Contentious Alliances and the Hostile State of Middle East Studies
This is the latest in the series Dispatches from the Front Lines of Antisemitism with Sharon S. Nazarian. Each month, Nazarian reports on antisemitism news as she travels the country and the world.
1. Israel’s Polarizing Antisemitism Conference
The politicization of antisemitism is not a new phenomenon, but last month’s International Conference on Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, convened by Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli, took matters to a whole new level, causing strife and consternation at a delicate time for Jewish people worldwide.
As stated on the conference website, it was organized to address contemporary antisemitism, raise awareness about its key drivers and to address “critical challenges posed by the evolving realities” since Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
But controversy emerged when the list of speakers and attendees was announced. Among them were Jordan Bardella (above, left), leader of France’s National Rally party (RN, formerly National Front), and Marion Maréchal (above, right), head of the Identity-Liberties party and the granddaughter of RN founder and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen. The common denominator: They represent far-right political parties that have in the past been outlawed or existed on the ultranationalist political fringe, considered taboo in Europe and by Israel due to their history of support for neo-Nazism, Holocaust denial and racism.
Next came the list of prominent figures from Jewish communities worldwide who announced they would boycott the event due to those speakers’ inclusion. Among them were French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, German antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein and U.S. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
The cancellations not only presented an embarrassment for Chikli but also exposed a divide in the global Jewish community at a time when Jewish leaders want to show a united front given the outbreak of antisemitic incidents around the world—the highest rate since WWII. On one side are those embracing far-right politicians as new allies against the so-called Islamist-extreme-left axis, otherwise known as the “green-red alliance.” On the other are those who are wary of those far-right parties and continue to hold them accountable for their past history and current racist and otherwise extremist views.
2. Netanyahu Also Courts Europe’s Far-Right
The normalization of Europe’s far-right ultranationalist parties by Israeli government officials is not new. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made a state visit to Hungary on April 3 despite facing an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, has undertaken a strategy (known as the “Visegrád Group strategy”) of reaching out to Europe’s far-right politicians in an effort to break the anti-Israel stance taken by the EU over the past decade. However, courting and meeting with far-right politicians across Europe often goes against the wishes and interests of the Jewish communities of those very countries. The main problem lies in normalizing political parties who are at once pro-Israel and antisemitic. What often makes them pro-Israel is their embrace of Israel as an “ethno-national” state, something they strive for in their own countries. Even more fundamentally, they view Israel as a homogeneous “white European” society standing at the forefront of the Judeo-Christian world’s war against Islam. This manufactured and cynical view of Israeli society goes against Israel’s multicultural and multi-ethnic makeup.
In addition, by aligning with ultranationalist and racist European political leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Netanyahu is siding with politicians who are pushing their democracies toward illiberalism and tearing apart their democratic institutions.
Netanyahu is doubling down on far-right political ideology and politicians both domestically in his government and globally through alliances with President Trump, Argentinian President Milei, and past Brazilian President Bolsonaro, among others.
Meanwhile, in order to ease tensions at the two-day conference, Israeli President Isaac Herzog hosted Jewish leaders for a private gathering the night before it opened. Ultimately, the conference exposed the reality that the fight against unprecedented antisemitism is also a tool the Israeli far right will use to achieve its political agenda.
3. Update from UCLA
I previously reported that the University of California, Los Angeles had suspended two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, after a protest outside UC Regent Jay Sures’s home that involved vandalism and intimidation. In late March, UCLA announced it was suspending the graduate group for four years and indefinitely banning SJP as a campus organization.
In making the decision, the university said in a statement that previous actions by the groups were also taken into account. “We will continue to uphold our policies to ensure UCLA remains a safe and respectful learning environment for all members of our Bruin community,” it read. UCLA is among a number of American universities that have either put SJP on probation or permanently banned the student group for breaking university policies and rules.
Individual SJP chapters and National SJP have justified and/or glorified the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel. SJP chapters, of which there are approximately 275 (mainly in the United States and Canada), and “informal” affiliates (other local campus organizations such as Palestine Solidarity Committee, or PSC) take their cues from National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) and often promote and cross-post the same messaging and “calls to action” on social media and at protests. NSJP as a national organization was formed in 2010 and held its first conference at Columbia University in 2011.
