MLA and BDS 9: Letter Declining 2025 Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies (Guest Post)

MLA Convention, New Orleans on January 11, 2025   

By Liron Mor, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

To Executive Director Paula Krebs, and Members of the MLA Executive Council,

 

I am writing to inform you that, regretfully, I must decline the 2025 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies offered by the Modern Language Association (MLA). I can no longer consider the MLA my academic home, given its leadership’s refusal, in the midst of an ongoing genocide, to pass to the Delegate Assembly for debate a resolution in support of the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). As a scholar of Palestine Studies and Israel Studies, whose research addresses this very region, I oppose this blatant silencing of dissent and, specifically, of Palestinian voices. I am unwilling for my book to serve as a fig leaf for the Association’s leadership, to cover over its failure to address Israeli violence in the region or its attempt to foreclose any discussion of this violence.

 

A genocide is still raging in Gaza. To date, even the most conservative estimates put the number of Gazan fatalities above sixty thousand. Israel has been pulverizing Gaza for over two years— starving, maiming, and killing its population; destroying its landscape, homes, and infrastructures; and committing a scholasticide so complete that not a single institution of higher education is left standing in the Gaza Strip. Consider the words of our colleague, Haider Eid, Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at what used to be al-Aqsa University in Gaza, who spoke at the Gaza Tribunal. He testified that he has personally lost 54 relatives, 39 colleagues from al-Aqsa University, and over 280 students, including his “best literature students,” and that Israel’s actions made Gaza “literally unlivable.”

 

Against the backdrop of this annihilatory violence, which was already abundantly clear a year ago, the MLA Executive Council undemocratically refused to bring Resolution 2025-1, “Resolution to Endorse the 2005 Palestinian BDS Call,” before the Delegate Assembly for discussion and vote during the January 2025 MLA annual convention. I remain unconvinced by the rationale offered by the Executive Council, which cited various economic pressures, as well as bureaucratic procedural limitations.

 

The failure of the MLA leadership is not merely a failure to protect freedom of speech and safeguard democratic procedures, though these are becoming increasingly important in the current political climate. It is also not merely a failure to stand up to financial and political pressures, though this failure, too, is alarming given the speed with which higher education is being hollowed out by business interests.

 

The most disturbing failure displayed by the Executive Council was the failure to consider Palestine worthy of discussion—the cleaving, once again, to the “Palestine exception to free speech,” even at a time of great urgency. This is the ethical and pedagogical failure to even acknowledge, let alone discuss, the genocide that is being visited on Palestinians in Gaza in general and on our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza in particular. This is the ethical and pedagogical failure to hear and respond to the call issued by Palestinian civil society at large and, again, by our own Palestinian colleagues, to support BDS—a non-violent mode of engagement through disengagement, meant to communicate to those supportive of Israeli policies and actions that these have long crossed all lines. How can an Association, so utterly absorbed with concern for its own freedom of expression, deny this freedom when it pertains to Palestinians and to the issue of Palestine?

 

I am honored to have been selected. I would like to thank the Selection Committee for the work that must have gone into reading through the submissions, and I appreciate their decision to showcase this “controversial” topic, which the Executive Council was unwilling to put forward for debate. I hope that the Association will soon change course, so that perhaps it might become, once again, a home for all of us with humanistic concerns.