Academic freedom VS academic boycott?
Preface
Several weeks ago I published a strategic reflection on a campaign against the attendance of several Israeli academics at the 2018 conference on Recognition, Reparation and Reconciliation (RRR), held in Stellenbosch during December of that year.
Professor Ashraf Kagee, from Stellenbosch University, recently published a paper describing and analysing the issues surrounding the withdrawal of the Israeli academics from that conference. At the time Kagee and I participated in the group that developed the case for implementing the Palestine Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines in respect of these academics’ presence at the conference, and presented these to the conference organiser. Going beyond the guidelines for boycotting only institutions, but in consultation with the Boycott National Committee (BNC) (which leads the Boycott Disinvestment Sanctions [BDS] campaign in Israel/Palestine), we also called on the conference organiser, professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, to withdraw the invitations issued to the Israeli academics.
Kagee’s article uses the events surrounding this conference as a case study to juxtapose academic freedom with a call for an academic boycott to advance Palestinian rights. It aims to resolve a supposed paradox between academic freedom and the boycott of Israeli universities in a manner that maintains the emphasis on human rights. Through analysing media reports of responses of academic leaders, activists and social commentators, his article attempts to throw light on what actually happened in relation to this event.
As this is a paper in an accredited academic journal it sits behind a pay wall. Kagee probably has discretion to share a limited number of copies and can be requested to do so at e-mail: skagee@sun.ac.za However, the journal has copyright over the publication, so there are likely to be limited free copies. To make Kagee’s insights and conclusions about the significance of this particular PACBI campaign available to a wider audience I decided to publish this review of his article. I have framed my concluding remarks within the concept and historical outlines of ideological struggles explained and explored in all my preceding articles. This theoretical framework includes a critical reflection of Kagee’s perspective on the events of and surrounding the December 2018 conference, as well as strategic reflection on how we develop these campaigns going forward.
Unit of analysis, method and data collection
Kagee’s unit of analysis is a case study, namely the processes leading up to the withdrawal of the Israeli academics from the RRR conference, and subsequent events. He notes that the object of analysis in a case study is a system of action, rather than the actions of an individual or practices of a group of people. His method is one of triangulation, i.e. accessing multiple sources of data and integrating these into a synchretic meaning from multiple perspectives.
Kagee’s sources are mainly website statements on this issue by the university, conference organisers, critics of the Israeli academics attending the conference and those pro-Zionist parties that supported their attendance. His paper also draws extensively on media reports on statements by the same range of organisations. The referencing is undermined by the fact that several of the links no longer work, meaning that a reader cannot read all the original sources of the information on which he bases his analysis of events. There is also one article that sits behind a commercial pay wall, meaning that accessing it comes at a cost.[1] However, he reflects what he considers are the critical views of the authors of these articles, and/or those interviewed and quoted in the articles.
The primary pro-PACBI media opinion pieces that Kagee refers to were by Suraya Dadoo, of Media Review Network, and his own Op Ed. International and local criticism of the withdrawal of the Israeli academics that he refers to is not always hyperlinked to original sources. These critics include professor Chaim Hames, rector of Ben Gurion university, the South African Jewish
Board of Deputies (SAJBoD) (through its spokesperson Wendy Kahn), the SA Zionist Federation (SAZF) (through its spokespeople — but the facebook page has either been removed or the hyperlink to their facebook page has been broken), the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) (but in this case too, the facebook page has either been removed or the hyperlink to their facebook page has been broken….), The Young Independents (based at Stellenbosch University) and Stellenbosch university’s rector professor Wim de Villiers.
The media sources that Kagee refers to and often quotes are Palestinian Chronicle, TPS News (hyperlink not provided, but this could have been an error instead of the reference reading Times of Israel), Middle East Eye, Israel Academia Monitor (while this link takes the reader to a raft of interesting articles on Israel/Palestine — albeit partisanly pro-Zionist and openly censorious and suppressive of pro-PACBI Israeli academics[2] — the Stellenbosch conference events do not appear to be part of this), SA Jewish Report, Cape Times and Haaretz. There is a preponderance of published views criticising the withdrawal of the Israeli academics, by pro-Zionist groups, although the media reports present a broader range of views that are sympathetic to Zionism as well as to the Palestinian liberation cause.
