The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception

Palestinian Liberation is Not a Metaphor

Excerpts from article

On October 7, 2023, I woke up to the news that the Palestinian resistance in Gaza broke free from the largest concentration camp that has been under economic blockade since 2007, two years after Israel’s withdrawal and so-called disengagement. I posted the following on social media platform X: ‘Academia loves to decolonize everything besides occupied land. Its silence on Palestine is enough to know how decolonization has become a metaphor signifying everything besides material change and collective resistance’. I also wrote about Palestinians’ right to resist colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and displacement, as well as their right to live with dignity on their own land. The next day I drew on Frantz Fanon’s (1967) work to historicize violence within colonial contexts, pointing to the psychosocial and asymmetrical power relations constitutive of colonial contexts, under which violence and resistance unfold. I noted the importance of taking seriously into consideration the children who have witnessed their family buried under the rubble, loved ones tortured and killed, and villages razed, one can only imagine the thoughts of resistance that develop in children’s minds. These children, who lost everything and became orphans during previous Israeli military campaigns of displacement and dispossession in Gaza, are no longer children and now form part of the Palestinian resistance.

Shortly after these posts, I also wrote, ‘When a child has experienced colonial domination their entire life, what do you expect them to do to resist? Hug the colonizer?’ It is important to recognize here that peaceful means have been used and exhausted. For instance, the Great March of Return of 2018 resulted in over hundred Palestinians killed and thousands badly wounded by ammunitions designed to completely destroy limbs (Molavi 2024). I then included a frequently cited quote by Walter Rodney: ‘By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master?’ In other words, there is no moral equivalence between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor. I also wrote a post suggesting that ‘decolonization is about dreaming and fighting for a present and future free of occupied Indigenous territories. It’s about a Free Palestine. It’s about liberation and self-determination’. All of these Twitter posts went viral. And it is not surprising that they got the Zionist censorship ball rolling, which would eventually come crashing down on me the following semester, when the university placed me on suspension for my social media activity. To understand how this process unfolded, let me start from the beginning.

Less than a week after October 7, I had already received hate emails, voicemails, and death threats from people who had read my social media posts. I remember going to the office and noticing a letter in my mailbox, which read as follows: ‘whatever horrible things might happen to befall you, you would richly deserve with your announced support of Hamas terrorism’. My university never offered support, even though administrators were aware of the threats I had received. My safety was not a concern, as universities pretend is the case when justifying repression of faculty and students who speak out against genocide. Around the same time, other random individuals, who had read my social media posts, accused me of supporting the beheading of children, the raping of women, and of being a ‘Jew-hater’. It may seem futile to counter these accusations within a reactionary context that not only diffuses fabricated stories of beheaded babies (Abunimah 2023; Scahill, Grim, and Boguslaw 2024) but also conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism in order deflect attention from the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The former is used to villainize the Palestinian resistance and dehumanize all Palestinians to justify the total destruction of Gaza. The latter serves a similar purpose by discrediting and villainizing the emerging pro-Palestinian movement, thus it justifies the repression of anyone willing to critique Israel’s settler colonial project. It is imperative, therefore, to critique dehumanizing rhetoric and the weaponization of antisemitism to unveil the varying ways in which they materialize into violence.

In this article, I first reflect on my experience of being suspended and reinstated. I demonstrate how administrators, including those at my institution, knowingly violate academic freedom and free speech. Throughout, I discuss the institutional and political machinations seeking to silence dissident voices, particularly those who critique Israel and Zionist settler colonialism. The aim is to make more visible the linkages between external pressure and the capitulation of administrators influenced by donors. I highlight the university’s role in producing technologies of colonial violence used on Palestinian bodies and the significance of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In the subsequent sections, I critique the weaponization of antisemitism and the Palestine exception to academic freedom. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of speaking and writing truth to power during a genocide.

The Palestine Exception to Academic Freedom

Existing frameworks for “academic freedom” on our campuses have actually enabled violence against Palestinians and our allies to occur with impunity. (Palestinian Feminist Collective 2024)

We need academic freedom to criticize Israel, but it takes more than academic freedom to contest the sites of power invested in protecting Israel from criticism. (Salaita 2017)

The Palestinian Feminist Collective and Steven Salaita’s work assist in unsettling the illusion of academic freedom as a universal ideal. Their work also helps generate some questions. What does academic freedom mean to untenured faculty, adjunct professors, and students? What does it mean to those who have historically been excluded from the white halls of the ivory tower? What does academic freedom mean when your own colleagues refuse to stand up for those who are suspended for expressing their right to speak out against genocide? What does academic freedom mean when knowledge production continues on its usual apologetic path of justifying colonial domination and dispossession? By asking these questions, I am not suggesting that academic freedom is not being violated or that negatively racialized scholars have not created small pockets of resistance within academia to radicalize intellectual work toward liberation. Rather, I ask these questions to historicize Western academia, that is, to better understand universities as constitutive of systems of domination and exploitation (see Author Collective scăpa ﺷﺎھﺪ in this issue). Universities and the so-called academic freedom and free speech they purport to uphold are not somehow suspended from the capitalist, colonial social reality of which they are an integral part. Salaita (2017) asserts,

Free speech, in both philosophy and practice, is attached to structures of power (seen and unseen, discernible and oblique, steady and unstable). Despite the state’s professions of fairness and benevolence, free speech is never fixed or disinterested. It is prosecuted according to circumstance. It is reified based on the needs of the audience. And it is conditioned by race, gender, nationality, class, religion, ideology, culture, sexuality, and so forth.

