This conversation was an online panel discussion on 29 November 2023 with Katherine Franke, Shahd Hammouri, Ardi Imseis, Darryl Li, John Reynolds, and Nahed Samour. It is published in three parts: 1. Influences, 2. The Role of Law, 3. Academic Freedom, BDS & Tactics. The panel was organized by Usha Natarajan and sponsored by Sijal Institute for Arabic Language and Culture; TWAIL Review; Center for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University; UWIN RAACES at University of Windsor; Social Justice Center at Kwantlen Polytechnic University; and Middle East Studies at University of British Columbia.
TWAILR: Dialogues #15/2023
USHA NATARAJAN: How have debates over academic freedom evolved? What is the role of movements such as Boycott-Divest-Sanctions (BDS)? How do we assess the coherence and effectiveness of contemporary tactics? Nahed, it would be helpful to get your thoughts first given your expertise.
NAHED SAMOUR: That is a difficult question because as academics, academic freedom and the university as an institution is something close to our hearts, and yet many fear it as we know universities can be hostile places. I’ll begin with the open letter to universities in France supporting scholars working on Islam and race because they were accused of inserting critical race theory into the French curriculum. In that letter, scholars used the term ‘academic authoritarianism’ to describe the current situation. The liberal university, the last liberal bastion where free minds reign, where arguments are fleshed out and where ideas matter, has transformed. The university is now a shrinking space. It is not only human rights defenders that are fighting against a shrinking space globally, but also academics in universities in the Global South as well as in the Global North, and of course the degree of authoritarianism varies from university to university. I will say that some universities are shying away from having much needed debates and doing what they do best, namely, asking questions, testing ideas, and challenging assumptions about ourselves and about others.
KATHERINE FRANKE: I’ve been at Columbia University for 25 years. I was an undergraduate at Barnard College when Columbia didn’t admit women. I have a long history at this institution and for a long time it maintained plausibly the idea of being a bastion of the liberal university, a place where we could tolerate and discuss controversial ideas. It is clear now that what Columbia and so many of these large universities are is basically a real estate holding enterprise. Columbia is the largest landlord in New York City and recently took over through eminent domain West Harlem to build a bunch of buildings that sit unoccupied. Nobody on the faculty, none of the students wanted those buildings. The business school is up there, not surprisingly, but the rest of the buildings are just monuments to fancy architects and Lee Bollinger’s ability to raise money.
What we are seeing now is the influence of trustees and donors in terms of dictating what we can talk about and what we can’t talk about on campus. We used to have a language to respond to what it means to feel uncomfortable, to feel unsafe, a politics of feelings, but somehow we have lost this language. Or at least the university has lost it in the current situation and I think we bear some of the blame for that. I think our political correctness over the last few years of checking what the faculty says, which I would admit were horrible things in many contexts, around the feelings that students may have in opposition to racist, homophobic, sexist, disablist, and other comments, this checking is coming back to haunt us. This moment is revealing some of those fundamental cracks in what, at least in the US, liberal universities have become, or maybe what they always were and are more so now.
BDS was a strategy that worked very well in South Africa largely because of the African National Congress. There was a strong political movement embodied in a political organization that we do not have in the Palestinian context.
With regard to BDS, I’ve always regarded that as a second-best strategy, or rather a tactic. It is really a tactic of withdrawal and inaction: ‘We won’t do that, we won’t go there.’ We will withdraw our engagement in order to protest those spaces. But it is very rarely accompanied with a politics of what we would do. In the US, people often sign up for BDS who were never going to engage with Israeli institutions anyway. As they were never going to go over there, it was very easy to say, ‘I endorse the academic boycott’. It is almost like ‘liking’ something on Facebook, it asks almost nothing of you. It gave us a politics of what we were against, but not what we were for.