Unfettered and qualified academic freedom
Kagee references Altbach and Academics for Academic Freedom (AAF), for an exploration of the contemporary meaning of the term academic freedom. This is captured in the AAF’s demand for “unfettered academic freedom”. I concur with Kagee’s definition of academic freedom, based on my own history and experiences. In the South Africa I grew up in I started my tertiary studies at the University of Cape Town, one of four liberal English-language institutions. Consequently, I was influenced by the classic liberal definition of academic freedom. Namely, the right of universities and scholars to decide who shall teach, who shall be taught, what shall be taught, and how it shall be taught. These demands were made in opposition to the then apartheid government. By way of contrast the latter had established separate tertiary institutions for each ethnic group defined under apartheid. Attendance at these institutions was reserved exclusively for those groups in each case. The liberals demanded the exclusion of race (or ethnicity) as a criterion for employing academic staff and enrolling students and deciding on curricula content. This view of academic freedom implies the waiving of discrimination with regard to the who, the what and the how referred to above.
The above liberal concept of academic freedom omits power relations, and also omits a relationship with other freedoms enshrined as rights. It fails to incorporate into its definition of academic freedom the exercise of power both in support of and against academic freedom. To address this absence Kagee develops two central arguments. First, academic freedom is a subset of a broader range of human and civil rights. Second, the academy is a political space where some wield power and others do not.
Important implications follow from the above arguments. The principle of academic freedom does not ipso facto trump other principles of human rights (e.g. self-determination, life, liberty and equality of opportunity) and civil rights (e.g. enfranchisement, trial in properly constituted civil courts and presumption of innocence until proven guilty).[3] In fact academic freedom is closely integrated with and woven into these other freedoms: the denial of these rights in certain contexts has a negative impact on academic freedom in that context,[4] often violating it in its immediacy and undermining it over the medium to long term.
In terms of Kagee’s argument, it is naïve (of power relations) to posit academic freedom as an absolute principle. This sets the scene for the challenges presented by the invitations to the Israeli academics to attend the RRR conference. To some extent PACBI anticipates some of these challenges by providing guidelines for action to its partners abroad.
PACBI’s guidelines are that the boycott is aimed at Israeli and academic institutions and not at individual academics employed at these institutions. The presence of presidents, rectors or deans of Israeli institutions would be boycottable as these individuals are present in their capacity as institutional representatives. However, the PACBI guidelines make an exception where it would be permissible to oppose participation in international conferences of individual academics from Israeli institutions. The PACBI guidelines encourage the organisation of opposition to what are termed ‘normalisation patterns’. These involve Israeli citizens and Palestinians engaging on the false assumption of a symmetry of power between the two sides, without addressing the Israeli occupation and dispossession of Palestinian land.[5] Opposing normalisation practices means that, notwithstanding its focus on institutions rather than individual academics, PACBI aims to stop certain discussions in academic and cultural forums that fail to acknowledge Israeli violation of Palestinian rights. In these instances, the campaign should be directed against individual participants in such discussions.
Taken together, these points form the basis for justifying the PACBI as a strategy for advancing the struggle for Palestinian human rights and civil rights. They are also the basis for justifying the demand for withdrawal of the individual invitations to the 2018 conference. Kagee concludes from this that notwithstanding its tertiary institutional focus, PACBI gets implemented through boycotting Israeli academics based on their nationality: our objection, he says, came down to the fact that these seven academics were Israeli citizens.
The rational case for PACBI targeting Israel academics is that Israel has been operating an apartheid regime that violates the human, civil and national self-determination rights of Palestinians. This claim has been made in many a reputable forum. In my earlier article I also refer to key human rights organisations that identify the state of Israel comprising an apartheid regime — see “The dialectics of Israel’s rights”, footnote 5. Kagee refers to the following scholars and analysts to reinforce this case: Aysha Munira Rasheed; Ariel Handel, Marco Erez & Allegra Maggor; Sultan Barakat, Samsom Milton & Ghassan Eikalhout; Gershon Shafir; Rosemary Sayigh; Hania Nashef; Michael Oren; Marwan Diab, Guido Veronese, Yasser Abu Jamei, Rawia Hammam, Sally Saleh & Ashraf Kagee; Lisa Hajjar; Tom Hickey; Ilan Pappe; and, Lena Meari. Kagee brings in studies, including one he participated in, of the psychosocial trauma of Palestinians living under occupation and the brutalising effects on them of Israeli military attacks and incursions into their living places. He should know, having had personal experience of providing support for mental health services to the people of beleagured Gaza. The accounts of physical suffering and mental anguish resonate strongly with the theme of the RRR conference. The structural causes that drive these states of mental depression and violation of many basic rights are the focus of his article — he takes them into account in his resolution of the contradiction between academic freedom and other basic human rights.
The stated purpose of the conference was to determine appropriate response to echoes of historical wounding, extending beyond the generation traumatised directly, and identify strategies to quell the haunting repercussions of genocide, slavery, colonial oppression and mass violence. Arguably, PACBI is one such strategy, that justified being debated at the conference.
