Prelude – Didier Bigo and Emma Mc Cluskey

Since publishing the first part of our forum in the last issue of pariss, news headlines on academic freedom, specifically manifestations of its decline- have proliferated at pace and the issue has succeeded in causing scandal and contestation. As Israel has escalated its war on Palestine and now Lebanon, academic freedom suppression has flourished within Europe and beyond. A broad constellation of actors has been drawn into the conversation. In our home countries of the UK and France, human Rights experts have very publicly denounced university leaders and managers for the stigmatisation and disciplining of students who engage in peaceful protests in support of Palestine,² and scholars have organised in solidarity to call for academic freedom to enjoy the same legal status as the protections afforded to journalists.

Even senior civil servants responsible for France’s cooperation policies, former ambassadors and foreign ministers- have all spoken out against the imbalance of the French President’s effective policy on Israel. This policy continues despite an overall discourse which has recently evolved to taking a more critical stance on Netanyahu after the attacks of Lebanon and unifil and the quasi-unanimous criticism of the General Assembly.³ This multiplicity of actors has supported scholars who dared to amplify the voices of Palestinians in different places. As the situation evolves, more significant ‘heavyweights’ have recognised that the academic analyses of the situation, and much maligned ‘context’ statements- were more accurate than the first political decisions, univocally centred around one important, albeit “internal” problem: the danger of rise of antisemitism in France, and therefore an acceptance of Israeli “représailles”.⁴ This emphasis on the internal repercussions in Europe, in France, Germany and even UK and their unease at criticising Israel and thus the US administration has set the terms of discussion. Internal electoral stakes have framed the most immediate reactions and pushed to try to silence, instead of pay heed to, the voices of academia.

This recognition of the dubious choice to privilege this preliminary frame in most Western democracies now needs to be put on the agenda. Academic freedom is one of the most important strength of democracies, and the multiplicity of positions inherent is an opportunity, not a problem. Academics were not naïve. On the contrary, many university managers, think tanks and politicians, with an impoverished understanding of geopolitics, and trapped in their own internal calculations, must now recognise their own “naivety”.

In this issue, we continue our effort to let complexities and transversality emerge from research concerning what we have called the ‘social suffering of various homo academicus(es)’ in the context of their lived experiences of profound deterioration of academic freedom in the present times. This second part of our reflections does not want to continue the war on words and mutual accusations about who was right, now that the situation evolved for the worst. Instead, we wish to issue a reminder that these times have been marked by very different phenomena which cannot all be neatly subsumed into one category of analysis, or indeed unified under one neat and tidy coherent narrative. As DeMatteo and Pandolfi so aptly observed, types of ‘preventative censorship’ at play cannot simply be understood as deprivation, but more accurately as a contribution towards the construction of legitimate subject[s].⁵ Scholars are mired in dissonance.

Six months after publishing the first forum, reflections on how practices have changed, in different contexts, complement and extend the contributions from our first forum. They give us a chance to hear the ways in which ‘legitimate [academic] subjects’ are brought into being in ever shifting and intersecting conditionalities. Reflections of lived experiences, when placed next to each other, allow for the contours and specific forms of constraints and injunctions to be objectivized. A plurality of stories is designed to produce estrangement, to allow for the emergence of new angles and unexpected observations, puncturing the illusion of one authoritative voice.

The Rise of ‘Institutional Neutrality’ and the Importance of Protest

Since the publication of our first forum, several US universities have chosen to take a position of ‘institutional neutrality’, refraining from issuing statements or taking a public stand on Israel’s war on Palestine. Established in a report issued by a committee at the University of Chicago in 1967, chaired by Harry Kalven Jr., an official neutral stance was argued to enhance academic freedom at a time when students were urging institutions to denounce the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa.⁶ Though this doctrine does not exist in such a codified form in other parts of the world, some universities have similar technical discourses of neutrality and balance. Useful to university presidents, trustees and other ‘stakeholders’, a position of neutrality supposes that the parties involved are equal when it comes to presenting their point of view. It supposes that order and discipline are more important than the substance of the debate and renders opaque the administrative-political logics that allow them to exist (or not). The impact of these logics is the reconditioning of our different habitus as teachers and researchers, the orienting our ‘dispositional heritages’ and our practices in the classroom and in research towards expressing respect for the social order to the detriment of listening to the voices of the official ‘voiceless’. It is for this reason that it’s necessary to subject to the same detailed examination those who present themselves as the experts in the neutrality of debates, as those who fashion themselves as spokespersons of these voiceless. Neither position should be taken as given.

The notion of freedom of assembly is therefore a useful entry point into the debate on the conditions and methods of legitimate expression within the university as a specific place (see Schabas, this issue), and this is why it is argued for a special place in relation to the recognition of the international obligations of states. For us, it is fundamental that a passion for slogans and calls for boycotts are not transformed into personal insults and calls for hatred. Nevertheless, using the existence of these practices as a pretext to limit or ban freedom of expression in academic premises contradicts the lessons learned from the years of demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the social conservatism of the pre-1968 years. Protests were ethically and politically justified, even if they displeased.

The University Industry: Blunting the Edges of Politics

Although much has been said about neo-liberalism as a form of meta-causation of these practices, it would be more appropriate to look to ordo-liberalism or ‘Colbertism’ to understand the ‘management’ of universities and the difficulties for the most senior officials in maintaining ‘civil peace’ within the university while allowing a certain degree of dissent to be expressed. Our present times sees former company directors or administrators, who are not trusted enough to run public companies, recycled into the ‘university industry’ through public-private partnerships that are supposedly a way of bringing academics closer to the realities of socio-economic life. If these managers were not there to guide them, scholars would supposedly be lost in their ‘ivory towers’.

In this logic of labour’s productivity, all those who teach become proletarianized. This is especially true for those who are the most dependent because they are the most precarious. For this ‘reserve army’ of young graduates, there is no hesitation being set in competition with one’s peers, destroying any vestiges of solidarity

Selling attractive diplomas to a clientele of young people and parents who want to acquire social capital then becomes the mode of expression for the most everyday practices and reasoning for decision-making. This process involves a profound de-socialisation of the relationships between teachers and students in many places. It breaks down the habitus constituted by reflexivity, intellectual research, collective sharing of forms of knowledge, distance from the imperatives of the moment, resistance to various fashions and political propaganda thanks to the critical use of discussion, including passionate discussion.

