Progress progress progress!
The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) announced on December 15th that it will join the boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
The small association becomes the third US academic association this year to join the boycott. In April, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), adopted the boycott, and earlier this month, the American Studies Association (ASA) joined as well. I wrote about that here.
The NAISA council responded to a petition from its members as well the call from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to join the boycott. After several months of deliberation, the council voted unanimously to join. The decision is non-binding on its members.
Why are American academics boycotting Israeli universities?
From NAISA's statement:
The NAISA Council protests the infringement of the academic freedom of Indigenous Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the Occupied Territories and Israel who are denied fundamental freedoms of movement, expression, and assembly, which we uphold…
...As scholars dedicated to the rights of Indigenous peoples, we affirm that our efforts are directed specifically at the Israeli state, not at Israeli individuals. The NAISA Council encourages NAISA members to boycott Israeli academic institutions because they are imbricated with the Israeli state and we wish to place pressure on that state to change its policies.
The ASA's
Bill Mullen said, "I think what the vote indicates is that people recognize the illegal occupation of Palestine as one of the major civil rights issues of our time globally. American scholars now understand the physical violence that's part of the Israeli occupation; they understand the massive restrictions on academic freedom for Palestinian scholars that is part of living under an illegal occupation. These facts are now irrefutable to so many people that the vote indicates a kind of coming to consensus around the illegitimacy of Israel's occupation of Palestine."
Eric Cheyfitz, also a member of the ASA and a professor at Cornell University wrote, "I am a Jew with a daughter and three grandchildren who are citizens of Israel. I am a scholar of American Indian and Indigenous studies, who has in published word and action opposed settler colonialism wherever it exists, including of course the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. It is worth noting in this respect that just as the myth of American exceptionalism seeks to erase the genocide and ongoing settler colonialism of Indigenous peoples here in the United States so the myth of Israeli exceptionalism seeks to erase Israeli colonialism in Palestine and claim original rights to Palestinian lands."
Many thanks to the NAISA council for answering the call--still a difficult stance to take in the US, yet no doubt on the right side of history.