This article appeared in Counterpunch on February 3, 2023
The Complaint
On the evening of January 11, 2023, I checked my university email to find The Washington Free Beacon asking me to “comment on” a Title VI complaint that they had knowledge was to be filed against the George Washington University (GW) by pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs the following day. The complaint alleges that GW “discriminated against first-year Jewish and Israeli students in its professional psychology program” (sic). As an Arab woman professor teaching in the United States, I am accustomed to demands to prove that I am not antisemitic as a precondition to engaging relationally. Similarly, as someone who has been involved in abolitionist and anti-oppressive movements in the field of psychology for years, I immediately recognized that I was the next target of choice. In recent years, right-wing advocacy groups have intensified their harassment, red-baiting and attack campaigns, vilifying academics (and clinicians) who critically engage settler-colonialism, white supremacy, anti-blackness, gender (especially trans issues), sexuality, disability, reproductive rights.
StandWithUs’ contrived complaint is a textbook example of how right-wing advocacy groups take advantage of today’s political climate with impunity. They released the complaint to a third-rate Breitbart-wannabe rag before the complaint was filed with the Department of Education. They redacted all names at the university save mine. This unambiguously showed their intention: not to advocate for students, but to manufacture controversy about my scholarship and activism around Palestine.
As the Center for Constitutional Rights has documented, defamation and harassment campaigns by StandWithUs gain traction because there is a “Palestine Exception” for academic freedom and free speech. While pro-Israel activists allege that carefully documenting the ways in which StandWithUs intentionally defames scholars, activists and students evokes age-old antisemitic tropes about Jewish conspiracies, the organization’s stated political intention, and the playbook it uses to whip up right-wing social media to intimidate and harass scholars is not a conspiracy. One only need look at its stated mission to see that it is a shameless fringe political activist group prosecuting a right-wing pro-Israel agenda. Their aims are documented as far back as 2015 by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
StandWithUs opportunistically exploits those who might share their political views on Zionism. In my case, StandWithUs’ complaint stands out as particularly egregious and reckless, considering GW, my program, and I are in possession of ample written documentation, eye witness accounts, and evidence to easily refute every claim in their poorly written document. Their interest is not in student well-being but rather to slander, malign, and at the most basic level, create confusion that equates anecdotal allegations with fact. Galvanizing racist, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian tropes is not difficult in a post-/911 era. StandWithUs just had to redact every name but mine and let racism and sexism do its job.
Facts Matter
Let me be unambiguous that StandWithUs, like other right wing activist groups, willfully misrepresents facts in order to smear, isolate, and defame its targets in order to convict them in the public eye before they are able to speak. I have been targeted specifically because I am an Arab woman whose scholarship and activism advocates for Palestinians and, in the process, critiques Israeli settler-colonial Apartheid. Because I am an Arab, StandWithUs can casually parse key information to create an inflammatory narrative in place of facts, relying on anti-Arab prejudice which remains robust in the United States.
Their campaigns of harassment and defamation rely on a tired technique and strategy. Take for example the tag line they have chosen for me, allegedly telling an Israeli student it was not her fault she was born in Israel. This salacious tagline is plastered across right-wing media sites, begging the question of my guilt. This is where they choose to begin their baseless complaint where they also unethically represent a brown bag lecture given by internationally renowned feminist and scholar, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. StandWithUs not only fails to mention that the brown bag was not mandatory, but also, that it was specifically held in the GW Elliot School of International Affairs building (not in our program’s space) so students would not otherwise feel obliged to attend. Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is an Israeli citizen herself, the Lawrence D. Biele Chair of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and recipient of the prestigious Gruber Women’s Rights Prize. Our department regularly hosts brown bags, announcing them on the program’s listserv (not in my class), and, unlike Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s talk, they are routinely held in our building, as was the case with the following brown bag about Veterans.
Co-hosted by our department and my newly launched Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab, Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian drew on recent work by Jewish Israeli scholars, Moriel Ram and Haim Yacobi, speaking about the ways in which the state of Israel, through IsraelAID (like USAID), launches mental and public health initiatives in the Global South as a means of developing soft power. Rather than exclusivizing Israel and alienating students as the complaint cynically asserts, students across cohorts lauded how the brown bag spoke to the ethical responsibility of clinical psychologists to recognize how they may be mobilized, even inadvertently, to serve state projects, no matter the state.
