BY DANA SAJDI

Part of my choosing to be a premodern historian is precisely to escape the reality of having been born and raised until adolescence in Nablus, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 

This 1967 photo, taken by my father from our house in Nablus in 1967, is of the first Israeli tank that entered my hometown announcing what was to become a perpetual military occupation—fifty-five years and counting, almost as old as MESA itself.

As a schoolgirl, it was a daily routine for me to carry in my lunch tiffin an onion, the root vegetable considered an antidote to tear gas. I was assigned to a different school every year and attended either morning or afternoon shifts in classrooms, built for thirty pupils, with sixty girls. 

My mother had my hair cut very short. She stopped me at the door every day holding two pencils, instruments not for writing but for checking for lice, which I had often. For my American University of Beirut–educated mother and my University of King Fuad/Alexandria University–educated father, the idea that their kids might be less educated, less cosmopolitan, and less widely traveled than them was intolerable. But this possibility was a direct effect of the Israeli military occupation. 

So, my parents made a very un-Palestinian decision and moved us to Jordan, where my mother was born. We were lucky enough to receive full citizenship. I ended up with a PhD from Columbia University and am now a tenured professor at Boston College. I live today what was once beyond my wildest dreams. 

However, being an academic does not compel me to live apolitically. I may not identify as an activist, but I still take stances on the moral and ethical questions of our time, and the occupation is one of them. 

Members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) are currently considering whether to endorse through referendum the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) directed at Israeli institutions (not individuals). This referendum is not a question of an academic association needlessly politicizing itself, of turning away from academia and toward activism—as if those two were always mutually exclusive. 

The 2005 BDS call emerged from the ashes of a failed peace process that attempted to trap Palestinians in an arrangement of perpetual subordination. Launched by a broad coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations, the movement sought the support of the international community as nearly all other avenues of protest had been seemingly foreclosed. Israel and the United States had even maligned other nonviolent legal advocacy efforts, like the 2004 case at the International Court of Justice challenging the route of the apartheid wall. Their resistance to the ICJ challenge was similar to their castigation of mass protests as counterproductive to peace efforts, and their condemnation of racist governing practices as somehow antisemitic. It is the foreclosure of other Palestinian avenues for protest that has heightened the importance of international solidarity. 

Heeding the call for BDS is about supporting the human rights of those who are denied them—a principled response to the Palestinian call for international solidarity in the face of diplomatic intransigence. For Palestinians have been deemed, as Hannah Arendt said, “superfluous.”

I thus wonder: How can I continue to pay annual dues and conference registration fees to an association that supposedly represents my interests and professional identity yet refuses to take a stand that explicitly rejects the apparent superfluity of a whole people? Palestinians are not tangential but are an integral concern of Middle East studies. How could my colleagues refuse to cease cooperation with institutions that perpetuate segregation, negation, memoricide—indeed, apartheid—as decades of studies and reports have shown? 

During my junior year abroad, leaving the American University in Cairo to study at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1988–89, I was captivated by daily agitations by students and faculty in support of liberation in South Africa. I was so impressed by the resolute and unflinching support for South Africa’s academic and cultural boycott. 

More than three decades later, increasing numbers of human rights defenders and organizations insist that Palestinians are living comparable apartheid conditions. The latest group to say so is Amnesty International, which stated unequivocally in February, “Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid.”

I hope my colleagues recognize that this issue, the lived conditions of Palestinians, can no longer be described as “complex” to avoid discomfort, or even complicity. The conditions are clear; so too is what we as scholars must now do in solidarity.

I urge my colleagues who are MESA members to renew their memberships and cast a YES vote for BDS. The resolution, which can be found here, emphasizes that as scholars, we have a responsibility to support our Palestinian colleagues who still do not enjoy the academic freedom that we so often take for granted. 

Dana Sajdi is associate professor of history at Boston College.