Monday 20 November 2023

Irish academics and boycott - Intellectuals in the Public Sphere




On November 4th last, the Irish Times published a letter organised by my colleagues and comrades at Academics for Palestine (Academics for Palestine – Academia Against Apartheid), the Irish campaigning group which advocates for the boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education, which I helped to set up with Ronit Lentin, David Landy and Jim Roche in 2014.  This letter protests at the current genocidal campaign being waged by the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip, and argues that all Irish universities and colleges should immediately sever any and all ties with their Israeli counterparts.   The letter as published had 633 signatories.    Posted later on the website for Academics for Palestine, it has since garnered hundreds more signatures, bringing the total over 1000.   Here is the letter:


We write as academics and scholars in or from Ireland. The scale and severity of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip has exceeded all previous levels of violence in the prolonged and brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and, according to many experts, genocidal violence. The incursion by Palestinian armed groups on 7th October included criminal attacks against civilians. But under no circumstances does international law permit the systematic bombardment and collective punishment of civilians in a besieged occupied territory.

The dehumanising language and tropes widely used by Israeli leaders in reference to Palestinians echo those typically associated with genocidal incitement and intent. In the past three weeks, Israel’s military acts have matched those words, killing more than 9,000 Palestinians inside Gaza, including some 3,760 children (more than the annual number of children killed in the rest of the world’s armed conflicts combined). Many more Palestinians are dying from the lack of fuel, water, electricity and medical supplies due to the deliberate blockade. Gaza’s hospitals are barely able to function – no power for ventilators, using vinegar as antiseptic, performing surgeries without anaesthetic – and continue to be hit by Israeli airstrikes. The situation is beyond inhumane.

Leading Jewish and Israeli scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies have called this ‘a textbook case of genocide’. Bosnian genocide experts have likewise stated that “what is happening in Gaza is genocide”. After the first week of Israel’s onslaught, a group of more than 800 international lawyers and genocide scholars were “compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces”, while UN human rights special rapporteurs warned of “the risk of genocide against the Palestinian people”, calling on all states and international organisations to fulfil their duties to prevent genocide. The killing and destruction has only escalated since then. More than 60 UN member states have now used the language of genocide to describe Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s population. This week, the South African foreign minister referenced the Rwandan genocide and “reminded the international community not to stand idle while another genocide is unfolding”. 

With the atrocities in Gaza now added to Israel’s 75 years of colonisation and occupation of Palestinian lands, there should be nothing remotely approximate to “business as usual” continuing. Many Irish universities and EU-funded research projects have active collaborations with Israeli universities. Israeli universities are, in the words of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, “major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of occupation” and its military infrastructures. Meanwhile, several Palestinian universities in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli airstrikes, with some 70 academics and 2,000 students among the civilians killed.

We call on all universities in Ireland to immediately sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions. Those ties should be suspended until the occupation of Palestinian territory is ended, the Palestinian rights to equality and self-determination are vindicated, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return is facilitated. Anything less at this point amounts to tacit support for crimes against humanity.

Some days after the original letter was published, the Irish Times published a letter by other Irish academics, critical of our letter.   AfP wrote to the Irish Times to seek to reply to this critique but our reaction was not published.   It has therefore been posted on the AfP website.  I post it here:

ACADEMICS FOR PALESTINE STATEMENT ON ACADEMIC BOYCOTT & ACADEMIC FREEDOM

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17th November 2023

A letter organised by Academics for Palestine and signed by over 600 scholars calling on universities in Ireland to sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions was published in The Irish Times on 4th November 2023.  That letter remains open for signature by academics and scholars in or from Ireland via the Academics for Palestine website, and now counts upwards of 900 signatures. 

In response, a small number of academics wrote to express their opposition to our call to suspend ties with Israeli institutions, and instead proposed doing nothing. 

They emphasised the need for dialogue with Israeli academic colleagues, but it is important to be clear that suspending institutional collaborations and complicity does not stop dialogue between scholars – there are many ways and spaces where those dialogues can and do continue to happen. 

The responses to our letter also highlighted the need to stand with critical and dissenting scholars in Israeli universities. Those making that call are very welcome to join Academics for Palestine in the work that we are actively continuing to do on this front – such as intervening in defence of scholars like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Nurit Peled-Elhanan who have been suspended or threatened with dismissal by their own universities in Israel for voicing anti-war or anti-genocide positions. 

