Obama must end support for Israeli apartheid against Palestinian scholars
, Electronic Intifada, 3 September 2015
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| Palestinians climb a ladder to get over the Israeli-built wall separating the occupied West Bank village of Abu Dis from Jerusalem, 17 November 2014. Muammar Awad APA Images |
US President Barack Obama, in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic,
reaffirmed his support and love for Israel because, as he claims, “it
is a genuine democracy and you can express your opinions.”
He further expressed his commitment to protecting Israel as a “Jewish state” by ensuring a “Jewish majority.”
reaffirmed his support and love for Israel because, as he claims, “it
is a genuine democracy and you can express your opinions.”
He further expressed his commitment to protecting Israel as a “Jewish state” by ensuring a “Jewish majority.”
The US government’s support for the “Jewish state” has always been
far more than rhetorical, backed by billions of dollars of military
funding and consistent pro-Israel vetoes at the UN Security Council.
We are a group of US-based academics, representing diverse ethnic,
racial and cultural backgrounds, as well as a range of national origins,
who recently visited Palestine. We were able to gain firsthand exposure
to what Obama described in the interview as Israel’s “Jewish democracy”
and to what kinds of infrastructure our tax dollars help to support —
walls, checkpoints and modern weaponry.
We had the privilege of traveling through part of the occupied
Palestinian territories — the West Bank, including East Jerusalem —
where we met with Palestinians.
Double standards
We feel compelled to share a few examples of what we witnessed during
our visit with Palestinian scholars, policy makers, activists, artists
and others working in the West Bank. We observed numerous double
standards with regard to Palestinians’ rights that prompt us to question
the claim that Israel is a genuine democracy.
We believe that our government’s assertions that Israel is a
democracy obscures the conditions it imposes on the Palestinian people
through the occupation and beyond with conditions that amount to
apartheid under settler colonialism.
Our concerns began even before we arrived, as a search of the US
State Department website for information about travel to Israel returned
sobering results.
The US government warns travelers
to back up their computers because Israeli border control officials can
erase anything at will. This indeed happened to one of us upon leaving
Tel Aviv to return to the US.
The site also warns travelers that their personal email or social
media accounts may be searched, and so travelers “should have no
expectation of privacy for any data stored on such devices or in their
accounts.” Equipment may also be confiscated.
The State Department further acknowledges that US citizens who are
Muslim and/or of Palestinian or other Arab descent may have considerable
trouble entering or exiting through Israeli-controlled frontiers. And
this too happened to one of us who had mobile phone contacts searched
immediately on entering Tel Aviv.
Profiling
Concerns in entering and exiting pale in comparison to the
restrictions placed on US citizens of Palestinian origin, along with all
other Palestinians who hold identification documents from the occupied
West Bank and Gaza.
Before traveling, most of us did not understand that for Palestinians
under occupation, there are several types of identification and
profiling and each comes with its own restrictions on mobility.
Palestinians from Jerusalem have identification cards they must carry
in a blue booklet while those living in the rest of the occupied West
Bank hold an ID card in a green booklet, issued to them from the
Palestinian Authority with the permission of the Israeli government.
People possessing that identification generally cannot enter
Jerusalem or present-day Israel without prior permission, even for a
visa interview to attend an academic meeting in the US. Many people we
met had only visited Jerusalem, home to many holy sites, once in their
lives despite being mere minutes away by car.
In the rest of the West Bank, a US citizen of Palestinian origin who
wants to live there long term has to obtain a visa that says West Bank
only. They are not allowed to travel in and out of the West Bank and are
subject to the same checkpoints as other Palestinians. They cannot
leave the occupied territories as a US citizen, as the State Department
warns on its website.
A Palestinian in the West Bank who holds US citizenship cannot simply
catch a plane from Tel Aviv like any other US citizen simply because he
or she is Palestinian and holds a Palestinian ID card. This fact is
stamped into the US passport.
