Saree Makdisi: Why Israel's schools merit a U.S. boycott
LA Times
Op-Ed
Why Israel's schools merit a U.S. boycott
Image removed by sender. Daily life in Jerusalem
Palestinian students play with a ball in front of the landmark Damascus Gate
in the Old City of Jerusalem on Dec. 9, 2015.
(Atef Safadi / EPA)
Saree Makdisi
At its annual convention this week, the Modern Language Assn., which
represents 26,000 language and literature scholars, will become the latest
academic body to consider the merits of adopting a boycott of Israeli
academic institutions. This follows endorsements of such a boycott by the
Assn. for Asian American Studies, the American Studies Assn. and, most
recently, the American Anthropological Assn., which voted 1,040 to 136 to
endorse a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions at its
November annual meeting in Denver; the AAA's entire membership will soon
vote on the resolution, which is expected to pass.
The justification for an academic boycott - which targets institutions, not
individual scholars - stems from the peculiar relationship between Israel's
educational system and its broader structures of racism.
The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to university
function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes.- Human
Rights Watch
The United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
points out with alarm that Israel maintains two separate educational systems
for its citizens - one for Jewish children and another for the children of
the Palestinian minority - a structure that reinforces the profound
segregation of Israeli society in everything from matters of citizenship and
marriage to housing rights.
According to official Israeli data cited by the human rights organization
Adalah, by the turn of the 21st century Israel was investing three times as
much on a per capita basis in the education of a Jewish as opposed to that
of a Palestinian citizen.
The consequences are obvious: Schools for Palestinians in Israel are
overcrowded and poorly equipped, lacking in libraries, labs, arts facilities
and recreational space in comparison with schools for Jewish students.
Palestinian children often have to travel greater distances than their
Jewish peers to get to school, thanks to a state ban on the construction of
schools in certain Palestinian towns (for example, according to Adalah,
there is not a single high school in the Palestinian communities of the
Negev desert in southern Israel).
These naked forms of discrimination extend into the university system as
well. "The hurdles Palestinian Arab students face from kindergarten to
university function like a series of sieves with sequentially finer holes,"
Human Rights Watch points out. "At each stage, the education system filters
out a higher proportion of Palestinian Arab students than Jewish students."
Image removed by sender. Discriminatory policies risk Israel's longtime
bipartisan U.S. support
Discriminatory policies risk Israel's longtime bipartisan U.S. support
In other words, children denied access to adequate kindergartens do less
well in elementary school; students in dilapidated and resource-starved high
schools find themselves funneled into work as carpenters or mechanics rather
than doctors, lawyers or professors. Indeed, the university admissions
process is the point at which the country's two separate and unequal
schooling systems converge, with calamitous results for Palestinian
students, who fall short on matriculation or psychometric exams that are
weighted toward the Jewish school curriculum, according to Human Rights
Watch.
About a quarter of Israeli schoolchildren are Palestinian. But as a recent
study by the Assn. for the Advancement of Civic Equity points out, the
higher you go in the system, the lower the number of Palestinian students.
As of 2012, according to data published by the Israeli Council for Higher
Education, Palestinians constituted only 11% of bachelor's degree students,
7% of master's students, and barely 3% of PhD students. A mere 2.7% of the
faculty in Israeli universities are Palestinian, and the percentage of
Palestinians in administration is even lower.
According to sociologist Majid al-Haj of the University of Haifa, Israeli
universities systematically fail their Palestinian students. These students
end up feeling alienated in an academic environment that stubbornly resists
integration and seems designed to consolidate rather than challenge
discrimination.
All of this is damning, but there is more: Israel's long-standing assault on
the right to education of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank. Israel has bombed schools and besieged university campuses; it
detains and harasses students and teachers at army checkpoints; it has
restricted the flow of school materials to Gaza; it has prevented
Palestinian students from studying overseas.
One must conclude that Israel's educational system is intended to
consolidate the nation's putative Jewish identity and further dispossess the
Palestinians. This is a process that the Israeli sociologist Baruch
Kimmerling once identified as "politicide." Surely one of its components
could be called educide, which international educators ought to reject by
endorsing the academic boycott of institutions that engage in it.
Such a boycott wouldn't affect individual Israeli scholars, whose freedom to
participate in international conferences, publish in journals or collaborate
with other scholars would not be threatened. Rather, it calls for a break in
institutional cooperation and affiliation. For example, the MLA would not
co-sponsor an event with Tel Aviv University.
Boycotts have been among the most effective means of nonviolent protest
against institutional injustice in the modern era. They played a key role in
bringing about the transformation of the Jim Crow South and the downfall of
apartheid in South Africa, both of which bear an unmistakable resemblance to
the situation in Israel. It is as unthinkable to turn a blind eye to the
racism of the Israeli educational system as it would have been to disregard
those earlier forms of injustice.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA
and a member of the Modern Language Assn. He presented a longer version of
this piece at the MLA convention in Austin on Thursday.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-makdisi-why-support-the-academic-
boycott-of-israel-20160108-story.html?utm_content=buffer70b5f&utm_medium=soc
ial&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