In place of these rules of the game, ‘soft’ management methods are being proposed that set limits on the expression of academic freedom in relation to law and order and the proper management of the flow of people. The ‘safe’ city needs a ‘safe’ university that justifies the priority given to order and surveillance and which accepts academic freedom only if it conforms to an assembly that mimics the rites of diplomacy and decorum, thereby reducing the edges of politics to serene shores.⁷

A Collective Enterprise: Disruption Multiple

Our project is designed to disrupt this picture of serenity, not by speaking on behalf of others, but speaking as a multiplicity of collective experiences. In placing our stories side by side, in forming transversal lines and by cutting across linguistic, disciplinary and national silos- we can shine a light into many facets of this attack on academic freedom and the transformation of the academic habitus, as well as the forms of resistance that show its persistence.

As with part one, the three biographical accounts of academic freedom/suppression set out below are not intended to represent the final word. The reflections from the United States, Germany and France- all narrate the shifting sands and every changing terrain of ‘preventative censorship’ from different perspectives. And as with part one, this article is collective only insofar as all contributors share the belief in the significance of assembling their reflections. The way this work is organized reflects this, with parts arranged in random order, with each contributor responsible only for their own intervention. We believe that it is only through assuming all our subjectivities as homo academicus[es] that can we open the door for creative disruption.

Panoptic Activism and the Erosion of Academic Freedom in US Higher Education – Jim Johnston

It is an irony that the very people advocating loudest for Freedom of Speech today are sometimes those who are trying to suppress it. In the United States, advocating for “Freedom of Speech” has now become synonymous with the right-wing, actually involving massive efforts to control discourse at colleges and universities. These efforts have become fairly blunt recently, using the courts and the threat of violence to prevent professors from standing up to discrimination and injustice in public, and teaching such subjects in classes. Yet because of fear, there is a lack of motivation on the left to protect academic freedom. This is part of a larger history of apathy that has caused enormous damage in the past. We cannot assume that academic freedom will always exist and wait until it is eroded out of existence before acting.

In the US, academic freedom of expression has long been an important failsafe mechanism in society – enabling experts to flag problems and bring injustices to light. That being said, for almost a hundred years it has been under attack. The American Association of University Professors (aaup) first fought for, and enshrined, academic freedom in 1915. In 1940, the aaup codified protocols, arguing that as long as professors wrote or spoke as citizens and not in the name of their institution, they could not be disciplined. This was especially important to protect faculty from trustees who were often industry leaders. This framework influenced most faculty handbooks in the US.

However, the aaup has rarely stood up for faculty and its principles, allowing many professors to lose their jobs for their views without intervening. During wwi and wwii, hundreds of faculty lost their jobs for their anti-war views. Hundreds more lost their jobs or were pressurized to leave their jobs during the McCarthy Red Scare in the 1950s. The aaup only protested after the damage had already been done.⁸

The consequence of this censorship and the lack of defense against it meant that rampant militarism, racism and sexism went unchecked throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, largely because academia was fearful to challenge them in case of reprisals. From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, when professors finally started protesting again during the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war, hundreds more junior faculty were let go for political reasons. Again, the aaup failed to stand up for them.

In the 1980s and 1990s, academia faced a more organized threat from the right wing. Millions of dollars were spent to demonize higher education as encouraging political correctness and left-wing identity politics. The volume of this rhetoric, that portrays higher education as Marxist indoctrination, has only increased in the past twenty years.⁹

Ironically, these efforts have been spearheaded by a Freedom of Speech movement from the right. Individuals in this movement claim that their speech is being characterized as racist and homophobic by students and faculty at universities, and that they are being unfairly shut down. The problem, they see, stems from professors who are teaching concepts of critical race theory and gender studies, and their solution is to curtail professors from teaching students what is discriminatory and offensive. This way, presumably, they can continue to voice their beliefs (Edsall 2023).¹⁰

Many states have tried to turn this rhetoric into policy. Florida, under Governor Ron DeSantis, passed the Individual Freedom Act (or Stop Woke Act) in 2022, which limited teaching on race-related issues and encouraged students to report teachers if they mentioned race in the classroom. While the act was struck down by courts in July 2024, 22 other states have implemented over 40 educational gag orders that have now become law, affecting more than 100,000 professors.¹¹

Yet there is a more insidious attempt to curtail academic freedom that does not require going through the courts and has already chilled academic freedom in universities. This draws from McCarthyism in an even more overt way that would have made Jeremy Bentham, the creator of the Panopticon, proud. In 2016, a far-right organization called Turning Point USA was set up, the main purpose of which is to eliminate Liberal Professors and topics from academia. With $39 million for organizing and influencing colleges, they are a formidable force.¹²

Turning Point USA encourages students to inform on their professors, recording with audio or video any discussion about race or capitalism in their classes. Once students send recordings to Turning Point’s headquarters, their team edit and disseminate the recordings through right-wing channels. Professors are then blacklisted on the Professor Watchlist, and alumni are encouraged to lobby presidents for their removal. Since its inception in 2016, Turning Point’s popularity surged. Despite some universities banning the organization, it remains active and has expanded its influence into UK universities, US public schools and other institutions.¹³ Today the Professor Watchlist has grown to over a thousand names, with professors on the blacklist from almost every college or university that has a Turning Point chapter. Worse than this, because the site gives out photos, emails and addresses, many on the list have received death or assault threats.

I am a professor at a University in the US. Although I do not have the honor of being blacklisted, I can attest to severe pressure from the Turning Point chapter at my college. Despite resistance to the inclusion of the chapter at the institution, it was set up because it was funded and encouraged by our Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and later ce of the college. Because the funding was so generous, the college was able to have numerous far-right celebrities come to talk to the students. Ironically, most of the talks were on the subject of Freedom of Speech. Students were told that they must act because they were being shut down, persecuted and programmed by liberal professors who were putting them down. Democrats were even called “cockroaches”, with whatever implicit solutions that entailed. This baiting made the students suddenly very militant.