Dialectic of PACBI and counterarguments
In his article Kagee isolates five thematic components of the argument against the demand for withdrawal of the invitations to the Israeli academics. I have reduced these to three issues because two of his components are logically subsumable as sub-components under other components.
What is interesting is that the critics of those demanding withdrawal of the invitations did not accuse us of being antisemites, which is the usual epithet thrown at those expressing solidarity with the people of Palestine through boycotts. The closest they came to playing the antisemitism card was when Wendy Kahn erroneously referred to SAJBoD, which registered strong protest against and criticism of the campaign for the withdrawal of the Israeli academics, as the 117-year old democratically representative body of the Jewish community.[6] Instead the criticism was that we used threats of violence and fear, suppressed academic freedom and poisoned the academic debate by bringing in politics.
Threats of violence and fear:
A strong recurring theme reported in the narrative of the critics of the demands from the Palestine solidarity activists, was that there was a threat to disrupt the conference, including through overt violence.
The implication was that the threat of disruption combined with the threat of violence created fear and this created pressure that resulted in the withdrawal of the Israeli academics.
Professor Shifra Sagy from Ben Gurion university was reported on 28 November 2018 (about one week before the conference was due to commence), in Israel Hayom (back up link, if required), as saying that that the activists protesting the Israeli presence had ‘threatened to blow up the conference’ if she and her colleagues participated. In an article in Haaretz on the same day Chaim Hames, rector of Ben Gurion university said that there had been ‘intimidation and threats’. One day later (29 November 2018) the SAJBoD through Wendy Kahn reiterated the point about threats of disruption (‘threats to disrupt the event’). Also, on 29 November 2018 the SA Jewish Report’s Tali Fainberg wrote that Gobodo-Madikizela (conference convenor) had hinted to her (Fainberg) that threats of violence towards one particular academic was the reason she had to capitulate.
This view of Palestine solidarity activists’ pressure backed up by the threat of violence was reinforced through comments by professor Thuli Madonsela, as a part of a joint statement from Stellenbosch university and SAJBoD, dated 05 February 2019. This followed the university’s joint meeting with the SAJBoD. SAUJS in 2019 referred to us as ‘hypocritical thugs’, implying that we threatened with violence if necessary to suppress views that we disapprove of.
Suppression of academic freedom:
For the critics the fact that the Israeli academics were not present at this conference represented a violation of academic freedom.
Kagee notes that it is unclear whether the Israeli academics’ withdrawal was voluntary or imposed on them.
Either way the critics of the disinvitation campaign made the point that this campaign was a suppression of academic freedom. This point follows closely on their characterisation of the withdrawal campaign as thuggish and mounting to little more than bullying by people who had no intention of facilitating a peaceful engagement between antagonistic parties. Linked to this was the criticism that this stifled the exchange of ideas that might productively contribute towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The above views are based on a liberal view of ‘unfettered academic freedom’ as explained earlier.
This criticism applies equally to the prevention of Israeli academics from attending international conferences, a la PACBI. One critic, professor Barak
Medina, rector of the Hebrew university, noted that our objection had gone beyond PACBI’s guide that this should be institutionally focused, and was instead based purely on the nationality of the invited (then disinvited) speakers (i.e., Israeli). This national discrimination, it was argued, was a violation of individuals’ academic freedom. It was claimed that it interferes with the right of Israeli academics, qua Israeli academics, to freely move around the world, engage in academic forums and share ideas. Specifically, SAJBoD (through Wendy Kahn), SAZF and two Facebook post commentators (one of whom was named as Brenda Stern, the other remaining unnamed), were quoted as evidence of South Africans expressing their shock at what they saw as Stellenbosch university’s culpability for suppressing academic freedom.
Relationship of ‘politics’ to ‘the academy’:
The critics of the withdraw campaign implied that local and global politics had interfered with academic freedom in this instance. Kagee makes the point that this part of the criticism of the boycott action was based on the assumption that the politics of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict existed outside the academic space that should be constructed to engage in ‘neutral’ debate about the vicissitudes of this struggle. The assumption that politics and academic freedom can be neatly separated, the one hermeneutically sealed from the other, is closely related to, supported by and reinforcing the assumption about unfettered academic freedom.
Conclusions
Academic freedom vs academic boycott:
Kagee resolved what he referred to as the apparent paradox between academic freedom and the academic boycott in support of advancing Palestinian rights.
There is no such state as unfettered academic freedom, which is always framed (limited) by discriminatory criteria in respect of the who, the what and the how. Ideally, these criteria should be rational in terms of a secular definition of objective truth. The key question is whether the universal application of human rights (i.e. justice) forms part of these criteria. Justice is part and parcel of truth seeking because our real social practices are linked to, influence and are impacted on by academic theoretical and research practices.