Boycott, divestment, sanctions was a strategy that we saw work very well in the South African context largely because of the African National Congress (ANC). There was a strong political movement in South Africa embodied in a political organization that we do not have in the Palestinian context. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is not viable anymore, neither is the Fatah party, and Hamas is an Islamist militant violent organization, so we just don’t have the equivalent of the ANC in the Palestinian context. That is where BDS has failed in that it is a politics of withdrawal, and it is unclear what vision of Palestinian freedom or Palestinian politics it is in service of. How are we exercising that tactic of BDS to support a larger movement? That movement just isn’t there. And this is where I miss Edward the most. He offered that kind of moral leadership from the academy and in the streets that we all feel an obligation to embody. But I’m not Palestinian and it’s not my job in the way it is for others to lead. I’m ready to sign up to support those movements as an ally, not to narrate them myself, but to support that narration. I feel a bit despondent at this moment because of that absence.
DARRYL LI: While I hope I have made it clear that I absolutely revere Edward Said, his status as an icon was also a symptom of that particular moment of the neoliberal university in the United States. The fact that he could leverage the benefits of that status to support the national liberation movement in which he was deeply embedded is of course to his credit. There were a lot of people who wanted to be a successor figure to him in some way. But what many of these people don’t quite understand is that there is a particular way that the academic system makes and captures stars that is just one small feature of the larger problems that Katherine referenced, which is that higher education in the US is one of the central drivers of inequality. Not just economic inequality but the regime of oligarchy that protects it. We are not in an era where we necessarily need ‘another Edward Said’ (and on a separate point one telltale sign of people who engage in bad faith with the question of Palestine is that the only Palestinian that they will ever mention or cite is Edward Said). Rather, what we need is to create the conditions of possibility that make it such that you don’t have to be as brilliant, or as credentialed, or as established as Edward Said in order to be able to speak truth to power.
With the BDS question there is an interesting shift right now with the renewed student interest in divestment. There was a wave of divestment efforts in the early 2000s that were not very successful. After that, the energy around academic BDS in the US shifted to professional associations like American studies, anthropology, and so on; and I worked very hard in some of these campaigns so I’m not belittling them. But I will say that focusing on those associations was a second-best option and the boycotts there are materially inconsequential.
There is a generational shift, a much larger group of students that is too big, too fierce, and too organized to be easily deterred; and they are coming for the money, so leaders should be scared. That is something we must take note of, start organizing around, and do everything we can to support.
However, these campaigns were important as political education and as galvanizing tools within academia, and they formed the backdrop for what we are seeing now, which is a renewed interest in divestment that actually attacks the political economy of the university in the US. Another key piece of background for this shift is the efforts to unionize graduate workers. A divestment conversation now, post-2008, post-Occupy, post-return of unionism, is much more materialist and organized compared with the moralistic symbolic stance-taking of a divestment conversation in 2002 or 2003.
That partially accounts for the panicked overreaction that we are seeing from leaders of higher education institutions in the US who are banning student groups left and right. There is a whiff of desperation and rearguard action to many of these efforts, to which I say: good. There is a generational shift at work, a much larger group of students that is too big, too fierce, and too organized to be so easily deterred; and they are coming for the money, so leaders should be scared. I think that is something we must take note of, start organizing around, and do everything we can to support.
SHAHD HAMMOURI: Academic freedom looks different now compared with Said’s times because decolonization is something quite hip and part of mainstream terminology on our campuses. Palestine has shown us that people are very happy to talk about coloniality but not to conceptualize it. By that I mean that people are happy to talk about domination but not to understand what domination looks like. I am in a university where I had my academic freedom upheld and no one on my campus has had problems. Yet there is no space to give value to my experience or the experience of subjugated people more generally. People easily jump to conclusions about how decolonized people should behave, how the subjugated should act, and what the experience of people from the Global South looks like. To understand decoloniality, people need to be humbler about accepting the limitations of their perceptions and keep an open mind to the radicality of decolonial critique. To understand the case of Palestine, to understand neoliberalism, to understand all the different forms of deeply integrated domination in our lives, we need radical shifts in our languages and perceptions. And a lot of people are willing to dip their toe into that but not actually to take the leap needed. Yet they are eager to name themselves as decolonial scholars that know everything already. So, there are paradoxical limitations of our right of freedom of speech. Inevitably, you can say things but not in the places where you want to say them.
