Boston U.'s Irene Gendzier: U.S.-Israel Alliance Built on Oil

Irene Gendzier

There is a certain class of academic for whom historical references to oil become a clarion call to rise up, denounce, and publish. Boston University's Irene Gendzier proved the point in a recent discussion of her book, Dying to Forget, Oil, Power, Palestine and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East, with an introduction from Columbia University's Rashid Khalidi.

In the latest Campus Watch research, appearing today at FrontPage Magazine, Mara Schiffren reports on the real focus of Gendzier's lecture or, as she puts it, "what Middle East studies practitioners view as a primordial sin committed against Palestinians by the alliance between the U.S. and Israel."

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University's Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, pronounced himself "lucky" to have previewed the work of the speaker, Irene Gendzier, professor emerita in the department of political science at Boston University: "She has . . . discovered things that those of us who thought we knew something about Palestine often found a revelation."

High praise from the former PLO spokesman for Gendzier's new book, Dying to Forget, Oil, Power, Palestine and the Foundations of U.S. Policy in the Middle East. A mix of students, colleagues, friends of the author, and the public totaling about forty-five squeezed into a tight space on the second floor of a bookstore near Columbia.

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