Last week the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) announced that it would be offering a fellowship to former Human Rights Watch (HRW) executive director Kenneth Roth. The move was a reversal of an earlier decision by Dean Douglas Elmendorf, who had originally vetoed Roth’s appointment.
Elmendorf’s denial of the fellowship began receiving widespread criticism after The Nation published an article by Michael Massing about the situation. According to a HKS professor Elmendorf admitted that the fellowship was nixed over Roth’s “anti-Israel” bias. Massing’s article details HKS’s longstanding connections to the military-industrial complex and its many pro-Israel donors. In April 2021, when Roth was still at HRW, the organization published a report documenting some of Israel’s human rights abuses and accusing the country of apartheid.
In an email to the school community Elmendorf insisted that Roth’s views nor the school’s donors had anything to do with his original decision. However, he offered few details as to why the fellowship was originally denied.
Elmendorf said he decided to reverse course after “consulting with faculty members,” but the Massing piece generated interest from the mainstream media and backlash from human rights organizations. It’s difficult to imagine Roth eventually being offered the position if the fiasco hadn’t received much attention.
Many celebrated HKS’s U-turn while also pointing out that the Roth case should be understood as an outlier. He received an outpouring of support from people and organizations citing academic freedom, but we saw none of that same energy when academics like Steven Salaita and Shahd Abusalama were smeared, suspended, or forced out of their positions over the issue of Israel.
“Harvard reversed because Ken Roth has the platform to tell his story. But for every man at the top of his field who is censored for speaking about Palestine, there are multiple women of color, junior professors, and first-generation scholars who we never hear about,” tweeted the group Palestine Legal after Roth was awarded the fellowship. “Many careers are destroyed by those seeking to silence any criticism of Israel’s brutality. This is the Palestine Exception to free speech, it’s routine and it must be reversed on every campus.”
We see the “Palestine Exception” at work in a current case out of George Washington University, where psychology professor Dr. Lara Sheehi is currently being investigated by the school. Sheehi is the president-elect of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic and the co-author of the recently published Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). The book documents the tribulations of Palestinian clinicians in working under Israel’s violent repression and apartheid policies.
Sheehi’s situation hits all the usual beats. She was targeted by the anti-Palestinian group StandWithUs, who filed a complaint against her at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The complaint alleges that Sheei discriminated against students based on their “their Jewish and Israeli identities.” It claims that she brought Hebrew University of Jerusalem Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in to speak with her class, Shalhoub-Kevorkian advocated stone-throwing as a form of resistance, and Sheehi called the students Islamophobic when they expressed concerns about the talk. The school, the administration, and the program already implemented its own internal processes over the allegations. They found that the accusations were without merit.
However, now that StandWithUs’s smear campaign has gained momentum among other pro-Israel organizations, George Washington is bringing in a third party to open its own probe into the incident. The school made the move despite the fact that the Department of Education has yet to even hear the original complaint.
Smear campaigns against academics like Sheehi are nothing new, but the tools have shifted in recent years.
Smear campaigns against academics like Sheehi are nothing new, but the tools have shifted in recent years. In 2019 former president Donald Trump signed an Executive Order mandating that federal agencies consider the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism while enforcing civil rights requirements. That definition is mired in controversy because it can be used as a means to suppress criticisms of Israel and its policies. It includes a “contemporary examples of antisemitism” and some of these deal specifically with the country, blurring the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
Trump’s move led to an uptick in pro-Israel groups suing schools over alleged discrimination, but the IHRA push is a bipartisan affair. Politicians from both parties have advocated for its adoption and the Biden administration has voiced its support for the definition on multiple occasions. In 2021 Secretary of State Tony Blinken told American Zionist Movement President Richard Heideman that The White House “enthusiastically embraces” adoption of the move.
Despite these public declarations (and consistent pressure from pro-Israel groups) the OCR did not incorporate the definition in a civil rights fact sheet that it released earlier this month. Biden also has yet to implement Trump’s IHRA Executive Order despite signaling that he’d make the move. The administration recently angered pro-Israel advocates by announcing that it wouldn’t revisit the issue until December 2023.
“I remain worried about academic freedom,” said Roth in a statement after being offered the fellowship. “Given my three decades at Human Rights Watch, I was able to shine an intense spotlight on Dean Elmendorf, but what about the others?”
The Roth situation symbolized an important battle, but the suppression of Palestinian human rights advocacy is a war that continues on college campuses across the country.
Any foreign entity that tries to silence legitimate political debate in America is directly attacking the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. I took an oath to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. It seems to me such an entity is an enemy of the American people.
