Whose voices are we hearing? Flickr/Farrukh. Some rights reserved.
An
academic conference, International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy,
Responsibility and Exceptionalism,
was due to start this Friday but the University of Southampton – citing spurious
‘health and safety’ concerns – cancelled
it, following intense pressure from the pro-Israel lobby. Despite many academics writing to the university expressing their dismay and a petition
which garnered wide public support, an application at the High Court yesterday
denied organisers a judicial review and the conference has now been postponed indefinitely. While an outrageous affront to freedom of speech,
Southampton’s capitulation to external pressure is not hugely surprising. The Israel
lobby has a long history of censorship, including in universities, which are no
longer bastions of free speech.
In
early March a UC Berkeley conference called Censoring Palestine at the University: Free Speech
and Academic Freedom at a Crossroads
was convened to discuss the apparent escalation in this repressive trend, in
the US and beyond. It’s a phenomenon that has occurred in response to heightened
criticism of Israel which in turn is a result of the moral outrage generated by
three successive Gaza ‘wars’ in six years – wars, Richard Falk observed at
Berkeley, better characterised as massacres, so one-sided was the slaughter.
This
article seeks to answer two key questions: why is it that universities can be
bullied into silence by pro-Israel groups? And why is it that Israel can’t
stand to be criticised? In the process it offers a critique not only of Israel
and Zionism but also of the neoliberal university.
Palestine/Israel on campus:
why universities matter
Universities have long been a key site of concern for the pro-Israel lobby. The idea that the ‘leaders of tomorrow’ receive their education in environments hostile
to Israel is compounded by the fear that attitudes acquired in this formative
period often persist throughout life. On top of this, trends in the academy are seen as prescient of the future direction of society as a whole. And,
just as throughout history progressive movements have emanated from campuses,
universities are witnessing a surge Palestine solidarity activism.
Losing the argument at the
grassroots, one relatively sophisticated response to this from Israel-advocates
has been to facilitate the expansion of ‘Israel studies’. As a means to influence the ideological
environment it is a long term strategy and it would be wrong to suggest every
academic or student in the field is a mere shill. However, both Israeli think tank the Re’ut Institute and prominent Zionist Lord Weidenfeld have openly stated that supporting the expansion of Israel studies courses
is, in their minds at least, one prong of a broader strategy to counter anti-Israel
attitudes. Weidenfeld was one of the backers of Israel studies at Sussex University while the subject has been introduced at the
universities of Manchester, Oxford and SOAS with the financial support of Trevor Pears, a
major donor to the Tory party and Conservative Friends of Israel. In fact a whole
institute – the International
Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR)
at King’s College London – a
collaborative project between several universities including KCL and Israel’s Interdisciplinary
Centre Herzliya was originally conceived as a project explicitly intended to challenge the
academic boycott by funder Henry Sweetbaum, who had
first offered the money to the LSE.
However, much cruder ways of promoting Zionist perspectives – and silencing
pro-Palestinian ones – are also vigorously being pursued. In The Idea
of Israel, Ilan Pappe has
described this phenomenon in Israel itself, where groups like Im Tirzu,
standard-bearer for the hard-right ‘neo-Zionism’ that increasingly dominates
centres of power in the country, hound dissenting academics like him out of universities. Scholars who have
defended Palestinian rights have faced persecution in many other countries too.
South African anti-apartheid and gender justice activist Farid Esask was recently banned from speaking at
several French universities about
Palestinian rights, on the basis of false charges of anti-Semitism. For daring
to back boycott as a legitimate tool to put pressure on Israel, Australian
academic Jake Lynch faced a law suit waged by proxy by
Shurat HaDin, an Israeli law firm
known to have enjoyed a close relationship with Israeli intelligence.
In the United States
Rabab Abdulhadi was the latest professor to be singled out for demonization by the AMCHA Initiative but long lists of scholars have found themselves
on the blacklists of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum (MEF). Student Rights, a similar campus monitoring body in the UK, has both undermined student activism and drawn up a dossier criticising LSE academics who defend Palestinians’ rights. (Notably, Student
Rights is a front
for the Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative think tank which has received funding from the Abstraction Fund. It is
thus tied in to the same funding networks as Campus Watch, since MEF also gets most of its money from Abstraction, and both are good examples of what Dr. Deborah
Gordon has called ‘the dove-tailing of professional Islamophobia and efforts to
counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement’). Given these
McCarthyist witch-hunts, it is no surprise that Prof. Lisa Rofel, speaking at Berkeley,
suggested that Palestine/Israel is today what critiquing capitalism was during
the Cold War.