Arising from the above, tertiary institutions and individual scholars and students as well as their representative forums, could justifiably discriminate against having specific institutions and individuals present at academic conference discussions if this would ideologically reinforce a view that covers up or justifies the violation of academic freedom in another context. Especially when this forms part of a broader systemic suppression of other fundamental human rights. In this view the search for truth requires the broadest existence of the full range of human rights that instantiate freedom.
Based on the above, the decision taken by Gobodo-Madikizela (the conference organiser) was consistent with the precepts of academic freedom: she effectively decided who could make presentations, what should be presented and how it should be presented on the basis of a sensitivity to the violation of the fundamental rights of Palestinians. As Kagee notes this refutes the Zionist accusation that Stellenbosch university capitulated to an attack on academic freedom. The response was decided at an operational level. Decentralised decision-making instantiated this specific instance of academic freedom. This could have served as an example for further decentralised academic freedom decision-making at this and other universities. However, this did not happen. Instead, through the 05 February joint SAJBoD/Stellenbosch university statement the administration publicly committed to an ‘unfettered academic freedom’ approach. In practice this means that for now Stellenbosch university policy is to adopt a flexible approach to human rights violations when considering academic engagements. This university’s policy is to give Israeli academic institutions and academics a free pass regardless of the human rights violations that they are complicit in. Arguably it was critical for Zionists to move quickly to effect this before the partial concession to the boycott demands created a precedent that others could follow.
In contrast Kagee referred to a qualified notion of academic freedom: freedom to research, discuss and share knowledge within academies should be exercised with an understanding of how these activities impact on the existing violation of human rights in specific instances. This understanding requires academics to hear what the victims of these violations say. These victims are neighbours in the human family: this is the basis for our solidarity with their suffering. PACBI represents a cry of the Palestinian people in the case of Israel. There are also cries from the current protests and uprisings of working-class South Africans. From her correspondence it is clear that the conference organiser, Gobodo-Madikizela, is sensitive to and hears those cries, both here and in Israel/Palestine. She also vouched for the fact that this was also true for the invited Israeli academics. Where she and they differed from us was about the question of normalisation of unequal and abnormal power relations. The challenge is to go beyond debating these power imbalances and rather also challenge them. If the Israeli and Stellenbosch academics and university administrators are unable to take that practical step, through expressing public solidarity with PACBI, then their grasp of social reality is at best partial and at worst mendacious (false). A state of mendacity effectively breeds propaganda. The Zionist critics of PACBI activists and Stellenbosch university are already trapped within that propaganda. This is reflected in the fact that their main source of attack was that we were a bunch of political thugs even prepared to perpetrate violence to prevent reasonable people from coming together to talk about their differences and conflicts.
Factual inaccuracies:
The other aspect of Kagee’s article that is enlightening is its addressing the question of what actually happened in the contestation over the attendance/non-attendance of the Israeli academics at the Stellenbosch conference. Here there are four key questions about the facts. First, was disruption and violent disruption threatened? Second, was there an adversarial relationship between the organisers of the conference and those protesting the presence of the Israeli academics? Third, were the Israeli delegates disinvited or did they withdraw? And, fourth, did the campaign target Israeli nationals qua Israeli nationals?
Non-violence or violence?
As I indicated in my earlier article no threat of violence was ever issued by our group. Both our initial and subsequent documented representations to the conference organiser never carried the threat to disrupt the conference. Those claiming the presence of violent threats gave no details of the content of these threats and the parties that issued them. Kagee makes a similar point in his article. Consequently, the Zionist claim that both the organiser and the university capitulated to violence does not bear out. This also calls into question Madonsela’s claim that the university acted to maintain the peace.[7]
This does not mean that there were no threats from other sources. To determine this we need more information regarding the nature and source of these alleged threats. I have therefore requested details of the threats of violent disruption from a local news source that made claims about threats, namely SA Jewish Report reporter Fainberg,[8]as well as source references that reportedly claimed the truth value of these threats, namely professors Sagy and Gobodo-Madikizela.
Collegial or adversarial relationship?
Closely related to the question about violent intimidation, was our relationship with Gobodo-Madikizela. The underlying relationship between us was not adversarial but respectful based on a mutual valuation of the conference theme — we supported the noble aims of the conference and emphasised honouring the South African liberation struggle.
Our text in the two statements to Gobodo-Madikizela reflected that.
On 23 November, in her personal communication to our group (through Roshan Dadoo) she expressed views congruent with ours — she mentioned that the Palestinians’ suffering was worse than black suffering under South African apartheid.
This collegial relationship was confirmed by her statement (published on the Stellenbosch university website) on 27 November 2018.
