The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative describes itself this way:
MESPI is a curated interactive platform for Middle East Studies resources, specifically tailored for the needs of teachers, researchers, and students. It is a one-stop-shop for course design on the macro level, lesson planning on the micro level, and for scholarship vis-a-vis specific topics, countries, and disciplines. The MESPI project strives to reorient the way educators and students research, learn, and teach the Middle East.
In Cooperation with The Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University (GMU), The Center For Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, The Asfari Institute For Civil Society And Citizenship at the American University in Beirut, the Center for Global Islamic Studies at GMU, we are launching he Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) to provide critical, user-friendly, and informative pedagogical material and instruction to educators in the field and beyond. MESPI will build on at least four counts: a) create and grow a community/network of educators; b) make available to them and to researchers, journalists, and students a wide array of resources; c) provide in good time a robust syllabus-building tool; and, finally, and most critically, d) MESPI will build partnerships with research centers, organizations, and projects that will constitute its evolving decision-making body.
Every article and book I see on the site that mentions Israel is anti-Israel. It is associated with Jadaliyya and the Arab Studies Institute.
The site highlights such anti-Israel luminaries as Noura Erekat. A typical article on the site is an interview with Smadar Lavie, author of Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, where she says
Wrapped argues that the plight of Israel’s Mizraḥim and the plight of the Palestinians are complementary. Both are subject to the state of Israel’s deployment of war as a unifying force to divert attention from domestic issues of racial and gender justice through the sanctity of the “chosen people” in their “chosen land.”
While Mizraḥi feminists stage protests against the neocon restructuring of Israel’s economy and society, this all but disappears when Israel undertakes a new cycle of violence against the Palestinians. They do not challenge their communities’ ultranationalism. As a result of the Jewish state’s unity against all goyim (non-Jews, Hebrew; enemies, colloquial Hebrew), the Mizrahim, Israel’s demographic Jewish majority—racialized and minoritized—increasingly vote for right-wing, authoritarian politicians.
This is antisemitism in an academic wrapping. And it is hardly the only example. Other articles include, for example, “a selection from the University of California Press on the theme of Occupation and Militarism in Palestine/Israel.”
Using academia to smear Israel is nothing new. But this is a project specifically meant to create fully anti-Israel curricula throughout universities, and possibly high schools, while positioning it in the larger context of Middle East studies.
(h/t Irene)
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