People jump to conclusions about how decolonized people should behave, how the subjugated should act, and what the experience of people from the Global South looks like … they are eager to name themselves as decolonial scholars that know everything already.
As to the effectiveness of tactics, resistance to Israel comes in many parallel forms and all these efforts work together. I liked the visual that I saw the other day of the small black dots in the keffiyeh and the lines connecting them. That is how people now, not just Palestinians but allies of all different forms, see themselves collectively as functioning together in every way they can. I have learned many lessons about coordination in the past 50 days and before that. We can see now that Palestinians have a tool kit. But one big weakness that I noticed in different spaces is that the current generation has not learned enough from the decolonial tactics of previous generations. For example, I learned a lot from an Algerian colleague in a recent panel, and it is not only the South African experience from where we can draw lessons but from the larger decolonial history across the Global South. We can use these decolonial narratives and push these hidden histories into the mainstream as part of our tactics for Palestinian liberation.
JOHN REYNOLDS: As important as we may think academic freedom is, it is ultimately a liberal right that is very much contingent on the dynamics of power and the material context in which it is being invoked. There is often a certain type of ‘background repression’ that preconditions the acceptable norms and disbars particular forms of dissent, even where there are no formal restrictions on academic freedom. In the case of, say, criticism of Israel in US or German universities, that background repression takes the form of an underlying anti-Palestinian racism that runs in parallel to the material and ideological interests involved in collaborations with Israeli institutions. And when we talk about academic boycott, we must remember that as academics who work in universities which are ultimately – to a greater or lesser degree – elite institutions, we are not going to be agents of revolutionary change or anything close to it, and we shouldn’t have any pretentions about that.
That being said, I think Katherine and Darryl have touched on some important points about the tactic of boycott. My understanding the academic and cultural boycott, or boycotts in general, was never to think of them as a only tactic of withdrawal that is pursued in isolation. The B of boycott is conjoined with the D of divestment, and the aim is about taking the personal and associational commitments to boycott as a platform to agitate collectively for institutional divestments. When the Irish tenant farmers and the Land League instituted their campaign against Charles Boycott and other British land agents in Mayo in 1880, it was not just a question of refusing to engage with Boycott and of ostracizing him personally because of what he represented. The core tactics of that movement took the form of labour strikes and rent strikes, and were fundamentally aimed at undermining the economic dividends of the colonial land regime.
Connecting the symbolic and the material elements in the context of Palestine today can be done by those who have committed to the academic boycott coming together through our own unions and campus formations – and crucially also in connection with student activist groups who often tend to be more effective organizers – to put pressure on the university to suspend or sever their ties with Israeli institutions and complicit companies. That’s the way we’ve tried to think about it in the academic boycott movement in Ireland at least, and maybe it chimes with what Darryl was saying. We set up Academics for Palestine in a context shaped by the post-2008 recession and the anti-austerity movement that many academics and student groups had been actively involved in. And there has been some progress. We’re dealing with things that are on a very small scale obviously compared to the level of complicity between US universities and Israel institutions, but certain Irish universities have now divested – under pressure from movements, and particularly thanks to the activism of student groups – from the arms industry. This was not specific to Israel, but does include divestment from companies who manufactured arms or security technologies used by Israel in its oppression of the Palestinians. On the back of this, the campaigns are now pushing for full suspension of all ties with Israeli universities and any companies complicit in the occupation.
The essential flip side of the academic boycott of Israel is about developing ties, supports and possibilities for Palestinian students and scholars – to build meaningful exchanges, facilitate research, source funding and scholarships, publish their work, teach their work, learn from their work.