Thereafter the projection of us as violent thugs commenced, on 28 November in Israel Hayom, and continued the next day through Wendy Kahn’s statement and the Tali Fainberg (SA Jewish Report) article.
Disinvitation or withdrawal?
Kagee suggests that we are unlikely to know whether the Israeli academics withdrew or were disinvited. The reporting did not delve deeper into the meaning of what various actors who were interviewed said. Had the journalists done this we might now be wiser about the answer to this question. The various narratives around this theme reflect interpretations of Gobodo-Madikizela’s response to both the Palestine solidarity activists’ demands and the counter pressure from the Israeli academics, Zionist media and groups like the SAJBoD which claimed to represent the interests of South Africa’s Jewish community.
Kagee refers to personal communication from Gobodo-Madikizela — he says she acknowledged the function of and right to boycott but averred that this (her) conference was not an appropriate vehicle for that. Fainberg’s two articles in the SA Jewish Report suggested that Gobodo-Madikizela wished to shield Stellenbosch university from protests and not have the conference derailed. And that therefore, she removed the names of the Israeli delegates from the programme but encouraged them still to attend even though they would not be addressing it. Gobodo-Madikizela appeared to be conforming with the PACBI guidelines on normalisation by so doing.
It appears that the Israeli academics took offence at this and might have decided not to attend under these conditions because it would have been a concession to PACBI.
Targeting Israeli nationals qua Israeli nationals?
Kagee notes that ‘the concerns of the objectors extended beyond the PACBI guidelines, which pertain to boycotting Israeli institutions but not individuals. Instead, those objecting to the Israeli delegation did so on the basis of the nationality of the delegates, i.e. on the grounds that they were Israeli citizens who were attending a conference on recognition, reparation, and reconciliation’.
However, the demands to Gobodo-Madikizela specifically excluded the identity and nationality of the Israeli academics. The demand to rescind their invitations was based on their silence on the call for support for PACBI combined with the absence of ‘authentic Palestinian presence’. These combined facts would amount to normalisation as explained earlier.
Strategic focus of PACBI
The withdrawal of the Israeli academics represented a significant victory for the PACBI in South Africa, notwithstanding the joint statement by SAJBoD and the university of Stellenbosch that followed. This victory necessitated Zionist and university administration demonisation of the campaign as threatening violence and violating academic freedom.
A glaring omission at the conference was the absence of Palestinian voices of resistance. The reason that these types of Palestinians were not invited remains unclear. It reflects on the perceptions and decisions of the conference organisers. That said, Gobodo-Madikizela expressed her awareness of the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli apartheid. In response to our respectful and supportive engagement she acted to try and reach a compromise that would see these academics still attending but not engaging in a discussion that would have created the normalisation that we were campaigning against. However, in trying to be all things to all people she ended up dissatisfying the Israeli academics and (unintentionally) facilitated their exclusion. In this respect Gobodo-Madikizela’s absence from the joint SAJBoD/Stellenbosch university statement is noteworthy. Had we had an adversarial relationship towards her the outcome could have been a different one with these academics well attending and even engaging as originally planned.
By contrast Madonsela reinforced the view that the Israeli withdrawal was prompted by the need to avoid a violent confrontation. Unlike Gobodo-Madikizela Madonsela is unlikely to be critical of Israel’s and Zionist policies towards the Palestinians. In August 2016 she spoke at an event with the then Israeli ambassador Arthur Lenk. In September of the same year she participated in a fund-raising event hosted by the Israel United Appeal (IUA) — United Communal Fund (UCF). These funds are earmarked for a Zionist organisation, Keren Hayesod, to further the national priorities of the state of Israel.
Tactical points:
The following tactical points, which were important for the successful application of the PACBI in this conference, could serve as guidelines for future action.
- Activists’ stated commitment to non-violent projection of the power of protest and boycott.
- Engagement with key constituencies, particularly conference organisers, aimed at winning their support.
- The demand for presence of Palestinian voices of resistance.
- The demand that Israeli academics recognise the asymmetry of power relations between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people and commit to PACBI, as a basis for inclusion in discussions about the situation and conflict in Israel/Palestine.
Defining normalisation
Normalisation was the key problem raised by Palestine solidarity activists objecting to the presence of the Israeli academics.
But what precisely constitutes normalisation needs to be clarified. Is it limited to discussions that assume a symmetry of forces in the conflict, and therefore normality?
Or, in the absence of their public support for PACBI, does the presence of Israeli academics at any conference constitute normalisation? For example, is there normalisation where Israeli academics attend conferences addressing other disciplines and topics, at which the issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would not even be discussed?