I teach several subjects that might be construed as left-leaning, including classes on race and gender, but I have always tried to find ways to present such subjects in as balanced a way as possible so as not to condemn the students or be overtly political. This is always important at a college that has about 50/50 Democrat and Republican students. However, the fact that the Chairman of the Trustees was using students to try and target professors like me did make me nervous. My colleagues were also nervous. Some came to me and pleaded with me to not teach certain subjects because they thought the content alone was too dangerous. I was told that I shouldn’t teach Marx, although I had always taught it with a critical perspective. I have continued to teach what I am employed to teach, but a few of my colleagues in other fields have removed certain subjects from their classes. The constant fear that we would be blacklisted has even induced some to buy bug detectors to scan classrooms for hidden cameras.

I was never too worried about losing my job, but the effectiveness of the campaign is not in the number of faculty that are let go by their universities. In fact, there are no statistics of faculty let go, and I imagine that presidents are unlikely to appear to bow to pressure from alumni. One professor on the US watchlist was pushed by two Turning Point members, but there are no other incidents of physical harassment recorded. However, the threat of exposure, assaults, online trolling and possible dismissal, have been quite enough to force many professors to be less vocal and to self-police themselves. Students are now much less likely to learn important concepts about race, feminism, gender etc. to be able to navigate in today’s world.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon was only powerful through the fear that imagination induced – the fear of being watched from a dark central tower that was often empty. So too is Turning Point only powerful through the power we give it. While the Professor Watchlist might be annoying, there is no-one in their dark tower ready to pounce. I now know that I should have fought back at this sort of intimidation, instead of just defiantly carrying on. In the same way that the aaup let censorship flourish in the past 100 years out of fear, we have let a lie entrench itself – the idea that teaching about race or gender is somehow liberal. Censorship of hate speech has been politicized, and students haven’t been taught how to explain the hurt that such words cause in ways that don’t condemn.¹⁴ Yet teaching the importance of self-determination is something that individuals from all political parties could agree on.

The real danger is that in the next few years of declining enrollment, when colleges are seeking to cut entire departments to save money, the humanities and social sciences will be targeted partly because, out or fear, they failed to demonstrate their relevance for all.¹⁵ This year my department of Sociology was cut despite being one of the most popular majors on campus. I am not sure whether this was because of its content, but behind a curtain of fiscal responsibility, cutting entire departments is an easy way for trustees to legally get rid of tenured professors who teach subjects that they now believe are liberal indoctrination.

Will German academia surrender without condition? – Mathias Delori

Introduction

German Chancellor Scholz was the first head of government to travel to Israel, ten days after the massacre of October 7th, 2023, in order to publicly assure Prime minister Netanyahu of his country’s full support. During the same month, German weapons deliveries to Israel increased significantly.¹⁶ This unconditional support took place whilst Israeli officials had already made clear how they intended to respond to the attack. As early as October 9th and 10th, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant had declared that Israel is “fighting human animals” and that the Israeli military organization should act “accordingly”, namely by retaliating “without restraint” and cutting off all vital resources to the population of Gaza.¹⁷ The unconditional support of Germany to Israel did not stop when the debate on the genocidal character of the Israeli war intensified. In January 2024, the German government intervened in favor of Israel when South Africa accused it before the International Court of Justice (icj) of violating the convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948. The German diplomatic and military support of Israel only decreased progressively in 2024 after the icj found that there is a plausible risk of a genocide in Gaza on January 26, 2024, after Nicaragua filed a proceeding about Germany’s complicity in genocide on March 1st, 2024,¹⁸ and after the icj published an advisory opinion on July 19, 2024 on the occupation of the Palestinian territories, stating that it is unlawful and that the Israeli policy violates the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, including its article 3 concerning apartheid. During the year 2024, German weapon deliveries decreased significantly¹⁹ and German officials, in particular foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, underlined that “there are also rules for the right to self-defense, and international humanitarian law also applies to the fight against terrorists”.²⁰ Throughout this period, German officials justified this unconditional support progressively matched by humanitarian concerns by echoing former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech before the Knesset in 2008: Germany has a “historical responsibility” towards Israel and Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson (raison d’Etat).

I was working at the Centre Marc Bloch, a French-German research center based in Berlin during this period. My colleagues Sonia Combe, Alexandra Oeser and I were puzzled at the German government’s stance on Israel/Palestine. As early as 1946, Karl Jaspers had reflected on the notion of guilt after the Holocaust.²¹ He had argued that the notion of criminal guilt could only apply to individuals but that German people – whether they had been criminals/nazis or not -, were responsible in some way of the crimes perpetrated by the German state. Jaspers perceived this responsibility as an opportunity. By reflecting on their responsibility as German citizens (political guilt) and human beings (moral and theological guilt), they would pave the way to the emergence of a new Germany which would show vigilance vis-à-vis racism, in particular antisemitism, and state violence. This universalistic approach to the notion of historical responsibility had been further developed by the Frankfurt school in sociology and philosophy, in particular Theodor Adorno,²² and, more recently, by Paul Ricoeur who argued that a healthy relation to the past should take the form of a travail de mémoire (memory work).²³ Ricoeur conceived of the latter as the opposite of devoir de mémoire (memory duty). The difference between travail and devoir de mémoire is what separates critique and sacralization, deconstruction and essentialization, dialogue and monologue … Although they stem from different theoretical traditions, neither Jaspers nor Adorno nor Ricoeur conceived of historical responsibility in terms of raison d’Etat. They argue, on the contrary, in favor of a universalistic approach and a democratic debate on the lessons to be drawn from history. We decided, therefore, to organize a conference in the Spring of 2024 at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin on the German support of Israel after October 7th and its puzzling justification.²⁴

