Bernie Steinberg, former executive director at Harvard University’s Hillel chapter, observes, “Antisemitism in the U.S. is a real and dangerous phenomenon, most pressingly from the alt-right white-supremacist politics that have become alarmingly mainstream since 2016.”

But is there anything to assertions that Joel Gordon and I are “hostile to Jews”? I’d suggest that the fact Gordon is Jewish should raise serious questions about the claims. I am not Jewish, but perhaps a few of my career accomplishments might correct the picture painted by Steinbuch and Greene:

In summer 2008, I served as a visiting professor in the M.A. Program in Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel (Gordon has taught there as well).

After publishing a book, “Memories of Revolt,” dealing with resistance to the British colonial occupation of Palestine during the 1930s, I began to do research on the culture of Middle Eastern Jews. It is still not well known that Jews lived and often thrived throughout the Middle East for centuries, a history that was tragically disrupted with the creation of the state of Israel.

Among my publications on Jewish singers of Middle Eastern background is a book chapter in “The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Jewish Cultures” that deals with celebrated Israeli pop singer Dana International of Yemeni origin.

During my tenure as Program Coordinator of the Middle East Studies Center, in spring 2019 I organized a conference on “Jewish Contributions to Middle Eastern Music.” Six Jewish experts in the field (among them a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem) offered lectures, and in addition we put on a concert featuring Iranian Jewish prayers sung by Galeet Dardashti, a Jewish-Iranian-American artist and musicologist who also serves as a cantor in her local synagogue.

Why, one wonders, did Gordon and I get smeared with the charge that we are hostile to Jews? Clearly it is not because we hold farright antisemitic beliefs, but instead because both of us have criticized Israeli policies. In this respect, the accusations against us should be seen as part of a much larger political trend in the U.S., one that has metastasized since the horrors of Oct. 7: the weaponization of the charge of antisemitism against those who publicly express dissent from Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.

The aim of such weaponization, as Bernie Steinberg of Harvard Hillel has observed, is to “to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel.”

Investigative journalist James Bamford describes in The Nation the efforts of one of the most important organizations involved in this campaign, the well-funded Canary Mission. This organization, Bamford shows, is “a massive blacklisting and doxxing operation directed from Israel that targets students and professors critical of Israeli policies, and then launches slanderous charges against them — charges designed to embarrass and humiliate them and damage their future employability.”

Since Oct. 7, many in the U.S. have been so targeted, which has resulted in the banning of student organizations, the firing of employees, the cancellation of many university public events and forums, and so on.

Daniel Levy, who served as an Israeli negotiator in the Oslo B peace process, explains another key factor that motivates these campaigns. At a time when the most respected international human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have charged Israel with practicing a policy of apartheid against Palestinians, it makes eminent sense for the Israeli state to shift the focus of the conversation. And so Israel and its allies are working diligently to turn the discussion away from Israeli actions and to shine the spotlight instead on individuals who might express criticism of Israeli policies, alleging they are antisemitic.

What possible harm would have been done if University of Arkansas students had attended a forum and heard from two professors with wide experience in the conflict region and 50-plus years of teaching experience at the university? From a professor with relatives in Israel who has taught courses on the Israel-Palestine conflict for years (Gordon). From a scholar with field research experience inside Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories, who lived in Lebanon during the first year of the Lebanon civil war, who made the first of his three visits to the Gaza Strip in 1968 (me). From two professors with friends and colleagues whose loved ones and comrades were killed or kidnapped on Oct. 7, and who also know many who have family in Gaza that have been killed and/or been rendered homeless by Israel’s attacks.

That the scheduled event did not occur is arguably due to what Andrea Long Chu, writing in New York magazine, describes as a nationwide “one-sided, McCarthyist crackdown on pro-Palestine speech.”

To my mind, the saddest part of the story is that the University of Arkansas administration failed to stand up to the McCarthyist challenge, and denied students the opportunity to hear any discussion of the Gaza Strip conflict in fall semester. I consider this a singular and shameful failure for a state university in whose respected Middle East Studies program I taught between 1996 and 2022.