Consistent with their creative editing of facts, StandWithUs’ also selectively cherry-picked quotes from a classroom discussion that was held on October 3, 2022, following Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s brown bag. I devoted the entire class period to discussing issues raised by a few Jewish students regarding the brown bag, replacing the scheduled class lesson on troubling the “micro” in microaggressions related to Asian erasure and fatphobia, specifically. Contrary to what some have irresponsibly made claims about in public forums, I did so because I do not single-out Jewish students, nor unduly and unfairly task them with holding their concerns in a cynical hierarchy of suffering. Despite my being keenly aware of the ways that structural patterns have the tendency to repeat themselves consciously and unconsciously (here especially in erasing Asians and Asian Americans at this violent time in the United States), I still made the conscious choice to use this class period to discuss antisemitism.
If StandWithUs were to release what I believe is a recording of a clinical psychology class discussion taken without consent of me or any other student, the transcript would reveal that I absolutely and categorically agree that antisemitism is undeniably real. Not only did I highlight how this was a valid concern especially in the current neo-fascist backdrop of the United States, but also, but also, how as mental health clinicians, we have a special responsibility to be hyper-aware of this context as a pre-cursor to ethical practice. The transcript would also reveal that several students extended their empathy, their support, and their wish to understand more from the Jewish students who spoke. Not only did I encourage this relationality, but also praised it, noting that students were experiencing in real-time what we often discuss in the abstract. We further discussed what is it like for us to reach beyond our political and social identifications in order to connect with others’ pain, even if we do not share their worldview.
Because my pedagogical approach is attuned to the psychodynamics of emotional and psychological activation, I go out of my way to never “shut down” disruptive or uncomfortable topics. In doing so, I hope to model in collective conversation what it means for mental health clinicians to commit to an ethics of care that is not only reserved for our patients or those who pay for our services. Despite an alarming level of anti-black and anti-Arab racism that was sadly articulated by these students that day, I (and other cohort members) made countless efforts to “call-in” (and not shame) students who voiced their concern about the brown bag, an approach I attempt to model for all my students.
What the transcript would reveal is that the students catgeorically refused to engage in genuine discussion, eventually leading to an alarmingly disturbing comment: “after listening to that lady [Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian], I am certain that she would readily dance on the grave of my seven-year-old niece.” Or, a comment insinuating that Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a “terrorist” and “advocated violence against Jews.” In their words, their fear was linked to the fact that Palestinian children are terrorists-in-the-making because they throw stones at Israelis; and stones thrown by Palestinian children have been known to kill. I similarly remained patient and understanding even when the voluntary brown bag was likened to “a talk that would discuss how black men commit crimes”. Because of the inappropriate and relentless anti-Arab, Islamophobic, and anti-black tropes, several students attempted to de-escalate the combativeness by alerting their classmates that perhaps despite their intention, their message was clouded by racism and being lost in the process of berating a professor.
The complaint also consciously omits the time stamp of how after more than an hour of escalating racist rhetoric, one student erroneously insisted that the IHRA definition of antisemitism was the official adopted definition globally, citing President Trump. Throughout the discussion, a select few students claimed criticism of the State of Israel is in itself antisemitic, in any and all contexts. The belief that Zionism does not represent all Jewish people or that anti-Zionism should not be reduced to antisemitism is largely accepted in progressive circles, US law and public policy. Despite this, though purposefully omitted from the complaint, I went out of my way to explicitly distinguish between political Zionism (a political ideology and movement attached to a national state project) and spiritual Zionism (a religious movement within Judaism that has looked to Palestine as a locality for spiritual renewal while making no political claims to the land).
More importantly, student witnesses and testimonies from that class and from several other cohorts can attest that, quite contrary to exclusivizing any state, I teach them that as ethical clinicians we have the responsibility to criticize all state discourses without essentializing an entire people. In this first-year cohort diversity class, we had already discussed the mistreatment of Uyghurs in China, without resorting to Sinophobia; the Russian invasion of Ukraine, without resorting to Russophobia; the totalitarian nature of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s regimes, without engaging in Islamophobia; and the rise of Hindutva ethno-nationalism, without essentializing all Hindus or Indians.
