Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel

Description

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. Contents List of figures About the contributors Foreword • Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi Introduction: Palestine and academic freedom • David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy Part I: Universities and academic governance 1 Whose university? Academic freedom, neoliberalism, and the rise of ‘Israel Studies’ • Hilary Aked 2 Disciplinarity and the boycott • Nick Riemer 3 The academic field must be defended: excluding criticism of Israel from campuses • David Landy 4 Lebanese and American law at American universities in Beirut: a case of legal liminality in neoliberal times • Tala Makhoul 5 Precarious work in higher education, academic freedom, and the academic boycott of Israel in Ireland • Sinead Pembroke Part II: Colonial erasure in higher education 6 Colonial apologism and the politics of academic freedom • John Reynolds 7 The academic boycott and beyond: towards an epistemological strategy of liberation and decolonization • Yara Hawari 8 Colonial academic control in Palestine and Israel: blueprint for repression? • Ronit Lentin Part III: Interrogating academic freedom 9 Lawfare against academics and the potential of legal mobilization as counterpower • Jeff Handmaker 10 Rethinking academic Palestine advocacy and activism: academic freedom, human rights, and the universality of the emancipatory struggle • Jamil Khader 11 Against academic freedom: ‘terrorism’, settler colonialism, and Palestinian liberation • C. Heike Schotten 12 Privilege, platforms, and power: uses and abuses of academic freedom • Arianne Shahvisi Index