Major Jewish Studies Program Joins Anti-Israel Academic Assault

Stumbling across the promo ad for an upcoming lecture at the University of Washington, the words “A Half Century of Occupation” resting upon an ink-blot stained map of Israel, one could be forgiven for assuming it is sponsored by an anti-Israel group on campus – it is in fact sponsored by the Stroum Center for Jewish studies.

Of Seattle’s Jewish institutions, few are as revered as the University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. Since its inception the center has maintained a robust engagement with the local Jewish community, offering popular lectures, programs and exhibits.

Thus some in Seattle’s Jewish community were taken aback by the Stroum Center’s hosting of an upcoming public lecture by Israel-critic Gershon Shafir titled “Unsettling the Occupation“. In his books, classes and speaking engagements Professor Shafir promotes a single overarching theme of Israel as a “colonial enterprise”, the Jews of Israel being a foreign transplant.  In the academic world such views are de rigueur, as courageous as lauding the benefits of coffee in the Starbucks boardroom. But to the lion’s share of world Jewry, the notion of the Jewish people as alien invaders in their indigenous homeland is considered both offensive and dangerous.

At a time when many Jewish students feel it is increasingly unsafe to publicly support Israel on campus, some questioned whether promoting the portrayal of Israel as a hegemonic, colonial power was helpful. The Amcha initiative has documented over two dozen anti-Zionist/antisemitic incidents at the UW in the past two years.  Because of the frequency of such incidents, the University of Washington was ranked seventh on a list of the 40 worst colleges for Jewish students. Earlier this year, Jewish Studies major Adam Rozen-Wheeler was manning an Israel information table on Red Square when the display was vandalized by a member of an anti-Zionist student group. Rozen-Wheeler shared that he is “disappointed that Jewish Studies is providing a platform for this kind of view”.

Shafir asserts Israel is a “colonial” enterprise.

In his lectures, available online, Shafir asserts that Israel maintains “a settler colonial framework” on “both sides of the green line”. Shafir labels the establishment of communities within the green line as “Judaization“.

Rejecting the wider BDS movement, Shafir instead champions a targeted boycott of selected Israeli politicians. Under the aegis of Scholars for Israel and Palestine, an organization of which he is a founding member, Shafir advocates that the U.S. and EU governments impose visa restrictions and freeze the foreign assets of those Jewish Israelis with whom Shafir and his cohort politically disagree.

Prof Cary Nelson

Cary Nelson, Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, told Haaretz that he sees Shafir’s targeted boycott as an assault on free speech. Nelson asserts that Shafir’s boycott proposal “would take us down a route of increasing hostility that can only further isolate Israel from the world community and undermine efforts to build the cooperation necessary to a negotiated settlement”

For the most part, the Stroum Center’s public lectures have focused more on the cultural, historic and sociological aspects of Jewish studies, avoiding one-sided political expositions, but this may be changing. In 2015, the Stroum Center hosted a lecture by Sayed Kashua an advocate of the “one-state solution” and supporter of boycott efforts against the Jewish state.

JJ Surbeck, a consultant on Middle East affairs, human rights and international humanitarian law and former legal adviser to the International Red Cross, believes the Stroum Center’s Shafir lecture lacks balance and raises concerns of fairness. Says Surbeck “If these academic gatherings had any intellectual integrity, they would have invited people with opposite views in order to spur a real debate.”

UW Stroum Center director, Noam Pianko.

The lecture titled “Unsettling the Occupation: Israel and Palestine in 2017” shares the theme of Shafir’s latest book “A Half Century of Occupation Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict” (currently at #204,951 on Amazon).

We reached out to Stroum Center Director Noam Pianko who declined to comment on the concerns raised in this article. Pianko serves on the Regional Advisory Council of New Israel Fund, an organization that funds groups and publications hostile to Israel.

8 thoughts on “Major Jewish Studies Program Joins Anti-Israel Academic Assault”

  1. Norman_In_New_York

    As a rule, curricula with “studies” in their name tend to be academically worthless ripoffs of tuition money.

  2. In the off chance that Ken Waltzer in the Facebook comments sees this, I offer the following:
    I welcome any informed and intelligent debate position anywhere on the spectrum on these issues. But I’d urge you to start by looking up the definitions of such terms as “occupation” and “colonialism” and then go read some history of the Jewish people and the Arab-Muslim conquests, and figure out whether those terms actually apply to Israel or not. (I’m happy to provide hints if you want them.)

    1. Hi JB. Shafir is not merely critical of Israel, he uses loaded terms to demonize Israel – words like colonial and Judaization. He knows full well that the label colonial is an assault on the legitimacy of the state and his term Judaization intentionally echoes the term “Aryanization” . He happily appears on panels with rabidly anti-Israel academics like Shira Robinson and Hanan Zoabi. Rather than challenge their libelous rhetoric, he heaps praise upon them. He has stated one of his reasons for opposing BDS is that it targets “liberal intellectuals” such as himself, he told Haaretz that he developed the targeted boycott so he can still swim in anti-Israel circles while protecting himself from BDS’s too wide net.

      One can criticize Israel while remaining ethical and fair, Shafir is neither.

      1. One might add that Shafir belongs also to the cohort of Israeli academics who can only be described as cowards since they live comfortably ensconced in the cocoon of a liberal Academic environment, while their “work” puts the lives of Israelis who live in Israel, i.e. on the front lines, at very real risk as the news inform us every day. If he had any integrity, he would go back to Israel and fight for his beliefs from inside over there rather than from outside here. It is a shameful of the UW Stroum Center of Jewish Studies to offer such an open platform, without any balance, to what will therefore inevitably be nothing more than a one-sided propaganda show. The people responsible for this decision should be investigated and reprimanded.

      2. Judith C. Levine

        I fully agree with you. I just wish people would stop referring to him as a liberal. He is not. He is a member of the regressive left. We were the same a very long time ago but that has stopped being the case for over 20 years. In fact I find his desire to foster Anti-Semitism by espousing the lies about Jews to be absolutely despicable. If the UW/Stroum is determined to have him speak, they should have a speaker who can debunk his poison presenting on the same program.

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