As an American Psychological Association (APA) accredited doctoral program whose goal is to train ethical and culturally aware future-psychologists, my diversity classes are designed specifically to prepare students-clinicians for these types of reflective skills as well as reflections on the biases that their patients might experience from them. In keeping with a psychoanalytic orientation, my explicit intent and ethical duty, is to model, guide, and train students to contend with these biases, conscious and unconscious, and to practice, with guidance and attuned care, the very challenging and sometimes destabilizing process of troubling our own personal and political identifications. My pedagogical approach irrefutably contradicts the claims of identity-based targeting, as it is not reserved just for my Jewish or Israeli students. It is a contract that is made with all students, not as a matter of political agenda, but rather, a commitment to the field and to the wellbeing of our patients.
The pedagogical and clinical practice of making visible the psychic effects of oppressive systems and critically taking up issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. is not new or fringe. In service of upholding their ethical commitment to first do no harm, to integrity, to beneficence, and to justice, this pedagogical approach is now established best practices not only in teaching a “diversity” course but as a feature within educating and training future clinical psychologists.
GW has now colluded with StandWithUs’ misrepresentation of my classroom by being silent about a number of key issues of which they are well aware and about which they have supporting documentation that could have been used to publicly dispel these allegations. For example, unlike what is sloppily represented in the spurious complaint, my syllabus has no specifically dedicated Palestine content. Palestine is mentioned in passing in two readings. In one reading of which I am the author, Palestine is mentioned in my immanent critique of another seminal psychoanalytic article that takes up a case of an Armenian-Lebanese woman patient. In my critique, I explore how over-focusing on Arabness and Zionism might have been a missed clinical opportunity to reflect on the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust as a potential common experience between the family histories of the patient and the psychoanalyst. In the other reading, Palestine is momentarily mentioned in clinical transcript material from the author’s own therapy, a passage quoted in the complaint without context. The author’s critique of her therapist’s non-empathic statement is clinically important because it was made in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the sentence that follows is of the author’s Jewish analyst saying, “at least Puerto Ricans have never been shot at like Palestinians. They aren’t being bombed.” StandWithUs is apparently also in the habit of silencing Jewish folks who criticize Israel.
Despite the fact that no reading on Palestine or Palestinians (or Israeli psychic and physical violence against them) appears on my syllabus, this exact “talking point” was used to disrupt and derail the learning of an entire cohort, again, in the October 31st class detailed in the complaint. Despite the fact that StandWithUs surely has my syllabus, as does my director, my program, and the Dean’s office, this false accusation remains repeated in the complaint, social media and professional listservs, yet one more untruth deployed to confuse a very clear issue.
The tactic to inaccurately represent my class, my syllabus, and my pedagogy, and the accusation that I create a hostile environment for Jewish students whom I target, falls in a long tradition of fomenting racially motivated hate against Arab scholars (especially Arab women scholars) who are engaged in Palestine solidarity work. Rather than engage my work on Palestine through rigorous academic scholarship or in reputable mainstream and scholarly venues, StandWithUs trudges out the hackneyed post-9/11 trope of the Arab “sleeper cell,” who is always imminently dangerous to Jewish people no matter how “reasonable” or “western” we may appear.
Disciplinary Charges
StandWithUs’ political agenda is much clearer with the knowledge of how my classes are specifically designed to encourage all students’ self-exploration as well as the explicit racist language that was used by a few students who are characterized as the aggrieved. Likewise, StandWithUs builds a false allegation that I “retaliated” against Jewish students, a claim that GW, the Dean’s office, and my program knows to be categorically false.
To start, a number of essential pieces of information are largely shelved by the complaint. Namely, the three diversity courses that I teach are zero-credit courses, which means the grade students receive does not affect their GPA. No one in this cohort got less than an A in the course. Despite this material evidence of non-retaliation, with disturbing tenacity, the complaint insinuates that I initiated “disciplinary charges” against all Jewish students in my class and that all were summarily “punished.” What is instead factual and well-known to student witnesses, the Program, and the University is that “remediation” was initiated after a semester-long, multitiered and extensively deliberated process because these students were disruptive, yelled at and berated a professor twice, and used explicitly pejorative, demeaning, inflammatory and racist language against black people and Arabs.
