Controversy has erupted at UCLA over a pro-Palestinian presentation on Zoom this week that was allegedly offered as extra credit for some students.
And one of the professors behind the seminar told The Post that Israel is “a power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology” and “maintains a brutal occupation of Palestine.”
The “Emergency Teach-In On The Crisis in Palestine” was convened Wednesday on the Los Angeles campus by professors Saree Makdisi of the school’s English department and Sherene Razack, chair of the gender studies department.
A 2015 alumna of UCLA, Davina Farahi, 31, who works with the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, heard about the presentation and signed on to Zoom to watch it.
“It started out as Makdisi representing Israel as a colonial power and compared it to a colonizing apartheid state,” Farahi claimed to The Post. “Razack framed it as an issue of everyone being made to see Palestinians as the ‘other’ so people won’t care when they die.”
Razack did not dispute claims about the tone and content of the talk.
“Yesterday’s panel did depict Israel as a settler colonial society that came into existence through the dispossession of Palestinians and that maintains a brutal occupation of Palestine,” she said in an emailed statement to The Post.
“Further, Israel practices Apartheid and Palestinians and Jews do not possess equal rights under law, a conclusion widely shared by scholars — Israeli and non-Israeli alike, and by Amnesty International, among others. As my panel member Professor Makdisi put it in a recent article in The…
Read the full article here