The growing trend of shouting down or otherwise disrupting Israeli and pro-Israel speakers on campuses “constitutes a dire threat to academic freedom,” the former president of the American Association of University Professors wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday.
Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois and the former president of the professors’ organization, and David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers, observed that many anti-Israel activists have claimed that their disruptions of lectures by Israeli or pro-Israel speakers were legitimate because “Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank placed its defenders beyond the protections of academic discourse.” This is concerning, they wrote, because it implies that free speech is not a universal right, but can instead “become politicized and diminished, subject to the whim of those in power.”
They explained that anti-Israel activists have adopted an strategy of “anti-normalization,” whereby “any activities that might ‘normalize’ relations between Israelis and Palestinians — from children’s soccer leagues to collaborative environmental projects to university panel discussions with both sides represented — should be summarily rejected because they treat both parties as having legitimate grievances and aspirations. Joint projects are to be shunned unless they begin with the premise that Israel is the guilty party.” These activists adopted “a convenient principle specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one that could create a rhetorical escape hatch from questions of why, by this logic, defenders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia or China didn’t also deserve to be silenced.”
In October 2015, former Israeli Supreme Court chief justice Aharon Barak, noted for his support of Palestinian rights, had his own UC-Irvine talk interrupted and curtailed. The following month the world-renowned Israeli philosopher and New York University faculty member Moshe Halbertal had a University of Minnesota lecture disrupted. In February, Israeli Arab Bassem Eid was relentlessly heckled by BDS activists at the University of Chicago; in April, they blocked Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat from speaking at San Francisco State University.
The leaders of the anti-Israel, anti-normalization movement “must defend more vocally than they have thus far the free-speech rights of all speakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the professors concluded. “They must do so now, before the shouting down of unpopular views becomes, for lack of a better word, normalized.”
While anti-Israel activists often seek to link their efforts to prominent human rights causes, many senior leaders of the movement have publicly affirmed that their ultimate objective is Israel’s destruction. Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, said in 2014 that Palestinians have a right to “resistance by any means, including armed resistance.” Leading activist As’ad Abu Khalil acknowledged in 2012 that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.”
[Photo: J. the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California / YouTube ]