This is an important point, with direct bearing on the principle of PACBI being aimed at individuals only where normalisation takes place. From the PACBI definition the issue of normalisation should not arise in the latter scenario. This distinction is also important to give practical effect to the PACBI principle of boycotting institutions as opposed to individuals.
Power and money
Power relations is a strategic area. Kagee states that the academy is a political space where some wield power and others do not. However, it would be accurate to say that there is an imbalance of power because no one is absolutely deprived of power.
Kagee analysed the conference-related events as they played out, within a framework of human rights. This meant that he interrogated the content to ascertain whether Israel violates Palestinian rights, whether the PACBI violates academic freedom and how we should think of academic freedom as a specific right in the context human rights generally and their particular violation by the state of Israel insofar as the Palestinians are concerned.
In my earlier and forthcoming articles I insert the conflicting narratives about the meaning of Israel’s rights to be an ethno-state and also of being Jewish and of antisemitism, into an ideological struggle framework, to explain how and why these narratives change and develop over time. I also say that this framework is embedded in the political economy of its contextual environment. This is significant in order to develop an understanding of the social interests driving the articulation of conflicting ideologies. I think this framework is also useful for strategically analysing the struggles over the meaning of academic freedom and freedom of speech, which were referenced by the antagonists in the Stellenbosch case study. This type of analysis can be further developed into a political-economy of the struggles around PACBI.
Kagee points to the likely influence of funders on the decision of Stellenbosch university to commit to unfettered academic freedom. By way of example he refers to the Zionist-supporting Mauerberger Foundation which the university listed as a funder in 2014 already.[9] Equally plausible is the hypothesis that Gobodo-Madikizela had the sponsors of the conference in mind when she tried to shield it and the university from negative publicity. The sponsors of the conference were Stellenbosch university, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, the Embassy of Ireland, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the British Council and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.
In 2010 the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation withdrew its support for an event at which well-known Israel critic Norman Finkelstein was to speak about the German government’s responsibility in the ongoing starvation of the Palestinian population. In 2018 the Foundation was noticeably unsympathetic to a Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) Cape Town application for funding support — I was involved in developing that application and it appeared that the Foundation wanted to distance itself from the global BDS movement. This would be consistent with the stance of Die Linke Party in the German parliament, to which the Foundation is linked, which although it opposed the 2019 parliamentary motion that the BDS movement was antisemitic, nevertheless proposed a counter motion to oppose BDS. In the same year the Foundation barred BDS Austria from participating in and co-hosting a Rosa Luxembourg conference. A brief internet research did not reveal the stances of the other donors towards BDS. Nevertheless, it is plausible that they too would be hostile. If so, this would explain the conundrum that Gobodo-Madikizela faced.
Corporatisation of the university
The influence of donors over the university’s policies should be contextualised in the significant changes to the funding regime of tertiary institutions over the past 25 years. From being mainly state funded universities are now primarily reliant on funding from private sources, namely corporations, companies and private foundations and trusts. This development has happened within the framework of the ideology of neoliberalism, which emphasises the entrepreneurial essence of people and the imperative to structure societies and economies on the basis of entrepreneurialism.[10] This also applies to states and governments.
In practice this means the withdrawal or paring down of government welfare subsidies and the exposure of individuals and public and semi-public institutions to competition. This, it is argued, results in a more efficient usage of resources, an assumption that underlies the tendency to focus on cost cutting and shareholder returns as a priority over longer term developmental implications. The point is that this milieu disincentivises social solidarity with those whose human rights have been violated (in this case, Palestinians), because human rights have been redefined, equated to or associated with policies that promote and facilitate entrepreneurialism. The avoidance by most Western human rights organisations and private and corporate endowments of an approach to life based on social solidarity, means that they have an interest in keeping the universities’ focus on unfettered academic freedom, rather than the nuanced definition that we have argued for. In my earlier article on the outcome of the 2018 PACBI campaign at Stellenbosch university I referred to the implementation of this neoliberal policy in tertiary education, as the corporatisation of the university.
A corporatised university means an institution that is sensitive to the economic elite donors from whom it raises most of its funds. The Zionist movement has a long history of congruency with British colonialism. Particularly since the 1967 Six Day War, the state of Israel has played an important function policing the Middle East on behalf of US imperialism. Zionism’s supporters in the West are active in many multilateral structures through which Western elites influence decision-making about investment as well as military targeting.[11] As such they are able to exert influence on tertiary institutions’ policies through manufacturing a consensus about unfettered academic freedom and the combatting of antisemitism on campuses, as a precondition for funding. This shaping of tertiary institutions’ policies takes place through ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), explained in one of my earlier articles.