They are not allowed to enter the checkpoints
into Jerusalem or any other checkpoints as other people with a US
passport can. This restriction is not at all applied to the Jewish
settlers who are growing in number — thousands of them US citizens who
are choosing to live in the occupied West Bank inside illegal
settlements financed in part by US tax-exempt organizations.
Academic freedom
As scholars, among the many disturbing things we witnessed was the
limited academic freedom and freedom of speech imposed on Palestinians
(and many Israelis, whose travel in the West Bank is restricted) by the
Israeli government.
We learned that there is a prohibition on most books published in
Syria, Iran and Lebanon even though Beirut is a central publishing hub
of Arabic literary materials in the region. Regardless, banning books
is, in our view, a profoundly anti-democratic act.
Israel’s wall
that surrounds the West Bank including Jerusalem — and which snakes
deep inside the West Bank in many locations — also functions to limit
academic freedom.
One of the starkest examples is in Bethlehem, where the wall cuts through the city, making access to education at Bethlehem University very difficult for those who happen to be on the wrong side of the wall’s many twists and turns.
Additionally, the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University is completely surrounded by the wall, making travel to and from the campus incredibly arduous despite it being in Jerusalem.
An academic colleague described to us the difficulties she
experiences getting to campus on a typical day. She must pass through
roadblocks and endure searches and myriad forms of harassment by Israeli
soldiers. In the West Bank, we were shocked to witness separate roads
for Palestinians and Israelis based on the color of one’s license plate
and identity card.
In theory, these roads exist for the protection of Israeli settlers
living on settlements built in the West Bank illegally according to
international law. In practice, these roads create an apartheid travel
system where Palestinians encounter several checkpoints on a given day,
some of which may be mobile, unpredictably placed “flying checkpoints.”
As our colleague explained to us, what used to be a very short trip
between her village and the university now often takes more than an hour
and a half and she is expected to cross through at least three
checkpoints. She is often late to teach her classes and some days she is
unable to make it to work or back home at all.
Her students are often arrested and jailed using the legal cover of administrative detention
— detention without charge or trial for an indefinite amount of time —
for their participation in any political activities, or simply for being
in the wrong place at the wrong time. We heard that this process is
intensified at exam periods.
This creates an extraordinarily stressful academic environment when
on any given day Israeli soldiers might detain students and faculty who
are simply traveling to class.
Impunity
We recognize every people’s desire to be secure — and Israel’s
supporters will defend its policies and actions in the name of its
national security. What we witnessed during our visit is that “security”
was offered as a rationale for almost any troubling behavior or policy.
What we witnessed was a slow but deliberate expansion of Israel’s
occupation, increased settlements, the taking over of agricultural land
and the spread of industrial parks in the West Bank including
substantial parts of East Jerusalem — all in the name of “security.”
The United States, as a settler colonial state with its own
occupations, police violence, carceral injustice, de facto apartheid and
its own brand of border brutality — certainly has its own failings as a
democracy, failings we continue to address in our intellectual and
political work.
We thus claim no moral high ground. But an ethnocracy is not a
democracy; the State of Israel imposes violent domination of the
Palestinian people through colonialism, occupation and apartheid — three
prongs of brutal oppression that are the very antithesis of democracy.
As academics, watching attempts to stifle criticism of Israel — as in the case of our colleague, Professor Steven Salaita — and visiting the West Bank has prompted us to speak out publicly about Israel’s injustices. Doing so is imperative.
We implore President Obama to reconsider his rhetoric and policies —
and budget appropriations — that support Israel with impunity.
Radhika Balakrishnan is professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.
Karma R. Chávez is associate professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Ira Dworkin is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.
Erica Caple James is associate professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is associate professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University.
Doug Kiel is assistant professor of American Studies at Williams College.
Barbara Lewis is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Soraya Mekerta is director of the African Diaspora and the World
Program, and associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at
Spelman College.