I read In Defense of Dean Elmendorf.
The comments pushed back against Elmendorf, Zionist students, Zionist contributors, Zionist faculty, Harvard Hillel, and Harvard Chabad. The Crimson had a policy of removing such comments but seems to have abandoned this policy.
The accusations of genocide and of material support to perpetrators of genocide seem finally to have had an effect. A Harvard Zionist whether faculty or student only looks stupid and racist when he flings an accusation of antisemitism against an opponent of the Zionist state.
The author (אני שונא את ישראל) of the comment seems to be Jewish. He is correct. A Palestinian like me must accuse the Zionist movement and the Zionist state of genocide. We must demand that the US enforce US federal criminal law against US Zionists. Genocide is a federal capital crime.
Here is an excerpt from a comment that directly attacks the author of the op-ed.
The lies of the twisted disgusting Zionist anti-Jew, who authored the op-ed, are unending. Just google Israel attack homosexual to see how tolerant of the LGBTQ+ community the criminal genocidal Zionist state and vile disgusting Zionist colonial settler anti-Jews are. MLK used this strategy when Jim Crow is legal.
I’ve worked throughout the Arab-speaking world. In general, Arabs are not tolerant of public displays of sexuality either heterosexual or homosexual, but nobody cares what happens behind closed doors. The Ottoman Empire had no laws against homosexuality. Muslims learned from intolerant white Christians that homosexuality was something bad.
Genocidal intent drips from the keyboard of Natalie Kahn. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Lemkin points out that denial of identity is a major genocide technique that the National Socialists used. Zionist mentality is congruent with the National Socialist mentality. No one should be surprised that a depraved and evil genocide-propagandist uses a National Socialist technique of genocide.
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Let’s think about this:
The U.S. Department of State has publicly adopted the vexatious IHRA definition of antisemitism while simultaneously the U.S. Department of Justice has promulgated its own, and very different, definition of “anti-Jewish bias“.
WTF?
Does every Federal agency get to craft its own definition of anti-Jewish bias? How does that work, exactly? The DOJ definition is both rational and comprehensible and has the additional benefit of defining bias against Jewish people in exactly the same way it treats bias against Hindus, Christians, Muslims and other religions. It reads:
Religious Bias– A preformed negative opinion or attitude toward a group of persons who share the same religious beliefs regarding the origin and purpose of the universe and the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being, e.g., Catholics, Jews, Protestants, atheists.
Rarely addressed in the coverage of the ethical/lexical issues raised by the IHRA’s efforts to embed its definitions into governmental, academic and international agencies is the spectacle of an ethno-religious special interest being empowered to impose its own privileged, prescriptive definition on the body politic. I have some questions:
(cont.)
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If competing definitions are approved and in play, how is the general public, as well as those law enforcement professionals tasked to evaluate for bias, going to be able to arrive at credible conclusions?
Given the role opacity, proceduralism and ethnic politics have played in promoting the Palestine Exception – Roth and Sheehi are excellent current examples – how is the public to know how the decision to adopt the IHRA definition was arrived at and whether or not anti-Palestinian bias was at play?
Any redefinition process should, at a minimum, embrace a commitment to: total transparency; vigorous public input; early involvement of language, lexical and academic professionals; and a range of checks and balances to thwart any effort to prescribe meaning.
Much more than the mere meaning of a single term is at stake.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to raise the above issues in a public forum?
View here 16 Palestine posters on the subject of IHRA
The Israel lobby – can we say that without being accused of anti-semitism? – not only affects the lives of individuals, it affects corporate behavior:
https://jewishcurrents.org/how-a-giant-of-responsible-investing-agreed-to-an-israel-exception
On October 31st, the major investment research firm Morningstar, Inc. announced significant changes to the information-gathering practices of its subsidiary Sustainalytics, which gives companies social and environmental responsibility ratings. To arrive at these ratings, Sustainalytics takes account of businesses’ human rights records; accordingly, the firm has historically penalized companies that facilitate Israeli settlement construction or military aggression in the occupied Palestinian territories. Now, however, Sustainalytics was adjusting its approach to Israel/Palestine. It would cease to apply the term “occupied territories” to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and would stop using data from prominent sources like the United Nations Human Rights Council….Morningstar itself had spent years resisting making the changes. It adopted them only after a lengthy pressure campaign initiated by the Jewish investing group JLens, which launched in 2012 with the goal of preventing socially responsible investors from putting pressure on companies that do business in Israel/Palestine.