Following the SAJBoD/Stellenbosch university administration statement of 05 February 2019, our group was faced with a strategic choice. To engage in discrete lobbying with a sympathetic vice-Rector, professor Niko Koopman, or challenge the statement publicly. I argued that we had to challenge in the public domain the linkage of our campaign to violent intimidation, a myth manufactured and projected by the SAJBoD/university administration statement. However, I was overruled by the majority in the team who opted to pursue discrete lobbying with Koopman to try and establish a basis for moving the university closer to adopting a PACBI position. Kagee and his colleague, Dr Marthie Momberg were delegated to engage with Koopman. Three years later there is still no feedback from them about the progress if any. It is likely that there has in fact been no progress, because of the limits imposed by the structured financial and political ISA networks referred to above.
Quo Vadis?
Notwithstanding the PACBI, most South African universities have not formally adopted the boycott.
In 2011 the university of Johannesburg terminated a long-standing relationship with Ben Gurion university. It committed to ending any teaching and research links with Ben Gurion that had direct or indirect military links, or in instances where human rights abuses were identified.[12] The university of Johannesburg move prompted other universities to examine their formal links with Israeli universities. In the same year the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Pretoria, KwaZulu Natal and Stellenbosch, all confirmed that they had no formal links with any Israeli university. Despite a strong campaign by students for the university of Cape Town to adopt the PACBI, it had still not done so by 2017. But in 2018 the university of the Free State signed a memorandum of understanding with the university of Haifa, Israel.
The student movements in South Africa have been more vociferous and resolute. By 2015 five student representative councils (from Cape Town university, Cape Peninsula university of technology, Durban university of technology, Mangopsuthu university of technology and university of the Western Cape) had all joined to support the PACBI. At the same time the South African Union of Students called on student representative councils at all South African universities to support PACBI.
In 2014 at the height of the bombing of Gaza through Operation Protective Edge, there occurred a street protest by over 100 000 people in Cape Town. At the same time several Palestine solidarity organisations launched a consumer boycott of the Woolworths chain, because they stocked several products produced in Israel. In 2017 Martin Jansen (chairperson of PSC Cape Town), during a debate about the efficacy of this consumer boycott, argued that it had been undermined by the betrayal of trade union leadership (from the Congress of South African Trade Unions) and political leadership (including that of the ANC and ecclesiastical groups) that had pledged their support initially. In response Friedman (referred to earlier) argued that the problem lay not with the trade union and political leadership but rather with the solidarity movement’s strategy of targeting these groups rather than going to their constituents, i.e. workers organised by COSATU and congregants of the religious communities. His point was that the grassroot constituencies of these formations were open to being shown the analogies between South African and Israeli apartheid, and reacting with protestations. I am mentioning this because I think a similar point has been reached in restricting lobbying for support for PACBI to the university communities (administration, students and alumni).
Friedman argued that to reduce the cause of the defeat (of the Woolworths boycott) to a betrayal by other progressive forces (including one‘s own members) is problematic because it shows that there was not a serious attempt to reach out to people. He said that it was rather a focus on getting identified organisations to do the action rather than the hard work of convincing South Africans of goodwill to join the boycott. You have to go beyond organisations and leaders and talk directly to the citizens, the populace. The ‘betrayal’ of the organisations was because there was no pressure on them to participate by their membership. He said that for the future these consumer boycotts were about building popular movements, i.e. appealing to the grassroots who could then pressurise their organisations to take a stand. The same could be said about the stalled PACBI campaigns at South African universities.
In my earlier article on the 2018 Stellenbosch conference I concluded that we had to take the PACBI message into the black working class communities in Stellenbosch and support their organising themselves around their own basic demands, but also enable them to become aware of the anti-apartheid struggles in historic Palestine and the linkage between that situation and their own conditions. This requires a rethinking of how activists mobilise and help to organise grass roots constituencies and communities. It requires a broadening of scope from only lobbying elite and semi-elite groups. In the absence of this there is a risk that we will continue to repeat the history of the past decade, namely limited tactical achievements arising from specific struggles, contrasted with a stalled strategy.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 05 June 2022.
[1] This point is not made in criticism but as a statement of fact in trying to connect to these source documents. It happens that original links to source articles sometimes get corrupted or that the authors have removed the source pages.
[2] According to Campus Watch, a US-based pro-Zionist organisation that functions as a watchdog surveying academics critical of Israel as well as PACBI activists, “a group of donors, concerned academics, students, researchers and others” founded IAM in 2004 as a grassroots organisation with the specific aim of exposing what they regarded as demonstrably false arguments to defame Israel, from a position of prestige and security. Veteran South African journalist and liberal Zionist Benjamin Pogrund wrote in 2009 that another organisation playing a similar watchdog role, was Isracampus. Little was known about who worked for these organisations: US citizens Dana Barnett and Seth J Frantzman appeared to write most of their articles, with Barnett being a founding donor of IAM. IAM and Isracampus identified as ‘the enemy within’ the following Israeli academics: Oren Yiftachel, Neve Gordon, Moshe Zimmerman, Tanya Reinhardt, Kobi Snitz, and David Shulman.
