Eleven people attended, with six others unable to come, but wishing to remain on the email list. Among the concerns discussed was the need to clarify our mission. Several people questioned the title of our group, “Scholars for Peace in the Middle East” as suggesting two quite different emphases:

1) an engagement in peace making, e.g. dialogue with political leaders in the U.S., Israel, and/or Palestinian territories;

2) working on campus to promote accuracy about Israel, Radical Islam, and the Middle East, so that students and the community are educated, and so that anti-Israel political propaganda is opposed.

We agreed that the latter was our mission. As stated at the meeting, the problem is that demonization of Israel is being normalized and mainstreamed. It comes from many sources: radicalized political organizations of Arabs/Muslims; radicalized Arab/Muslim student groups; radicalized Latino student groups; post-Zionist/post-colonialist theory being academically fashionable.

Some participants raised the question of whether UCLA —-in contrast to UC Irvine or UC Santa Cruz or UC Berkeley—-actually needed our efforts. We agreed that we did not know the extent of the problem at UCLA, but that there should be zero tolerance to even infrequent examples of anti-Semitic rhetoric and anti-Israel bias seeping into classrooms or into invited lectures or into campus events.

For example, Martin Mendelsohn described going to a Finkelstein lecture at UCLA and being chilled by students cheering Finkelstein’s anti-Semitic statements. The recent report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding Anti-Semitism on American campuses was discussed, particularly its recommendation to conduct a public education campaign to inform college students of the rights afforded to them under federal civil rights laws, including the right of Jewish students to be free from anti-Semitic harassment.

A question was raised as to whether extant grievance procedures, or the campus ombudsman sufficed to address the problem, but the group agreed they were not, since many students either are unaware of their rights or are reluctant to make trouble or to confront the faculty.

Several in attendance noted that in recent years anti-Israeli propaganda on campus and elsewhere has been increasingly sophisticated and often effective, particularly for those who do not have relevant information. Many who are supportive of Israel are uninformed, and sometime misinformed, about the history of Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East. It would therefore be useful to make available such information with responses to false charges and statements.

Some such material is now available, such as Bard’s “Standing on One Foot”, and Meir-Levi’s “Big Lies. Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel.” Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, director of UCLA Hillel, suggested a series of luncheon presentations on the history of Israel and Zionism. Bert Raven offered to assist him in developing such a program.In addition, the following objectives were discussed and formalized by Roberta Seid:

On the UCLA campus:

* Monitor events/lectures etc
* Monitor one’s own department to see what is happening (eg Anthropology)
* Keep track of and help students who feel intimidated or discriminated against because of pro-Israel views

* More generally:
* Keep track of the national associations of one’s own discipline as to biased anti-Israelism ( e.g. as Bert Raven has been doing with Psychologists for Social Responsibility)
* Keep track of circumstances in UC system
* Keep track of anti-Israel distortions etc more widely in academia here and abroad

* To do:
Use our prestige and knowledge as professors/academics to help plan events (seminars/lectures) to educate UCLA communityand wider community
* Write letters/raise protests when evident bias and distortions occur in one’s disciplines’ associations and in our UCLA departments.
* Make use of the wide network provided by SPME to get support from academics in their field and from other academics in general.
* Be proactive to spread positive (and more accurate) images of Israel and Jews through the above methods. Don’t always just react–

Leila Beckwith
Professor emeritus in pediatrics
UCLA

Bert Raven
Professor emeritus in psychology
UCLA