Our program has consistently referred to our remediation process over the past years, specifically, as “non-punitive” and preventative. Contrary to StandWithUs’ claims, remediation never appears on a student’s academic “record”, and certainly is not permanent. The Student Handbook also clearly states that an appeal process is available to any student put on remediation. Because our remediation process had in the past tended to be harsher and quicker when students of color were involved, my colleagues and I have been diligently trying to redress the procedure over the past years. The concrete changes we have made include assuring that the Director of Training and Clinical Director are not responsible for remediation plans. This was especially important for me, having been concerned about the undue coerciveness on students if the two people with the most evaluative power over their training were involved. Similarly, I advocated alongside other colleagues for a student’s academic advisor to never be directly involved in their remediation plans. This was explicitly intended to allow for a student to always have a stalwart advocate on their side. Finally, in recent years, we have moved to a two-person faculty panel that collaborates with students to co-create and sometimes even co-write a remediation plan that is individualized, tailored, and most importantly, helps attend to the differing goals each student might have. As a psychoanalytic program, we are especially attentive to giving students ample space to think deeply about the complex and sometimes contradictory positions they may hold in our program, in their cohorts, and in the world. Their remediation plans can include written reflections, experiential tasks such as watching movies or reading books in service of their larger learning, and/or ongoing conversations with their advisor. These tasks are meant to aid them in furthering their clinical and ethical responsibilities as well as thoughtfully engage about their impact on others.
As they are nothing but a one-issue pro-Israel activist group, StandWithUs was unwilling or unable to do due diligence to counter-check these allegations against me and the University. StandWithUs’ explicit and intentional misrepresentation of “disciplinary charges” and retaliation are extremely unethical and the University’s failure to clarify this falsity and process is irresponsible and opportunistic. This is especially the case because the Dean’s office was in close and continued conversation with me, our program Director, members of the faculty, and students from October until after the time students were alerted of their remediation.
I am perplexed and saddened that GW has not had the moral fibre and courage to repudiate claims which they know to be easily, empirically, and objectively refuted by an ample (electronic) paper trail (including comments on the aggrieved student papers and journal entries; temporary secondary faculty-oversight over their journal posts; emails between me and students, me and the Director, me and faculty, and me and the Dean’s office; minutes of faculty meetings, etc.). Perhaps more importantly, a classroom full of eye-witness students (as also reported to the Deans and an external consultant that was hired to attend to the “rupture” in the class in November-December) have been ignored along with letters of support and character attestation from students across all cohorts.
The Aftermath
Within a span of a few hours of the “story” being published by right-wing on-line outlets, social media, and then posted to my professional listservs, the public pillorying began. Trolls, ideologues, and right wingers concluded that, by merit of being Arab and engaging in scholarship on Palestine, I clearly must be not only an antisemite and “Jew-hating trash”, but an ISIS follower, a Hizballah operative, a Hamas agent, an Ayatollahist, an Iranian spy, and an Arab “Goebbels.” Trolls have called for my house to be visited, to “egg” my house “or worse,” in one exchange. In the most egregious cases, tweets (and emails) have called to have me publicly ridiculed, deported to Lebanon, and “sniped” or killed for being “treasonous.”
Well-known pro-Israel (and anti-BDS) activists from outside of psychology have begun to AstroTurf lobby to have me fired from GW, to have an ethics investigation lodged against me by my professional organizations, and to have me resign from my new position as President of the APA Division 39 (I assumed that role on January 1).
As many letters of support have already documented, I have been doxed, with my personal information, including my address, professional license, and personal email proliferated online. A letter-sending campaign to GW has been organized with the website proudly advertising “over 1200 letters already sent”. Accusations that the many principled statements in my defense are antisemitic because they allude to a “Jewish conspiracy” is a cynical defense, especially since the calls to discipline me are publicly stated by StandWithUs and StopAntiSemitism.org, a self-described “watchdog” pro-Israel vigilante group.This degree of external pressure on universities and administrators by these political campaigns is extraordinary, as recently noted in an urgent letter of concern and support for me penned by the Jewish Voice for Peace Healthcare Advisory Council. The pressure is intentional and sustained, having the intent to make universities rewire their own internal processes so as to quelch bad press, and in some instances, placate threats of retribution from donors. The playbook is not conspiratorial, as has been suggested, but rather, forthright and dogmatic. And, yet, because of the acrimonious mud-slinging involved, administrators cave and set precedents at alarming rates. We saw this most recently in the case of Kenneth Roth and Harvard, with the years long fight of academic Rabab Abdulhadi at SFSU, Shahd Abu Salama at Sheffield Hallam University, Shami Dallali’s dismissal from the National Union of Students, Jasbir Puar’s sustained harassment campaign at Rutgers, and most egregiously, Stephen Salaita’s specious firing which was adjudicated in his favor. There are countless others whose stories have not been made public for fear of greater retribution.