These are just a few recent examples.
I’ve not mentioned high profile cases like those of Norman Finkelstein or Steven Salaita, or less well known but highly punitive cases in which student
activists have been targeted, such as the Irvine 11. Lower level
administrative harassment, from creating extra layers of bureaucracy to
monitoring and over-policing, is a common experience of student activists, especially
Muslim students advocating for Palestine (Imperial for instance, told FOSIS at
the last minute that its recent Palestine conference could not be a public
event, forcing them to change venue.) Increasingly, attacks are made online anonymously, via websites
like HamasOnCampus.org which seeks
to demonises Students for Justice in Palestine in the U.S.
Mindful, however,
that smears can sometimes backfire, some pro-Israel groups, such as The David Project, an organisation dedicated to promoting Israel on U.S. campuses, has
begun stressing softer, normalising, techniques: its Latte Initiative, for example, emphasised building relationships with key
‘influencers’ on campus, as Ali Abunimah has noted. When these strategies fail, though, pro-Israel
groups are very willing to turn to so-called ‘lawfare’ initiatives. In the U.S.
there has been at least one lawsuit and four complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act 1964, an attempt to criminalise activism for
Palestinian human rights. In the U.K., Ronnie Fraser notoriously took the
lecturers union, UCU, to an employment tribunal, alleging ‘harassment’. Even when unsuccessful, as all these cases have
been, they may still engender future self-censorship by exercising a chilling
effect.
The power structure
shaping the boundaries of acceptable debate
Any discussion of ‘free
speech’ and ‘censorship’ without reference to questions of power is
meaningless. The critical feature of the Southampton case was the extraordinary
pressure the university came on from above. This included interventions by four
Conservative politicians: a letter from ex-treasury minister Mark Hoban MP to university vice chancellor Don Nutbeam, critical comments from Lord Leigh and Caroline Nokes MP and – most
alarmingly – a statement from Communities Minister Eric Pickles. Besides the worrying precedent set for academic freedom by
government interference in the affairs of an independent higher education
institution, this illustrates the power structure shaping what can and cannot
be said about Palestine/Israel. At the recent ‘We Believe in Israel’ conference
both Michael Gove and Michael Dugher spoke, proudly declaring themselves Zionists. Numerous other
frontbenchers from both main parties count themselves active supporters of
Israel while a wider pool of elites can be relied upon to line up as allies of
the pro-Israel lobby in times of crisis.
So when KCL students voted to back a boycott of Israel, the country’s supporters, notably members of StandWithUs – a transnational body which has received funding from the Israeli government – were able to elicit a statement from London mayor Boris
Johnson which they used to undermine the democratic will of the student body. In
the US, political theorist Corey Robin noted the same phenomenon when a host of
university presidents lined up to condemn the American Studies Association vote
to boycott Israel, dubbing it ‘a very
elite backlash’. In the UK, before becoming head of the Charity
Commission, William
Shawcross wrote regularly for the Jerusalem
Post, which could have influenced the body’s
willingness to advise student unions (which are registered charities) against
taking ‘partisan’ positions on this global justice issue.
This
is not to say that the Palestinians do not have high profile supporters, for
there are indeed some; Baroness Jenny Tongue is one prominent example. However, the
majority of the political class are reflexively Zionist while the Palestinians
draw most of their support in parliament from backbenchers. It’s also clear
that ordinary people overwhelming reject Israel’s belligerence, for – as the
chair of pro-Israel lobby group BICOM noted
with dismay – last summer around ten times as many letters to
MPs were sent supporting the Palestinians than supporting Israel. Their voices,
of course, count for less – which is why Spinwatch’s report on BICOM argued that the
PR body has concentrated on shoring up elite consensus.
