A book accusing Israel of maiming Palestinians to assert control over them won an accolade from the National Women’s Studies Association.
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, authored by controversial Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar, was a winner of the association’s 2018 Alison Piepmeier Book Prize, awarded for scholarship concentrating on feminist disability issues.
Published last year by Duke University Press, the book asserts that the Israeli Defense Forces believes in “rehabilitation through the spatial, affective and corporeal debilitation of Palestine,” as well as “the sovereign right to maim, wielded by Israel, in relation to the right to kill.”
Its preface, which shows the “intensification” for writing it started in 2014, applies the fake narrative of “hands up, don’t shoot” to another false chronicle within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty-one-day Israeli siege of Gaza,” Puar writes in the introduction. “Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli state to the tweeting of advice from Palestinians on how to alleviate tear gas exposure.”
The National Women’s Studies Association is no stranger to engaging in anti-Israel activism and bias.
In 2015, 88.4 percent of the organization voted in favor of a BDS resolution, with 35 percent of NWSA members present, that states “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”
Puar has an extensive history with anti-Israel activity, according to Canary Mission, which documents people and groups that promote hatred of the United States, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.