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Along the United States's glittering Pacific Coast, in the bucolic college town of Berkeley, California, a proxy war is heating up, pitting the supporters of Palestinian solidarity against Israeli Zionism.
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The university’s Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, himself a scholar of colonial studies, Monday reversed his decision to suspend a course on the history of settler colonialism in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Dirks' reversal is the latest battleground in an escalating campus-wide war on the Berkeley campus, which was a hub of the radical anti-war student movement in the 60s and 70s. Students, faculty, lawyers and activists forced Dirks to reinstate the course, just as the president bowed to pressure last week from Jewish groups and Israel supporters.
“Hundreds of students and faculty from across the globe (called) for the course to be reinstated on the grounds of academic freedom,” undergraduate Paul Hadweh told teleSUR. “There was resistance on multiple fronts.”
Indeed, from the students enrolled in the class themselves who signed off a letter to the university administration, to a mass petition by Jewish Voice for Peace that circulated the interwebs, it was this mass mobilization that reversed some of the uptick in the suppression of Palestine solidarity.
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“There’s been a concerted effort to suppress scholarship on Palestine,” Liz Jackson, the staff attorney from Palestine Legal, who advocated on behalf of Hadweh, told teleSUR. “It’s really alarming for everyone, no matter what your views are on (the issue).”
More than 40 off-campus Israel advocacy groups joined with the campus Hillel chapter to cancel the class, arguing that the course had an "anti-Israel" bias that sought to study "ways to 'decolonize'—that is, eliminate—Israel” and to “politically indoctrinate” students.
As Jackson explained, Dirks and the executive dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, Carla Hesse, cited the Regents of the University of California’s “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” which seeks to ban “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism.”
The statement was adopted across universities in California in 2015, and legal professionals critical of the Israeli state, like Jackson, knew it was “going to lead the university to violate the First Amendment,” she said.
“It’s not anti-Semitic to be highly critical of Israel,” the attorney pressed, saying that any attempt to buttress an intellectual discussion of the state of Palestine today and Israel’s ongoing settler colonial policies was an affront to free speech.
Jackson’s organization, Palestine Legal sent a letter to Dirks on Friday, warning the administration of this violation of the First Amendment, which “undermines Hadweh’s right to an equal educational opportunity, and subverts the university’s stated processes for approval of DeCal (Democratic Education at Cal) courses.”
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From a slew of politically-emboldened courses taught by undergraduates through the university’s DeCal program, on topics ranging from police brutality to the Zapatista movement, none have been scrutinized like Hadweh’s.
But the crackdown on Palestinian scholarship at Berkeley is nothing new—it is part of a larger trend, even on a campus that has enabled the activism of many left-wing students throughout the decades. In 2010, when students campaigned to divest from Israeli products on campus as part of the larger Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, “the Israeli consulate intervened to manage the university’s public relations response,” said Jackson.
In addition, last year an Israel lobby group attempted to get the Regents of the University of California to admonish all anti-Zionism on Californian campuses as anti-Semitic. While that didn’t pass, the previously-mentioned “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance” soon did after.
And while Hadweh’s course has been inspected and reviewed vigorously, “there is absolutely zero scrutiny of Israeli studies classes,” said Jackson. “(There are) a large number of Israeli studies courses that are also arguably ‘one-sided’ and which ignore history and are political.”
As the university attempted to change the makeup of Hadweh’s course, he resisted and has since only made “cosmetic changes” to the course description as prompted by Hesse’s review. The syllabus has been left intact.
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Hatem Bazian, the faculty sponsor of the contentious course, told The Electronic Intifada that the dean has not personally reviewed the syllabuses for the other 193 DeCal courses offered this semester.
“Not a single course that I have sponsored in the past had to be run by the dean’s office, including the two that I sponsored last year,” he said. “Palestine-related courses are subject to regulations by exceptions, administration and political intervention that run contrary to the principles of academic freedom and inquiry.”
With the dramaturgy surrounding Hadweh’s dynamic new course behind him for now, the student teacher is excited to finally begin instruction
“I’m excited to get back into the classroom, which is where I wanted to be from day one,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
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