Opinion: Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites

In his latest column for Middle East Eye, Joseph Massad argues that western countries are willing to destroy academic freedom and human rights as part of its "commitment to Israel". 

He writes: "No academic expert could deny that Zionism was always a European settler-colonial movement allied with the imperialist countries or that Zionism had always espoused racist views of the Palestinians and cooperated with other settler colonies extending from South Africa to French Algeria and beyond.

And no scholar today could earnestly question that the Israeli state is an institutionally racist and Jewish supremacist state - enshrined in law - or deny the history of Zionist terrorism in the region, let alone the turmoil and violence Israel has visited on the entire Middle East since its establishment in 1948.

The problem, however, is that the media seems oblivious to this massive corpus of academic knowledge. So are academics in the professional schools of business, engineering, law and medicine, or even in the natural sciences or some of the social sciences who obtain their information from the mainstream western media."

You can read the full column below. 

Opinion: Why academic scholarship on Israel and Palestine threatens western elites