We took some practical measures when organizing this conference: we did not communicate about it in advance; we asked participants to send us a list of trustworthy guests, and we made sure that no others could access the conference. We felt that we had to do so because dozens of public events touching the question of Israel/Palestine had been cancelled during the years and months preceding our conference.²⁵ These attacks against freedom of expression and academic freedom²⁶ had taken an extreme form one month before our conference, in April 2024, during the organization of the Palestine congress. Two conferenciers – physician Ghassan Abu Sita, the rector of the university of Glasgow, and economist Yanis Varoufakis – were denied entry in Germany. The German police also shut down the whole congress when they understood that they might intervene online. Some people we planned to invite to the conference had also been victims of such attacks. Moshe Zuckermann, the author of a seminal book on our topic,²⁷ had just been called “antisemitic” by the German authorities.²⁸ Zuckermann, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, is not the only Jewish academic who has been called antisemitic for criticizing Israel. As we shall see later, Emily Dische-Becker of Diaspora Alliance, an international ngo which challenges the instrumentalization of antisemitism and Holocaust memory, has calculated that 30% of the artists and academics who have been cancelled in 2023 for alleged antisemitism are Jewish.²⁹

This article investigates how it has become possible, in the country of Jaspers and Adorno, to use the memory of the Holocaust to justify the support of a far-right government that is massacring civilians.³⁰ It also investigates how it has become possible, in the country of Alexander von Humboldt, to cancel critical academics and call them “antisemitic”, even when they are Jewish, for criticizing a state’s policy. My own expertise straddles the fields of sociology and philosophy of memory,³¹ reconciliation,³² othering,³³ and liberal violence.³⁴ However, I have neither worked on the relations between Germany and Israel/Palestine per se nor on (anti-)antisemitism. Therefore, this article also draws on the work of specialists like Sonia Combe, Emily Dische-Becker, Teresa Koloma-Beck, Daniel Marwecki, Dirk Moses, Susan Neiman, Alexandra Oeser, Esra Özyürek, Nahed Samour and Aurélia Kalisky. I am particularly grateful to Aurélia for the time she dedicated to our conversations. I also thank all those colleagues who have been victims of the recent developments and have accepted to testify anonymously.³⁵

How German Memory Culture Went “Haywire”

Germany used to be praised for the way it dealt with the darkest pages of its history. In Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman argues that West-Germany’s failure to denazify did not impede the development of a memory culture based on the recognition of past crimes, the prohibition of the glorification of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the memorialization of the victims.³⁶ This Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (work on the past) would have contributed to fashion a political culture which encourages vigilance towards racism, in particular antisemitism, and state violence. Neiman’s general argument is that the US society could learn from this example to come to terms with its racist past and present.

This positive assessment of the German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung has been criticized by specialists who have observed that it mainly focuses on the official memory discourses and policies and does not do justice, by doing so, to the complexity of memory dynamics in East, West and unified Germanies.³⁷ Besides, the official discourses which acknowledge responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by nazi Germany are often closer to what Ricoeur calls devoir de mémoire than travail de mémoire. It is the case, in particular, when they claim that the Holocaust is not only singular – like all historical events – but also incomparable.³⁸ Another problem is the epistemic erasure of the Nakba³⁹ or, when it is thematized, its framing as an event Germany bears no responsibility for.⁴⁰ It also translates into a diplomatic and military support of Israel which amounts to an (in)security policy in Bigo and Tsoukala’s sense.⁴¹ It generates more security (or a feeling thereof) to some, in this case those who support Israeli occupation and militarism, but produces more insecurity (or a feeling thereof) to others: the victims of Israeli occupation and militarism (and their supporters).⁴²

Whether Neiman was right or wrong to praise the German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, there is little doubt that it has gone “haywire” – as Neiman recently acknowledged⁴³ – during the last few years. So have the “anti-antisemitism complex”,⁴⁴ i.e. the policies and discourses which officially aim at fighting antisemitism. Before the framing of the security of Israel as German Staatsräson, anti-antisemitism mainly drew upon what specialists call a “human security concept”.⁴⁵ It aimed mainly at protecting the human victims of antisemitism, namely Jewish people, irrespective of their opinions regarding the state of Israel. This translated into a vigilance vis-à-vis all forms of antisemitic acts with a particular focus on the most frequent and violent ones, namely those perpetrated by neo-nazis. Although the trend is not new,⁴⁶ the framing of the security of Israel as German Staatsräson transformed anti-antisemitism by introducing a state-centered security concept. The project of protecting humans (Jews) has not fully disappeared, but it is now largely dependent on their attitude towards Israel. The statistic which I mentioned in the introduction regarding the percentage of Jewish academics and artists who have been cancelled for alleged antisemitism is, in this regard, a case in point. The shift from a humane to a state-centered conception of antisemitism is also perceivable when members of the political elite show more attention for the security of Israel than that of German Jews: “For example, Christian Lindner, Germany’s current finance minister, who is the head of the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (fdp), which has championed the anti-bds cause on the grounds that it is antisemitic, recently attempted to cut pensions to Holocaust survivors.”⁴⁷

This trend intensified in 2017 when Germany adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (ihra). ihra defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”. Although the definition also highlights that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”, it goes along with a series of examples which have fueled the conflation of the critique of Israel with antisemitism.⁴⁸ Neve Gordon goes as far as claiming that the ihra definition has become “a counterinsurgency tool developed to shield Israel from resistance to its oppressive form of racial governance, its ongoing denial of Palestinian liberation, and, following its recent war on Gaza, from accusations of genocidal violence”.⁴⁹ Not all specialists share this radical critique, but more than 100 civil society groups have highlighted that “the ihra definition has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest”.⁵⁰

At the same time, Germany established antisemitism commissioners – i.e. civil servants in charge of fighting antisemitism – in most German institutions (the federal state, the federated states, the police, etc.). Under the leadership of federal antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein, most antisemitism commissioners interpret antisemitism in a way which resonates with the notion of Staatsräson and has little to do with the fight against actual antisemitism. As Emily Dische-Becker puts it, “it is apparently not within the mandate of Felix Klein, Germany’s Federal Antisemitism Commissioner, that there are German police officers sending each other Heil Hitler text messages every morning as a greeting. Rather than addressing the things that are actually a threat to the life and limb of all racialized minorities in Germany, the commissioner prioritizes policing anti-Zionism among artists.”⁵¹

