The 2023-2024 academic year demonstrated the extent to which Brown has lost its way. The nadir, so far, of the University’s shameful year was its craven capitulation to the anti-Semitic occupiers of the College Green and their many faculty enablers. As reported by the press around the world, Brown agreed to an October vote by its leadership on whether the University should divest from entities doing business with Israel - not a discussion of divestment, but an actual “yes” or “no” vote. More specifically, there will be a vote on “divestment from the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territory”, the definition and scope of which were left unsaid. So far as I know, no other university in the country has gone to such an extraordinary length to appease the uneducated and uneducable. Why would Brown enter into such an agreement? The University did so to ensure that commencement and reunions weekend would go on without incident.
In so doing, Brown President Paxson managed to achieve a trifecta of academic leadership failures in one fell swoop. Like Neville Chamberlain, she believed she had guaranteed “peace for our [graduation] time”; like the German planners of the 1936 Olympics, she thought she would be able to pretend that all was well on campus - no signs of anti-Semitism, no one chanting “there is only one solution intifada revolution”; she channeled noted antisemite and Nazi sympathizer Avery Brundage, who insisted that the 1972 Olympic Games continue after Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli Olympic athletes, “the [graduation] must go on”. (It bears repeating that Brown professor and endowed chair holder Beshara Doumani headed Birzeit University for two years, a university that happily celebrates that particular act of Palestinian barbarism, among many others.) Paxson and the rest of the Brown leadership who agreed to this Faustian bargain embarrassed themselves and did permanent damage to the institution. And yet they received absolutely nothing meaningful in return for surrendering to the occupiers.
Moreover, it didn’t quite work out as agreed to. While I had previously written that the graduation was quiet, that was not entirely so. Paxson’s commencement speech on the Sunday of graduation weekend was interrupted by chants of “no rest till Brown divests”. A group calling themselves “Brown Alumni for Palestine” took credit for the puerile sloganeering thereby demonstrating the quality of the education they received at Brown.
What comes next given the lose/lose situation Brown has put itself in? A “yes” vote on divestment - whatever divestment actually means in the context of the October vote - would not only be a stunning departure from principles Paxson has repeatedly expressed with respect to the importance of the non-political use of the endowment, but also would be an epic victory for Hamas, for Hamas supporters on the Brown campus and for terrorists around the world. It is hardly surprising that the extreme right wing, religious fanatics running Iran - a living hell for women, the LGBTQ+ community and political dissenters as a majority of Brown students and faculty surely must know - have nothing but high praise for America’s pro-Hamas campus sycophants.
And if the vote is “no”, what then? What is Brown’s plan to deal with what will no doubt be the fury of the scorned adolescents among the students and faculty? What will Brown do in response to another encampment? Does Brown’s leadership believe that a “no” vote will result in calm acceptance? That is naïveté bordering on the delusional (although I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong on this point).
Notably, in a wide-ranging interview in mid-April and published again yesterday, Jane Dietze, Brown’s Vice-President and Chief Investment Officer, made several comments underscoring the importance of Brown having a plan in place to deal with the reactions of Brown students and faculty to a “no” vote on divestment. Dietze was asked:
“Given the share of investments now managed externally, is it even possible for Brown to divest in the way it did in the 1980s from companies conducting business in South Africa during apartheid?”
Her answer? “Essentially no. Given today’s realities, it’s not possible to divest the way Brown did in South Africa or Sudan.”
Entirely apart from the fundamentally immoral and factually baseless arguments made by the financially illiterate divestment supporters at Brown, Dietze’s comments should put the nail in the coffin, hopefully forever, of the divestment from Israel game.
The only question that remains is why Brown’s leadership entered into the “agreement” to vote on divestment a few days after the Dietze interview.
How did the final couple of months of the semester go? First, it’s worth noting what didn’t happen. No Brown students or faculty protested the continued incarceration in concentration camps of over a million Uyghurs by the Chinese government; or the 10 million Sudanese displaced and starving which, according to the Guardian, is “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world”; or the 500,000 to 600,000 Syrians killed so far in their civil war; or the murders of thousands of Christians and moderate Muslims by Islamists in Nigeria and the Sudan; or the Chinese threats to take over Taiwan; or the ongoing war by the Turks against the Kurds. No students or faculty mounted divestment campaigns targeting entities doing business with human rights luminaries China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or South Africa or any of the predominantly Muslim countries where apartheid is the law of the land. The three reports of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (“CAMERA”) detailing Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”) single-minded devotion to advancing Palestinian agitprop at all costs continue to be ignored. (The Brown Daily Herald (“BDH”) has never even mentioned them.) My suggestion of nearly a month ago that Eli Rosenbaum, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, be invited to speak on campus this fall has yet to be responded to. As noted previously, Rosenbaum is a true expert on genocide and the laws of war having spent nearly 40 years representing the United States in the prosecution of war crimes and war criminals around the world. And, unlike a single person on the Brown faculty, he has real-life experience dealing with these concepts in a context - trials - where facts and law matter; by way of contrast, in the real world, op-ed pieces, journal articles and speeches by academics and others speculating about genocide and the laws of war matter not at all.