Throughout the Fall semester, the university administration and my program bent over backwards, going above and beyond their own due process to act with due diligence and care to adjudicate the disruptions in the class and attend to a few counter-claims against me. These claims retroactively located blame in my teaching and syllabus, but as StandWithUs’ complaint highlights, it my scholarship about and advocacy for Palestine that is on trial.
The University has abandoned its due process toward me. It has not replied to at least two formal DEI bias incident complaints that were filed on my behalf. More importantly, it has not had the decency to dispel publicly made career and life-endangering claims about me, even though it has extensive documentation of how I engaged in every good faith effort at de-escalation. In fact, I went out of my way to safeguard any potential, even if undue and incorrect, perception of retaliation against students. I did this despite documented discriminatory and isolating tactics toward me by some colleagues. All of this is documented in countless email exchanges and meetings, including with the Associate Vice Provost of DEI.
I am certain that the GW administration feels confident that a third-party investigation will disclose the same evidence that I document here in order to have an “objective” party exonerate them from the complaint. However, they fail to apprehend, or willfully neglect, the irreparable damage done by these smear and defamation campaigns. Inadvertently or through negligence, GW’s President has set a reckless precedent by lending even a modicum of credibility or legitimacy to right wing attack groups intent on curtailing academic freedom. This move not only pre-empts adjudication by the Department of Education, but encourages right wing political advocacy groups, empowering them to believe that their tactics of harassment and intimidation to silence critical voices yields results. Equally important, GW’s upper administration fans the flames of racialized and gendered abuse of faculty and students, dangerously mainstreaming the myths of single-issue political groups.
Why This Matters: Academic Freedom and the Disciplining of Women
In addition to what USACBI has determined is an egregious precedent regarding due process and academic freedom, GW’s reaction to the campaign against me has also given a semblance of legitimation, in the public sphere, online, and within my professional psychoanalytic circles, to baseless and defamatory claims against me. They have done so despite knowing the allegations to be categorically false after an entire semester of internal processes and documentation. The President’s choice not to wait for the Department of Education, but rather to “hot potato” the matter to an “independent third party investigator” rewards the hackneyed right-wing strategy to use political activism outside the classroom and, in my case, personal tweets to incriminate targeted scholars and “prove” unrelated allegations.
As a junior colleague, a woman of color and a decolonial scholar of race and oppression, I categorically reject the civilizational and sexist discourse whereby language on my personal social media accounts is under paternalistic scrutiny and used as “evidence” of my guilt. The disciplining of language is an old misogynist cudgel by which Black, Indigenous, and women of color, especially, are expected to, at best, reply to racism, sexism, and xenophobia with a gentile and “civil” reply. If we do not, we are actively punished—in my case very publicly—for refusing psychological and physical boundary crossings. The discourse of “professionalism” is also used as a civilizational technique to imperiously shame women and people of color and is intentionally deployed as a disciplinary tactic to stabilize patriarchy and whiteness. Those in psychoanalysis, ironically, also willfully forget the sordid history our entire profession has had in silencing, pathologizing, and disciplining BIPOC women’s bodies and minds.
StandWithUS intentionally activated these civilizational discourses that saturate our world. Releasing a handful of salaciously decontextualized tweets from among tens of thousands of others I have posted shows an awareness of the power of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism as well as sexism. Not surprisingly, even their attempts to criminalize me by way of tweets is as sloppy as their complaint, unethically cherry-picking content as their complaint.
