Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State by Cary Nelson (review)

In what has become a perverse annual ritual for some academic associations, the American Historical Association (AHA) voted on two anti-Israel resolutions at its January 2020 meeting, which would have singled out Israel for condemnation for supposedly restricting educational access to Palestinian Arabs. Both resolutions were, fortunately, voted down by the membership, but the fact that such anti-Israel votes—part of the worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Jewish state—even exist represents a challenge to academia since free academic inquiry and debate have been degraded by this toxic movement.

In not passing these resolutions the AHA thankfully avoided the intellectual hypocrisy that plagued the American Studies Association and other academic associations whose memberships have voted to introduce boycotts against Israel, contributing to the cognitive war against Israel that has infected the Academy and corrupted teaching and research in the social sciences and humanities—especially in Middle East Studies departments.

While much of the anti-Israel activism on campuses is fomented by students in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the contortion of scholarship, academic boycotts, and the publication of journal articles and books as weaponized scholarship against the Jewish state is the purview of faculty, and some of the prominent members of the professoriate are the subject of Cary Nelson's book, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State.

In this campaign, classrooms become places where propaganda defines learning, where faculty with a visceral loathing of the Jewish State promulgate pseudo-scholarship, historical contortions, factual inaccuracies, and even lies in their campaign to demonize, slander, and libel Israel with the goal of achieving social justice for the Palestinians. Nelson, who was President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) between 2006 and 2012 and is Professor Emeritus of English and Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is not a right-wing ideologue so the professors discussed here are criticized for their violations of academic integrity more so than their unrelenting hatred toward the Jewish state. "Israel Denial seeks to occupy a political space in which fierce opposition to BDS 'scholarship' is paired with practical proposals for how to make progress toward a two-state solution," Nelson wrote about his book, "a space in which teaching, writing, and public advocacy that promotes mutual understanding and offers practical solutions to the conflict can thrive" (Cary Nelson, "Israel and the Left: Three Studies of the Crisis: (3) Israel Denial and the University," Fathom [July 2019]).

Like many in the Academy and elsewhere, Nelson seeks a two-state solution, and he has convinced himself that such an outcome is feasible, but only if, he contends, Israel can be encouraged to make significant concessions to the Palestinians to help them in their campaign for self-determination. Nelson includes some discussion of those concessions at length here, as if to show that his condemnation of the anti-Israel professors he has cataloged in the book is not mere ideology on his part but part of a balanced and nuanced debate wherein all sides have to make concessions in order to achieve that elusive concept of "two states living side by side in peace." He contends, unlike many hardliners, that Jerusalem will need to be divided into capitals for each state, and even suggests that Hebron should be abandoned to Palestinian control in the name of peace—just as Gaza was in 2005.

Many on the Right would of course reject both of these extraordinarily significant concessions on the part of Israel, but Nelson includes these (and other solutions, such as a whole chapter in which he discusses a proposed course in Palestinian and Israeli poetry to examine and understand two competing but equally valid narratives to create mutual understanding) as a contrast to the manner in which the BDS proponents he...