York prof responds

Re: Backing Israel ‘racist’: academics — Tristin Hopper, April 18

Please let me correct some misrepresentations of our internal report. In his article, your reporter claims that the report recommends “defining support for Israel” or “acknowledging its existence” as evidence of anti-palestinian racism, that it calls for the “Zionist settler colonial project” to be “isolated and destroyed,” and that it denies that principles of academic freedom should apply to “anybody supportive of Israel, working with Israeli academics, or having any peripheral connection to Israel whatsoever.”

The report does not say these things.

Israel obviously exists as a state and within its polity are many currents of opinion. This report takes issue specifically with the dominant Zionist political project that seeks to displace Palestinians from their lands and deny them equal rights both within and outside Israel. The report does use the word “destroy” five times but only in relation to Israel’s destructive campaign in Gaza. The report does recommend a boycott of Israeli academic institutions but explicitly notes that “The academic boycott is a boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions not individuals.”

At other points your reporter distorts the meaning of claims in the report by selectively editing them. For instance, in the discussion of academic intimidation on campus he quotes the report as saying that faculty members “should not be pressured to condemn Hamas” but leaves out the rest of the sentence which provides crucial context. The full sentence reads: “As scholars we should not be pressured to condemn Hamas while failing to discuss or critique Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial violence and ongoing attacks in Gaza and the West Bank.” The point here is that we can’t understand any isolated event without some broader appreciation of the history they take place within.

To be clear, this report critiques the actions of Israel as a state and Zionism as a political ideology.

Putting the actions of states in a critical light and analyzing political ideologies is what politics departments do.

Dr. Dennis Pilon, Professor and Chair, Department of Politics, York University