Academics can’t just talk about freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, we must defend it too. But academic boycotts of Israel target institutions, not individual scholars.
Eileen Culloty
Thu Oct 10 2024 – 05:57
The devastation in Palestine has reinvigorated calls for an academic boycott of Israel. This is not simply about campus protests and the long history of student-led activism. It is more fundamentally about what, if anything, academia stands for and against.
In 2004, Palestinian academics asked international colleagues to boycott Israel in protest against the suppression of Palestinian education. While support for the boycott has grown, the Israeli occupation has also been rewarded with academic support. Israel has received more than €1 billion from EU research funds. This funding is supposed to be for civil, not military, applications and resulting technologies are supposed to be “for the benefit of individuals and societies, free from authoritarianism and respecting high ethical standards and human rights”. Yet Israel’s two largest arms companies – Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries – and universities that contribute to the occupation have all received funding.
In Ireland, DCU currently co-ordinates EU-GLOCTER, an EU counter-terrorism project with two Israeli partners: Reichman University and its affiliate ICT. The latter was cofounded by Israel’s former spy chief while Reichman University hosts an annual conference for Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus.
In 2014, the university developed a propaganda app for social media, which targeted activists and international news outlets. This app was developed in consultation with former Israeli intelligence officers, launched by Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, and funded by Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israeli billionaire who reputedly donated $100 million to Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
This is incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, the boycott targets institutions, not individual scholars. Academics are not asked to exclude Israeli colleagues from conferences, or to stop researching and publishing with them. Scholars are asked to boycott Israeli institutions by not attending conferences they organise or partnering with them in research projects.
Many universities have promised to divest from Israeli companies operating in the occupied territories, but declining to profit from occupation is not radical. Indeed, the International Court of Justice declares all countries obliged “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining” the occupation. Boycott advocates want universities to do more by shunning Israel’s academic institutions. Many object to this because, on the surface, it seems contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry.
Secondly, it is the boycott advocates who are upholding academic values. A boycott is a collective moral action, a non-violent means to express disapproval and demand change. The academic boycott takes aim at Israel’s suppression of Palestinian education and accuses Israeli universities of failing to defend human rights. Human Rights Watch have observed “discrimination at every level” of Israel’s education system. Palestinians are “winnowed out” of education as the hurdles they face “from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves”.
Israel’s current war has targeted educational infrastructure. The UN reports that over 80 per cent of Gaza’s schools are damaged or destroyed. All 12 Gazan universities have been bombed, wholly or partly destroyed. Al-Israa University and the 3,000 artefacts in its National Museum were obliterated in a controlled demolition. Such attacks are not new. In 2009, three colleges and six universities were completely destroyed by Israeli bombing. In 2014, the Islamic University and Al-Quds University were bombed and more than 400 students died.
Karma Nabulsi, a professor of politics at Oxford University, calls it scholasticide – an attempt to wipe out Palestinian education and learning. The complicity of Israel’s academic institutions is wide-ranging. Ariel University is one of several institutions built on illegally occupied land. Archaeological associations conduct illegal research in a bid to rewrite history and legitimate land grabs. Israeli universities collaborate with weapons companies to develop technologies that are deployed against Palestinians and sold abroad as “battle proven”.
Many universities have promised to divest from Israeli companies operating in the occupied territories, but declining to profit from occupation is not radical
There is an idealised vision of academia as a noble enterprise that valorises learning and knowledge. It persists even though universities are now largely run as corporations, and even though the history of intellectual thought has justified abysmal injustices from the subjugation of women to slavery. Nevertheless, many of us do believe in the pursuit of academic knowledge and the transformative power of education.
Dr Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian academic and poet, believed in it. He edited the volume Gaza Writes Back, an “anthology of short stories . . . to showcase Palestinian creative resistance to injustice”. Palestinians, in common with oppressed people throughout history, find courage and resistance in words. In his final interview, Alareer said: “I’m an academic … the toughest thing I have at home is [a] marker”. He vowed to throw that marker at Israeli soldiers “even if that is the last thing that I do”.
On December 6th, Alareer and six family members were killed in an Israeli air strike. Four months later, a strike killed his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild. The Islamic University of Gaza, where Alareer taught Shakespeare and creative writing, has been bombed to dust. That university’s president, Sofyan Taya, was killed, along with his family, last December. A professor of theoretical physics, he died in a strike on Jabalia camp, the same refugee camp in which he was born 52 years earlier.
Since 2005, the Palestinian call to boycott Israel has centred on three demands, all grounded in international law: withdrawal from the occupied territories and dismantling of the separation wall; full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. As academics, we are not violating reason when we join the call to boycott. We are defending it, and all scholars.
It is not enough merely to say nice things about academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge during graduation ceremonies. We must also defend those things as well.
Dr Eileen Culloty is an assistant professor at the DCU School of Communications