[3] I mention these specific rights because in one form or another they are denied to the full range of Palestinians: those living within the state of Israel the borders of which are the 1949 armistice lines, in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPTs) and in the Palestinian diaspora.
[4] The context here is the violation of Palestinian rights to self-determination and civil liberties. In this context there are often blatant violations of academic freedom at tertiary institutions in the OPTs, by the actions of the Israel Defence Force.
[5] The PACBI reasoning is that normalization either ignores oppression or says that it must be lived with.
[6] The so-called representivity of SAJBOD can in no way be compared with the democratic representivity of a government of a nation state, with sovereignty over a defined territory. This leaves the question of the definition of being Jewish. For SAJBoD this includes people linked through a blood line and the land of Israel. What about those of us who define our Jewishness around other contingent, historical factors? There are further contradictions to SAJBoD’s claim to be representing the interests of Jewish South Africans. There is no voters roll of Jewish citizens qualified to vote and no regular polling for parties and representatives on SAJBoD. As public intellectual Steven Friedman informed me several years ago Jewish elites who dominate certain organisations elect representatives from these organisations to sit on the SAJBoD. According to Wikipedia these organisations are most of the country’s Hebrew congregations, Jewish societies and institutions.
[7] Rather, Gobodo-Madikizela, the conference organizer, acted out of her own conscience, prompted by our engagement with her. Her actions raised a contradictory response from the Israeli academics and the local South African Zionists. Their responses as reported in various media appeared in late November 2018 and were strong accusations that Stellenbosch university had capitulated to ‘extremists’.
[8] Such threats could have originated as a psychological operation (psy-op) to discredit us by creating doubt as to our bona fides. In 2019 the Middle East Monitor reported a Mossad agent saying that its surveillance and sabotaging of BDS activities were necessary to protect state security. Mossad’s mandate included not only conventional intelligence work but also special operations, of which Mossad’s professionalism ensured that there were no fingerprints, leaving people guessing about whether anything was actually done or said. If implemented within a prepared environment in which the ideology of unfettered academic freedom and the struggle against the ‘enemy’ complement each other, special operations have the potential to smear a non-violent grouping as ‘violent thugs’, hence the term ‘psy-op’.
[9] In June 2022 the Mauerberger Foundation Fund was no longer listed as a donor to Stellenbosch university.
[10] Cf. Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, for an insightful exposition of this process and its ideology, and economic and political policies.
[11] The following are several pertinent examples.
- Irwin Cottler is the International Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, an Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General, longtime Member of the Canadian Parliament and an international human rights lawyer. Cottler views anti-Zionism as the “new antisemitism”, because it singles out Israel for criticism against standards that no other country is held to, and masks the expression of traditional antisemitic tropes by claiming that these are anti-Zionist critiques only.
- Falicia Gaer directs the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC’s) Jacob Blaustein Institute for Advancement of Human Rights. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). (The CFR has been identified as a key institution in the implementation and reproduction of US imperialism across the globe — see the Annexure.) Between 2000 and 2019 she was Vice Chairperson of the Committee Against Torture. From 2001 to 2012 she served the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom. She was Regents Professor at the University of California Los Angeles in 2010. The Jewish Theological Seminary awarded her Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, in 2018. She chaired the Steering Committee for the 50th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
- David Harris is the Chief Executive Officer of the AJC, a position he has held since 1990. He has been honoured more than 20 times by the governments of Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Moldova, Poland, Spain and Ukraine for his international efforts on behalf of the defence of human rights, advancement of the transatlantic partnership and dedication to the Jewish people. In the 1980s he advocated for Soviet Jewry, and in 1987 helped steer a rally on the National Mall that brought out 250 000 Jewish people from across the United States. In 1990 he led a successful campaign to get the United Nations to reverse its 1975 decision that Zionism was racism. Under Harris the AJC established relations with Muslim and Arab countries long before Israel started to normalise its relationships with the same states. (In the case of the Balkans AJC engagement with Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovinia and Kosovo reinforced a dominant Western view of Serbia). In 2020 the AJC opposed the move by Israel to annex the West Bank, but said it would also defend it if it became a fait accompli.
[12] The university of Johannesburg said that if Ben Gurion violated any terms of the conditions agreed on by Johannesburg’s senate, or Johannesburg’s stated principles for engaging with Ben Gurion, the relationship would be terminated completely after six months.
