Date:
Author: Heidi Matthews, Assistant Professor of Law, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada
Original article: https://theconversation.com/universities-should-not-silence-research-and-speech-on-palestine-243880
The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant and Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A pre-trial chamber of the ICC found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant intentionally “deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity.”
This is not the first attempt to seek legal accountability for Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip. In December 2023, South Africa brought a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide. In January of this year, the ICJ found there was a “real and imminent risk” that Israel was committing — or would commit — acts of genocide in Gaza.
Nine months later, a United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry reported:
“Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza. Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, wounded, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles, constituting the war crimes of willful killing and mistreatment and the crime against humanity of extermination.”
As the world witnesses the ongoing destruction of Gaza, universities in the West have become critical sites of examination, debate and protest. They have also become sites of suppression that shrink, rather than facilitate, the open exchange and analysis of ideas.
Universities are indispensable to supporting the free inquiry needed to do the work of addressing atrocity crimes. However, Western universities are increasingly prioritizing ideas of neutrality over a principled commitment to free speech and the pursuit of truth.
(AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
The indispensible role of the university
In an essay on education and neoliberalism, Canadian-American cultural studies scholar Henry Giroux emphasized the importance of the university’s role in leading social change. He said the university is: “one of the few public spaces left where students can learn the power of questioning authority, recover the ideals of engaged citizenship, reaffirm the importance of the public good, and expand their capacities to make a difference.”
Understanding — and ultimately preventing — genocide and other atrocity crimes requires an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates insights from a multitude of areas of expertise including law, history, politics, hard and applied sciences, psychology, journalism and others. Universities are crucial to supporting the evidence-based research needed to do this essential work.
“The chances for truth to prevail in public,” as Hannah Arendt argued, are “greatly improved by the mere existence” of universities and “by the organization of independent, supposedly disinterested scholars associated with them.”
Academic freedom should always be highly valued and steadfastly protected. As the Canadian Association of University Teachers stated in November 2023, “academic freedom, like all expressive freedoms, is particularly vulnerable during periods of war, conflict, and social unrest.”
Unfortunately, many have responded to political and donor pressure by repressing discussions of Palestine in the classroom and on campus grounds. These moves curtail the academic freedom of scholars working on Palestine.
When universities become less free, the health of our democracies declines.
The importance of student protest
Over the past year, students across North America, Europe and elsewhere established encampments on campuses to bring attention to Israel’s crimes and to call on their institutions to divest from companies and industries associated with Israel’s assault on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian land.
Read more:
A different way to address student encampments
However, many encampments were violently dismantled, with universities collaborating with authorities to shut down dissent and protest on campus.
Some universities have targeted students and faculty who support Palestinian freedom with surveillance, reprisals and expulsions. They have enacted a range of new policies designed to discourage or otherwise police speech on campus, which disproportionately target speech on Palestine. Such actions violate the expressive and assembly rights of students and faculty and transform the university into places where people are fearful of speaking out.
In October, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, Gina Romero, criticized these policies and practices, urging universities to change course. Romero observed that the “brutal repression of the university-based protest movement is posing a profound threat to democratic systems and institutions.”
Erasure of Palestinian history and culture
Teaching Palestinian history on campuses is essential work, especially as schools and universities in Gaza are facing scholasticide. Scholasticide refers to the “systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff and the destruction of educational infrastructure.”
Histories of the Nakba — the violent displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the founding of Israel — have been actively denied in Israel and in Western education and public discourse.
The destruction of education is a method of genocide, as education is essential to the continuation of the Palestinian people as a distinct national and cultural group. This destructive erasure is underscored in a recent report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese.
Read more:
The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems
A false neutrality
Instead of providing spaces for knowledge and discussion related to Palestine, Western universities are increasingly asserting that they have a responsibility to remain “neutral” regarding so-called controversial geopolitical issues. However, such commitments to neutrality are, in practice, often false.
Institutional neutrality serves to flatten politics and silence scholarly debate. It obscures the fact that virtually every activity conducted in universities is political, from decisions regarding who is permitted to enrol to which research gets funding to policies on holding events and putting up posters. Small and large decisions by university administrators inevitably involve political choices.
Claiming to remain apolitical in effect relieves universities of their responsibility to support the freedom of scholars to document, discuss and educate about political violence. Individual faculty members and students wishing to do so must navigate a bureaucracy of political suppression on campus.
Activism is a form of education and argumentation. Campus activism has long been central to both instigating and consolidating social progress. Restricting dissent on campus is a classic authoritarian tactic.
Universities should be places were we oppose unlawful killing, maiming and destruction, wherever this violence occurs. Universities should be spaces where Palestine is no longer treated as an exception. They should be places that actively support displaced students and faculty and work with Palestinian colleagues to rebuild institutions of learning in Gaza. Finally, universities should be places where students and scholars can freely examine and debate the political, legal and social dimensions of Israel’s actions in Gaza and throughout the Palestinian territory, Lebanon and the broader region.