UW attempts to appease anti-Israel activists by creating 'Faculty Committee on Scholarship of Palestine'

Pressure has mounted on the University of Washington (UW) to address antisemitism on campus, yet the administration has worked to increase academic focus on Palestinian issues. They have worked with anti-Israel figures on and off-campus, including a professor known for cheering on violent anti-Israel protests, according to a new report.

Emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) revealed that international studies professor Resat Kasaba has been leading the push for “Palestine studies” as chair of the “Faculty Committee on Scholarship of Palestine.”

UW caved to the demands of a violent Gaza encampment that took over the campus quad for three weeks and agreed to form Kasaba’s committee “to examine opportunities to deepen our expertise in the scholarship of Palestine into a range of existing academic units.”

According to the agreement UW made with the violent activists, “On the recommendation of this committee and the corresponding Deans, the Provost will commit seed funding to accelerate a hiring plan … beginning in fall 2025 … to pursue faculty-led future fundraising, grant applications, and/or organized research or study units, including for a center with a focus on the scholarship of Palestine.”

Kasaba previously advocated for keeping the Communist China-linked Confucius Institute when, in 2018, President Donald Trump defunded “Confucius Institutes” at American universities. UW eventually closed its Confucius Institute. He is joined on the committee by Professors Rawan Arar, Karam Dana, Sunila Kale, and Stephanie Selover.

Emails obtained by DCNF showed the committee scheduled a Jan 28 meeting with Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, an anti-Israel academic who defended the notorious encampment at the Morningside Heights campus, whose actions were so violent, the Trump administration yanked $400,000,000 in federal funding from the school after it failed to address antisemitism.

In May 2024, Khalidi told pro-Hamas activists on Columbia’s campus that administrators “brought disgrace” to the school by calling in the police to disband the encampment and called it “police repression.” He told the radicals, who were recently accused of having advanced knowledge of the Oct 7, 2023 massacre, that they were on “the right side of history.”

Kasaba also took University of California, Berkeley professor Ussama Makdisi with him to a Jan. 14 meeting with UW’s provost shortly before Makdisi gave a public “Why Palestine Studies Now” speech. Kasaba said in an email that the provost “has been very supportive” and hoped Makdisi’s event would “be successful in making the case for this initiative.” UW even offered to pay Makdisi $1,000 and cover his expenses for the visit despite the radical writing about the “Zionist colonization of Palestine” and having been accused of downplaying Palestinian terrorism and violent protests.

The committee also scheduled a Jan. 21 meeting with Yale University’s Asli Bali, who previously claimed Israel supporters are weaponizing antisemitism against violent radicals on campus. The committee also invited Edith Dale, vice president of equity and inclusion in UW’s student senate, and Yoseph Ghazal, a student senator who sponsored a resolution calling for UW to “divest from companies” linked to Israel.

An October report showed widespread antisemitism on the UW campus but combined it with a report on alleged "Islamophobic" incidents, some of which have been debunked. UW was among many schools that settled civil rights complaints with President Joe Biden’s Department of Education in January with no punishments for the universities before President Trump took office.

The Trump administration’s Education Department has since warned UW and dozens of other schools to “protect Jewish students” or lose federal funding. Kasaba said in a November email to his colleagues, “I hope you are finding a way of processing and recovering from the election results.”

The UW Jewish Alumni Association told the DCNF, “In short, the university is laying the groundwork for establishing a whole department (taking valuable funding away from other areas) to satisfy the demands of hooligans who vandalized the campus, interrupted classes and got the school sued for antisemitism.”