Pushback for Anti-Israel Academics

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Opponents marshaled evidence to prove this was untrue. Egypt, not Israel, controls the “Rafah crossing” that Gaza students and faculty heading toward universities abroad have used for decades. Unlike the benighted English-department faculty members from Columbia and Wesleyan universities who proposed a similar resolution two years ago, AHA historians were interested in facts. They likely knew that after Egypt closed the Rafah crossing in October 2014, Israel increased the flow of students leaving Gaza through the Erez crossing into Israel to the north, and on to Jordan for flights abroad.

But Jordan, which once issued transit visas in 10 days, now takes several months or longer because of increased security concerns about students from Gaza. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t pass on requests for permits to Israel without the visa from Jordan. Fellowships and other opportunities expire as a result.

The resolution also condemned Israel for an air attack on the Islamic University of Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. But it failed to mention that the campus housed a weapons development and testing facility, a valid target under the laws of war.

All this was too much nuance and complication for Historians Against War, the group proposing the resolution. Yet an academic discipline that is supposedly a forum for disinterested scholarship and open debate was at risk of abandoning its traditions and intellectual integrity. In the end a strong majority of historians didn’t want to see their field turned into a propaganda machine (although a similar resolution is sure to return eventually).

Less was at stake for some academic organizations—such as the National Women’s Studies Association—that have endorsed anti-Israel resolutions. Born of political movements and forged with political agendas, they sacrificed little in terms of disinterested scholarship.

But history is one of the venerable humanities fields, and its loss to ideological politics would have wide and deeper implications. The humanities have been slowly defunded over decades. If the key humanities and interpretive social-science fields—from literature and languages to history and anthropology—become centers of anti-Israel indoctrination, they will not only be economically marginal; they will be discredited. Will parents, state legislators and, most important, universities feel any reason to replenish humanities resources?

On April 15, the 10,000-member American Anthropological Association will begin voting on an anti-Israel resolution endorsed at its annual meeting in November. While that meeting was dominated by zealots, the April vote may focus instead on hard evidence and on the damage the resolution would do to anthropology as a field. A battle over whether to boycott Israeli universities also will unfold this year in the 25,000-member Modern Language Association representing English and foreign-language faculty and graduate students.

Activists in these disciplines have convinced themselves they have their hands on the levers of history and can delegitimize the state of Israel. But they are more likely instead to discredit their academic disciplines. We will soon get to see whether the humanities will be left standing when the dust from balloting settles. There are no guarantees.

Mr. Nelson is an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an affiliated professor at the University of Haifa in Israel.