“Israel Apartheid” panel at academic conference to feature just one side

By Moshe Phillips

The most prestigious organization of historians in the United States will be hosting a panel at its upcoming conference called “Debating Israel and Apartheid”—but all of the panelists will be taking the same side in the debate. Can you guess which side?

The venerable American Historical Association, founded in 1884, is the premier professional association for American historians in all fields. Its next annual conference will be held in January 2022 in New Orleans.

A panel scheduled to be held on January 8 is called “Debating Israel and Apartheid.” With that kind of title, one would assume that the panelists will be expressing a variety of viewpoints. Certainly that’s what any serious academic panel should have. But don’t count on it in this case. It’s pretty obvious from the panelists’ track records that they will all be pointing an accusing finger at the Jewish state.

The chairman of the panel, Prof. Andor D. Skotnes of Russell Sage College, is a passionate supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. He is one of the signatories to the declaration of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Skotnes signed an open letter in July 2014 accusing Israel of “provoking” the thousands of Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza. He signed another open letter in 2014 urging then-President Obama “to suspend U.S. military aid to Israel.”

Skotnes has also signed multiple petitions urging the boycotting of academic events at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, on the grounds that Israel is guilty of “apartheid.” So the chair of the “Debating Israel and Apartheid” panel is somebody who has already decided in advance that Israel is guilty.

The four panelists have similar histories.

Prof. Sean Jacobs, of The New School, is the author of a book called “Apartheid Israel.” That’s right, a panelist who is supposed to objectively discuss “Debating Israel and Apartheid” has literally already written a book called “Apartheid Israel.” You can’t make this stuff up!

The second panelist will be Prof. Jonathan Alschech, of the University of Northern British Columbia. Earlier this year, he signed an open letter to British university officials, urging them to reject the idea that calling Israel a Nazi state is anti-Semitic. The letter also accused Israel of “occupation, dispossession, segregation, and discrimination.” Not surprisingly, the letter is featured on the official BDS website.

Now, what position do you suppose Prof. Alschech will take in a “debate” over whether Israel is an apartheid state?

The third panelist is Prof. Alex Lichtenstein, of Indiana University, who is editor of the American Historical Association’s journal, American Historical Review. Lichtenstein has not written as much about Israel as the other panelists, but in the pages of the journal in 2015 and in 2018, he gave a clear indication as to his perspective.

He wrote there about what he called “the profound impact of the occupation of the West Bank in stimulating Palestinian nationalism” and “the eruption of the post-Occupation national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.” The entire premise of those two sentences is utter nonsense.

For a historian, Lichtenstein is astonishingly unaware of the history of the Arab war against Israel. It wasn’t Israel’s presence in Judea-Samaria, starting in 1967, which created “Palestinian nationalism.” And the “national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians” is not a “post-Occupation” phenomenon. The Palestinian Arab war did not begin in 1967. Palestinian Arabs have been slaughtering Jews in the Land of Israel since the 1920s. They slaughtered Jews long before there was any “occupation” or any “settlers.” The Palestine Liberation Organization was created in 1964. The “Palestine” they were trying to “liberate” was Tel Aviv and Haifa.

The final “Debating Israel and Apartheid” panelist is Prof. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, an extremist who teaches sociology at Hebrew University. In an interview with the Washington Post earlier this year, she accused Israel of “trying to de-Palestinize” Israeli Arabs. “But we are all part of one community,” she vowed. “We are all Palestinians.”

In her writings and lectures, Sabbagh-Khoury rails against alleged Israeli “expulsions,” “pillaging of  Palestinian lands and property,” and, of course, “settler colonialism,” a favorite catch-all phrase—although, ironically, Sabbagh-Khoury often uses the term to refer to leftwing kibbutzniks in the 1940s, not the religious-nationalist Israelis in Judea-Samaria today. (The title of her 2016 guest lecture at Brown University was “The Zionist Left: Settler Colonial Practices and the Representation of the Palestinian Nakba.”)

In short, the line-up for the “Debating Israel and Apartheid” panel at the upcoming American Historical Association conference will be nothing less than a kangaroo court, with Israel in the docket and its harshest critics making up the entire jury.

The great irony is that Prof. Lichtenstein, writing in the December 2015 issue of American Historical Review, declared: “Our organization has always housed multiple viewpoints on the questions of Zionism, Israel, and Palestinian self-determination.” And yet the panel on which he is serving at the association’s conference will be occupied completely by people who all have essentially the same harsh viewpoint toward Israel.

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[Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press. He was a U.S. delegate to the 38th World Zionist Congress in 2020. His views are his own.]<
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