Liberal notions of academic freedom and free speech will not save us. It is not for nothing that the West’s liberal institutions have so easily revealed their commitment to colonial violence—violence they do not only justify but actively participate—simultaneously stripping away even the minor affordances and protections dominant notions of academic freedom and free speech previously gave faculty.

One should ask what academic freedom means when hate speech and dehumanizing discourses justify incalculable violence, death, and destruction, as we have historically seen and are seeing now in the ways in which Palestinians are portrayed (human animals, children of darkness, baby killers, terrorists, and so on). Free speech or dehumanizing discourses do not exist in a vacuum nor in a perfect liberal society composed of individual signatories to a social contract where everyone has equal rights to express themselves freely. As Charles Mills (1997, 18) demonstrated in The Racial Contract, academia is complicit in perpetuating an epistemology of ignorance. When faced with addressing matters related to colonialism, slavery, and racism, the epistemology of white ignorance constitutive of the university prescribes instead ‘a particular pattern of localised and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will, in general, be unable to understand the world they themselves have made’. This ignorance, moreover, prevents white academics, including those who subscribe to or are seduced by coloniality and whiteness, from facing the uncomfortable historical and contemporary facts that threaten their epistemic privilege and authority acquired through ostensible academic freedom (Lootens and Fúnez-Flores 2024). The presence of others and the alternative perspectives they carry are rendered theoretically insignificant. Their presence threatens dominant discourses, namely the historically uncontested position of whiteness and its epistemological underpinnings and material consequences. After all, negatively racialized and colonized others ‘know where the bodies are buried’ (Mills 1997, 131). Coloniality of power and its concomitant whiteness is hence upheld by academics, especially when they feel threatened by Indigenous, Black, and Global South radical thought that points to the intimate relationship Eurocentric knowledge historically had and continues to have with racism, imperialism, Zionist settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. Academic freedom and free speech thus cannot be detached from the epistemologies intimately intertwined with material systems of domination. Academic freedom is merely a mirage one chases in vain.

Not all discourses (expressed through academic freedom) carry equal weight. Hateful dehumanizing speech cannot be equated to the way critiques of Zionist settler colonialism are deliberately misconstrued as hateful and antisemitic. One form is linked to structures of violence, while the other is misconstrued because it questions said structure. Both do not have similar intention nor equal consequences. For those on the receiving end of domination and who have seen their communities displaced through war justified by dehumanizing discourses, there is a distinct experience with free speech and hate speech, which is always-already expressed in a field of power. The same thing can be said about academic freedom. What does academic freedom mean in a modern/colonial institution that justifies and actively participates in colonialism, displacement, and genocide through its production of technologies of violence and surveillance? What does academic freedom mean in a colonial institution that continues to silence those who have historically been excluded, including the knowledges, experiences, histories, and struggles deemed irrelevant to the university’s Eurocentric commitments and coloniality (Fúnez-Flores 2024)?

Salaita (2024) once again reminds us that academic freedom is a facade that is easily unmasked when speaking up against the colonial occupation of Palestine. When critiquing the Zionist settler colonial state of Israel and speaking out against genocide are the exceptions to academic freedom, we cannot possibly say that academic freedom means the same thing for everyone. For whom is academic freedom protected? To whom is academic freedom denied? Why do some critical, anti-racist, critical race, and decolonial scholars remain silent? Why are they complicit? Here it is apropos to quote Edward Said (1994: 100-1):

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take […] Personally, I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, and muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.

Edward Said shed light on the complicity of academics who remained silent on what was—and continues to be—a seemingly controversial or complicated topic. He pointed to their complicity for not taking a clear and unwavering ethical and political position in the question of Palestine. As we have seen since October 2023 (and certainly before that), far too many self-proclaimed critical, anti-racist, and decolonial academics have not mentioned Palestine, called for a ceasefire, or critiqued Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza or increasing violence in the West Bank and in historic Palestine. The editors of the Settler Colonial Studies (Settler Colonial Studies Blog 2019) journal even went as far as portraying the genocide as a long, complex, and nuanced history that is hastily dismissed by political commentary on social media. Some of our colleagues who like to begin their conference presentations with land acknowledgments have apparently forgotten that Palestine is also a territorial struggle against settler-colonial dispossession.

