College and University Monitor

...The boorish Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature, took a break from defending Iran on June 26 at 4:56 a.m. to post a rant on Facebook, offering his insight on the “Deal of the Cenrury [sic].” In Dabashi’s mind the Bahrain conference was simply a diversion, assigned to the “arrogant” and “stupid” Kushner, to distract from the “Saudi-Zionist plot to have US bomb Iran.”

Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history, reached beyond Facebook and wrote an actual essay on the Trump deal, published on July 16 in the Middle East Eye. His Marxist explanation of Trump’s deal demonizes a handful of Palestinian millionaires who are selling out the masses in the “final part of the Oslo trap laid for Palestinian political elites.”

Through the Oslo Accords, according to Massad, Israel achieved a great victory by turning the radical PLO into the bureaucratic P.A. and by tying the Palestinian business class to the peace process. Trump’s deal, he claims, will force the P.A. to cede its power to the business class. His admiration for the “democratically elected Hamas” is unmistakable.

Perhaps the most influential of Columbia’s experts in all things Palestinian is Khalidi, himself a former PLO member. Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies, took his rejectionist rhetoric to The New York Review of Books, where he railed against the “neocolonial arrogance” of what he calls the Kushner plan, predictably, a “proposal to buy off Palestinian opposition to a plan that obviates a negotiated political settlement.”...