Precisely because concepts like freedom of speech cannot be separated from questions of power, it
is crucial to
understand the pro-Israel lobby in context. Pro-Israel
groups like BICOM, the Board of Deputies (BOD) and the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) enjoy access
to elites that advocates of Palestinian rights cannot compete with. The same
goes for resources: BICOM,
for instance, is funded by billionaire Poju Zabludowicz. This all translates into considerable political
influence at the top. (Questions about whether the less than democratic JLC can
be said to represent the Jewish community and whether it or the BOD should
using its power to lobby for Israel when many Jews do not support Israel’s
policies remain unanswered).
One of the most
astonishing facts about the Southampton case was a statement by the conference organisers which revealed
that the university vice chancellor had not agreed to meet with them, while it
was widely reported he had at least one meeting
with external pro-Israel groups, including the BOD and JLC,
who were calling for the conference to be shut down. (Ben White has noted
the hypocrisy of this since the same groups cite ‘academic
freedom’ to argue against boycotts, a neat illustration of the way concepts like free speech
are deployed strategically rather than applied consistently). Perhaps
we should not be surprised, given that Israeli government ministers have
directly asked British government ministers to put
pressure on universities over support for Palestinians on campus –
a fact which might also explain the presence, at a separate meeting about
the Southampton conference that included the BOD and four vice-chancellors from
Universities UK, of Britain’s ambassador to Israel, Matthew
Gould.
Neoliberalisation and
the counter-extremism agenda
As
well as the huge clout of pro-Israel lobby groups, the reason conference
organisers were correct to recognise that the topic they proposed to discuss
had been marginalised has much to do with the government and its agenda
for universities – the twin pillars of neoliberalism and counter-extremism.
As
state-funding is being withdrawn the
increased power of external donors allows the likes of Weidenfeld and Pears to
shape the syllabus by offering universities pots of money to fund Israel
Studies. The threats by ‘at least two major patrons’ of Southampton University, reported to be ‘considering
withdrawing their financial support’ because of the conference may well have made
up the vice chancellor’s mind. After all, the same formula worked, outside of
the university context, at the Tricycle theatre.
Meanwhile, the huge emphasis on employability means the university was no doubt
alarmed by lawyer Mark Lewis’s threat to look ‘unfavourably’
at CVs sent by Southampton
graduates. More generally, the prospect of graduating with 50 grand debt after
steady increases in fees likely also acts as a disincentive
for students to be politically active – though
many still are.
But if neoliberal environments, as universities are
fast becoming, are already conducive to depoliticisation, this is especially so where they meet
‘anti-extremism’ discourses of the war on terror. The government’s Prevent policy
includes universities in a range of civil society arenas in which it says ‘extremism’
need to be combatted. The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, which academics warned was a threat to free speech before it was passed in February 2015, made preventing
the spread of extremism a statutory duty on universities. This came about in
part because a clutch of right wing think tanks such as the Henry Jackson
Society (HJS), aided by the right wing press, have inculcated the idea –
despite a distinct lack of compelling evidence – that universities are ‘hotbeds of extremism’. Douglas
Murray of the HJS put that very phrase to work in the Daily Express writing about the Southampton conference – also,
ludicrously, linking it to the case of Mohammed Emwazi aka ‘Jihadi John’ who merely
by virtue of having been to Westminster university, has been seized upon as evidence
that universities are ‘breeding grounds for terrorists’. A Prevent officer was present at a meeting with
Birkbeck university officials just before it pulled out of hosting a conference on
Islamophobia
in December last year, citing –
like Southampton University – concerns about potential protests.
Given this enormous pressure on universities to restrict ‘extremist’ speech it
is unsurprising that pro-Israel actors have increasingly tried to push pro-Palestinian speech into this category. They’re
helped in this endeavour by the fact that the definition of extremism is
extremely broad and vague. The chief constable of Greater Manchester Police has
explicitly cited pro-Palestinian demonstrations as an example of police uncertainty about how to
operationalise the term, which requires them to decide on the spot what is and
what is not ‘extremist’. Indeed the word has travelled so far from any
connection to violence that Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor used it to refer to a
peaceful protest against a speech by deputy Israeli ambassador Tayla
Lador-Fresher at the University of Manchester in 2010. ‘Extremism is not just running through these places of
education – it is galloping’, Prosor declared. This is not mere rhetoric but has
consequences for how police apply the law. Greater Manchester Police – the same
force whose head later admitted the concept of extremism was unclear – paid a
visit to one of the young people involved in that demonstration, soon after the
protest, and involuntarily placed him on the Channel programme, as Arun Kundnani
documents in his book The Muslims are Coming!
