Asaf Romirowsky
Jerusalem Post, July 30, 2023
“… the AAA and MESA resolutions, for all their self-proclaimed morality, are the death cries of disciplines devoted to self-destruction.”
In a widely predicted move, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has now joined the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in adopting a boycott of Israeli universities. It represents a turning point in the discipline of anthropology and a milestone in the fall of American academia as a whole.
The resolution, which was adopted by a large margin of its members, prohibits Israeli universities from advertising in AAA journals and participating in other organizational activities. It does not, however, prevent Israeli anthropologists from presenting at AAA meetings or publishing papers in AAA journals.
But despite disclaimers, the resolution will certainly act as a blacklist and litmus test for Israeli and Jewish anthropologists in the context of university departments, and in classrooms, where anti-Israeli animus has already reached high levels.
That is the resolution’s unstated rationale: the creation of a false consensus that will isolate Israel, vilify its supporters, and thereby contribute to the cause of peace in the Middle East.
But the resolution itself makes it clear what kind of peace anthropologists have in mind. It states that “The Israeli state operates an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the internationally recognized state of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank,” and that “Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the Israeli state’s regime of oppression against Palestinians… including by providing research and development of military and surveillance technologies used against Palestinians.”
From this perspective, the only logical outcome is either a “one-state solution,” where Israel as a sovereign state is dissolved and somehow melded with the Palestinians, an outcome desired by no one except foreign academics; or where Israel is actually destroyed and replaced entirely by “Palestine.”
Anthropology was once a discipline which tried to understand culture, both local manifestations with individual characteristics and as a broader concept of beliefs and practices. In recent decades, however, it has deliberately transformed itself into a discipline that purports to study power, in the process arrogating to itself the final word regarding forms of “justice” (environmental, social, restorative, historical, and more). Studying the panoply of the human experience is passe if not retrograde.
So, too, with academic Middle East studies, which has too often put “Israel/Palestine” at its center of concerns, frequently as the paramount political, if not moral, issue in the world.
Unconsciously, a wide swathe of Middle East studies, represented by MESA, has a worldview where Israel is the little Satan to America’s great Satan, reshaping history into a simplistic post-colonial morality play, where imperialism was invented by Britain and taken over by the US.
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