Rachel Lea Fish led a campaign in 2003 that was instrumental in pressuring Harvard University to reject funds from Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of the United Arab Emirates, who funded and lent his name to an anti-American, anti-Semitic think-tank based in Abu Dhabi.
Rachel Fish learned in July 2000 as a student of Islam Studies at the Harvard Divinity School that the school had accepted $2.5 million from the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, for the creation of an endowed professorship in Islamic religious studies. She felt that a professorship in Islamic studies was long overdue at Harvard Divinity School, but when she learned more about the donor, Sheik Zayed, she became dismayed.
Why did she feel this way? Because Amnesty International had repeatedly documented the terrible human-rights record of Sheik Zayed’s country: its lack of elections, use of corporal punishment on political prisoners and trafficking in Bangladeshi child slaves. Sheik Zayed ruled the United Arab Emirates as unelected president since 1971.
Perhaps more important, Sheik Zayed also funded the Abu Dhabi-based Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, a prominent think tank of the Arab League, founded in 1999. The Zayed Center, described on its Web site “as the fulfillment of the vision of Sheikh Zayed,” promoted Holocaust denial, anti-American conspiracy theories and hate speech in its lectures, symposiums and publications.
In August 2002, the Los Angeles Times quoted Mohammed Murar, the executive director of the Zayed Center, saying about Jews that “the truth is they are the enemies of all nations.” His comment came on the heels of a Zayed Center report stating that “the Zionists are the people who killed the Jews in Europe.”
The Zayed Center had a history of giving Holocaust deniers like David Irving a forum to promulgate their ideas. In 1998, Sheik Zayed’s wife donated $50,000 to finance the defense of infamous Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy in a French court.
In April 2002, the Zayed Center hosted Thierry Meyssan, the French author of “The Appalling Fraud,” which claimed that the U.S. military staged the 9/11 attacks. The center translated Mr. Meyssan’s book into Arabic, hailed its publication and widely advertised the work. A month later, Lyndon LaRouche, the fringe political figure who had made disparaging remarks about Judaism, was an honored guest. The center hosted Umayma Jalahma in May 2003, a professor of Islamic Studies at King Faisal University, who declared: “The Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare for holiday pastries.”
Despite Sheik Zayed’s track record, Harvard Prof. William Graham, who became dean of the Divinity School, hailed the donation. “This endowment,” he told the Harvard Gazette in September 2000, “is a most welcome gift. We are delighted with this encouraging development.”
So Rachel started the student organization "Students for an Ethical Divinity School" that went to Dean Graham in March of 2003 with a dossier of evidence and a request that Sheik Zayed’s hate money be returned. Mr. Graham told the group that he was going to have an “independent” researcher look into the matter. It should be noted that Mr. Graham had not been afraid to take a public stand on Harvard’s ties to the Middle East –he had signed a petition calling for the university to disinvest from Israel.
By accepting the sheik’s money, the Divinity School honored and validated the hate speech he promotes. Harvard would never accept money from a Ku Klux Klan financier. Is the hate funded by Sheikh Zayed’s money any less abhorrent?
She received support from only one organization for her efforts - Charles Jacobs, The David Project. An online petition urging the university to decline Zayed's money drew thousands of signatures.
And when the media called her regarding the 70+ page fact finding report behind Zayed's conditional donation, she immediately called Graham (who, btw, had never gotten back to her in a promised 4 to 6 week time frame) asking him (his office) if he wanted to respond before the she commented to the press. She was met with complete silence.
Zayed withdrew his pledge as the school sat on its hands.
Unfortunately, Rachel tells us that this problem extends beyond Harvard. Sheik Zayed is also a backer of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Saudi rulers facing lawsuits for their ties to al Qaeda have funded professorships now under fire at Berkeley.
The next action of Rachel Fish was in 2003 when she was director of the New York office of the David Project, a campus-oriented Israel advocacy group. She went to the Columbia University campus to find out how best she could support pro-Israel students there. She met with leaders of LionPAC, who spoke warmly of the vibrant Jewish population and of their active Hillel. But when talk turned to MEALAC, student after student spoke of hostility and intellectual intimidation. She suggested the students testify on film.
"Columbia Unbecoming" was first screened for a student audience on November 3, 2004 and had wide repercussions. Columbia President Lee Bollinger released a statement promising to investigate questions of intellectual intimidation and to examine Columbia's complaint procedure. New York Representative Anthony Weiner, joined by the editorial staff of the New York Sun, calling for the dismissal of Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in MEALAC whom the film critiques particularly harshly. Fish reports that the film has also prompted several students, previously too afraid to come forward, to speak up about their own incidents of intimidation.
To Rachel Fish, publicizing these problems is a way to prompt much-needed reform. "I think Middle East Studies need to have the curriculum reexamined," she says. "I think if you looked at what these departments teach, you would find overwhelmingly that their courses have to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than addressing other issues in the Arab world: the problem is perhaps not so much that there is too little taught on Israel, but that there is too little taught on Israel’s accomplishments.
Few courses study the lack of civil society in the Arab world, or gender apartheid in the Arab world. Rather, they use Israel as a weapon of mass distraction." She hopes that through making administrators, the public, and the Jewish community aware of the problems faced by pro-Israel students, this will trigger an overhaul of Middle East Studies.
She gives the example of a failed effort to change the anti-Israel approach of Middle East Studies. In the fall of 2002, Bay Area philanthropist Helen Diller decided to contribute to the effort. She'd heard about the uproar over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at her alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, and by endowing a visiting Israeli scholar's position, she hoped she would alleviate some of those tensions.
Within months, Berkeley's selection committee announced that Professor Oren Yiftachel, previously of Ben-Gurion University, would be the first to fill the spot. Yiftachel is a highly regarded Israeli academic. He is also a post-Zionist scholar and known for being highly critical of Israel. Accordingly, advocates seeking better representation for Israel in the university were outraged. Despite his many credentials, Yiftachel was an "unacceptable" choice, Rachel Fish explains, because "he's putting forth one side only. The search committee found a scholar who happened to be Israeli but who agreed with them."
Berkeley's faculty deliberately ignored Diller's intentions. A possible solution would be to give greater control by the donor over appointments but this would create a new problem as it would allow funders, rather than scholarly committees, to staff the academy – putting curricula into the hands of philanthropists. Hiring decisions made under these circumstances would blur the line between scholarship and advocacy, undermining the authenticity of such programs.
Rachel Fish received a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies from The George Washington University in 2001. She then went on to receive a Master of Theological Studies, Contemporary Thought in Judaism and Islam from Harvard University in 2003. She has been a doctoral candidate in the NEJS department at Brandeis University since 2005; her dissertation examines the history of the idea of bi-nationalism and alternative visions for constructing the State of Israel.
Rachel Fish is presently assistant director of program development at the Schusterman Center of Brandeis University. She has worked as an educator and consultant in various capacities in the Jewish community and higher education, teaching about Zionism and Israeli history at Brandeis University, UMASS Amherst and the Me’ah Adult Jewish Education program. She has appeared on CBS Evening News, NPR's All Things Considered, and published in the Wall Street Journal. Through her activist work, Rachel Fish was named one of the "Forward Fifty," a list of the 50 most influential Jews in America, in 2003.
She was also the regional ICC representative in New York when she was director of the David Project's New York office. The Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) is a pro-Israel umbrella organization founded in 2002 under the auspices of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. Today, "the ICC serves as the central coordinating and strategic body to address campus issues and intelligently impact a pro-active, pro-Israel agenda on campus."