The reality is that while plenty of individual scholars in Israel may not support the occupation or the siege of Gaza, at an institutional level their universities do – in a whole variety of ways. Israeli universities have joint projects with arms and weapons companies. They are heavily involved in the research and development of Israeli military security and surveillance technologies. They train personnel, advisors and lawyers for an army that has now bombed all 11 of Gaza’s universities and killed thousands of students. They hold the corpses of some Palestinians killed by occupation forces at their campus facilities. They are in some cases physically built on illegally expropriated lands in occupied Palestinian territory. And at this moment in time they are heavily engaged in the repression of Gaza solidarity positions adopted by Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian staff and students alike.

So yes, dialogue is important, but entrenched military occupation, colonisation and siege won’t be ended by dialogue between scholars. It will require a whole range of international sanctions and pressure to support the Palestinian movements for freedom and equality. An institutional academic boycott is the one small but concrete step that we as scholars and university communities can take in that direction, and is the one thing our Palestinian colleagues have asked of us. Those who continue to object to it (especially now as the Palestinian death toll continues to mount and the effects of mass displacement and collective punishment get worse by the day) seem scarcely different from those who opposed the boycott of apartheid South Africa for its duration, before later trying to claim they had supported it all along.


Thursday 9 November 2023

'History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms which shape the life of man' - Lukács in the Levant

Today I gave a talk on Edward Said's life and work.  The core of the talk was an account of Said's understanding of Georg Lukács's great essay on 'Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat', and how this essay underpinned much of Said's own 'worldly' and activist criticism.    Said, like Lukács, envisaged critique as emerging most importantly in a moment of crisis - a moment of crisis where the normal 'laws' which govern or seem to govern society and economy are thrown into a new light and shown not to grasp the chaos of actuality.  Further, this moment is the crux moment when the consciousness of the proletariat becomes a full 'class consciousness', and offers the potential for critique, knowledge and change.




I argue that this Lukácsian formulation fed directly into Said's great essay 'Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims', where he suggests that the most powerful or fundamental knowledge of Zionism is that made by its victims, as they come to collective consciousness under its terrifying and awesome subjugation.

Thinking about this essay again today makes me believe that we can use it as a prism through which to think about Gaza.   This is not complicated - it's simply the recognition that Israel's Gaza campaign is the logical endpoint of Zionism's treatment of Palestinians.    The catastrophic damage wrought in Gaza shows us that the desired endpoint of Zionism is either the destruction of the Palestinians, or their being pushed out of the Strip.  Genocide or murderous ethnic cleansing.  A logic of elimination.  Gaza brings out into the open the tremendous violence of state-Zionism, which has always been part of the creation of Israel but which has been, for extended periods at least, hidden or euphemized in forms of ideological obfuscation - socialist Zionism, the kibbutz movement, the two state solution, Camp David, the Oslo process.  We must remember that all states are violent entities, even if only implicitly.   Max Weber's famous definition - that the state is the agency in society which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence - tells us that all states are constituted by a centralization and unifying of certain violent agencies and the delegitimation, exclusion and elimination of all others.    Those states are most successful which can conceal their violent undergirding.   Israel, being an ethnic state, as argued by Oren Yiftachel, shows and has always showed its violence in its efforts to get rid of the ethnic detritus or waste or surplus which it cannot handle: non-Jews, meaning in Israel overwhelmingly Palestinian Arabs.   Gaza, therefore, offers us a profound knowledge of the meaning of Zionism by bringing out into the open the core logic of Zionism, of its craving for more land and less Palestinians, its need to reify or objectify Palestinians as less than human - 'human animals' - and then to extrude or kill these wasted people, as Zygmunt Bauman has argued of the logics of contemporary capitalism.  Mouin Rabbani has noted how the Israeli authorities have called their cyclical attacks on Gaza 'mowing the lawn' - a form of waste disposal or management.   This is, at the moment, the best that Palestinians can hope for from Zionism.




I am not making any very sophisticated statement.    There is far too much talk, both about the Gaza crisis and about the Israel-Palestine conflict generally, which tells us that it is 'very complex', that it is morally riven, that it's hard to understand.    This has always struck me as a highly problematic vision: it tells us that the situation is beyond the knowledge of most people and beyond their capacity to learn.  And, as Seamus Deane wrote in another locus of late colonialism, to declare that a political problem is too complex for one to hold a clear opinion on it is 'a scandalously unintelligent position'.  Actually, of course, the situation is not so complicated.   A powerful first world state is stamping savagely on a largely defenceless people (and has been doing so since 1948), which does not possess a state or state apparatus, which lacks the protection of a legal jurisdiction or a security machinery, or safe borders, let alone a stable economy and an enabling and humanizing culture.   It's in that sense that we can, in fact, say that what is happening in Gaza at the moment is Zionism, for its Palestinian victims.

Death in the Air

Death in the Air