Some antisemitism commissioners try to swim against the tide. Uffa Jensen, the antisemitism commissioner of the Technische Universität in Berlin, is a good example. Jensen is a renowned specialist of antisemitism. His work has contributed to shed some light on the under-scrutinized far-right antisemitism.⁵² Jensen also co-signed the Jerusalem declaration on antisemitism which offers an alternative to the ihra definition and proposes that “antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)”.⁵³ However, Jensen and the partisans of the Jerusalem declaration operate in a difficult institutional environment. Besides the fact that Germany adopted the ihra definition (see above), the German Parliament voted in 2019 a resolution which calls “antisemitic” the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (bds) campaign against Israel. Although the resolution is not legally binding, it has had legal and political effects. Dozens of associations whose members (sometimes only one) have expressed sympathy for bds have lost their public funding because some civil servants have thought, sometimes in good faith, that the resolution is binding. This has tremendous deterring effects because Germany is one of the countries where civil society is most dependent on public funding.

The transformation described above conflicts with freedom of expression, especially in a society which is becoming, de facto, multicultural. This fashions a juridical insecurity which has intensified since October 7, 2023. People who live in Germany cannot know for sure what is legally considered as antisemitic, what is not, and more generally speaking what they are allowed to say regarding Israel/Palestine. In October 2023, whilst Israel was carrying out a mass bombing of Gaza and implementing its full blockade, Iris Hefets was arrested for wearing a sign stating: “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza”. She was arrested again and again, for the same reason, during the following six months, including after the icj found that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza. Until the charges were dropped in April 2024, citizens and residents in Germany could not know whether their freedom of expression allowed them to refer to the Israeli war in Gaza as “genocidal”.

The transformation of anti-antisemitism has gone along with a reframing of German philosemitism, the set of attitudes consisting in showing admiration or love for Jews.⁵⁴ Whether it has ever had positive dimensions or not, German philosemitism is problematic when it reduces Jews to their status of victims of the Holocaust and when the positive feeling towards them turns into identification. One is only a step away, then, to frame all German people as victims. Chancellor Scholz coined a soft version of this identity construct when stating that “who attacks Jews in Germany is attacking us all”.⁵⁵ A more radical version externalizes antisemitism and transfers guilt to racialized minorities. Arabs and Muslims are framed, in a good Orientalist fashion,⁵⁶ as the antisemitic Others which threaten the anti-antisemitic or post-antisemitic German national identity. Esra Özyürek has described how this identity construct operates when young Arabs/Muslims who visit former nazi concentration camps express sympathy with the Jewish victims of nazi Germany.⁵⁷ They are told that they should not identify with the victims, only with the perpetrators, and thus even though their family history often makes this identification quite abstract.

The state-centric turn of anti-antisemitism and philosemitism draws upon an image of Israel which leaves outside the frame – to use Butler’s photographic metaphor⁵⁸ – the violence it perpetrates against the Palestinians. The illiberal notion of Staatsräson is useful in this context. As Hans Kundnani observed, it helps “to take German policy towards Israel out of the space of democratic contestation and make a commitment to Israeli security ‘an unquestionable, no-alternative principle,’ as historian Jürgen Zimmerer has put it”.⁵⁹ The notion and its associated security practices also help silencing those who could bear witness of it. This implies artists and academics, as we shall see in the next section, but first and foremost Palestinians. Despite their important presence in Germany and in Berlin,⁶⁰ Palestinians are framed as objects of public discourse⁶¹ or, to use Spivak’s terminology, as subalterns.⁶² The world could witness the weight of this power/knowledge nexus during the 74th Berlinale in February 2024 when the jury gave an award to the documentary film No Other Land. Two of the film makers – Yuval Abraham, an Israeli, and Basil al-Adra, a Palestinian – together, which called for the liberation of all hostages, denounced the blockade of Gaza and the apartheid in the West-bank, called for a cease-fire and asked Germany to stop weapon deliveries to Israel. The audience, including the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media Claudia Roth, applauded. Roth was heavily criticized for having given the impression that she agreed with this criticism of Israel. A few days later, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media tried to escape the controversy by explaining that she had only applauded Yuval Abraham, not his Palestinian friend Basil al-Adra, and thus even though they had given the speech together.⁶³

German Universities between Staatsräson and Resistance

In February 2024, the Max Planck Society (mps) terminated its collaboration with anthropologist Ghassan Hage after the newspaper Welt am Sonntag accused him of “hatred of Israel”. Hage had been active on the social media since October 7 and criticized Israel for, among other things, implementing an “apartheid” and a “genocide”. He did not only do so as a citizen entitled to freedom of expression but, also, as a scholar. Hage is, indeed, an internationally renowned specialist of racism and multiculturalism.⁶⁴ The mps considered that Hage’s posts on the social media expressed “views that are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society”.⁶⁵ In December 2023, mps’ chief Patrick Cramer had indeed declared that accusing Israel of “apartheid, neo-colonialism or even genocide” goes beyond the scope of what the mps can tolerate.⁶⁶ Whatever one thinks of Hage’s post⁶⁷ and his response,⁶⁸ this episode says a lot about the provincialization of some segments of the German academic field. Specialists within the field of Middle-East studies and genocide studies have not waited the icj order and opinion of the year 2024 to discuss whether Israel perpetrates “apartheid” in the Westbank and a “genocide” in Gaza. Not all scholars agree that Israel perpetrates apartheid and genocide, but it is being debated in academic events and in the mainstream media.⁶⁹ This provincialization further emerges from the international outraged prompted by the mps’ decision. Thousands of academics, including 50 Israeli-Jewish scholars, have expressed solidarity with Hage. So did, among other institutions, the Australian Anthropology Society, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association.⁷⁰

