Two sessions on academic boycotts and the Israel-Palestine question, one official and one organized outside the conference, drew relatively small but passionate crowds on Thursday as the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting opened here.

The panels helped set the stage for a vote on Saturday by the MLA Delegate Assembly, which will consider a resolution that calls on the U.S. State Department “to contest Israel’s arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.”

The official boycott session, billed as an exploratory “conversation about Israel and Palestine,” brought together scholars and activists who have been closely involved in a campaign known as the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

The session’s organizer—Samer M. Ali, an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Texas at Austin­—declared himself agnostic on the question of boycotts. The other participants explained the moral and political reasoning that had led them to support the BDS approach.

Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, called attention to what he termed “the entrenched and persistent complicity of Israeli universities” in violating Palestinians’ human rights. “Heeding the BDS call is hardly heroic,” Mr. Barghouti told the audience. “It’s a profound moral obligation.”

Barbara Jane Harlow, a professor of English at Austin, invoked international human-rights law and the global struggle against apartheid. David C. Lloyd, an English professor at the University of California at Riverside, made a case for BDS as a nonviolent “civil-society movement,” one that does not take aim at individual scholars, he said.

“This is an invitation, not a threat,” to Israeli scholars, Mr. Lloyd said. “It’s an invitation to free oneself from the uncomfortable paradox of espousing democracy while living in a country that denies some of its citizens full rights. It’s an invitation to step out of the meshes of a colonial Zionist project that has become a nightmare.”

Counterarguments

At an alternative panel, held Thursday afternoon at a nearby hotel, a group of MLA members who oppose the BDS movement attacked the resolution being voted on Saturday as based on flimsy evidence, and argued that passing it would send the association down a dangerous path.

Opening the discussion, Russell Berman, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University and a past president of the MLA, said the counterpanel had been arranged only in the last month, in response to the American Studies Association’s widely contested decision to call for a boycott of Israel. Mr. Berman also said that the MLA had not “improperly excluded” the panel from its conference program, as some boycott opponents have alleged.

The counterpanel audience got a detailed lesson in the history and shifting definitions of academic freedom from Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and past president of the American Association of University Professors. He questioned what he called BDS supporters’ obsession with Israel, which he compared to Captain Ahab’s trying to harpoon the white whale.

Gabriel Brahm Jr., an associate professor of English at Northern Michigan University, amplified that theme of obsession and questioned whether anti-Zionist talk wasn’t in fact anti-Semitism by another name. He described the BDS movement as “marginalized” and argued that it had little hope of having much effect on the Israeli government.

“The real threat of BDS is to the moral and intellectual life on America’s college campuses,” Mr. Brahm said.

‘Active Cooperation’

A firsthand perspective came from Ilan Troen, director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University and a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “Israeli and Palestinian Arabs need and want more, not less, of Israeli higher education,” he said.

Mr. Troen described examples of what he called “active cooperation” between Palestinians and Israeli institutions of higher education. Some of those activities—work that tackles desertification, for instance—are “life-sustaining projects” that benefit the whole region, he said. “Zionism has made the desert bloom.”

During the question-and-answer session, the BDS movement came under attack for being cavalier with terms like “Zionism” and “apartheid.” “Many BDS supporters don’t know Israel and don’t understand Zionism,” one commenter said.

“It’s unfortunate how concepts are hijacked,” Mr. Troen replied. “At the MLA especially, one ought to be careful about the use of language.”

In a conversation after the panel, a reporter asked Mr. Berman, the former MLA president, whether the association ought to weigh in on political issues at all.

“The MLA should take stands on issues that are central to its mission and that are significant enough to warrant the association’s endorsement,” he said. He named funding of the National Endowment for the Humanities and working conditions within academe as two examples. “If it takes political positions, it should take itself seriously and expect serious, watertight documentation.”

He added, “My big fear is that divisive resolutions like this will impair the potential unanimity of the association on those burning issues of higher education. It’s going to reduce our ability to work effectively.”