Zionism from the Standpoint of its Critics - Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine

'Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims', published in 1979, stands as one of Edward Said's most powerful essays.  In about 50 pages, he marshalled literary, historical and political materials and ideas to suggest that Zionism's greatest success has been its ability to narrate its own history as one of free-standing and victimless purity.   Against this myth, Said suggested that a properly historical and secular understanding of Zionism must see it as a worldly phenomenon, and, most radically, that the  ultimate understanding of Zionism is predicated on the standpoint of its Palestinian victims.   The triumphant story of Zionism's organizing of a Jewish national movement and its winning of a national territory is revealed always already to be shadowed, hollowed and haunted by the minoritarian story of the Palestinians - colonisation, exclusion, ethnic cleansing, massacre, martial law, theft of land and water, racialisation and biopolitical domination to this day.

Most of us in the academy who seek to draw attention to this situation have not suffered and will never suffer in the manner of the Palestinian people.   Yet it is worth highlighting the efforts of dissenting intellectuals, and the formidable powers which Zionism arrays against them.   True intellectuals are a rare breed in the universities, where radical or eccentric energies are so often swallowed up by bureaucratic procedure or turned into the dogma of classroom 'politics', which has often little relationship to politics on the street.  But a volume which I helped to edit and which has just been published - Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel - gathers the efforts of a redoubtable band of university-based writers from Europe, Ireland, America and the Middle East, including Palestine itself.   The focus is on one crucial expression of the political in the zone of higher education: academic freedom and its ultimate meaning defined against the limit-case that is the boycott of Israeli universities.   

Academic self-promotion is a vulgar and unseemly phenomenon, but I won't hide my pride to have contributed to this book, and to stand alongside my brilliant fellow editors Ronit Lentin and David Landy, and all of our wonderful contributors.   Getting my copies of the book in the mail yesterday pierced the weirdly amorphous and phony combination of 'remote teaching' and unstructured time in which some of us now live, and reminded me that there are real stakes in what we do, and that there are always real battles worth fighting. 

Conor

Enforcing Silence

Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel

Edited by David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy

Situates the academic boycott of Israel in the broader context of academic freedom

• Overview
• Author Bio
• Table of Contents
• Reviews
• Details

Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on ‘no platforming’ by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel.

This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.