The attack against Hage illustrates a broader trend. The German academic field is becoming what Bourdieu calls a champ hétéronome (an heteronome field). The nomos of academic freedom is being challenged by a norm produced elsewhere: German Staatsräson.⁷¹ This trend is also perceivable in the disinvitations of critical thinkers from conferences or visiting scholarships. As pointed out in the introduction, Emily Dische-Becker has calculated that 30% of those who have been disinvited in 2023 for alleged antisemitism are Jewish.⁷² Knowing that the percentage of Jewish people in Germany is less than 1%, one can reasonably infer that Jewish scholars are disproportionately targeted by anti-antisemitism. A generous interpretation of the over-representations of Jews among the victims of Israel-centered anti-antisemitism puts forward that Jews tend to speak up more because they are less afraid of being called antisemitic.⁷³ Yet this statistic also fuels Elad Lapidot’s analysis regarding the common epistemic basis of antisemitism and anti-antisemitism.⁷⁴ Lapidot argues that this common epistemic basis is noticeable in philosophical thought. After the Holocaust, several philosophers criticized antisemitism, but they often did so by arguing, like Sartre, that antisemites invented Jews and Judaism or, to put it differently, that antisemitism impeded assimilation.⁷⁵ Thus, anti-antisemites are guided by good intentions, but they act like antisemites when they fail to recognize Jews as agents of their own identity. This happens, in Germany, when agents of anti-antisemitism deny anti-Zionist and Buberian⁷⁶ Zionist Jews the right to criticize Israel and, even more, when they call them “antisemitic”.

Emily Dische-Becker has also calculated that 90% of the victims of anti-antisemitism in the academic and artistic fields are racialized (she argues that Jewish people are racialized in Germany). Crude racism is not the only explanation. Israel-centered anti-antisemitism often goes hand in hand with a paradigmatic opposition against postcolonial theory and, more generally, all approaches which do not take a white/Northern gaze. The cancelling of Achille Mbembe in 2020 is a famous example.⁷⁷ Mbembe, an internationally renowned specialist of postcolonial theory, was invited to give a talk at the Ruhrtriennale cultural festival. Yet federal antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein and a regional politician named Lorenz Deutsch accused him of being antisemitic for, among other things, having called Israel an apartheid state. As it happened with Hage, the decision to cancel Mbembe caused international outrage,⁷⁸ but this episode was only the tip of the Iceberg. As Gert Krell recently observed, “almost every day, German papers pour vehement criticism over anything looking like post-colonial theory”.⁷⁹ Within academia, some attacks against non-Eurocentric approaches are carried out by a group named Netwerk Wissenschaftsfreiheit (“network scientific freedom”). It is made of more than 700 conservative and far-right⁸⁰ academics who repeat, out of ignorance or bad faith, that postcolonial theory (and other critical approaches like the gender studies) is not scientific and that it leaves no space for their own “apolitical” research agenda. Joël Glasman has showed that the attacks perpetrated by this network against critical thinkers have increased since October 7, 2023. Since then, critical academics are also accused of supporting terrorism.⁸¹

These attacks against academic freedom and critical thinking also impact pedagogical projects. A dozen of Jewish Israeli artists and scholars from the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, an art college in Berlin, started a program in 2020 called “The School for Unlearning Zionism”. Although it was mainly thought as an “internal Jewish-Israeli self-negotiation with the Zionist story”, the organizers planned to invite external speakers such as Ilan Pappé, Marwa Fatafta and Salem Barahmeh. The Israeli embassy called the event “a delegitimization of Israel” and “antisemitic”. The Weissensee Kunsthochschule ended up cancelling the funding and justified this decision by observing that four speakers (all Jewish and Israelis) were bds supporters.⁸²

The massacre of October 7, 2023 provoked understandable emotion among Jewish students and scholars in Germany. It was important to assure them, as many academic institutions did, that “universities must be places where Jews can feel safe without ifs and buts”.⁸³ However, some universities did so in ways echoing the federal government’s discourse on Staatsräson. Consider, for example, the following press release of the Humboldt Universität:

“Humboldt University condemns the terrorist attack on Israel last weekend”. We are deeply shocked by the extent of the violence. Our thoughts are with the many Israeli students and scholars at hu, who have been fearing for the lives of their relatives and friends ever since. Our thoughts are with the relatives of the six partner institutions of the hu in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rehovot and Be’er Scheva. We are in contact with the hu students who are spending a semester abroad in Israel.⁸⁴

At the time of this press release, on October 23, 2023, the publicly documented massacre of Palestinians, including scholars and students,⁸⁵ had already started. The fact that the hu found no words for the Palestinian students killed by the Israeli war in Gaza illustrates a mechanism which Judith Butler calls the “differential distribution of public grieving”.⁸⁶ Butler coined this notion after September 11, 2001, when the US mainstream press published necrologies of all the victims of the terrorist attack whilst finding only two words for the civilian victims of the US counter-terrorist war in Afghanistan: “collateral damages” and “human shields”. Butler went on arguing that this differential distribution of public grieving is not only a speech act which contributes to fashioning a racist world view where human lives have different values. It is also a “frame of war”, i.e. a series of semiotic element which legitimizes war violence: “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not”.⁸⁷ The differential distribution of public grieving fuels the war machine by normalizing the idea that it is acceptable to kill some people – the “collateral damages” and “human shields” – so that some others can live: those whose names, faces and history are made public. Berliners were privy of an illustration of the incorporation of public grieving into a security apparatus when the police rightfully protected the candles and photos of the Israeli victims of October 7 but destroyed those honoring the Palestinian victims of the Israeli war.⁸⁸

This differential distribution of public grieving also impacts minorities in Germany. As Emily Dische-Becker puts it: “part of what is frustrating about the situation in Germany today is the fracture resulting from October 7th – the incompatible subjectivity of the people grieving two different violent events”.⁸⁹ Eyal Weizman goes a step further, arguing that this impossibility to grieve beyond community bounds fuels racism: “At a time when Jews feel vulnerable and often alone, the Germans, at many levels of society, could stand by their side. But by making Jewish people the stated reason for the repression of Muslim migrants in Germany they make us more vulnerable, not safer. German intervention amplifies both antisemitism and Islamophobia, with mounting hate crimes against both Jews and Muslims the direct consequence. In Germany as elsewhere, the safety of Jews and Palestinians is interdependent.”⁹⁰

In their defense, German university managers have to deal with a supervising institution which has a particular idea of the balance between the norms of German Staatsräson and academic freedom. On December 14, 2023, a group of students occupied a lecture hall of the Free University in Berlin to protest against what they perceived as a one-sided pro-Israeli position of their institution.⁹¹ After their eviction by about 100 police officers, more than 100 Berlin lecturers signed a public letter stating that “regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp, we stand up for our students and defend their right to peaceful protest”. Internal e-mails from the Federal Minister of Education and Research were leaked to the ard news program “Panorama” and published on June 11, 2024. These e-mails show that minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger or a high-ranking official from the ministry wanted to check whether the protest letter could constitute a criminal case and whether the lecturers’ funding could be cut. As we shall see in the conclusion, the idea of cutting funds to critical academics has not been abandoned.