The other crucial aspect is to consider in all of this discussion is the question of academic freedom in Palestine: What is our response to universities being bombed and destroyed? To students and academics in Gaza being maimed and killed, even apparently being targeted for assassination? To students and scholars in the West Bank being rounded up and detained? To Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli staff and students in Israeli universities being disciplined and punished for opposing genocidal violence or in some cases simply for being Palestinian? What does academic freedom mean for them and in what ways can we respond to that from the outside? The essential flip side of the academic boycott of Israel is about developing ties, supports and possibilities for Palestinian students and scholars – for us to build meaningful exchanges, facilitate their research, source funding and scholarships, publish their work, teach their work, learn from their work. This is vitally important now as much as ever.
I would also just add before I finish that one particularly useful piece for understanding the limitations of academic freedom itself which we posted a couple of years ago on the TWAIL Review site was Stephen Salaita’s lecture on The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom. Salaita reflects on his own experiences of falling prey to ‘the fine-tuned cultures of obedience that govern nearly every campus around the world’. In cases like his where the rubber hits the road in the form of Palestinian scholars being ruthlessly targeted for removal, academic freedom in practice is so structurally constrained that it ‘cannot provide the very artifact it promises: freedom.’
ARDI IMSEIS: Coming back to Professor Said and his engagement with the world, there is a need to center Palestinian voices when we speak about Palestine. I occupy a very privileged space, one that was long and hard fought for. I’m one of only two Palestinian law professors in the history of Canada, and the only one amongst us who made it to the academy on the strength of a record very much devoted to exploring international legal issues around Palestine in international law. I am, in a very real sense, a rare specimen in my chosen discipline. And so the academic freedom that I enjoy is something that I look at as a tool to represent, to make representations, to narrate.
In the grand scheme of things, the material tools available to rectify this horrific historic injustice are very limited on the Palestinian side … every tool counts in the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The BDS movement has its limitations, but at bottom I share John’s view that every tool counts in the Palestinian liberation struggle. And in the grand scheme of things, the material tools available to rectify this horrific historic injustice are very limited on the Palestinian side. I was, for instance, glad to see a synergy between the BDS movement and the issuance of the Wall Advisory Opinion. Many people in civil society, especially those who are pro-Palestinian, don’t care for international law and see it as implicated in Palestinian subjugation. But I like to think of the work that I’ve been doing for years as a public international lawyer, a critical scholar, and so on, as feeding into civil society movements and that the BDS movement is invariably going to benefit from such work. Keep your eyes focused on the Advisory Opinion coming out of the ICJ next year, oral hearings begin on 19 February. It promises to be an important moment in the history of international law and its engagement with Palestine. Just imagine if the Court declares that Israel’s presence in Occupied Palestine is unlawful. That would be a revolutionary moment that can be built on. In my mind’s eye, this would be done by partisans of the BDS movement, by members of civil society, by every free man, woman, and child, to lead to the freedom of not only Palestine but, I should hope, the freedom of Israelis as well from the shackles of the fascism and fascistic thinking that has been running roughshod over that place for over a hundred years now.
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AUDIENCE QUESTION FOR SHAHD: How can one use Said’s linguistic, historical, and deeply critical ideal of humanism in international legal scholarship, where Eurocentricity is still dictating the language (French or English), history (from Grotius onward), and analytical frameworks (institutionalism and the like) that we use?
SHAHD HAMMOURI: Rhizomatically, or hitting them from where they do not expect. Despite the overwhelming weight of domination in shaping these frameworks of thought, there are spaces for intellectual resistance that can challenge the underlying presumptions in these frameworks. Said’s dictionary can help us articulate the inherent logical fallacies behind international law’s claim to legitimacy. Pushing these logical fallacies to the surface allows for a shift in agency from where they do not expect.