For years, SJP chapters have also been leading campus organizers of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel, and specialize in using confrontational tactics such as disrupting student-run pro-Israel events, constructing mock “apartheid walls” and distributing fake “eviction notices” to dramatize alleged Israeli abuses of Palestinians. As proponents of “anti-normalization” between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel advocates, they make it more difficult for groups with diverging views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to work together and achieve mutual understanding.
SJP chapters at Columbia University, George Washington University and Rutgers University were suspended in November and December 2023 for violating university policies, and the SJP chapter at Brandeis University was banned.
4. The Hostile State of Middle East Studies
Harvard University is replacing the top two leaders of the school’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), though both will remain in their faculty positions. One potential factor in this action was a 2024 report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance that accused CMES of tarring Israel as the “last remaining colonial settler power embodying the world’s worst evils: racism, apartheid and genocide.” Harvard also recently announced the suspension of a research partnership with Palestinian Birzeit University in the West Bank.
“The individuals heading these centers have betrayed every standard and academic principle in their roles,” said Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, head of Chabad at Harvard, “thus completely disqualifying themselves from the ability to advance scholarship and, most certainly, [from] the qualifications to advance human rights broadly.”
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is the professional association of Middle East studies scholars and has more than 2,800 members and more than 50 institutional members. In a letter to Harvard leadership, MESA expressed “deep concern about Harvard University’s decision to remove Professor Cemal Kafadar and Associate Professor Rosie Bsheer as, respectively, director and associate director of the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). We regard Harvard’s action in this matter as an egregious violation of longstanding and widely accepted norms of faculty governance as well as the principles of academic freedom.”
Over the past 20 years, many centers for Middle East studies at major U.S. universities have turned hostile to looking at contemporary Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. In a 2022 Tablet article titled “The Hijacking of Middle East Studies,” authors Asaf Romirowsky and Alex Joffe wrote, “Few trends in academia are more depressing than the continued domination of Middle Eastern studies departments by postcolonial professors whose shtick involves recycling cliched attacks on the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ and Israel as the ‘Little Satan.’ The results of this trend are evident in faculty antipathy toward Israel, which is increasingly playing out in their support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”
In 2022, MESA endorsed and implemented a BDS resolution against Israel and its universities. MESA’s president, Eve Troutt Powell, wrote of the resolution, “Our members have cast a clear vote to answer the call for solidarity from Palestinian scholars and students experiencing violations of their right to education and other human rights.” In response, ISGAP, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, said that “MESA disavowed any pretext of being an authentic academic association. Those who wish to boycott Israeli universities undercut academic freedom and betray values that academic associations are meant to hold dear: freedom of expression, tolerance, equality, justice, and peace.”
Another indicator of hostility is the exclusion of Israeli studies chairs and programs under Middle East Studies departments. At UCLA, when the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies (endowed by the Y&S Family Foundation, of which I am president) was created in 2010, it was made clear that it was not welcome under the umbrella of UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies. At the time, and since, academic inquiry and programming on Israel invariably depicted the state as illegitimate. The founders of the Nazarian Center made the decision to house it under the International Institute.
Finally, private donations, especially from states such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, have been cited as another indicator of the hostility toward the study of Israel. According to a 2024 report by Mitchell Bard, since 1981 “American universities have accepted nearly $55 billion in foreign funding; nearly one-fourth came from donors from, and the governments of, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.”
The Trump administration’s demands that universities remove leadership at their centers for Middle East studies or place their centers under academic receivership has forced a reckoning of systemic bias against the study of Israel in many major American universities.
Top image: Jordan Bardella (left), leader of France’s National Rally party (RN, formerly National Front), and Marion Maréchal (right), head of the Identity-Liberties party and the granddaughter of RN founder and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen. (Photo credit: Raphael ATTAL @BootEXE (CC BY-SA 4.0) / © European Union, 1998 – 2025 / Heritage Conservation Jerusalem Pikiwiki Israel (CC BY 2.5)).