I have thought a lot about Derrida during this turbulent period. In The university without condition,⁹² Derrida points out that universities would not survive if their sponsors – the Prince in the old days, the state and private foundations nowadays – would stop funding them. Derrida argues that this extreme vulnerability vis-à-vis exogenous powers implies a clear roadmap. Since universities are always at the edge of surrendering “without condition”, academics have not only an ethical duty,⁹³ but also a strategic one, to resist those powers. And since they have no police forces or militias of their own, they should do so with the only weapon at their disposal: critique.

Derrida understands critique in a way that is rooted in the word’s etymological root: krinein, which means separating and judging. Scholars are critical when they deconstruct their object of investigation and describe its components meticulously. This descriptive moment of the critical gesture leads to an epistemological one: scholars understand that they can neither observe nor describe the whole phenomenon. They learn, to freely paraphrase Saussure, that the perspective fashions the object of investigation.⁹⁴ Since all perspectives carry value judgements, scholars are left with two main options. The first consists in producing some knowledge that reproduces power structures. The second option, which Derrida advocates, follows Achille Mbembe’s view that scholarship should aim at describing the world, but also “changing” it.⁹⁵

Many academics based in Germany who work on antisemitism, Staatsräson, Israel/Palestine and related topics have followed Derrida’s proposal. Instead of surrendering without condition, they have continued to produce critical scholarship. Many have not remained in their ivory tower. They have signed open letters supporting their cancelled colleagues, organized press conferences to re-state the basic principles of academic freedom, joined sit-ins organized by students and denounced the conflation of antisemitism with the critique of Israel. It is impossible to do justice and account for the diversity of all those acts of resistance, but one can lay out a trend: those critical scholars have often acted collectively. Some have joined existing international networks like Diaspora Alliance and Jewish Voice for Peace. New collectives have emerged like that of “Palestinian and Jewish academics” where Palestinian and Jewish scholars speak up together. Some scholars also built and expanded networks in closed online fora as well as in person meetings. Some of these initiatives are aiming for institutionalization.

The structuring of this academic movement of resistance has followed the temporality of the attacks against academic freedom. Important stages were the smear campaign against Achille Mbembe, the accusations of antisemitism against the art exhibition Dokumenta in 2022 and the repression of the student protests of the years 2023–2024. This strategy of collective resistance helped counterbalancing the individualized accusations of antisemitism and facilitated the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse which has sometimes found some space in the medias.

Like the German human rights movements in general, those critical thinkers have been empowered by the icj order of January 26, 2024 regarding the question of genocide and the opinion of July 19, 2024 which re-stated the unlawfulness of the Israeli occupation and the violation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, including its article 3 concerning apartheid. Before those icj order/opinion, anyone who would use the words “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians was automatically called antisemitic. Although the icj statements have not put an end to these accusations, human rights organizations, artists and critical academics have started to point out that these accusations amount to calling the icj antisemitic. The press release of the United Nations experts of April 2024 denouncing the “scholasticide” in Gaza has had a similar empowering effect. The experts pointed out that 80% of schools and universities had been destroyed in Gaza and that 5 479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors had been killed.⁹⁶ Six months later, when commemorating the massacre of October 7, 2023, the Humboldt University published a statement which contrasts with that of October 26, 2023 (see above):

“One year ago today”, on 7 October 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas attacked Israel in a cruel and inhumane manner. Hostages are still being held by Hamas today. The attack triggered a war that has since claimed many more victims every day and has caused great suffering. We commemorate the victims and see with great concern the expansion of the conflict. We stand together in the hope and confidence that the spiral of violence will be stopped and a path to lasting peace can be found.⁹⁷

Like all texts (including this article) this statement should be critiqued and possibly criticized, but it paves the way to a common grieving of both Israeli and Palestinian victims.

Conclusion

During the summer of 2024, the main German political parties (spd, Bündnis90/Die Grünen, fdp and cdu/csu) drafted a resolution entitled “Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”. 150 Jewish artists, academics and intellectuals published an open letter explaining why this text “claims to protect Jewish life in Germany [but] promises instead to endanger it”.⁹⁸ One of their arguments is that the text conflates Israel and Judaism and, by doing so, fuels the antisemitic view that Jews are responsible for the crimes of Israel. Besides this problem, the text proposes to make the positions and fundings of academics dependent on their attitude towards antisemitism as defined by ihra. This is very intimidating because the neoliberal reforms of the last two decades have severely undermined the autonomy of academics. About 90% of courses are given, in Germany, by Dozenten and untenured lecturers, i.e. people whose position in academia has to be regularly renewed. This shows that German academia is at the crossroad described by Derrida in The university without condition.⁹⁹ Some academics resist¹⁰⁰ but others seem to be willing to surrender without condition.

