Professor says growing up under ‘Israeli occupation’ inspired his academic work
The chair of the political science department at Northwestern University responded to criticism of hiring a pro-Palestinian professor, Professor Mkhaimar Abusada, to teach a course on the “Palestinian National Movement.”
A conservative news outlet has raised concerns about Abusada’s (pictured) ties to groups supportive of Hamas. The hiring is part of a pledge by the university to recruit Palestinian professors in exchange for activists ending a tent encampment last year at the Evanston, Ill. university. He will be teaching at the university through the end of September, according to his university bio.
Professor William Reno told The College Fix email “the political science department’s view is the purpose of the class is not to promote a Palestinian view exclusive of other views of the conflict.”
“It’s also important to consider the possibility of multiple Palestinian views. It is hard to find someone from Gaza as critical of Hamas as Dr. Abusada for their disastrous actions,” Reno, the department chair, said.
“Predictable, that precipitated death threats. I gather Hamas wanted to influence university students and Dr. Abusada, a university administrator at the time, got in their way at great personal risk,” Professor Reno said.
Abusada did not respond to two emails in the past two weeks asking for comment on the criticism of his class and for more information.
As first reported by The Washington Free Beacon, Northwestern University hired Professor Abusada as a visiting associate professor of political science in the fall of 2024, as part of a longstanding initiative to support academics from “war-torn countries,” as well as part of a deal with student groups, such as Students for Justice in Palestine, to end an anti-Israel encampment on campus.
Abusada, as reported by The Free Beacon, “serves on the boards of two organizations that present themselves as human rights groups—the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR).”
However, according to the Free Beacon, these groups “maintain close ties to terrorists.”
However, Reno told The Fix Abusada had been “vetted” by the federal government as a condition of receiving his work visa. “Federal government vetting includes scrutinizing travel history, family connections, and social media activity to ensure among other things, that the person has no ties to US-designated terrorist organizations.”
He also said Northwestern “vets personnel, though more in line with its need to ensure that credentials are genuine and the person has suitable training and expertise.”
“The university’s International Office works with the federal government to ensure employees have a legal right to work in the US,” he said.
Reno said the professor does try to teach the class fairly, providing a link to a Daily Northwestern story about Abusada’s class including both a Palestinian and Israeli guest. The newspaper article does not include what the particular views were of the two guests.
In the same interview, Abusada said he has always been interested in the Palestine-Israel conflict, because he “was born three years before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.”
“I was seeing Israeli soldiers, Israeli tanks, Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip,” all his life, he told the student newspaper.
Professor Reno said he attended a talk by Abusada and “saw that he presents Israeli government positions and rationales and asks the audience to take these seriously.”
However, an orthodox rabbi questioned Northwestern’s decision.
“Any Northwestern University student should be worried, Jewish or otherwise, when administrators succumb to extortion from hateful actors,” Rabbi Yaakov Menken told The Fix via email. He is the executive vice president and founder of the Coalition for Jewish Values.
“Bringing in more racists was never the solution to the problem of antisemitic racism and harassment on campus,” Menken said.
Rabbi Menken was also asked about his thoughts on Northwestern’s deal with the student group regarding the hiring of two Palestinian professors and full-ride scholarships to Gaza students.
“The false narrative that ‘Palestinians’ are Arabs, while Jews are ‘colonialists’ when they return to the homeland from which they were expelled by previous generations of racists, is historical revisionism in its purest form,” he said.
“It is the province of indoctrination centers rather than institutes of higher education, so it is clear which of these better describes Northwestern at this point.”
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Mkhaimar Abusada on a TV interview; TRT World Now/YouTube