GWU academic’s antisemitism isn’t helping Palestinians like me
Bassem Eid
Video Embed
It surely does a disservice to any culture to allow the violent and venal villains who usually compose dictatorships to speak on behalf of their people. With the Palestinian people, our whole identity is often assumed to be bound up with the anti-Western, violent ideology promulgated by Yasser Arafat and his proteges.
George Washington University professor Lara Sheehi is just the latest example of this violent misrepresentation, which gives my people a bad name. Consider some of her activity on her now-deleted Twitter account @blackflaghag, on which she frequently showed her hateful bias against Israelis with comments such as: “F*** Zionism, Zionists …,” “F*** every person who is not yet an anti-Zionist,” “Zionists are so far up their own a***,” “Zionists are unhinged,” “You can’t be a Zionist and also a feminist,” all psychoanalysts must actively practice anti-Zionism, and Zionism is a “psychosis.”
BIDEN IS PULLING THE REVERSE FERRET
Sheehi has also repeatedly condoned violence against Israelis. And this past semester, she used her mandatory diversity course to spread such dangerous views and actively discriminated against Jewish students in her class.
Let me be abundantly clear: Sheehi and her fellow antisemitic haters do not speak for me or for the many Palestinians who desire peace and coexistence with our neighbor, Israel.
Hatred and radicalism harm Palestinians and do nothing to advance our cause. What is needed is a commitment to peace. Just consider the negative effects that advocates such as Sheehi have on my people. When several Jewish and Israeli students in GWU’s graduate psychology program took a mandatory diversity course with Sheehi, they were astonished at how they were treated. Students were asked to go around the class to share their ethnic identities, to which the professor would make unsettling comments such as, “It’s not your fault you were born in Israel,” as if it was a negative trait. Students were subjected to anti-Jewish course readings and antisemitic guest speakers. This included Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who recycled a version of the Medieval “blood libel” in claiming that Israel tested weapons systems on innocent Palestinian children. Sheehi herself claims that after attending that guest lecture, one student was forced to comment that she was “certain that [Shalhoub-Kevorkian] would readily dance on the grave of my seven-year-old niece.”
When the students complained to school authorities, Sheehi counterclaimed that the students were exhibiting “Islamophobia” against her. Sheehi retaliated against the most vocal students by denigrating them to other faculty members and instigating baseless disciplinary proceedings against them, which the university allowed to proceed without conducting any investigation. Students were then told they would face a remediation hearing with a committee, which has the potential to go on their permanent records.
Sheehi also verbally attacked a student for speaking about terrorist attacks in Israel, which have killed civilians, including American citizens. Her claim was that the student’s use of the phrase “terrorist attack” invoked Islamophobia, even though the student never mentioned Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims in the comment.
Sheehi’s actions do not and should not represent the Palestinian people, the good men and women I know who respect our neighbors and wish for an end to these endless cycles of violence. Those of us there see how peace, economic opportunity, and cooperation benefit both Palestinians and Israelis, just as the normalization of political and economic cooperation with Israel has brought tremendous advantages to countries such as the United Arab Emirates. This is what most Palestinians want, too.
As recently as 2006, polling showed that the majority of Palestinians support peace with Israel and recognize the Jewish state. Even after the violence of the last few years, 39% of Palestinians support a two-state solution as of 2022. Tens of thousands of Palestinians work in Israel and suffer economic harm when BDS radicals implement broad boycotts.
Those of us living there understand that our leaders are corrupt and divisive, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas currently serving the 19th year of his four-year term and having suspended the Palestinian legislature, constitution, and all elections since 2006.
According to the democracy monitor Freedom House, the Palestinian Authority “governs in an authoritarian manner, engaging in acts of repression against journalists and activists … journalists can be fined and jailed and newspapers closed for publishing information that might harm national unity.” The plight of Gazans is even more terrible, as Hamas has formed a Taliban-style theocracy in their territory.
What we need, and what I have consistently advocated, is new Palestinian leadership with a different mindset and a road map for peace. We know what the preconditions for a peace deal might look like because of the three attempted peace agreements negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians in 2000, 2001, and 2008.
In the first place, we need mutual recognition and an end to violence. There also must be agreed-upon borders that provide territorial and demographic security for Palestine as an Arab state and for Israel as a Jewish state. Finally, normalizing relations will allow the two states, which geography has predestined to share an intimate relationship, to cooperate on economic development. Both sides will benefit from normalizing our borders and relations with our neighbors, ending the perception of our region as a conflict zone, and providing the foundations for a surge in prosperity, especially for Palestinians.
Over the past few weeks, we have seen the bitter fruits of Sheehi’s style of hatred as violence has begun to spiral out of control in Israel and the West Bank. Brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, aged 21 and 19, were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist as they drove through the West Bank town of Huwara on Feb. 26. That same evening, Israelis from the same village as the Yanivs rampaged through Huwara in an act of vigilantism, setting fire to cars and killing 37-year-old resident Sameh al Aqtash. The very next day, 27-year-old American-Israeli dual citizen Elan Ganeles of West Hartford, Connecticut, was shot to death by Palestinian terrorists near the Dead Sea as he was visiting the country for a wedding. These are the inevitable results of prioritizing hateful rhetoric instead of building bridges for peace.
Violent, hateful rhetoric rejecting the aspirations and experiences of Israelis may get headlines, but it does not represent the majority of Palestinians, who know that peace is the path to a better life for ourselves and our children. When radical actors preach hate and violence, it inevitably leads to violent incidents that only worsen matters and trap us in an escalating cycle. Bloody-minded propagandists such as Sheehi mislead Palestinian youth on the path to violence, decrease the chances of peace, and give the Palestinian people a bad name.
For the prosperity and future of both peoples, living in the narrow space between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, I call on Palestinian voices and those who support us to advocate peace, not hatred. And I call on GW to condemn this discriminatory, divisive, and extremist behavior that only serves to spread hate, incite violence, and hurt us even further.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Bassem Eid is an award-winning Palestinian human rights activist.