The Set-Up On ‘Debating Israel and Apartheid’

The final panelist is Professor Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, an extremist who teaches sociology at Hebrew University. In an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year, she accused Israel of “trying to de-Palestinize” Israeli Arabs. “But we are all part of one community,” she vowed. “We are all Palestinians.”

In her writings and lectures, Sabbagh-Khoury rails against alleged Israeli “expulsions,” “pillaging of Palestinian lands and property,” and, of course, “settler colonialism,” a favorite catch-all phrase—although, ironically, Sabbagh-Khoury often uses the term to refer to left-wing kibbutzniks in the 1940s, not the religious-nationalist Israelis in Judea and Samaria today. (The title of her 2016 guest lecture at Brown University was “The Zionist Left: Settler Colonial Practices and the Representation of the Palestinian Nakba.”)

In short, the line-up for the “Debating Israel and Apartheid” panel at the upcoming American Historical Association conference will be nothing less than a kangaroo court, with Israel in the docket and its harshest critics making up the entire jury.

The great irony is that Lichtenstein, writing in the December 2015 issue of American Historical Review, declared: “Our organization has always housed multiple viewpoints on the questions of Zionism, Israel, and Palestinian self-determination.” And yet the panel on which he is serving at the association’s conference will be occupied completely by people who all have essentially the same harsh viewpoint towards Israel.