Red lines, Zionist hegemony and ‘delegitimisation’
Supporters
of Israel would rather not be seen as censorious. The fact that, at Southampton
and elsewhere, they increasingly have to resort to these tactics, suggests a
rupture. Despite the massive power imbalance and the structural factors
mitigating against it, voices in defence of Palestinian rights are growing increasingly
bold. If, as Douglas Murray suggested in the Express, these voices were only those of ‘fringe weirdos’, they could easily be ignored. However, what we are actually
witnessing is a mood-shift in the mainstream: thus
censorship, as Ben White has observed, is a sign of weakness and insecurity, a desperate attempt to stop a sea change in opinion,
not just among serious scholars but also the wider public. The enormous groundswell
of popular condemnation of Israel is finally creating fractures in elite
support – even in our attenuated British democracy, in which foreign policy in
particular is rarely up for debate.
Though
Israel’s military might remains supreme – as we saw last summer when it killed more
than 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza and destroyed or damaged around 96,000 homes –
the ideological aspect of its
hegemony is in unprecedented crisis. We are witnessing a slow but profound
normative transformation. Because of the effects it has
had on the Palestinians, Zionism as a political project has failed to win over
hearts and minds. Israel has failed to even maintain the façade of a peace
process, making the two state solution patently impossible and
inevitably increasing calls for a one state solution, which would entail an end
to the Zionist project. However, Colin Leys’ observation, applied to Thatcherism by
Tom Mills, equally holds here: ‘for an ideology to be hegemonic, it is not necessary that
it be loved. It is merely necessary that it have no serious rival.’ In other
words, neutralising the opposition by silencing dissent may yet be enough to ensure
Zionist hegemony or at least delay its demise. This insight helps us understand
the impulse to censor and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is right: ‘more of this will happen as public opinion
shifts towards the Palestinians and their long struggle’.
It is also true, as Richard Falk has pointed out, that
censorship is a symptom of the increasing
difficulty of defending Israel substantively.
If the question were ‘what about LGBT rights?’ or ‘why hasn’t Israel made any medical breakthroughs or technical innovations lately?’, the Israel lobby would have all the answers. But
questions about why Israel controls the lives and movements of millions
of Palestinians without giving
them a vote and has done for nearly fifty years; why Israel has over twenty laws which discriminate against non-Jews; or why Israel continues to build settlements and roads for
Jews only in occupied territory;
these are harder to answer and pro-Israel forces seem to know that any answers
they offer are unconvincing; their best bet is to try to stop the questions
being asked. But this strategy is not sustainlable.
Anxiety – panic – about Israel’s international standing intensifies
censorship even within pro-Israel circles. A senior member of the Board of Deputies recently stepped
down from his post due to what Haaretz called
a "ban" on criticising Israel. A few weeks ago the Zionist Federation held an event called "Crossing the line: is public criticism of Israel acceptable?" (No prizes for
guessing their answer.) Jewish activists were physically removed from the ‘We Believe in Israel’ conference,
testament to a truth Anthony Lerman learnt long ago, that Jewish critics of Israel are often treated
most harshly. In 2010 Israeli think tank the Reut Institute, in an
influential report, came up with a more sophisticated strategy than outright
censorship, namely to ‘drive a wedge’ between ‘critics’ and what they called ‘catalysts of
delegitimisation’.
The invented concept of ‘delegitimisation’ was at once
intended to distinguish mild criticism of certain Israeli policies, which Reut
said should be allowed, on the understanding that it has PR benefits, from
types or levels of criticism it wanted to ring-fence outside of ‘acceptable’
debate. The exact location of these red lines is elusive and particularly the
more fanatical wing of the pro-Israel lobby will often simply used the term in
an attempt to discredit any criticism of
Israel, shrilly accusing everyone from Amnesty
to the United Nations of ‘delegitimisation’. But where the University of Southampton
conference over-stepped the line into ‘delegitimisation’ was by asking
questions about the relationship between Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish
state to legal, moral, egalitarian and democratic principles. In other words, it
dared to interrogate Zionism. The ‘Fair Play Campaign Group’ (whose work is
concerned with ‘opposing anti-Zionist activity’) was quick to condemn it.