So what has happened in recent months? Among other events:
(1) Also as previously noted, the Brown Concert Agency used a poster some described as “explicitly antisemitic” to advertise that Elyanna, a twenty-two-year-old Palestinian-Chilean singer who sings in Arabic, would be among the Spring Weekend performers. Elyanna famously cancelled her North American tour a few weeks after October 7 to demonstrate solidarity with “my people” in Gaza. Who are her people? Hamas? After she performed (mostly in Arabic) at Spring Weekend, she told a BDH reporter “the crowd was amazing and I had the best time with them…I love how everyone was wearing their keffiyeh”. Just for balance, next year the Brown Concert Agency presumably will invite Eden Golan to perform at Spring Weekend. This year Golan, a twenty-year-old Israeli, performed at Eurovision, the international song competition. Despite receiving death threats, catcalls, jeers and other forms of hate, and despite calls for a boycott by the predictable suspects, 163 million people reportedly watched the competition; Golan finished 5th out of the 24 competitors and 2nd in the “public vote”.
(2) On April 23, Angela Davis spoke at Brown for the seventh time, this time at the invitation of the Brown Center for Students of Color. According to the BDH, “At the start of the event, BCSC student workers, many of whom wore keffiyehs, welcomed University Professor of Social Science Lina Fruzzetti who then introduced [Davis]”. Fruzzetti was the perfect choice to introduce Davis. In 2021 she signed a turgid “Letter in Solidarity with The Palestinian Liberation Struggle” awash in the usual academic boilerplate; on November 7, 2023 she signed a letter calling for an immediate ceasefire and release of all hostages. She introduced Davis as an “icon” who received a standing ovation. As reported by the BDH, Davis noted that “pro-Palestinian advocacy is one of her greatest values”, which she claimed to have learned from her “progressive Jewish classmates” at Brandeis in the 1960s. The BDH further reported that “Davis then shared that many who criticize the existence of Israel are “falsely labeled antisemitic” but went on to say “[it’s] so important to challenge antisemitism, to say no to antisemitism”. So for this supposed “icon”, criticizing the very existence of Israel is not anti-Semitic but one must say “no” to antisemitism. Only one who has spent much of her life tilting at windmills could express those two thoughts in virtually the same breath. (Does the Brown Bookstore yet sell keffiyehs emblazoned with the Brown University seal? Clearly there is a market.)
(3) Brown’s Graduate Labor Organization (“GLO”) is a labor union representing graduate student employees, i.e., “researchers, teachers and mentors” and states that “through collective bargaining and collective action, we advocate for the needs of a diverse student body, fight against discrimination in all its forms, and nurture a caring community that supports the personal and professional lives of all student workers.” Despite this statement of purpose, GLO decided to focus its activities this past spring on divestment. Its decision to support divestment shows just how disconnected this union is from serving, e.g., “the needs of a diverse student body”.
According to Brown graduate student Andrew Clark, GLO communications director, the union has a history of support for “Palestine” including having formed a “Palestine Solidarity Caucus” in 2021. Unsurprisingly for Brown students and faculty, Clark and GLO President and graduate student Sherena Razek, who notes she is a Palestinian member of the union, blithely toss around words like “genocide” and “apartheid” in a way that highlights the extent to which they haven’t the vaguest idea of what the words mean.
Apart from general questions surrounding the value and relevance of faculty unions, the most troubling aspect of the GLO is that the union’s statements and conduct guarantee that Brown is turning out yet another generation of supposed “educators” dedicated to delivering misinformation and polemics about Israel/Palestinians as opposed to engaging in scholarship. The extent to which GLO is focused on propagandizing for Palestinians was demonstrated by its decision to have Brown faculty member Ariella Azoulay address GLO picketers in late April. Azoulay is a member of Brown Academics for Justice in Palestine, seemingly a sister organization of the shadowy-funded, junior varsity terrorist group Students for Justice in Palestine.
Azoulay came to public prominence in the late fall of 2020 in connection with a presentation she made to Cornell’s architecture department. In her presentation, Azoulay showed pictures of early Israeli pioneers but with their faces blacked out. Her explanation? “I can’t bear to look at them.” Quite apart from Azoulay lacking any semblance of emotional intelligence and having the emotional maturity of, say, a ten-year-old, her status as a favorite of the GLO and her continued presence on the Brown faculty speak volumes about how far gone Brown is with respect to issues surrounding Israel/Palestinians.
