The University of Washington (UW) capitulated to an anti-Israel protest encampment by seeking ideas on “Palestine” studies from several figures, including a professor known for cheering on another violent protest.
A faculty committee that convened in October spent months building ideas to increase UW’s academic focus on Palestinian issues, according to emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. While pressure mounted on UW to quell antisemitism, the public university focused on consulting anti-Israel figures on and off-campus and a student group’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) office for its project.
President Donald Trump’s Education Department has since warned UW to “protect Jewish students” or lose federal funding. UW’s priorities collided with Trump’s in the past when he defunded China-linked “Confucius Institutes” at American universities in 2018, prompting UW to get rid of its own.
International studies professor Resat Kasaba, who advocated for keeping the Confucius Institute, now leads a push for “Palestine studies” as chair of the “Faculty Committee on Scholarship of Palestine.” Kasaba and the other professors on the committee — Rawan Arar, Karam Dana, Sunila Kale and Stephanie Selover — began their work in response to anti-Israel protesters’ illegal tent encampment in May 2024.
UW spokesperson Victor Balta told the DCNF after publication that the provost meeting with certain people “does not imply an endorsement” of their views.
The encampment mob drew attention by assaulting and obstructing people and vandalizing several buildings with messages such as “long live the resistance” and “kill your local colonizer.” Protesters stayed for three weeks until UW created a written agreement for them to disband. In addition to “waiving tuition for at least 20 Gazan students” and other concessions, UW 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.”
“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,” the agreement reads.
“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,” the UW Jewish Alumni Association told the DCNF.
Balta emphasized the “long, complex, and important history” of “Israel and the Palestinian territory,” saying that “even before the encampment protests, it was clear that there was room to deepen the level of expertise in this area and increase our understanding of such a significant part of the world.”
Balta said UW tasked the committee with finding “opportunities in any of our disciplines” and that its advice “will help the Provost assess whether it makes sense to hire in an area, if requested.” The five committee members did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Documents show the committee scheduled a meeting for Jan. 28 with Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, a strongly anti-Israel scholar who defended an April 2024 encampment that got his own school in trouble with the federal government. Protesters at the Columbia encampment advocated for Hamas, harassed Jewish students, took over a building and pressured the school to “divest” from Israel.
Khalidi told activists in a May 2024 speech that administrators “brought disgrace” to Columbia by calling in the police to disband the encampment, calling it “police repression.” Khalidi said the activists were on “the right side of history” for standing against Israel, which he has called a “settler-colonial” state.
The radicalism at Columbia led to federal antisemitism probes and a university report detailing widespread violence and hatred toward Jewish students. Trump began cutting millions of dollars in Columbia’s funding in March after another pro-Hamas protest.
“Needless to say I am very happy that this has come through,” Kasaba wrote about the arranged meeting with Khalidi.
Khalidi declined to comment to the DCNF.
Kasaba also took University of California, Berkeley professor Ussama Makdisi to a meeting with UW’s provost on Jan. 14, just before Makdisi gave a public “Why Palestine Studies Now” talk, according to emails and a UW spokesperson. Kasaba wrote in another email that the provost “has been very supportive” and hoped Makdisi’s event would “be successful in making the case for this initiative.” UW offered to pay him $1,000 and “cover all your expenses” for the visit.
Makdisi has written about the “Zionist colonization of Palestine” and has been accused of downplaying Hamas terrorism and violent protests at UC Berkeley. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The committee also scheduled a meeting for Jan. 21 with Yale University’s Asli Bali, who has claimed that Israel supporters seek to “weaponize antisemitism” against campus protesters who are merely responding to “astonishing genocidal violence” in Gaza. Bali’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Others invited to meet were 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. The email said others at UW referred their names to the committee “as students who have an interest in the important project” of “supporting the study of Palestine.”
Dale and Ghazal did not respond to a request for comment.
UW Jewish Alumni Association complained that the school keeps catering to anti-Israel radicals — even when it released a “damning” October report showing how the encampment fueled widespread antisemitic incidents.
“When it was announced, the university insisted on combining it with an ‘Islamophobia’ report … probably hoping that very few people would have the patience to read the whole thing,” the Jewish group said.
The Education Department ended an antisemitism probe in January with a resolution that found no wrongdoing by UW, as with other schools it investigated. The Trump administration called such resolutions “toothless” in February.
“Today, the Department is putting universities, colleges, and K-12 schools on notice: this administration will not tolerate continued institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students on American campuses, nor will it stand by idly if universities fail to combat Jew hatred and the unlawful harassment and violence it animates,” a press release said.
Kasaba made it clear he was not looking forward to Republican control in government in a November email to his colleagues.
“I hope you are finding a way of processing and recovering from the election results,” the professor wrote.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect comment from the University of Washington.
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