Analysis

Brandeis president ‘reaches out’ to al-Quds counterpart in row over Jihad rally

Frederick Lawrence says he wants to keep lines of communication open after suspending universities’ alliance; Sari Nusseibeh had accused him of ‘going overboard’

David Horovitz

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

A rally with anti-Semitic symbols al-Quds University on November 5
A rally with anti-Semitic symbols al-Quds University on November 5

Brandeis University President Frederick Lawrence said Friday he was “reaching out” to Al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh amid a bitter dispute between the two universities stemming from an Islamic Jihad rally held on the al-Quds main campus earlier this month.

In a statement, Lawrence said Nusseibeh had “made a number of remarks and serious accusations to the media that have not been conveyed to me personally or through my staff. I am reaching out to President Nusseibeh today and hope that he will be open to that discussion.”

Brandeis on Monday suspended a long-time partnership with Al-Quds, after Nusseibeh issued what Lawrence called an “unacceptable and inflammatory” statement in the wake of the November 5 rally. In an email to The Times of Israel earlier Friday, Nusseibeh charged that Lawrence had “gone overboard” in his handling of the affair.

“As I have indicated to him directly,” Lawrence said in his Friday statement, “this decision by Brandeis University [to halt the universities’ partnership] was taken deliberatively and with broad input. The partnership was suspended – not terminated – pending the receipt of additional information including input from our faculty members.

Frederick Lawrence (photo credit: Brandeis University)
Frederick Lawrence (photo credit: Brandeis University)

“My position on the issue of free speech and hate speech, a subject that I have studied for my entire professional and academic career, can be read on my blog. I am dedicated to keeping the lines of communication open between our institutions,” Lawrence wrote. “But I will not respond to specific issues raised in the public media.”

During the Islamic Jihad demonstration at al-Quds’s main campus two weeks ago, JTA reported, protesters marched in black military gear with fake automatic weapons while waving flags and offering Nazi-style salutes. Banners with images of Palestinian suicide bombers decorated the campus’s main square, according to a statement from Brandeis. Several students also portrayed dead Israeli soldiers.

When news of the rally broke, Lawrence called on Nusseibeh to issue an Arabic and English condemnation of the demonstration. Unsatisfied with the statement subsequently issued by Nusseibeh in English and Arabic, the Waltham, Mass. university on Monday suspended its partnership with al-Quds, which had been in place since 1998. Lawrence said the university would reevaluate the relationship in the future.

Speaking to The Times of Israel in his office at al-Quds’s Beit Hanina campus on Wednesday, Nusseibeh said he hoped Brandeis would reconsider its position. But on Friday, in the latest round of the dispute, Nusseibeh sent an angry email to The Times of Israel.

Nusseibeh was responding to a follow-up query in which The Times of Israel asked him whether he had condemned the rally — and any lauding of suicide bombers that may have taken place there — in Arabic to the students of al-Quds. Nusseibeh replied with a lengthy critique of Lawrence’s role in the affair and a defense of his own actions in the wake of the rally.

President of Al-Quds University Prof. Sari Nusseibeh in his office at the university in Beit Hanina, in East Jerusalem. (Photo credit: Nati Shochat/Flash90)
President of Al-Quds University Prof. Sari Nusseibeh in his office at the university in Beit Hanina, in East Jerusalem. (Photo credit: Nati Shochat/Flash90)

“I think president Lawrence has gone overboard in his reactions — the last being his decision to expel me from the Board of Ethics, justice and public life, with which I have been associated since its inception, and from many years before I forged a partnership between the two universities,” Nusseibeh began. Brandeis maintains an International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life, and Nusseibeh was a member of its international advisory board. (That board, incidentally, is headed by the South African judge Richard Goldstone, author of the Goldstone Report into the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead, which accused the Israeli army of deliberately killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza — a charge Goldstone personally later retracted.) The website of the Board now states that Nusseibeh is “currently suspended” from membership.

Nusseibeh continued, in his email, by protesting that Lawrence had “chosen to read my letters to students as ‘inflammatory’.” He also criticized Lawrence for never bothering “to express any sympathy for the continued plight of my university — the latest being yet another vicious incursion by the [Israeli] army into the campus… Nor has he shown any sympathy for the fact that my graduates continue to suffer from not having their degrees accredited in the Israeli system.”

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