Unfor­tu­nately, the event was can­celed after charges of anti­semit­ism were leveled against me and the other sched­uled speaker, Pro­fessor Joel Gor­don. Sub­sequently, due to the atmo­sphere cre­ated by such claims, not a single pub­lic event deal­ing with the Gaza Strip viol­ence took place at the state’s flag­ship uni­versity in fall semester 2023.

The charge against us was made by Jay Greene, a former Uni­versity of Arkan­sas pro­fessor now at the Her­it­age Found­a­tion, with Fay­etteville-based Con­duit News. Greene’s accus­a­tions played a major role in the decision to can­cel the event. More recently, on Dec. 16, law pro­fessor Robert Stein­buch quoted Greene in pub­lished a column in this paper accus­ing me and Dr. Gor­don of being the “most hos­tile to Jews” of all Uni­versity of Arkan­sas pro­fess­ors.

Anti­semit­ism is cer­tainly a ser­i­ous prob­lem in the U.S. As Bernie Stein­berg, former exec­ut­ive dir­ector at Har­vard Uni­versity’s Hil­lel chapter, observes, “Anti­semit­ism in the U.S. is a real and dan­ger­ous phe­nomenon, most press­ingly from the alt-right white-suprem­acist polit­ics that have become alarm­ingly main­stream since 2016.”

But is there any­thing to asser­tions that Joel Gor­don and I are “hos­tile to Jews”? I’d sug­gest that the fact Gor­don is Jew­ish should raise ser­i­ous ques­tions about the claims. I am not Jew­ish, but per­haps a few of my career accom­plish­ments might cor­rect the pic­ture painted by Stein­buch and Greene:

In sum­mer 2008, I served as a vis­it­ing pro­fessor in the M.A. Pro­gram in Middle East Stud­ies at Ben Gur­ion Uni­versity of the Negev in Beer­sheba, Israel (Gor­don has taught there as well).

After pub­lish­ing a book, “Memor­ies of Revolt,” deal­ing with res­ist­ance to the Brit­ish colo­nial occu­pa­tion of Palestine dur­ing the 1930s, I began to do research on the cul­ture of Middle East­ern Jews. It is still not well known that Jews lived and often thrived throughout the Middle East for cen­tur­ies, a his­tory that was tra­gic­ally dis­rup­ted with the cre­ation of the state of Israel.

Among my pub­lic­a­tions on Jew­ish sing­ers of Middle East­ern back­ground is a book chapter in “The Rout­ledge Com­pan­ion to Con­tem­por­ary Jew­ish Cul­tures” that deals with cel­eb­rated Israeli pop singer Dana Inter­na­tional of Yemeni ori­gin.

Dur­ing my ten­ure as Pro­gram Coordin­ator of the Middle East Stud­ies Cen­ter, in spring 2019 I organ­ized a con­fer­ence on “Jew­ish Con­tri­bu­tions to Middle East­ern Music.” Six Jew­ish experts in the field (among them a pro­fessor at Hebrew Uni­versity in Jer­u­s­alem) offered lec­tures, and in addi­tion we put on a con­cert fea­tur­ing Ira­nian Jew­ish pray­ers sung by Galeet Dar­dashti, a Jew­ish-Ira­nian-Amer­ican artist and musi­co­lo­gist who also serves as a can­tor in her local syn­agogue.

Why, one won­ders, did Gor­don and I get smeared with the charge that we are hos­tile to Jews? Clearly it is not because we hold far­right anti­semitic beliefs, but instead because both of us have cri­ti­cized Israeli policies. In this respect, the accus­a­tions against us should be seen as part of a much lar­ger polit­ical trend in the U.S., one that has meta­stas­ized since the hor­rors of Oct. 7: the weapon­iz­a­tion of the charge of anti­semit­ism against those who pub­licly express dis­sent from Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip.

The aim of such weapon­iz­a­tion, as Bernie Stein­berg of Har­vard Hil­lel has observed, is to “to intim­id­ate and ulti­mately silence legit­im­ate cri­ti­cism of Israel and of Amer­ican policy on Israel.”

Invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ist James Bam­ford describes in The Nation the efforts of one of the most import­ant organ­iz­a­tions involved in this cam­paign, the well-fun­ded Canary Mis­sion. This organ­iz­a­tion, Bam­ford shows, is “a massive black­list­ing and doxxing oper­a­tion dir­ec­ted from Israel that tar­gets stu­dents and pro­fess­ors crit­ical of Israeli policies, and then launches slan­der­ous charges against them — charges designed to embar­rass and humi­li­ate them and dam­age their future employ­ab­il­ity.”

Since Oct. 7, many in the U.S. have been so tar­geted, which has res­ul­ted in the ban­ning of stu­dent organ­iz­a­tions, the fir­ing of employ­ees, the can­cel­la­tion of many uni­versity pub­lic events and for­ums, and so on.

Daniel Levy, who served as an Israeli nego­ti­ator in the Oslo B peace pro­cess, explains another key factor that motiv­ates these cam­paigns. At a time when the most respec­ted inter­na­tional human rights organ­iz­a­tions, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Inter­na­tional, have charged Israel with prac­ti­cing a policy of apartheid against Palestini­ans, it makes emin­ent sense for the Israeli state to shift the focus of the con­ver­sa­tion. And so Israel and its allies are work­ing dili­gently to turn the dis­cus­sion away from Israeli actions and to shine the spot­light instead on indi­vidu­als who might express cri­ti­cism of Israeli policies, alleging they are anti­semitic.

What pos­sible harm would have been done if Uni­versity of Arkan­sas stu­dents had atten­ded a forum and heard from two pro­fess­ors with wide exper­i­ence in the con­flict region and 50-plus years of teach­ing exper­i­ence at the uni­versity? From a pro­fessor with rel­at­ives in Israel who has taught courses on the Israel-Palestine con­flict for years (Gor­don). From a scholar with field research exper­i­ence inside Israel and the Israeli-occu­pied ter­rit­or­ies, who lived in Lebanon dur­ing the first year of the Lebanon civil war, who made the first of his three vis­its to the Gaza Strip in 1968 (me). From two pro­fess­ors with friends and col­leagues whose loved ones and com­rades were killed or kid­napped on Oct. 7, and who also know many who have fam­ily in Gaza that have been killed and/or been rendered home­less by Israel’s attacks.

That the sched­uled event did not occur is argu­ably due to what Andrea Long Chu, writ­ing in New York magazine, describes as a nation­wide “one-sided, McCarthy­ist crack­down on pro-Palestine speech.”

To my mind, the sad­dest part of the story is that the Uni­versity of Arkan­sas admin­is­tra­tion failed to stand up to the McCarthy­ist chal­lenge, and denied stu­dents the oppor­tun­ity to hear any dis­cus­sion of the Gaza Strip con­flict in fall semester. I con­sider this a sin­gu­lar and shame­ful fail­ure for a state uni­versity in whose respec­ted Middle East Stud­ies pro­gram I taught between 1996 and 2022.

Reprinted with the author’s permission from the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette