Dear Colleague:

At its meeting during the 2008 convention in San Francisco, the Delegate Assembly took two actions that are subject to ratification by the MLA membership. First, it elected the Chinese novelist Mo Yan to honorary fellowship in the association. Second, the assembly approved the following resolution:

Whereas Palestinian literature and culture are legitimate subjects of study;

Whereas the conditions in the occupied territories have been critical in shaping modern Arabic literature generally;

Whereas those teaching and writing about the occupation and about Middle East culture have regularly come under fire from anti-Palestinian groups on extra-academic grounds;

Whereas education at all levels in the occupied territories is being stifled by the occupation;

Be it resolved that the MLA endorse teaching and scholarship about Palestinian culture, support members who come under attack for pursuing such work, and express solidarity with scholars of Palestinian culture.

Members were asked to comment on this resolution during the month of October; you may review these comments before you cast your vote. Please note that the ratification ballot, which is now available in the members-only area of the MLA Web site, also contains a link to the comments...

...you will find links to the ratification ballot on the MLA's home page. The deadline for submitting the ratification ballot is 12:00 midnight (EST) on 10 December.

To request a paper ratification ballot, please contact me at the MLA office. The last day for requesting a paper ballot is Friday, 20 November 2009.

Sincerely,

Carol Zuses, Coordinator of Governance

I do not support this resolution. Were the language inclusive rather than targeted so narrowly, I think it would better reflect MLA policy and past actions. As is, it seems more a political statement.

...Really, what are we trying to do here? This resolution doesn't know if it's coming or going. Are we trying to support the study of Palestinian literature and culture (an aim I would hope we would all--IMPLICITLY, by the very fact of our membership in this Association--endorse), or are we trying to criticize Israel as The Great Zionist Occupational Threat (an aim ancillary at best to the mission of this Association)? Should the MLA take a position in every political conflict anywhere in the world? The third and fourth "Whereas" clauses are almost completely irrelevant to the literary historical meat (which is to say the first third) of the resolution, and the latter two-thirds of the resolution ("support members who come under attack for pursuing such work, and express solidarity with scholars of Palestinian culture") are included only to express criticism of Israeli thuggery. This resolution smacks of the preposterousness with which the MLA Executive Committee in early July 2009, in the wake of violence in Iran following the disputed elections there, issued a statement "deplor[ing] the attacks on Iranian universities, which endanger students, faculty members, and staff members," and "express[ing] our hope that the government of Iran will refrain from using violence or other repressive measures in these revered centers of learning and teaching"; the intelligent response to THAT statement had two parts: 1. no shit, and 2. who cares?...

This is the kind of resolution that makes it increasingly problematic to belong to the MLA. Such overtly political statements presuppose a political homogeneity that simply does not exist. I wish to be a member of an organization that supports the teaching and scholarship of literature, but I object to membership being used for political purposes extraneous to that.

I would like to ask a question--whose answer you need to search for hard in your hearts: WHY this obsession with Palestinians? Do incomparably larger numbers of human beings affected today by war, displacement, and terrible abuses matter less--or not at all--to the MLA constituency? Is this obsession with Israel--under the guise of concern for the Palestinians--a sign of unresolved problems in the Western psyche? What do people want from the Jews? What do Jews want from themselves? Why this obsession with Jews--first they killed Jesus, now Palestinians. Are you sure that what you think is going on is REALLY going on? Is your view of the situation in Israel/Palestine based on a real knowledge of the populations and opportunities in the area?

Does any one to whom this proposal might be addressed dispute that Palestinian literature and culture are legitimate subjects of study? Or that education for all Israelis and Palestinians and many many other citizens of nations throughout the world who do NOT receive adequate education (many of them women) is important and has to be priority for all of us who care about such things? Resolution 2008-1 is NOT resolution about academic freedom but a slightly veiled and highly uninformed political statement and it should not be passed by the MLA. A bit of reality check: I myself have read one doctoral thesis passed by Bar Ilan University on Arab American women's literature, and I am presently directing another work in this area at Hebrew U -- both researches conducted by Arab women at Israeli universities. 15% of the students in the Hebrew U English department are Arab students -- Christians and Moslems, citizens of the State of Israel and non-citizens. I don't know the percentages at the other Israeli universities but I suspect the numbers are similar, both in English departments and in other departments.

To my knowledge the only Middle Eastern academics who have regularly come under attack for pursuing scholarly work -- whether concerning literature and culture, biology and sociology, or anything in between -- and who have been subjected to boycotts and exclusions are Israeli scholars, not Palestinians scholars. The resolution is, if anything, the wrong-way 'round.

