As Columbia University launches its Center for Palestine Studies, the first of its kind in the United States, blogger Martin Kramer askswhether the new center will earn the university the moniker “Birzeit on the Hudson.”
While the center’s co-founder Rashid Khalidi defines its area of study as the “historical territory covered today by Israel, the West Bank and Gaza” Kramer wonders whether the center will not be “a redoubt of militant Palestinian nationalism in the guise of scholarship.”
The affiliates of the new center aren’t only engaged in the positive affirmation of Palestinian identity, but are activists in the campaign to negate Israel. This is obviously the case in regard to Joseph Massad and Nadia Abu al-Haj—their field isn’t Palestine studies, it’s anti-Israel studies—but it’s increasingly true of the new center’s co-director, Rashid Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor, an enthusiastic spokesman for the PLO in its terrorist phase and a severe critic of the same leadership in its present phase.