(4) On May 1 Nadim Bawalsa appeared on a webcast sponsored by Brown’s Watson Institute and CMES. Beshara Doumani introduced him, cheerily noting that the webcast was on May Day. Bawalsa’s most recent book is “Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return Before 1948”. He described the emigration of Ottoman subjects - Syrians, as he says they considered themselves - from villages in what is now Israel to, in particular, Latin America. Their travels, as he described them, were no easier or more difficult than those of any other immigrants seeking freedom in the Americas. And, like so many other immigrants, many have lived for generations, often very successfully, in Chile, Argentina, Mexico and other countries. An age-old, entirely familiar story - and good for them.
But he suggests, including by the title of his most recent book, that all these people - 500,000 he says in Chile alone - should have a “right of return” to what is now Israel. He says “Palestine is everywhere”, whatever that means, although even Doumani as moderator conceded that there was no “Palestine” in the formal sense of a state when these people left the region. And of course there still is no state of “Palestine” - it’s a fiction perpetuated for self-serving reasons by politicians and academics.
Bawalsa does not explain why Palestinians are somehow entitled to a “right of return” to places they left, whether voluntarily or not, as compared to the scores of millions of people displaced in the last century alone but who claim no such right. Like the others who believe in this contrived “right”, he cites as a root cause British colonial policy as reflected, e.g., in what he called the “infamous” Balfour Declaration. No one doubts that British colonial policy, like the colonial policies of many other countries through the centuries, caused dislocations and other harms to millions of people. Those who were living in greater Syria at the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire suffered no more or less than any other displaced persons. Yet somehow Bawalsa, like others who wallow in Palestinian victimhood, believes in a “right of return” for anyone claiming to be a “Palestinian” on whatever basis - real, flimsy or entirely made up. His solution to effectuating this fantasy? “Dismantling Zionism first.”
Bawalsa, Doumani, the CMES faculty and all those who keep alive the delusion of a “right of return” do a tremendous disservice to millions of people by constantly and confidently selling a false hope. Another false hope these same people sell, as Bawalsa put it in his webcast, is the delusion of Palestine “from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea”. Not happening no matter what Israeli government is in place.
In connection with Brown’s agreement to hold a vote on divestment Brown President Paxson stated that “universities were built to hold disagreement and grapple with competing views. This is an essential part of our mission of advancing knowledge and understanding.” In recent months, much has been revealed about Hamas including, e.g., their phony fatality statistics as even the UN, the Associated Press - and Hamas itself - have reported; “journalists” holding hostages; “civilians” being paid by the day by Hamas to hold hostages; “civilians” shooting at Israeli soldiers rescuing hostages; and humanitarian aid being hijacked by the Hamas terrorists for their own use. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, there is ample documentary evidence supporting what has been obvious for decades - that Hamas intentionally puts its own people in harm’s way hoping their deaths will keep international pressure on Israel.
Those supporting Hamas and those supporting Israel’s right to defend itself against enemies openly seeking its destruction and the extermination of its Jews, do not merely hold “competing views”. This isn’t like one side favoring the Red Sox, the other the Yankees. There can be no “competing views” about proven facts. Hamas, and only Hamas, has the blood on its hands of every single man, woman and child - Palestinian or Israeli - who has died in the war Hamas started. Have the Israelis always acted flawlessly in that war? Of course not. But who at Brown has the requisite courage and intellectual integrity to address the actual facts? And when will that happen? If the past at Brown as evidenced by the above is prologue, the answers to those two questions are “no one” and “never”. So much for Brown’s “mission of advancing knowledge and understanding” when it comes to Israel/Palestinians.
Willis J. Goldsmith, Brown Class of 1969
Quite evidently none of the stout social justice warriors cares for the Uighurs, Syrians or Kurds. But here’s an idea. Perhaps some Jewish group might invite a speaker from the Africa-Jewish Alliance who can speak knowledgeably about ongoing enslavement of Blacks in Arab countries. That should create some cognitive dissonance among many of the keffiyeh-wearing dilettantes on campus.
https://givebutter.com/AJA
Separately, has Brown considered a mask ban (with health and festival exceptions but even then, they must unmask upon demand for ID purposes to ensure their student status)?
Many campuses could benefit from what, in our day, was called guerrilla theater. To bring home a rather obvious point, a student group could parade in Klan outfits along with keffiyeh-clad auxiliaries - or maybe adorn their sheets with a keffiyeh. May as well have some fun while exposing the double standard.