Anne-Marie Debanne

Overview

Anne-Marie Debbane has defended campus anti-Israel activists, expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and defended anti-Israel Professor Rabab Abdulhadi.

Debbane is a professor in the Department of Geology at San Diego State University (SDSU).

Defending Campus Anti-Israel Activists

Debbane signed a 2017 letter, condemning a decision by Fordham’s dean to block the establishment of a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter on campus. The letter was authored by the anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) organization,

In 2016, Fordham reportedly blocked the formation of a Fordham SJP chapter “based on the reported behavior of other [SJP] chapters on other campuses,” indicating that “the establishment of a local branch could be ‘polarizing’ and pose a safety concern to students and faculty.”

Signatories demanded that Fordham “immediately rescind the rejection of SJP as a student group on campus, apologize to the students affected by this harmful decision, and reaffirm Fordham’s commitment to free speech and academic freedom.” 

The petitioners also highlighted SJP’s BDS activity, characterizing SJP’s efforts to promote anti-Israel boycott as part of “a time-honored non-violent mode of political expression.” The petition accused Fordham’s administration of a “fundamental misunderstanding of what boycotts are, the purpose of a university, and the goals of SJP.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in cooperation with Palestine Legal (PL), and civil rights attorney Alan Levine sued Fordham on behalf of four students in April 2017. A New York court annulled Fordham’s decision in August 2019, mandating that the university recognize SJP as an official club. 
 
Fordham appealed the ruling to the NY State Supreme Court Appellate Division in January 2020. On July 24, 2020, Fordham SJP students filed a brief asking the appellate court to deny Fordham’s appeal of the lower court’s decision.
 
As of October 2020, a variety of groups, not directly involved in the case, filed amicus briefs with the Appellate Division for the court's consideration including JVP. 

In May 2016, Debbane co-authored and signed a letter to former President of San Diego State University (SDSU), Elliot Hirshman, condemning him for not expressing support for students who had advocated for BDS on campus.

Specifically, the letter slammed former President Hirshman for not expressly supporting  “students from Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Muslim Student Association (MSA)” who had faced “charges of ‘Jew-hatred’ and of being linked to ‘terrorists.’”

Supporting BDS

In 2019, Debanne signed a resolution of Pitzer College (Pitzer), calling on the school to not make: “exceptions for votes related to Israel & Palestine.”

Signatories of the petition condemned a decision made by Pitzer’s trustees in 2017 to overturn a BDS resolution, characterizing the decision as an “intervention in autonomous, democratic, student-led decision-making on issues related to the College’s complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

Defending Rabab Abdulhadi

Debbane signed a letter, published on June 28, 2017, suggesting San Fransisco State University (SFSU) professor Rabab Abdulhadi was the victim of “ongoing defamation, intimidation, and assaults against the academic freedom of SFSU faculty members by the right-wing Zionist organization.”

The letter went on to claim a conspiracy “to silence researchers and advocates for Palestinian rights and to ensure that they are punished,” that accused “Prof. Abdulhadi of anti-Semitism and of having links with terrorist organizations.”

The letter also alleged that viewing anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic was “fundamentally anti-Semitic because it associates with Jewishness an unending list of well-documented racist policies and crimes against humanity committed by the state of Israel.”

Professor Rabab Abdulhadi has, since 2014, sought to cultivate alliances between SFSU and two Hamas-dominated Palestinian universities.

During an SFSU faculty event, Abdulhadi praised international hijacker Leila Khaled as an “icon in liberations movements and… an icon for women’s liberation.”

In 2016, Abdulhadi signed a letter to Vassar College President Catherine Bond Hill defending Jasbir Puar. Puar demonized Israel, suggesting that Israelis harvest the organs of dead Palestinians.

BDS

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by Omar Barghouti in 2005 to challenge “international support for Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.” BDS is an allegedly “Palestinian-led movement,” although leading BDS activists have admitted [00:01:01] this is not true. 

One of the demands of BDS includes [point 3] what is generally known as the “right of return,” a demand discredited as a way to eliminate Israel. Barghouti said the “right of return” is a means to “end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.”  

Barghouti has said that BDS “aims to turn Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.”

In his activism, Barghouti has also said [00:05:55] regarding Israel: “Definitely, most definitely, we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No…rational Palestinian, not a sellout Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

The movement has been linked to numerous terrorist organizations and received a public endorsement from Hamas in 2017.

BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.

The movement’s most notable achievement has been the infiltration of university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments and student groups, backed by their own anti-Israel members and affiliates, have proposed resolutions on some form of boycott of, or divestment from, Israel and Israeli-affiliated entities.

Boycott resolutions, although non-binding, have been passed by student governments on numerous North American campuses.

BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents on campus. On one campus, when the student government debated a BDS resolution, reports emerged of violent threats against those opposing it.

Social Media and Weblinks

University Website: https://geography.sdsu.edu/People/Faculty/debban%C3%A9.php