French academia, Gaza and Israel after October 7, 2023. A critical assessment – Laurent Bonnefoy

In conjunction to the terrible plight of civilians, military strategies, and the transformation of economies, wars reconfigure fields of academia and expertise. These can then be understood as yet another form of ‘warscape’ as coined by anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom in the 1990s as she studied Mozambique. The concept defines the variety of spaces characterized by political, social and economic disruption linked to violence, inviting to study the processes through which new orders may emerge.¹⁰¹

Among many other things, wars are then also trying periods for researchers, professors, and graduate students as they have an effect on the way scientific norms play out in the university and how knowledge is produced. Armed conflicts thus act as moments of crisis that need to be analysed self-reflexively and critically. Rather surprisingly, this is only rarely the case. Beyond the current issue of pariss, a recent exception is a project launched in 2024 by Marc Lynch of George Washington University titled ‘The war on Gaza and Middle East Political Science’.¹⁰²

Actors of the scientific fields who focus on violence (whether as an object in itself or not) can relevantly be seen as part of what Carolyn Nordstrom calls an ‘endlessly complex set of people and personalities, each of whom has a unique relationship to the war and a unique story to tell’.¹⁰³ As such, they are also people who are interconnected to a given conflict and may to some extent depend on it, while also constructing specific narratives that have some degree of influence on the way the war is portrayed, framed, and then transforms. As researchers, professors or graduate students, they evolve in a space, or more precisely a field and sub-fields, that are themselves shaped and restructured by the war, generating new forms of interactions, social orders and capitals.¹⁰⁴

In fact, for academics, wars can become (at times maybe unrequested) opportunities. One’s object of research can suddenly become meaningful, if not interesting in the eyes of colleagues and institutions when it used to be seen as only peripheral. Symbolic resources and financial ones can arise as a consequence, giving birth to a specific economy of expertise and knowledge production that has been analysed critically in a number of situations like that of the Balkans during the 1990s, or linked to ‘counterterrorism’ after 9/11.¹⁰⁵ The context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also been described as one which produces a specific economy of expertise and ‘peace business’.¹⁰⁶

These transformations generate a series of specific challenges: internal competition, political polarization and deep ethical matters linked for instance to the (il)legitimacy of foreign researchers, independence, collaboration with governmental institutions or the military, access to the field, etc.¹⁰⁷ New dilemmas are also induced as the very object of research may imply to seek to improve the coverage and analysis of a given conflict, help voices from the field be heard. Wars which are deemed ‘hidden’ or ‘ignored’ by the ‘international community’ and ‘mainstream media’ add another challenge for external observers.¹⁰⁸ At the methodological level, situations of violence also frequently end up depriving researchers from access to the field, thus generating a paradox: demand for knowledge and analysis rises, while the capacity to carry out state-of-the-art firsthand accumulation of data is impeded if not jeopardized. Categories of expert, researcher and activist can also blur.

Knowledge is evidently controversial and, with good reason, can be understood as a component of domination, one that generally sees “Westerners” interpret a war in which “locals” are portrayed as pawns. The process ends up concealing many of its own ideological parameters within the guise of neutrality and empiricism. Such a critical approach (inspired in particular by analysis produced by Edward Said in his seminal essay Covering Islam. How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World) has evident relevance. It thus remains much in our scope, yet the object of this article is somewhat different. It aims more specifically to delve into the transformed economy and field of research in a specific war context.

As a political sociologist with a more than two-decade spanning interest in contemporary Yemen, I both witnessed and analysed these transformations in my field in publications and oral communications. Armed conflicts have a deep impact on researchers, either foreign or originating from the country at war or targeted by an external enemy. While my own case-study, affected by an ongoing armed conflict which started in 2015, has only generated limited polarization among the field of international researchers,¹⁰⁹ other wars have a different impact. For example, that with a focus on Syria generated feuds with cross-accusations of compromission with the al-Assad regime or conversely with jihadi groups being thrown at colleagues during lectures or while anonymously reviewing papers for scientific journals. Much like Syrian society itself, the field of ‘Syrian studies’ is to a large extent destroyed, and full of tensions and acrimony.

The object of this paper adds another layer to the reflection on the effects of war on the production of knowledge by academics, and on what sociologist Robert King Merton labelled the ethos of modern science in the 1940s.¹¹⁰ The paper focuses on the effects of public and political scrutiny within European and North American societies on what researchers and professors say or write on the war in Gaza and on violence in Israel since October 7, 2023. The purpose here is to analyse how comments and the study of this conflict (ongoing at the time of writing) by individuals who claim to have a specific legitimacy based on knowledge and experience – professors, researchers, PhD students and post-docs, are being put under pressure, breaching also what Merton called the norm of ‘scientific universalism’. It seeks to understand how this situation is affecting an already ill-secured academic freedom, and fostering more polarization, violating unwritten rules and traditions of academia in so-called liberal societies.

Since historical and social contexts are varied, and levels or forms of pressure may differ from one society to another, the article will focus on the case-study I am most familiar with and have directly practiced, that of contemporary France. How have the latitude of researchers there been affected by political, media and institutional pressures since the attacks of October 7 and their military aftermath in the Gaza strip and elsewhere in Palestine? More specifically, how are academic practices being constrained by ever-expanding accusations of antisemitism and alleged ‘incitement to terrorism’ in the context of an ever-lasting conflict with deep political ramifications and implications in terms of identity?

My reflection will build mainly on my own experience as a concerned observer more than an actor in the academic field of Palestinian studies; my own professional space – a ’warscape’ in its own right, transformed by the decade long armed conflict in Yemen, is somewhat related, but largely separate. The article will feed on the trajectories of colleagues who publish on Palestine and Israel, on internal debates within the profession, a two-year long experience of managing a public research institute in the Palestinian occupied territories between 2010 and 2012, and also my participation to the editorial team of an online media Orient xxi which publishes widely on the Middle East, including short papers by academics. It will also feed on a set of similar debates addressed by colleagues like Alexander Cooley in a recent publication¹¹¹ or more broadly in a collective brainstorming published by pariss.¹¹² Each of these is trying to make sense of what is happening to freedom of speech and academic freedom internationally in the context of the war in Gaza as it unravels.

This contribution will first describe how academic fields focusing on either Israel or Palestine in the humanities have structured over decades in France and gradually polarized in the context of the enduring conflict. The paper will then focus on more recent transformations which occurred after October 7th, 2023 and embody a shrinking space for freedom of expression and research, for access to the field, and for informed epistemic debates, highlighting worrying processes.

Fragmented Fields

Increased Pressures after October 7