The BDS bandwagon continues to roll through the world of American academia, but this week’s vote from the American Historical Association proves it may be hitting some bumps in the road.
The association flatly rejected an attempt to add two resolutions condemning Israel.
A group called Historians Against the War tried to push new anti-Israel agenda items to the leadership of the association for an upcoming conference. But because the motions were presented long after the deadline for resolutions had closed, they required a vote on a rule change for inclusion. The vote came to 144 against changing the rules to 54 in favor.
Neither of the two resolutions were directly related to academic boycotts of Israel. Instead, they were focused on condemning Israel for supposed violations of academic freedom for Palestinians. An earlier resolution calling for full academic boycott had already been rejected on the grounds that it fell outside the association’s mission.
William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection called the tactic of proposing condemnations of Israel rather than boycotts a way of laying the groundwork for future anti-Israel action. “This is the stepping stone approach — first get a resolution condemning, then later come back with a boycott resolution,” he wrote, adding that the Modern Language Association used the same tactic a year earlier, also unsuccessfully.
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Hasia Diner, a historian at New York University, told the New York Times that the proposals were political, not academic. “There is a subtext that Israel is more guilty because it’s Israel,” she said, referring to claims by the Historians Against the War that they were concerned primarily by academic freedom. “I think the agenda is a political one, and they don’t really care about scholarship.”
But even though the motion failed to get on the association agenda, it still marks a partial victory for BDS. Just by holding the vote, the anti-Israel nature of the resolutions gained media coverage, all the way up to the New York Times. And the entire episode demonstrates yet again that virtually every academic association has a significant number of BDS supporters in its ranks.
For the moment, however, the BDS hit a setback. As Jacobson noted after the vote, “sanity prevailed someplace in academia. A good start to the New Year.”
Image: CC BY flickr/biscuitsmlp, HonestReporting.com
