A harassment campaign against the ASA
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli apartheid has been winning major gains, including last week's vote to endorse BDS by the union of graduate student workers at NYU. But defenders of Israel have been furiously enlisting allies in state legislatures and university administrations to pass blatant restrictions on the right to free speech. Among these efforts at retaliation is a frivolous lawsuit against the American Studies Association (ASA), one of the first U.S. academic associations to come out in support of BDS.
The following is the text of a petition calling on supporters to stand in support of the ASA against this baseless attack.
WE THE undersigned stand in support of the American Studies Association and its democratically elected leadership in the face of a baseless and harassing lawsuit filed against the ASA for supporting a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, after the membership overwhelming voted in support for it in 2013.
The lawsuit, brought by four U.S. academics, falsely alleges that the ASA did not have the power to endorse a boycott. It contends that the ASA should not be a social justice organization, and that a boycott of Israel falls outside the organization's stated mission. It also seeks to prosecute elected leaders of the organization, scapegoating them for the broad, democratic vote taken by the organization as a whole.
The allegation that the boycott violated ASA's education mission is unfounded primarily because the boycott debate is part of the ASA's core purpose to engage in critical investigation of U.S. policy, including foreign policy, and transnational and comparative studies.
Such aspects of the American Studies discipline have been a primary element of ASA's scholarship and a major part of the field for many years.
The claim that ASA was torn asunder after the ASA vote is patently false. In the year after the vote was taken, the Association gained close to 1,000 new members. Financial contributions to the Association also increased.
Indeed, as the civil rights advocacy organization Palestine Legal has declared, the lawsuit is "meritless" and an attempt "to chill speech supporting Palestinian rights. Such threats are being used to intimidate advocates for Palestinian rights, and deflect the conversation away from Israeli human rights violations"
In fact, the suit is pure "lawfare," an attempt by Israel and its advocates to intimidate and repress the wave of professional and academic organizations which in recent years have taken principled votes to support divest or boycott campaigns Israel.
The timing of the lawsuit makes this plain: it comes two-and-a-half years after the ASA resolution, but simultaneous with an organizational vote on academic boycott by the American Anthropological Association, and in the midst of a campaign for an academic boycott resolution by the Modern Language Association, scheduled for discussion and a vote in early 2017.
In denouncing this lawsuit against the ASA, we also assert the democratic and emancipatory principles of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement it seeks to destroy: an end to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands and extension of full civil rights to Arabs in Israel and the occupied territories; destruction of the Apartheid Wall; and respect for UN resolution 194, the right to return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland.
We also affirm the principles of academic freedom and free speech which were expressed in the American Studies Association's vote to boycott Israeli Universities.
Lastly, we urge professional colleagues to sign and share this petition, and to push forward the cause of Palestinian freedom.
