Columbia University search committee includes anti-Israel professors

The "New York Sun" reports that the search committee responsible for recruiting a lecturer for Israeli studies to Columbia University includes one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in academia, as well as a faculty member who supported an anti-Israel divestment campaign on campus. While the university was wrapping up its investigation of professors of Middle Eastern studies accused of intimidating Jewish students in the classroom, it announced last month that four of its trustees, David Stern, Mark Kingdon, Richard Witten, and Philip Milstein, had pledged US$ 3 million to establish a chair in modern Israeli history, politics, and society. The search committee for the chair is composed of five faculty members, two of whom have portrayed Israel as a gross abuser of human rights and an obstacle to Middle East peace. Those members are the director of Columbia's Middle East Institute, Rashid Khalidi, and an anthropology professor, Lila Abu-Lughod. Khalidi and Abu-Lughod identify themselves as Palestinian and have been involved in pro-Palestinian and Arab activism, the paper writes.