I oppose this resolution for reasons others have offered. I see it as yet another instance of the knee-jerk anti-Zionism that has afflicted the academic world in general, and the MLA in particular. Would anyone dare to offer a resolution castigating the "democratically elected" rulers of Gaza--Hamas--for stifling freedom of thought? for oppressing women? for vicious, anti-Semitic misuse of popular media (children's cartoon programs that glorify, no, promote, suicide martyrdom)? Would such a resolution have any chance of being passed? I think not; but any denunciation of the "occupation"--de rigueur.

This is more of the Israel-bashing that has become a staple of the MLA in recent years. There have been repeated resolutions on variations of the same thing, and having witnessed the discussions at the convention, they are hardly about literature.

If you want to foster the teaching of any particular literature, there is a procedure to form a discussion group where it can be presented, this has been done by Catalan, Celtic, Hungarian, and Arabic.

But then academics isn't the point here, is it? This makes the MLA look cheap and debased. Where is our executive committee?...

I strongly oppose the resolution as worded. The term "Palestinian culture" is much too vague. Does it include Holocaust denial, support for so-called martyrs (suicide bombers), teaching against Israel's right to exist (the map of Palestine in school books, for example, does not include the State of Israel), etc. etc. If all this is part of Palestinian culture, as it certainly seems to be, we should oppose its teaching, not endorse it.

Save the world on your own time, as Stanley Fish has put it. Drop the resolution, and do this kind of propaganda using your own resources and on the weekends.

In 2007 the Delegate Asembly approved by an overwhelming majority my resolution which called for MLA to support the teaching and research of all scholars concerning the Middle East, including Palestinians, other Arabs and Israelis. But since the Radical Caucas exists to villify Israel, they are back with another clearly political resolution.

Everything in this pro-Palestinian resolution has been documented against Israeli scholars and institutions. Witness the European boycotts, demonstrations against Israel on American campuses, attacks on pro-Israel speakers both in the US and abroad. Please vote against this barely disguised political attack on Israel which does not deserve the MLA official stance on Iran.

This resolution should be defeated not only because it is, as many have suggested, a political statement outside the purview of the MLA, but also because it distorts the truth. While I certainly support the teaching of Palestinian and other literatures, the resolution is motivated by an anti-Israel bias where it targets "anti-Palestinian groups" who have allegedly challenged teaching and writing about the occupation. There is considerable evidence that misrepresentations of the facts are being perpetuated by Palestinian educators rather than by unspecified "anti-Palestinian groups." Palestinian textbooks continue to deny the existence of Israel as a legitimate state recognized by the U.N. and promote hatred against Israel and Israelis...

...The resolution as proposed would align MLA with the radical West European intellectual left (what's left from the left after 1989), in which under the burka of anti-Israeli stance hides plain old anti-Semitism.

Like many of my colleagues devoted to non-political, inclusive, high-standard literary research, I have been increasingly alarmed at the MLA's accommodation of radical groups who would like to turn our organization into a political platform for bizarre pathologies regarding my country of origin--Israel.

Jews have been targeted and maligned with special fervor throughout history, and I think the time to end this scapegoating has come now.

The Radical Caucus does not care much about Palestinian rights. If Jews were not mixed with Palestinian lives, they would care as much about this unfortunate group as they care about others with FAR greater problems around the world.

As a longtime MLA member, as a scholar who truly believes in the importance of studying literature as a work of art, as well as a cultural product, I beg MLA members and its governance to clarify our organization's mandate, and decide whether it wishes to support the Radical Caucus's agenda at the expense of losing serious contributors to the study of languages and literatures.

I say this, furthermore, as someone who is engaged in studying a spectrum of national literatures, including both Hebrew AND Palestinian works...

> Since deceit and falsehood are nowadays held to be politically > correct, I cannot comment on the language of the proposed > resolution, its concealment of the targeted Other, its semantic > slippages and manipulation of biased opinion, though I would > recommend reviewing George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the > English Language". However, I can tell you who are the scholars > who have "come under attack"--they are MLA members at Israel > universities who pursue the legitimate teaching of and research > on British, American, and postcolonial literatures, all branches > of linguistics, and Middle East cultures in Hebrew, Arabic, and > Aramaic. Studies are open to all students regardless of > citizenship, race, color, religion, or political views. In > summer 2006 MLA members at Haifa university were subject to long- > range missile attack from southern Lebanon. Since 2000, > thousands of rockets have been fired at MLA members in southern > Israel and in January 2009 medium range Iranian "Grad" missiles > forced the closure of Ben-Gurion University for over three > weeks. The attacks continue (60 Qassam rockets have been fired > in the last three months, targeting kindergartens, schools, and > colleges). As we know, indifference and ignorance can be more > deadly than the murderous acts they silence, and it is a pity > that such one-sided and misleading resolutions are totally > silent about the most basic of academic freedoms and human > rights--the right to live in peace.

