At the April faculty meeting, the faculty will vote on a resolution to remove two Israeli universities from the recommended list of study abroad options. This resolution, following a proposal made by Mac for Palestine, is a modest attempt by faculty, staff and students to express their revulsion at the crimes against humanity being committed by the Israeli state against a defenseless civilian population in Gaza. As condemnation goes, however, it is toothless. It does not prevent a single student from studying in Israel, nor a faculty member from working there. As far as Israelis are concerned, it won’t register; Israel, after all, has been subjected to far more consequential condemnation, including by the International Criminal Court which has indicted its prime minister and former defense minister for war crimes. With the U.S. protecting it from the consequences of global condemnation, Israel has been content to forego a decent respect for the opinion of humankind on its actions, and this modest resolution won’t move the needle on that score.
Even so, the frenzy of opposition generated on this campus to this mildest of rebukes has been startling. The resolution has been vehemently opposed, including with that old faithful rhetoric, the “what about [insert some other atrocity current in the world, whose name is Legion]”. Whataboutism, of course, is designed to abort action. It ensures that the status quo — of death and suffering in Gaza — proceeds undisturbed. As Elie Wiesel, a Zionist who survived another holocaust, once said, “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” In this instance, it is the Palestinians who are being put to the sword.
All of us, as members of the Macalester community, are implicated in what Israel is doing to Gaza. First, because Macalester invests in companies that provide Israel with the tools and financing for its violence against Palestine (for details, see Mac for Palestine’s well-thought-out proposal for divestment). Second, because the United States, by arming Israel and providing it with diplomatic cover, has enabled Israel to prolong a war that it would otherwise have had to terminate in a few months. That’s how long its munitions would have lasted, given the indiscriminate nature of its carpet bombing of Gaza. If the trustees had voted to divest, that would have sent a clear statement of where Macalester stood on this matter: in line with our proclaimed values and our supposed commitment to the United Nations. Both now seem like a marketing gimmick. Seeing that they did not, this resolution is an attempt to signal our disapproval of Israel’s actions.
My main concern however, lies with the idea of academic freedom, which has also been advanced to counter this proposal. Why this resolution should curtail academic freedom is unclear. It prevents no one’s speech. It bars no student from studying in Israel. It undermines no faculty member’s research or teaching. It merely removes two universities from the recommended list. That’s it. Next year, ten students from my department will study abroad; only three will go to universities on the recommended list. That the other seven will go elsewhere will make no difference to them.
The issue that remains out of the frame of debate over academic freedom is the socio-political context in which some academics have the freedom to express their opinions and others do not. There can be no academic freedom in such a context. Palestinian universities in the West Bank are subjected to repression by Israel’s military authorities, which arrest their faculty and students for their speech, limit or prevent their contact with foreign scholars and academic institutions and, since before the present conflict, have prevented students in Gaza from attending universities in the West Bank. In Gaza, every single university has been destroyed, and hundreds of faculty and students murdered — courtesy of the American taxpayer. If this is not sufficient reason for us to engage with this issue, then what is?
In Israel itself, certain topics are off limits, especially those pertaining to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or criticism of the current war. Internationally known Palestinian-Israeli feminist scholar of genocide formerly at Hebrew University, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, accused Israel of engaging in genocide in Gaza. That is an unpopular view in Israel (and in the U.S.), but being able to freely express unpopular views is the acid test of academic freedom and free speech. The Guardian described her arrest for that speech in these terms: “Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is in her 60s, was strip-searched, handcuffed so tightly it caused pain, denied access to food, water and medication for several hours and held in a cold cell without adequate clothing or blankets.” Where such things happen, there is neither free speech nor academic freedom. Far from defending her, Hebrew University forced her to resign her position, thus demonstrating its opinion of her academic freedom.
Another case concerns Israeli anthropologist Regev Nathansohn, who signed a petition calling on the Biden administration to cease supplying weapons to Israel and to fulfill U.S. obligations under international law. Students demanded he be fired; instead, his college compelled him to take an indefinite unpaid leave of absence. There are certainly Israelis, both Palestinian and Jewish, with the courage to speak up against the genocidal war their country is waging against a defenseless civilian population, but they pay a heavy price, with scant to no support from their home institutions for their right to speak. As is increasingly the experience on American campuses, they are arrested, maligned and fired.
Academic freedom is an American idea that has percolated, to varying degrees, into other academic contexts. It has never been integral to the university but has been struggled for in the United States over the course of the twentieth century. In medieval Europe, from whence the American idea of the university is derived, scholars toed the line drawn by the Catholic Church, on pain of being used for kindling did they not. That scholars should have the right to teach, research and write on the topics of their choice without fear of adverse consequences, originates with the establishment of the American Association of University Professors in the early part of the twentieth century, which claimed that right and made it central to their organizing. Elsewhere in the world, what university faculty can study or teach is circumscribed by law or cultural or religious worldviews. In many places — including Israel — universities are simply arms of the state, to serve the state’s purposes. In Israel, that includes a brutal military occupation of Palestine with the goal of its ultimate annexation. The role of Israeli universities in this enterprise has been documented by the Israeli anthropologist Maya Wind in her book, “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities deny Palestinian Freedom.”
Academic freedom in the U.S. is underpinned by the First Amendment, which prevents the state from interfering in speech. Private institutions accomplish that end via contractual obligations with faculty guaranteeing that they can only be dismissed for cause and after due process. But where there is no state guarantee of free speech, then even contractual obligations by one’s institution cannot protect a right to speak freely. Lack of protection has never prevented courageous scholars from speaking up against oppressive regimes — as Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian did — but we should not confuse their courage with academic freedom.
Here in the U.S., the concept of academic freedom is under assault from all sides: from liberal college administrations under the guise of “care,” while conservatives assert that teaching this country’s history of racism and genocide hurts the feelings of white folks. However, the most disturbing assault, which, because it is bipartisan, is most likely to succeed in turning back the clock to a time when faculty could teach only what their Boards of Trustees approved, has come from weaponizing anti-semitism and deploying it to crush dissent on campuses across the United States. The watershed moment may well be Columbia University’s shameful capitulation to the Trump administration’s illegal extortion — but Columbia is not alone. Those who worry that the modest proposal to wag our collective finger in reproof at Israel, which will be before the faculty at its next meeting, somehow impacts academic freedom (a red herring), are looking in the wrong direction. They should focus their gaze closer to home, where our own academic freedom has been savagely compromised in the service of an obscene war that we have enabled with our tax dollars, our investments and our country’s steadfast and immoral support.
When that big, beautiful riviera emerges atop the bones of Palestine’s dead; no doubt there will be a land acknowledgment.
Arjun Guneratne
Professor of Anthropology
