The permeation of anti-Zionism into Middle East Studies programs and academia at large is an old story, as is the BDS movement fostering a pipeline of hate on campus. George Washington University once accepted this problematic reality as a facet of its own campus culture. While pressure from advocacy groups and students like me over the last year has forced it to at least feign reversing course, recent events reveal that virtually nothing in GW’s thinking has changed.
Consider that recently, GW’s Elliott School hosted “Promises, Then the Storm: Memory, US Politics, and the Israel-Gaza War” that told the story of “Palestinian resistance and resilience” regarding the Oct. 7th massacre perpetuated by Hamas. It also facilitated a webinar with the authors of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), about the “deeper history and context of Lebanon’s history of resistance to Israeli violence and its entwined struggle with the Palestinian people.” Not only have each of the panelists slandered Israel as a genocidal state, but also MERIP has carried laudatory interviews with terrorist leaders and other activists in addition to encouraging readers to “comprehend the achievements” behind the 1972 Munich Massacre and declared that “all Israeli settlers are potential targets of the Palestinian resistance” in the aftermath of a 1974 Palestinian terror attack on an Israeli school.
Organized by the Institute for Middle East Studies (IMES), a partner of MERIP and a cynosure of anti-Israel dogma on campus, the events advertisements neither mention the tragedy Hamas inflicted on Israeli civilians last October, nor the role the Iranian Regime plays in destabilizing the Middle East with its proxy network of terror. This suggests a subtle but explicit endorsement of terrorism and a distortion of facts that the university, as of my writing, has failed to denounce and remedy.
This is exactly the kind of event GW pledged to keep off campus when it severed its relationship with IMES’ institutional partner, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), last July. MESA is a pro-BDS academic association whose presence on campus has been linked to a rise of antisemitic incidents. IMES, whose symposiums on “decolonizing knowledge” and “producing knowledge for resistance practices” were already known for promoting radical and anti-Western ideologies. MESA, however, provided IMES its revolutionary steel, inciting verbal and physical abuse toward Jewish students in and out of the classroom.
In May 2023, the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to former GW president Mark Wrighton, warning the University about the perils of the partnership with MESA. The letter described how MESA’s presence at GW was coinciding with an increase in antisemitic incidents, including Holocaust revisionism and denial in class, the appearance of swastikas, the desecration of mezuzot, and Jewish students being harassed and spat on for their Zionist beliefs.
A study by the AMCHA Initiative found that universities with faculty supporting the BDS movement are 3.6 times more likely to experience acts targeting Jewish and pro-Israel students with physical harm. The letter called on GW to terminate its partnership with MESA, arguing that it violated the university’s Academic Freedom Guidelines, contradicted GW’s anti-BDS policy, and could jeopardize its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as an educational institution.
Many GW community members deemed the university’s breach with MESA a step in the right direction. Over time, however, students and attendees of Middle East programming at the Elliott School began to question whether GW truly disaffiliated because BDS activity in the Elliott School and antisemitism on campus were only intensifying.
Indeed, IMES remains listed as an “Institutional Member” of MESA, rendering obvious the anti-Israel bent of IMES’s programming. Despite IMES not publicly endorsing a BDS resolution on their own website, the majority of its faculty including Professors Ilana Feldman and Shira Robinson support BDS and even signed onto a letter supporting last spring’s illegal pro-Palestinian encampment.
Former interim director of IMES Professor William Youmans, now a current lecturer at GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs, was one of the many GW and DMV faculty who attended the encampment. At the encampment, he stated “[students] enact what we teach in the classroom.” Another IMES professor dedicated class time to expressing support for the encampment and encouraged his pro-encampment students to stand alongside him and do the same in lieu of a final review session. No doubt, anti-Israel students feel legitimacy when advocating to guillotine administrators, pushing “Israeli Zionist pigs” off campus, and physically harassing Jewish families.
