The Fallacy of Academic Freedom and the Academic Boycott of Israel

If you’re outraged at conditions, then you can’t possibly be free or happy until you devote all your time to changing them and do nothing but that. But you can’t change anything if you want to hold onto a good job, a good way of life and avoid sacrifice.

—César Chávez

The world witnessed the apex of the siege on Gaza in early 2008 when Palestinians once again took control of their destiny and blew up the apartheid wall imprisoning the population inside the Gaza Strip. Although many of Israel’s violations against the Geneva Conventions have been highlighted in some of the international media—such as blocking fuel, medicine, food, and water from entering Gaza or preventing medical patients from seeking treatment outside Gaza—other aspects of the siege have been largely ignored, particularly in the United States. Since June 2007, the Israeli-imposed siege has held the people of Gaza hostage as it imposes its policy of collective punishment, a siege that has recently been escalated rhetorically as a shoah (Hebrew for Holocaust) by Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defense minister: “The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves” (Israeli Minister, 2008).

Palestinians who are held captive to the onslaught of Israeli attacks on Gaza include civilians, many of whom are children, and students. Indeed, one of the consequences of this siege has been the impact on Palestinian education internally by not allowing educational materials to enter Gaza and by prohibiting students from leaving to attend their universities, whether in the West Bank or abroad. Last fall, Khaled Al-Mudallal was one of those students who was trapped inside Gaza and prevented from returning to Bradford University to continue his coursework; his case symbolized the struggle for Palestinians’ right to education.¹ The “Let Khaled Study Campaign,” which emerged from student organizations at Bradford, organized various petitions on his behalf, and he finally returned to England at the end of the fall semester. Khaled’s case is one of several hundred such cases that target Palestinian students and their academic institutions.

It is this context of Palestinians being denied their right to education by the state of Israel that must be brought to bear in discussions about the international solidarity campaign to support the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Israel’s practice of infringing upon the right to education coincided with the founding of the first Palestinian university, Birzeit, in 1975. In addition to curricular materials being subjected to Israeli censors—both in terms of intellectual production within Palestine and what sorts of academic materials may be imported— Palestinian students, faculty, and academic institutions have been under siege. In the West Bank, this began when Birzeit’s founding president, Dr. Hanna Nasir, was arrested and deported to Lebanon in 1974. It continued with the closing of all Palestinian universities, schools, and kindergartens during the first intifada in 1987, ostensibly rendering Palestinian education “illegal” (Barghouti and Murray 2006). Between 1988 and 1992, all universities remained closed, and “Palestinian education was pushed underground” (Barghouti and Murray 2006) into people’s homes, mosques, churches, and community centers, which were repeatedly raided and during which people were arrested. Since 1992 when Birzeit and other universities were allowed to reopen, Palestinians still found themselves struggling to arrive at their educational institutions as a result of curfews, closures, checkpoints, and Jewish-only roads throughout the West Bank. More recently, since the start of the second intifada, Palestinian academic institutions have become military targets as “eight universities and over three hundred schools have been shelled, shot at or raided by the Israeli Army” (Barghouti and Murray 2006).

This brief history provides a crucial backdrop that led to the academic boycott’s genesis in Palestine. But while progress has been made in Canada and England in educating and building support for boycott, including divestment and sanctions, in the United States...