They knew they had to splice my twitter thread to craft a narrative that would not be easily refuted by women let alone feminist and women of color. In the misrepresented thread, I recount my eight-hour detention at the King Hussein Bridge by Israeli border security who questioned me about my research project in Palestine. My detention is not what is striking here. The Israeli occupation forces who populate the border crossing routinely harass, detain, and intimidate researchers, activists, or professionals who may be critical of Israeli Apartheid. What is omitted by their unethical cherry-picking is that a male Israeli agent, acting as representative of the State—hence my use of blanket “Israeli”—specifically threatened to hit me if I did not sit down. After I told him to not talk to me like that, two other male agents threatened, demeaned, and harassed me. One specifically yelled at me, “I will send you back to Lebanon so that you can be raped and beaten by Hizbullah who will hang you by your hair from the ceiling”.
Relying on a “shock and awe” effect, StandWithUs and their right-wing trolls also neglect to take time stamps into account as necessary contextualization for someone’s—in this case, my—rightful anger. on August 4, 2020, I quote tweeted an Israeli Occupation Forces’ tweet (who, incidentally, were not as perturbed as StandWithUs and the trolls, as evidenced by their lack of response). This date may not have significance to many, let alone to anti-Arab racists in a rush to demonize me. And yet, it is indelibly etched in Arabs’ minds. It is the tragic and catastrophic day of the Beirut blast that killed hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands in its wake.
For over two decades, Israel illegally occupied southern Lebanon. It remains an internationally recognized occupying power of Palestine and the Golan Heights in Syria. I became inured to Israeli war planes breaking the sound barrier as I played outside as a child, later when I went to school, and as I became politically active in college. In high school, Israel decimated a power plant less than a mile away from my high school as I sat for finals. In addition to previous Israeli invasions, I watched from my grandmother’s balcony as the largest bridge in Lebanon was bombed to smithereens by Israeli warplanes despite supposed “Hizballah fighters” being tens of miles away and my house being far from the front line.
During the 2006 invasion, I left Beirut, which was subjected to bombing and a refugee crisis for my parent’s home in our ancestral mountain hamlet, where I remained sleepless under the relentless sound of Israeli drones, helicopters and jets. Eventually, my family and I were evacuated from Lebanon, an inauspicious departure for graduate school with 10 kilos of belongings that I had deemed “most important” as we fled. Later that year, I told my psychoanalyst in DC that I dreamt of an engulfing fire; that my memories of Lebanon felt disjointed. I could no longer remember an intact Lebanon.
These stories to me, and countless others under occupation, feel cheap and demeaning to recount.
I have long resisted the fetishizing glances of a trauma industry ready to contour me/us as mere victims, worthy of care and support only through the legibility of our suffering. I am resentful of the coercive tactics of StandWithUs and all those who wielded their power to demand my narrative, my story, my trauma, as fodder for their racist fantasies.
My anger, in those tweets, and in what fuels my liberatory fire, is justified. My anger at an Israeli who threatens to have me raped and beaten angers me. My anger towards an Israeli male who threatens to hit me if I do not listen angers me. My anger against an occupying army and occupying state that has stolen so much from me, my people and my Palestinian siblings is not contextless, capricious or religiously based. It is a political anger.
Any anger that I express also pales in comparison to the violence of colonial, settler colonial, and imperial forces that have decimated the Middle East in the course of my lifetime. It pales in comparison to the internal and foreign policies of the Global North that have wreaked havoc on the most vulnerable people and their environments, especially in the Global South. It pales in comparison to the ways that language and comportment of women (especially women of color) are disciplined when they threaten to destabilize cisheteronormativity, patriarchy and whiteness. Even if decontextualized, the language of my tweets pale in comparison to the organized and systemic violence done to my siblings today from Jenin, to Nablus, to Jerusalem, from Pakistan, to Puerto Rico, to Iraq, to Kashmir, to Haiti, to Memphis, Jacksonville, Ferguson, Flint, Atlanta, Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock, and all other spaces in which life is vibrant and deliberately targeted for swift erasure.
The objective and irrefutable facts do not support StandWithUs’ specious claims that I target my Jewish and Israeli students. They do not support the unethical and dangerous allegations that I am antisemitic and retaliatory. What the facts, in glaring clarity do support, is that, like others before me, StandWithUs exploited students’ political beliefs and targeted me because I am an Arab woman who is involved in scholarship and activism for Palestine and Palestinians.
Lara Sheehi is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the George Washington University. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine.