My field has nothing specific to do with the Middle East. I am an epidemiologist, and my research interests are cancer and asthma. I love my day job because it gives me the opportunity to try to find out the truth about disease and how the human suffering it causes may be prevented. But in the spring of 2002, I discovered that the humanities and social sciences at my university and many others had become major sources of anti-Israel miseducation and pseudo-scholarship. In response to this realization, Ed Beck and a small group of academics, including me, founded Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) as a faculty-to-faculty network trying to promote academic integrity and good scholarship, particularly with reference to the Middle East
Many Jewish organizations have responded to the problem of campus-based anti-Israel propaganda and its impact on students by pouring resources into programs for Jewish students, trying to transform Israel’s image on campus by sponsoring trips, having Israel fairs, and so on. The organizations generally either are blind to the role of faculty as the source of the problem or blind to the potential importance of faculty as a solution.
Programs for Jewish students reach only those students who are willing to attend them. Faculty reach both Jewish and non-Jewish students, as well as colleagues. Faculty set the tone of intellectual life at the universities, and they stay much longer than students do. In the past five years, we have learned that anti-Israel faculty do not necessarily outnumber faculty who are open to learning the facts, who understand what academic freedom is, and who recognize when it is threatened. Our numbers have grown from a few hundred to nearly 20,000, representing more than 1000 institutions all over the world.
We have also learned that many of those who demonize Israel on campus are funded by anti-Israel organizations and wealthy nationals of Arab/Muslim countries. They have achieved dominant roles in their departments and marginalize or eliminate those who do not espouse their views. It will take years and considerable resources to reverse these trends.
However, with very little funding, SPME has had an effect. We helped to mobilize academic opposition to the proposed British boycott of Israeli scholars. Because we are academics, we have a degree of credibility on campus that outside organizations may lack. We can hold scholarly conferences and issue publications that are taken seriously by the academic community. With what we have accomplished, we are poised for still greater impact.
Judith S. Jacobson, D.PH,
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University