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| Palestine Exploration Fund map (1876). Via Palestine Open Maps. |
Dear colleagues,
Since the new Dan David Prize has arrived on the shores of Lake Ontario, I think it’s prudent to think about why and how.
The Dan David Prize is hosted by Tel Aviv University. From its inception in 2001 until 2021, the prize was reserved for well-established scholars and artists, three prizes of $1 million each were awarded annually according to a theme (in 2014, the medical school’s Peter St George-Hyslop received the prize). In the last two years, the format has changed. Now 9 junior scholars (no more than 15 years beyond their PhD) working in the “historical disciplines” (historians, art historians, archaeologists and the like) are awarded $300,000 each through an open nomination process. This shift is undoubtedly linked to the historian Catherine Hall’s public refusal of the prize in 2016. What junior scholar, Palestinians be damned, can refuse 300,000 U.S. dollars?
A new academic advisor position was established and a major PR firm, New York’s DKC, was hired by the Prize, which was rechristened “the largest history prize in the world.” The firm has done its job well. Last year the Washington Post dubbed the previously obscure prize a “MacArthur-style ‘genius grant’ for history.” This year, whoever runs the American filmmaker Ken Burn’s Twitter account is busy publicizing the prize. University PR offices of course need no outside incentive to publicize their faculty's awards, so breathless press releases streamed out in an efficient manner from all the awardees' institutions.
The annual selection committee of 9 scholars is now also widely publicized after the prize’s announcement, their affiliations and visages listed on the Dan David website and posted to their social media with flashy graphics. So each year now, 18 scholars of history are enlisted in a PR project hosted by Tel Aviv University and Israel. Three members of the 10-member board of the foundation are affiliated with Tel Aviv University, including the current president, a former one (Itamar Rabinovich), and a historian.
Tel Aviv University's campus was constructed on the site of the Palestinian village Sheikh Muwannis. Today, you can host a wedding at the renovated “Green House,” as it’s called, one of the village's only remaining structures. If you look across the street from the house’s rooftop patio, you’ll see the brutalist edifice of the Institute for National Security Studies. Gaze towards your north, you’ll see the buildings of the Engineering faculty. More pressing than the past however—the Dan David Prize after all “celebrates scholars and practitioners whose work illuminates the human past and can enrich public discourse with a deeper understanding of history”—is the future. Tel Aviv University, especially its engineers, information technologists, and Orientalists, is tightly enmeshed in the war-making and intelligence-gathering apparatus of the State of Israel. Its faculty and students collaborate in an official capacity, to give one pressing example, with Elbit Systems, the most high-tech and wide-reaching weapons manufacturer in Israel, producer of the drones which terrorize Palestinians on a daily basis. Needless to say, the University like all academic and cultural institutions in Israel, is the subject of an international boycott.
Last year, on the same day that the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by an Israeli sniper in Jenin, the Dan David Prize winners were paraded on stage in an extravagant ceremony just fifty miles west on the grounds of Tel Aviv University.
The Dan David Prize, like the Jerusalem Prize before it, serves to legitimize Israel’s presence on the global stage. In 2001, Edward Said wrote to Susan Sontag, explaining what her acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize entailed: “your charismatic presence for the Prize and your acceptance of it is, for the Israeli government, a badly needed boost to its poor international standing, a symbol that the greatest talents in the end subscribe to what Israel is doing.”
Dear Esmat Elhalaby, I want to thank you for the informative blog post. I did not know anything about the renaming and reframing of the prize. I am a socio-legal scholar, a prof emeritus who has long supported the Palestinian cause -- I was brought up in a left wing Spanish family that did a lot of solidarity with Latin America and retain the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist politics of my family of origin. Since you are still junior I think it is brave of you to come forward with this blog entry. So congratulations on your courage and thank you on behalf of all those at U of T who have learned much lately about the higher administration's links to Israel and the lack of any support for Palestinian scholars and students.
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ReplyDeleteMany thanks, Professor Elhalaby. I agree that, given the prevalence of attacks on the reputations and careers of those who speak out on the increasing criminality of the Israeli State project, your statement is indeed courageous. Academic standards and privilege make it imperative to learn about and address this and many other injustices resulting from University-sponsored research and collaboration. In a world on life support, Universities must be a force for good rather than profit or prestige.
ReplyDelete"In a world on life support, Universities must be a force for good rather than profit or prestige. indeed - yet will they?
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