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AUDIENCE QUESTION FOR JOHN: In western media coverage of the ongoing conflict in Palestine, I often come across comparisons between the IRA/The Troubles and Hamas/Palestine today, sometimes even in an attempt to try and explain Ireland as an island of solidarity with Palestine within European support for Zionists. What are your thoughts on this comparison? In what ways could this be a fruitful comparison and where are its limits and dangers?
JOHN REYNOLDS: There are certainly broad, if somewhat superficial, similarities in terms of debates over the acceptable parameters of resistance, the liberal impulse to compel any speaker to ritualistically ‘condemn’ the IRA/Hamas before they can be granted permission to speak, the loosely analogous nature of the Sinn Féin—IRA and Hamas—Qassam Brigades relationships, and so on. But the material context of the colonisation of ’48 Palestine and the West Bank, and the regional and geopolitical dynamics of the occupation, siege and now genocidal assault in Gaza do also differ from those in the north of Ireland during the Troubles in fairly significant ways, and so we have to understand and respond to the situation in Palestine on its own terms.
When we look at the shared histories, some quite visible British colonial officials and ideas made their way to Mandate Palestine after having done their damage in Ireland.
It’s also important to bear in mind that the ‘island of solidarity’ in Ireland hasn’t translated into Irish government policy being anywhere near as practically distinct as it should be from the craven European institutional support for Israel. What I would say is that there is a longstanding groundswell of Irish-Palestinian popular solidarity that is undeniably linked to our recent history in the north and more fundamentally to the longer history of colonialism and partition on this island. Irish solidarity with Palestine has a character that is distinct in the context of western Europe because of that. This is not to exceptionalize or romanticize it – we may have a strong tradition of anti-colonial internationalist solidarity, but certainly less of a tradition of socialist international solidarity than you would find in many of the Latin American countries for example. The upshot of that has been that more tangible and decisive state actions and interventions have come from some of the Latin American countries than from Ireland in recent years.
When we do look at the shared histories, the fact that some quite visible British colonial officials and ideas made their way to Mandate Palestine after having done their damage in Ireland speaks to the colonial entanglements between both places, going back more than a century. Arthur Balfour was known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ in Ireland from his time as Chief Secretary in the colonial administration of the island, and the atrocities committed by the Black and Tans here are still very vividly and distinctly remembered. Both Balfour and the Black and Tans left significant footprints in Palestine in their own different ways. Balfour’s mantle was also taken up on the ground in Palestine by Ronald Storrs who served as military governor of Jerusalem for the first decade of the British Mandate. Storrs famously described the British vision for Palestine as ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’. In the more recent histories, the connections forged between the Irish and Palestinian political prisoners and hunger strikers, going back to the 1981 Nafha – H Block statement and manifesting most recently in the solidarity messages from Irish hunger strikers to Khader Adnan, came from a real sense of ‘shared struggle’. It’s also important to emphasize here that Irish solidarity is rooted not just in some of the historic commonalities with Palestine, but in wider anti-colonial and anti-racist activism that grew out of the 1960s. This encompasses everything from Bernadette Devlin gifting her freedom of the city of New York to the Black Panthers, to Ireland becoming the first country in western Europe to ban imports from apartheid South Africa on the back of a long strike by women workers in Dunnes Stores who had refused to handle produce from South Africa.
The wave of genuinely momentous cultural events organised by Irish Artists for Palestine over the past month has been something poignant to be part of, and something heartwarming for the Palestinian community here to hold on to amidst all the devastation back home. The walls of west Belfast and Free Derry corner have long been regularly adorned with Palestine solidarity murals, and the Palestinian flag is flying over Dublin City Hall at the moment – not for the first time. The task for all of us involved in Irish-Palestinian solidarity now though is to move the needle in the Irish state response from symbolic gestures and rhetorical support for Palestine to concrete action and meaningful sanctions.
Click here for Part One ~ Influences
Click here for Part Two ~ The Role of Law