...It is noteworthy that the MLA resolution makes not even passing mention of the circumstances that have resulted in the curtailing of educational opportunities for Palestinians. The wording of the resolution makes it seem that the present situation of Palestinian scholars has resulted from a gratuitous and arbitrary action of the Israeli government, acting in an historical vacuum.

It makes one wonder why, as it surveyed the world, the Delegate Assembly of the MLA could find no other case of comparable social injustice or political repression on which to focus its indignation. Are there no other trouble spots, no other civil wars, no invasions, no tyrannies, no mass expulsions on an incomparably larger scale, no massacres, no threats to freedom of education of similar or greater note, that might have merited the MLA's attention? And, speaking with all due respect, is freedom of education so sedulously cultivated throughout the Muslim world? Are Muslim countries all hotbeds of intellectual freedom? Why are there so many Muslim students in non-Muslim universities, notably in, of all places, Israeli universities? Why not mount a boycott against those Muslim countries that deny women opportunities for professional advancement?

There is no more dangerous anti-Semite than a sincere anti-Semite; an anti-Semite who is convinced that his/her antagonism to Jews and to things Jewish stems from the highest moral principles. That is why the menace to Jews has so often come from the political left. In this case, Israel is the excuse.

Does anyone believe for a moment that, if Israel were to behave more "reasonably," the Arabs, or, for that matter, the Iranians, would leave it alone? Israel made one gesture, withdrawing from Gaza, and we all know how that turned out. Israel is a minute patch of land, arid; largely desert. The Muslim world, over a billion people, stretches from the Atlantic all the way broadly eastward across Africa and Asia, deep into the Pacific.

We need some place to be. Stop picking on Israel. Give us a break.

I totally agree with this posting, since I think that Palestinian literature is worth to be studied (just as any other literature), especially because of the Jewish occupation in Gaza. This issue can be reflected in literature and enrich world literature.

It is true that other peoples and cultures are threatened and that they all deserve our support, but it is also true that writers who reveal the truth about the occupation and Israel's apartheid rule are more vulnerable than those who write about Burma, Tibet, or Darfur (only three among many others). Their jobs--and sometimes their lives--are threatened.

...I strongly support each and every word of MLA's resolution regarding Palestine. And I quote from Edward W. Said: "Today Islam is defined negatively as that which the West is radically at odds, and this tension establishes a framework radically limiting the knowledge of Islam. So long as this framework stands, Islam, as a vitally lived experience for Muslims, cannot be known. This, unfortunately, is particularly true in the United States, and only slightly less true in Europe." ("Covering Islam", which we know it completes the trilogy initiated with includes "Orientalism" and "Culture and Imperialism")...

...Political or not, it is dangerous to even broach the topic in some environments. If I voice an opinion that even hints at being critical of the bigger picture re: Israel/Palestinian/U.S. relations, I am almost always branded as "Anti-Semitic" to one degree or another, which is absurd, but said, nevertheless. Just look at the ad hominem attacks against Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Arundhati Roy...

...The resolution's "political" language is in fact quite fitting, since for the Palestinians (as for all peoples undergoing a national struggle) literature is born from politics and serves as a non-violent, yet effective means of political expression. The modern Palestinian experience is necessarily defined by politics and resistance.

Of course we should support this resolution!

To suggest that it is "anti-Israel" to oppose the fascist occupation and the stifling of Palestinian education and culture is to ignore the fact that a great many Israelis also oppose them...

Without being in any sense anti-Israel, much less anti-Semitic, I strongly support this resolution.

I strongly approve, as strongly as I disapprove of any and all boycotts of Israeli universities. The resolution is positive not negative, and not especially political. I taught for a semester at the Islamic University of Gaza in 1998 (apparently the only American, Brit, or Westerner ever to hold a full semester appointment at the IUG), and I know the conditions under which occupants of Gaza labor. Those conditions have worsened. Abba Eban may have been right, that the beleaguered Palestinians never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity - I could sense that - but that's what comes of living in prison colonies like Gaza especially and the West Bank. Palestinian productive scholarship and inspired teaching can only help.

...We of the MLA should be proud to stand behind any of our members who are specifically targeted by a well-funded attack machine.