GW’s academic culture pertaining to the Middle East is no different than Columbia University, Northwestern University, and Harvard University—institutions facing some of the most serious concerns about antisemitism and under investigation by the Congressional Education and the Workforce and Ways and Means Committees—who are also listed as Institutional Members of MESA.
Once the foremost academic institution for its field, MESA’s 2022 official endorsement of BDS signaled its transformation into a political advocacy organization. Since then its overall popularity has declined. At the end of 2022, there were 43 institutional members; by the end of March 2023, only 31 remained. MESA’s advocacy page includes a section on “Campus Resources” with dozens of letters and statements written promoting ceasefire, negating anti-Zionism, and promoting illegal anti-Israel activity.
Last November, MESA sent a letter to Hebrew University defending Dr. Nadrea Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who was invited by GW’s infamous Dr. Lara Sheehi—a former professor responsible for harassing Israeli students in class—and stated that “Jews use money for nefarious purposes” among other antisemitic tropes. MESA also sent a letter to GW’s administration defending SJP under “academic freedom” after the group was suspended for violating school policies by projecting “Glory to our Martyrs” and “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” among other pro-Hamas slogans on Gelman Library.
Since Oct. 7th, the most tragic terrorist attack in Israel’s history, IMES has reeked of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Not unlike last year, where IMES held two anti-Israel events shortly after Oct. 7th—a panel of several scholars with an anti-Israel bent and the screening of “Israelism”—IMES will hold two events related to Gaza without a single firm pro-Israel perspective. One event slated for October 15 features Dr. Annelle Sheline, who recently resigned from the State Department in protest to Biden’s Gaza Policy. The other, occurring on Oct. 23rd, explores the work of Arab and Arab-American poets and musicians to tell a story of “Palestinian resistance and resilience.” Unlike last year, however, IMES will not platform a single Israeli speaker—not even one Israeli critical of Israel’s policies—this October.
IMES faculty justifying and legitimizing Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks as a “right of resistance” is no surprise. Before Oct. 7th, too, defamatory lies about Israel as an apartheid, settler colonial and genocidal entity with no contrasting views in talks like “The One State Reality: What is Israel/Palestine?” and “Between the Colonial and Authoritarian” were ever-present.
At several IMES events, when I asked questions about topics like Islamic terrorism, the antisemitic education system administered by the United Refugee & Works Agency, and the detriment of BDS to Israelis and Palestinians alike, GW faculty members and IMES panelists shut me down with claims of settler violence and parallels between the Israeli Declaration of Independence and the Hamas charter.
During an IMES-sponsored screening of the documentary “Israelism” last October (for which I received extra course credit for attending and writing about) the film director responded to my question by saying I was wrong because I “grew up blind to Palestinian suffering” due to being raised in an Israeli-Jewish-American home. Keffiyeh-garbed audience members applauded, cheering on the panelist as he sardonically responded to my questions.
The issue with IMES faculty and these events is not merely their anti-Israel stance but the complete lack of viewpoint diversity. During the Oct. 16th Panel Discussion on Developments in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, when panelists were encouraged to ask each other questions, nobody did, demonstrating that they more or less agreed. This undermines the intellectual rigor and stimulating contradictions that students come to college to explore, discuss, and challenge.
Indeed, this orchestrated absence of viewpoint diversity is crafted to distort and manipulate facts to fit an anti-Israel agenda, suppressing any informed and comprehensive education on Israel—whether this includes jihadi terrorism, Israeli internal society and politics, Jewish-Muslim relations in the MENA region, or antisemitism. IMES programming thus contributes to a “pipeline of hate,” inciting hostility toward Israel (and by extension, Jews in general), driving a misleading narrative that guides GW students destined to become future leaders and policymakers.
GW administrators’ failure to entirely remove MESA from the university’s Middle East studies program shows a continued tolerance for the promotion of terrorism as events celebrating “Palestinian resistance and resilience” persist—most cynically, this month, in the wake of the one-year anniversary of the massacres perpetrated on Oct. 7th.
Sabrina Soffer is a senior at George Washington University.
