Professor Bassam Frangieh supports a boycott of all Israeli goods and academics according to a pro-Hezbollah petition he signed in 2006. Dean Hess’s statement to the faculty which I critiqued here never mentioned Professor Frangieh’s support for a boycott of all Israeli goods and academics but some of his students have privately told me that he would, of course, be against a boycott. They do this, I suspect, because they are well-wishes, as Professor Frangieh has said nary a word on the whole scandal now enveloping him, despite repeated requests for comment.
Well, here he is in his own words saying he personally boycott’s oranges from Jaffa and that he is deeply cynical about the peace process. Given that he has never brought a pro-Israeli speaker to campus, is it too much to think that, perhaps, Professor Frangieh boycotts people as well as oranges?
Have a look for yourself. Here’s Frangieh in his own words from a May 26, 2006 interview.
Q: You are the son of a Jaffa family, which emigrated from Palestine…the first country.
A: My family lived in Jaffa, as I mentioned, and is a Jaffa family. My father worked in orchards—orange orchards. Whenever he saw oranges in the markets after the Nakba, he would cry. The orange was a symbol of his lost country, work, house, and identity. He swore to never touch or eat an orange until he returned to Palestine. My father died without ever eating another orange. A few years ago I happened to see in an American market an orange imported from Jaffa. I stood pondering, and grasped the orange. It had a distinct smell, something different than the typical orange. “Ah, if only my father had seen it,” I said to myself. I didn’t buy it, and I will never eat it. These oranges that I saw had been opened with a wound in [word missing in interview]
I returned home afterward, where I had received several letters inviting me to attend a lecture at the University, in which officials from the Palestinian Authority as well as American officials were participating in a discussion on the Road Map and its dimensions. I wanted to cry. There’s no way they are talking about this. This must be a profitable venture, no doubt, done in the name of the Palestinian people. Everything was in the name of the Palestinian people—the private jets, the limousines, the five-star hotels… [ellipsis in original] [Emphasis mine]
