Summary
U.S. scholarly association whose December 2013 resolution enacting an organizational boycott of Israeli academic institutions Feldman treats in the Epilogue of A Shadow over Palestine as the breaching of what Edward Said called “America’s Last Taboo” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1255-1261).
Details
- Feldman traces the resolution’s path: the ASA’s International Committee began exploring support for a boycott in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s 2006 siege of Lebanon and returned to the idea after Israel’s 2008-9 bombardment of Gaza; at the November 2012 annual meeting, coinciding with another large-scale bombardment of Gaza, the Academic and Community Activism Caucus sponsored panels on Palestine in the United States and an open session with scholars who had travelled to Palestine as a delegation; at the 2013 meeting the program committee sponsored two town hall meetings on the Caucus’s boycott resolution (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1255-1257).
- The ASA council adopted the resolution unanimously, underscoring the association’s commitments to social justice and to struggles against all forms of racism, and to the protected rights of students and scholars to education and intellectual freedom, “both of which are severely curtailed for Palestinians”; a few weeks later over twelve hundred members cast ballots on endorsing the resolution and 66 percent affirmed it (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1257).
- The ASA followed the precedent of the Association of Asian American Studies earlier in 2013; in the weeks after adoption, university presidents and state legislatures censured the association, membership grew, and by the end of 2014 the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association and the African Literature Association had passed similar resolutions (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1255-1259).
- Jewish Voice for Peace, whose origins Feldman traces to the New Jewish Agenda, provided levers for political mobilization and avenues to legal counsel in the resolution’s defence (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1259).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, BDS movement, Academic boycott, Association of Arab American University Graduates