Terror U: Who is suppressing academic freedom in Palestinian Universities?

• Published date: 18 January 2021
• Date: 18 January 2021
• Author: Dr. Richard L. Cravatts
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

In that condemnatory letter, MESA, an organization that has been obsessively and chronically anti-Israel, chastened Israel, with the purpose of the complaint ". . . to urge a halt to the Israeli army and security forces conducting arbitrary arrests at and incursions into Palestinian universities, assaulting students, faculty, and staff and obstructing the education of thousands of students."

Of specific concern to MESA was the 2018 arrest of Yehya Rabie, the President of Birzeit University's Student Council by the IDF and a similar arrest of Omar al-Kiswani, the previous President of Birzeit University's Student Council.

For an organization of coddled, safely-ensconced professors in American universities it is easy, of course, to castigate Israel for its behavior in insuring the safety of its citizenry, particularly since in discussing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, MESA has reliably expected no rational or reasonable behavior from the perennially-"oppressed" Palestinian Arabs and has singularly blamed Israel for its alleged brute treatment of the Palestinians, including these specific arrests which, it contended, "follow a pattern of Israeli forces' aggression on Palestinian campuses," and the "attacks, assaults, and detentions described above are grave violations of basic rights to education and academic freedom."

Allying with a Hamas cell is not the same as joining a chapter of College Democrats or College Republicans on an American campus. In the West Bank and Gaza, we are not in Kansas anymore.

As Israel-haters in the West and elsewhere are prone to do, MESA exonerates the Palestinians for any complicity in creating campus climates far from the idyllic picture one normally has when thinking about institutions of higher education.

In fact, as Cary Nelson fastidiously examines in his new book, Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, despite the jaundiced view of MESA and other of Israel's critics, Palestinian higher education is defined by radical politics, rival political factions who use harassment, violence, and intimidation to promote their views, alignment with terror groups such as Hamas, repression of opposing views, the use of terror cells within university facilities for weapon production, and violence against and even the murder of dissenting faculty who do not conform to the prevailing hatred of the Jewish state or the tenets of Islam.

Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) between 2006 and 2012 and Jubilee...