Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics

Palestine-Israel in British universities

Ruth Sheldon

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526108586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Provides the first ethnographic study of opposing Zionist and pro-Palestinian activist groups in contemporary Britain and develops an original relational understanding of the raging campus conflicts around Palestine-Israel.

1

Contested framings: democratic conflict and the public university

In April 2012, the annual NUS conference was dominated by a confrontation between the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) and pro-Palestine activists. Commenting on this in the Jewish Chronicle, a Jewish student activist took the opportunity to raise a familiar rhetorical question: ‘What I do not understand is this: why the problems in the Middle East, and in particular the Palestinian cause, continually gain so much attention within the arena of student politics?’ (Carroll 2012). By questioning the true source of the public’s fascination, this student adopted a discursive tactic that is well established in media reporting of this campus politics. As Dávid Kaposi (2014: 16) notes, debates on the Palestine–Israel conflict are more broadly characterised by what he terms ‘meta-discourses’, profound disagreements not over the veracity of claims but rather over the hidden motivations and systematic biases that underpin seemingly rational arguments. For, when opposing protagonists ask publicly, ‘Why is this issue so significant within Britain?’, they tend to do so with a particular sense of the stakes and boundaries of this conflict in mind. They might, like this student, be alluding to the underlying presence of a ‘new antisemitism’ within campuses as the ‘Jewish state’ is perceived to be subject to disproportionate hostility. Alternatively, this question could express an affirmation or critique of the political activities of British Muslim students in a new era of ‘Western imperialism’. Or perhaps the emphasis is oriented towards the moral primacy of the humanitarian values held dear by cosmopolitan members of increasingly globalised university institutions.

In this chapter, I offer a historical account of how the stakes, boundaries and grammars of the student politics of Palestine–Israel in Britain have come to be framed within the wider public arena that contours university campuses. Taking up Fraser’s (2009) call for critical analysis of the politics of framing, I explore the dominant representations of this campus politics within public media, policy interventions and academic research. I argue that these campus conflicts are currently problematised as posing a threat to the liberal-democratic nation-state in relation to the ‘War on Terror’ and explore how this narrative is rooted in liberal, secular and nationalist imaginaries. I explore how these contemporary framings have emerged in relation to evolving inter and intracommunal relations within the British civil sphere and are shaped by less-acknowledged intertwined histories and geographies of the Holocaust, British imperialism, migrations and racisms. Turning to consider an alternative focus on the involvement of diasporic and left-wing counter-publics in this conflict, I ask how this framing can develop a deeper understanding of the internal tensions experienced by activists. Finally, I turn my attention to an aspect of this politics which has become obscured within these dominant approaches: the university itself.

My analysis in this chapter makes the case for the ethnographic approach developed in this book. I show how dominant representations of Palestine–Israel campus politics, are unable to account for the limits of consensus or to explore the significance of the contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences experienced by student activists. This reveals the value of research that is responsive to complex experiences, attentive to the heterogeneity of political groups, and also to the heteronomous responsibilities felt by people who bring multiple temporal and spatial attachments, belongings and relationships into this conflict.

The evolving framings of campus conflicts: a historical perspective on student activism around Palestine–Israel

Activism over issues relating to Palestine–Israel has been central to the British student movement for over four decades, giving rise to repeated conflicts within university campuses (Day unpublished). Yet, for all the key stakeholders concerned – including students, academics, policymakers and campaigning organisations – the significance of these tensions has evolved over time. Changing perceptions of what is at stake in students’ transnational activism over Palestine–Israel has been bound up with the academy’s shifting entanglements with international socialist movements, processes of decolonisation and forms of imperialism, and with the more recent processes of globalisation, democratisation and marketisation of university institutions. In order to situate current framings of campus conflicts, I therefore begin with a brief genealogical account of how the meanings attributed to Palestine–Israel activism within the British university context have changed over time.

Student pro-Palestine and pro-Zionist campaigns first began to garner momentum in Britain during the Cold War and were deeply enmeshed in its binary ideological framework. Within international student arenas, the General Union of Palestinian Students, established in 1959, became aligned with the pro-Soviet International Union of Students in opposition to the pro-Western International Students Conference (Burke 2012; Day unpublished). From the 1960s, moderate and more radical left-wing British student factions developed split allegiances towards Palestinians or Israelis. These differences deepened after the 1967 Six Day War, as many socialist activists moved from viewing Israel and the kibbutz movement as embattled and heroic to increasingly identifying Zionism with American military imperialism. This shift within the student movement thus reflected a broader long-term migration of left-wing sympathies from Israel to the Palestinians, which has been accentuated by the move to the right within Israeli politics over subsequent decades (Kahn-Harris and Gidley 2010).

