CHICAGO — The Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly narrowly approved a resolution Saturday urging the U.S. State Department to express concern over what the measure calls restrictions on scholars’ ability to travel to Israel and the West Bank to work at Palestinian universities.

The 60 to 53 vote followed hours of debate in which supporters of the measure framed their issue as a matter of human rights and academic freedom, while critics said that the association was singling out Israel based on faulty information and bias against the nation.

The vote now goes forward for further review by MLA leaders, and so does not become official association policy just yet. But the issue set off intense debate here. The meeting of the Delegate Assembly was frequently interrupted by confusion over the rules — and delegates on both sides of the issue expressed frustration over how the meeting was run. Some parliamentary decisions were revisited, and there were numerous interruptions in the proceedings so MLA leaders could study the rules.

Ostensibly, the vote was about a specific Israeli policy with regard to how some people are or are not admitted to visit the country. Proponents said scholars were being blocked from visiting Palestinian universities, while others cited the many American and other scholars who travel to those institutions all the time.

But much of the debate went beyond that. Supporters of the resolution talked about their view of Israeli abuses of Palestinians’ rights, and cited U.S. aid to Israel as a reason to justify a focus on that country. Critics of the resolution, meanwhile, said that the MLA lacked the expertise to weigh in on these issues. Further, many critics said that the association risked its reputation by singling out Israel.

In a change made to the resolution before today’s meeting that was cited by critics as an example of its flaws, references to Gaza were removed. Supporters said that they were trying to clarify the measure. But critics noted that Egyptian authorities control much of the entry to Gaza, and that the change illustrated that supporters hadn’t done their homework.

The vote here took place against the backdrop of a recent vote by the American Studies Association to support a boycott of Israeli universities. But proponents of the measure denied repeatedly that this was a first step toward a boycott, and said that the matters were not necessarily related.

At the end of the meeting Saturday, the Delegate Assembly declined to take up an “emergency resolution” that would criticize those who have criticized the American Studies Association. For such a resolution — submitted well after the normal deadline — to be considered, 75 percent of the delegates would have to have approved it, and not even a majority voted to do so. Many delegates were at that point, however, clearly anxious to see the nearly five-hour meeting draw to a close.

The MLA announced however, that the emergency resolution would be referred to the association’s Executive Committee for possible consideration. That was viewed as a victory by one of the supporters of the emergency resolution.

The debate about the main resolution was contentious from the start, with Richard Ohmann, one of the sponsors demanding an apology from Cary Nelson, one of its leading critics, for saying the resolution was a step toward a boycott vote. That statement is “false, insulting, damaging to our professional reputations,” said Ohmann, professor emeritus of English at Wesleyan University. “I would like an apology.” Ohmann called the resolution “narrow in scope.”

Nelson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and former president of the American Association of University Professors, responded to the apology request: “Not in this life.”

Of the resolution as a whole, he said that “we need to act like scholars and look at evidence, not anecdotes.” He repeatedly questioned why Israel was being singled out when there are complaints about scholars’ access to many countries.

At one point, a substitute resolution was proposed that would not have focused on or even mentioned Israel. That resolution stated that “boycotts, blacklists and travel restrictions directed against scholars and academic institutions pose a serious threat to academic freedom and scholarly debate.” The resolution would have urged “all government and academic institutions” to refrain from those practices.

The chair of the meeting — Margaret Ferguson of the University of California at Davis — ruled the substitute out of order, on the grounds that it was too similar to past MLA resolutions. That ruling outraged many here. But others said that the substitute resolution should have been ruled out of order for not really being an amendment, but an entirely different resolution not related to the first one. Ferguson initially declined to let her ruling be challenged. Then she said it could be challenged. And the delegates voted to sustain her original ruling killing off the substitute proposal.

Many of those who spoke in favor of the resolution (the one adopted) accused supporters of Israel of distorting the issues. Nathan Brown of the University of California at Davis, said that it was time to take a stand against “rhetorical ploys.” He said that all of the complaints about whether the MLA is qualified to take a stand on the issue amount to saying that “no one knows enough to speak out. It is an oppressive rhetoric to make us feel too ignorant,” he said. “The rhetoric is, ‘you are too stupid to decide for yourself.’ ”

Others supporting the resolution said that just because other countries have problems is no reason not to speak out against Israel. They compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and said that by the standards cited by supporters of Israel, no one could have spoken out about South Africa.

After the vote, Rachel Harris, head of the Hebrew division of the MLA, said she was upset by the outcome. Harris is assistant professor of Israeli literature and culture at Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, and she studies Palestinian authors who write in Hebrew. She said she was “deeply sympathetic” to many of the concerns of proponents of the resolution. But she said she was “appalled by the lack of critical evidence” in the debate and the singling out of Israel.

She said that “motions of this kind are part of a broader movement to delegitimize the study of Israel as an academic field.”