Luke Akehurst, manager of We Believe in Israel, has claimed
he is ‘not in
the business of telling people what to say’. Strange
then, that elsewhere he has declared that when criticism ‘crosses
red lines and becomes inappropriate’ it must be stopped. We can all agree that anti-Semitic speech is
unacceptable, which is why it is illegal. But why should questioning Zionism be
taboo? This implication was the thrust of much of the lobbying against the
Southampton conference: a letter sent at the end of last year said the event
appeared to ‘surpass the acceptable’; Richard Falk’s
contribution was deemed likely to be ‘beyond
the limits of reasonable discussion’. Less freedom of expression then, more compulsory
Zionism.
Legitimacy, international law and
intellectual integrity
While important, the discursive struggle overlooks the reality on the
ground. Israel’s advocates focus on ‘winning the communication battle’ and ‘winning the battle of narrative’ and rarely stray beyond the level of discourse.
But Israel’s ongoing colonisation and human rights abuses are all too real. One
side of the ‘battle’ is seeking to uphold the very
concrete rights of human beings in international law. The other is concerned with insisting upon the abstract ‘rights’ of a nation state: Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ and ‘right to exist’. Not even the most ardent defenders of the union, in the last days
leading up to the Scottish independence referendum, made the claim that the
United Kingdom had a ‘right to exist’, regardless of the wishes of the people
in it!
Supporters of Israel are trying to
win it legitimacy using illegitimate means, of which censorship is only one
strand. Instead, it should be acknowledged that states derive their legitimacy from the extent to
which they uphold people’s rights – and lose it when they cease to do so. A
Southampton-style conference ‘would not be permissible about another country’, claimed Mark Lewis, while Simon Johnson of the
JLC asked ‘What other state…is subjected to such critique?’ The claims echo the
‘what-aboutery’ of many defences of Israel but can be answered by history and
international law.
Is Israel unique in facing criticism or practicing
censorship? No. Opponents of the Indonesian occupation of East
Timor faced similar pressures in
countries that were allied to Indonesia: ‘In May 1994, then Philippine President Fidel Ramos, bowing to pressure
from Jakarta, tried to ban an international conference on East Timor in Manila
and blacklisted Ramos-Horta [the Nobel peace Laureate who would later become
president of East Timor]. Later that year, Ramos-Horta was made persona non
grata in Thailand and banned from entering Bangkok in 1995 to teach at a
diplomacy training program at prestigious Thammasat University’ (I am grateful
to Professor Stephen Zunes for pointing to this example). Israel is not
special. Power always wants to censor its critics.
The special significance of the
Southampton conference was its attempt to restore the primacy of international
law, and to judge Israel – and measure its legitimacy – by these universal
standards, like any other state. But just as the pro-Israel lobby’s free-speech
exceptionalism is eroding freedom of speech, Israel’s exceptionalism in its
flouting of international law – (it’s
impunity has gone on so long that the phrase ‘illegal under international law, but Israel
disputes this’ has become a BBC
institution) – is undermining the very laws themselves. The Southampton
conference blurb observed that sometimes international
law can be ‘the very instrument of rationalisation of violence and suffering.’
As if to prove this, Israeli law firm Shurat HaDin will soon hold a
conference apparently geared towards re-writing the Geneva Convention, a novel way to bring Israel’s actions in line
with international legal principles.
Though the phrase ‘speaking truth to
power’ has been overused, the Southampton University case and the wider litmus
test of Palestine/Israel, illustrates the real importance of freedom of speech.
But if our centres of so-called intellectualism can’t stand up to the Israel
lobby and uphold free speech, how will the international community ever stand
up to the state of Israel and uphold international law?
Southampton university’s vice
chancellor would do well to heed Edward Said’s words, on intellectual integrity and the question of Palestine:
‘Nothing in my mind is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the
intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a
difficult and principled position that you know to be the right one, but which
you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political, you want to
keep a reputation of being balanced, moderate, objective. Your hope is to
remain within the responsible mainstream. For an intellectual, these habits of
mind are corrupting par excellence.’
Said noted that these behavioural
traits are often encountered in connection with ‘one of the toughest of all
contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the
greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who
know the truth and are in a position to serve it’ but concluded that ‘despite
the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights
and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be
spoken.’
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