These same academics appear to only care about colonization and decolonization in abstract, metaphorical terms, or as a historical event that is gradually receding—perhaps a colonial legacy we are slowly moving away from as we progress toward a more egalitarian liberal society. It is evident that academia, for the most part, does not care about material decolonization or radical notions of academic freedom. It merely desires a topic, a subject matter, that refers to the distant past rather than the colonial present. As politically committed intellectuals, however, one must reveal how discourses materialize into the cruelest practices, becoming real, concrete, violent. A decolonial praxis is thus urgently needed at this precise moment, demanding we commit in material terms, willing to make real sacrifices for the liberation of Palestine. The Palestinian Feminist Collective (2024) invites us to reveal ‘the unprecedented levels of institutional violence against Palestinians, including our own universities’ investments in the Zionist settler-colonial regime and their tactics of repression and censorship’. The Gaza Solidarity Encampments proliferating on many campuses are militantly responding to this call.

Only through collective action in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle have free speech and academic freedom within the context of neoliberal universities been so easily unmasked. The Palestine exception to academic freedom is evidenced by the coordinated attacks both within and beyond academia. When radical thought linked to questioning genocide, colonial occupation, and ethnic cleansing does not neatly fit into accepted notions of academic freedom, it becomes quite easy to see the colonial foundations of liberalism and its false promises of freedom. It seems like only knowledge that remains at the textual level is relevant to academia. Decolonial thought, for instance, is valued insofar as it is not praxis-oriented and grounded in liberation movements and material decolonization. Analyzing colonial systems of domination as mere historical legacies—as things of the past—are accepted, while the militant critique of actually-existing settler colonial projects, such as Zionism, are immediately misconstrued as antisemitic, at worst, and hastily disregarded, at best.

The silencing of dissident voices reveals what Western universities have historically represented: colonialism, racism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. For these reasons, the emerging student movement urges us to not only question or interrogate academia’s silence and complicity but also to unsettle the technologies of colonial violence in which universities are deeply invested. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment led by student activists at Columbia University, which has proliferated on many campuses throughout the United States, is teaching us what a decolonial praxis demands—that is, a radical ethical and political commitment that remains steadfast in the face of institutional and police violence, a commitment willing to make material risks and accept the consequences. This transpires in the words of Christopher Lacovetti, a PhD student at the University of Chicago encampment who was interviewed by Fox News:

if our government and our academic institutions are complicit in this, there comes a point where we say, “we’re not following orders and it doesn’t matter what you do to us because there are principles and there are human lives that matter more than our careers and our futures.” This is what this university has never understood, has never accepted, has never reckoned with about the student movement—not only in UChicago but around the country—is that the commitment to Gaza runs deeper than fears for our safety, fears for our careers, fears for ours paychecks. (FOX 32 Chicago 2024)

When the reporter asked Christopher of potential discipline, he said it simply did not matter if there would be consequences. ‘There are things that matter more than my academic future…. questions about what might happen if Paul [the university president] puts me on a leave of absence is ridiculous, and it’s insulting to the memory of every child that has been murdered in the course of this genocide with the full complicity of the United States, of Joe Biden, and of people like Paul Alivisatos and his cops….They’re hypocrites. They’re cowards. And the blood of Gaza’s kids in on their hands too’ (Ibid.) Students are teaching us a radical form of academic freedom and right to assemble, unafraid of the material consequences for organizing and speaking out against genocide. Despite the criminalization, they are continuing to pressure universities to divest from weapons manufacturers, military contracts, and companies (including tech companies, such as Elbit Systems) profiting from Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and in Palestine writ large; boycott Israeli institutions and research centers; disclose all funding sources and investments; reinvest in Palestine, Arab American, and Ethnic Studies; and empower scholars and researchers to delink themselves from the funding sources tied to Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine.

As decolonial scholars, we must also contribute to these efforts by making evident the intimate relationship between material and symbolic domination, between political economic domination and epistemicidal settler colonial projects. The Palestinian Feminist Collective (2024) evinces that genocide always includes scholasticide or sophicide, a deliberate eradication of Indigenous knowledge rooted in the land and its custodians. This involves the systematic killing of Palestinians whose educational and sociocultural roles as students to scholars are prematurely ended by Zionist settler colonialism. Sophicide and scholasticide not only includes physical destruction of educational institutions and resources but also the erasure of Palestinian history, epistemologies, archives, and scholarship, extending even to academic spaces in the U.S. and Canada where Palestinian and pro-Palestinian scholars and students are criminalized for speaking out and organizing against genocide and colonial occupation. All of this reflects the intimately entangled relationship Western universities have historically had with colonial and racial capitalist projects. Thanks to university students, these intimate linkages are more exposed than ever before. It is only through organized collective action taken by faculty, staff, and students that universities will be prevented from returning to ‘business as usual’.