California faculty vote to suspend Israel study abroad program
Faculty at California’s Pitzer College have voted to suspend discriminatory study abroad in Israel programs. (Pitzer College Facebook)- 29 November 2018
Voting by a 4-to-1 ratio in favor, faculty said the programs should be curtailed “until the Israeli state ends its restrictions on entry to Israel based on ancestry and/or political speech” and until Israel “adopts policies granting visas for exchanges to Palestinian universities on a fully equal basis as it does to Israeli universities.”
Professors also rejected their administration’s move to nullify a resolution passed by Pitzer’s student senate last year in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign for Palestinian rights.
In what the board of trustees admitted was an unprecedented step after decades of respecting student autonomy, it had rescinded the students’ vote to suspend purchases from corporations that profit from Israel’s occupation after coming under fire from Israel lobby organizations, according to civil rights group Palestine Legal.
Pitzer is one of several campuses in the Claremont Colleges consortium in southern California.
Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) said it received the news of the two motions “with great joy.”
“The University of Haifa program is deeply problematic and it is imperative that the colleges withdraw this program from their study abroad curriculums,” the student group said.
Good News! Faculty at @pitzercollege in California overwhelmingly voted in support of the BDS movement for Palestinian rights. As Israel’s attacks on Palestinian education escalate, professors & students are standing up for what's right buff.ly/2ADafCX #RightToEducation
Thank you @pitzercollege faculty for opposing discriminatory study abroad program in Haifa. As a young Jewish person who supports #BDS, I probably won’t be allowed in Israel. But more importantly, Palestinians are routinely denied entry. bit.ly/2E0FgVs via @BDSmovement
They also violate equal rights clauses because Israel regularly denies entry to persons on the basis of their Palestinian, Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim ancestry.
By encouraging Pitzer students to participate in the Israel program, “the college has been consciously supporting these discriminatory practices,” Claremont SJP noted.
Israel’s racial profiling has a “discriminatory impact on students participating in educational programs,” while the 2017 passage of its anti-BDS law “means that US students could be prohibited entry into the country for an act of political expression that is fully protected under the US Constitution,” warned the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI).
The group recently launched a call to students and educators not to support or participate in Israel study abroad programs.
“Israeli universities have deep ties to Israeli military occupation and colonization throughout Palestine and are boycottable for this reason alone,” Heike Schotten, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a member of USACBI’s organizing collective, told The Electronic Intifada.
“But Israel’s racist and ideological litmus tests that determine who may – and may not – pass through Israeli-controlled borders means that any US study abroad program in Israel would subject US students to this racist and politically objectionable discrimination,” Schotten added.
“We wouldn’t allow our own students to be treated this way on our campuses. We shouldn’t allow Israel to treat our students this way in an attempt to study at theirs.”
In a statement condemning the Pitzer faculty vote, the University of Haifa alleged that its campus – which is inaccessible to the vast majority of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and from elsewhere around the world – is evidence of Israel’s “commitment to an open and inclusive society in which multiculturalism and interfaith tolerance thrive.”
The university touted the fact that 25 percent of its students are Palestinian citizens of Israel.
But it failed to note that Israel has never allowed the establishment of an Arabic-language university – forcing many Palestinian citizens of Israel who want to pursue higher education in their native language, rather than in Hebrew, to leave their homeland.
Israel supporters have slammed the faculty’s votes and are demanding that the university block implementation of the motions, claiming that they single out Israel and promote “bigotry and anti-Semitism.”
“Falling down on the job”
The move by Pitzer’s faculty to suspend programs with Israeli institutions “is particularly significant because in general, administrations are falling down on the job here,” New York University professor Andrew Ross told The Electronic Intifada. Ross is also a member of USACBI’s organizing collective.If universities are willing to violate their own basic principles by promoting programs with Israeli institutions in which not all students can participate, Ross said, “it’s up to faculty and students to be the conscience of these institutions.”
For a smaller college like Pitzer, “it does seem possible that faculty votes have a certain amount of power and consequence. It’s not the case everywhere, but they’ve managed to prevail in the face of administrative efforts to suppress this vote,” he added.
The Pitzer faculty motions come on the heels of recent attacks on two instructors at the University of Michiganwho refused to write recommendation letters for students wishing to join study abroad programs in Israel.
Under pressure from Israel lobby groups who smeared professor John Cheney-Lippold’s refusal to write a recommendation letter as anti-Semitism, the University of Michigan took away his merit pay raise and sabbatical and charged him with interfering in the student’s request with his own “personal views and politics.”
University of Michigan graduate student instructor Lucy Peterson, who pledged to support the call to boycott Israeli institutions, also faces potential discipline for refusing to write a recommendation letter.
“The two professors at the University of Michigan began by setting us all an example of our proper conduct in relation to education abroad programs in Israel,” said David Lloyd, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.
“They refused to collaborate with them by writing letters, but there are other ways of not cooperating – including pressuring the institution not to participate in them,” Lloyd told The Electronic Intifada.
Lloyd said that his students who have traveled to Palestine for research or just to visit family have been routinely detained, interrogated and strip-searched.
He added that students understand that they can “put themselves in danger by applying to such programs, so they avoid them.”
Lloyd called the move by Pitzer’s faculty a “major advance” for the academic boycott movement.
He added, “it’s time for some of the larger academic institutions to take the right kind of ethical stand now.”