It was during this period that the symbolic status of Palestine–Israel began to be embroiled with the anti-racist and multicultural politics of the student movement. In 1973, the UJS was established in response to a perceived rise in anti-Zionism and left-wing antisemitism in universities (Kahn-Harris and Gidley 2010). Within NUS politics, the UJS became closely aligned with the National Organisation of Labour Students, and this close association between the UJS and Labour Students continues to influence NUS politics today. During the 1980s, following UN Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be a form of racism, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, high-profile campaigns sought to exclude ‘Zionist’ groups from campuses, including attempts to ban Jewish societies at London South Bank and Sunderland Polytechnic (Rich 2011). Students continued to campaign for the Palestinian cause throughout the 1990s, developing campaigns against human rights abuses, imperialism and racism, while the UJS raised ongoing concerns about ‘the new antisemitism’.¹ Kahn-Harris and Gidley (2010) describe 2000–1 as a more recent turning point in this process, as the failure of the Oslo Accords and initiation of the al-Aqsa (second) intifada gradually gave rise to the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, which was modelled on the South African anti-apartheid campaign. The most controversial strand of BDS continues to be the call for an academic boycott of Israeli universities, which has provoked particularly intense ongoing conflicts among academics and students over the definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism (see, for example, Butler 2006, 2012; Hirsh 2010).² This has further intensified following a series of Israeli military offensives in Gaza in 2008–9, 2012 and 2014 in which coverage of the escalating violence in the British media has mobilised further support for BDS and renewed concerns around rising antisemitism. The call for an academic boycott has also been consistently rejected by the British government and by Universities UK³ on the basis that it infringes the principle of academic freedom.

Over the past two decades, Palestine has also become a key campaign issue for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), whose growing importance within student politics reflects the rising numbers of Muslim students within UK higher education (Gilby et al. 2011). This has signalled a further shift in the framing of Palestine–Israel, as this has come to be identified as a key conflict in the broader narrative of a ‘civilisational clash’ between Western liberalism and political Islam. Thus, the transnational politics around Palestine–Israel has come to be embroiled within the post-9/11 politics of the ‘War on Terror’ and with the discourses of extremism and policies of securitisation that it has given rise to in Britain (Gilby et al. 2011; Song 2011). For prominent government policymakers, ‘counter extremism’ think tanks and interfaith dialogue organisations, this is now framed as a problem of ‘good campus relations’ in Britain; the challenge is to secure harmonious campuses against extremist ideology alongside the right to freedom of expression within the legal boundaries of the nation-state. Meanwhile pro-Palestine campaigners radically oppose this nationalist frame, insisting that Palestine–Israel is a question of the right to express transnational solidarity with legitimate justice claims that emanate from far beyond the British campus. As high-profile conflicts over the stakes and bounds of Palestine–Israel evolve through national, international and student media, a broad array of public actors have become enmeshed in these struggles. This includes British politicians and civil servants, international government representatives, Universities UK, national faith bodies, think tanks, campaigning groups, the NUS and academic researchers, all of whom proactively intervene in the dynamics of university campuses.⁴

As this historical overview highlights, Palestine–Israel has long been a concern for academics and students based in British universities. However, its significance has shifted over time with the rise of post-Cold War imaginaries oriented around the mythology of a civilisational clash between Islam and the West (Werbner 2004). As I will explore further in subsequent chapters, this genealogy is significant for current conflicts as the legacy of these histories of imperialism, racisms and antisemitism continue to shape British universities as liberal public institutions (Back 2004a; Phillips 2012). Furthermore, the struggles over framing broadly outlined here are enacted not only within institutional arenas but also within academic research. This is reflected in studies which implicitly reproduce liberal Enlightenment paradigms and in research produced out of explicit solidarity with oppressed or maltreated groups. As such, this chapter analyses academic scholarship alongside more overtly political interventions. It is to these contemporary framings of Palestine–Israel that I now turn.

The dominant frame of the liberal nation-state: rights, responsibilities and ‘good relations’

Public interest in Palestine–Israel campus politics intensified after the 2009 university protests over ‘Operation Cast Lead’ as prominent stakeholders reasserted the stakes of this conflict according to dominant paradigms. An example of this was the ‘Campus Conflict’ comment series published in the Guardian newspaper, which featured exchanges between UJS and FOSIS representatives, well-known Jewish and Muslim academics and interfaith practitioners (Guardian 2010). The newspaper introduced these contributions by situating the ‘problem’ within the classical terms of liberal-democratic theory, as a conflict between principles of freedom from harm and freedom of speech in the civil space of the campus:

Debate in universities has become increasingly fractious and polarised between supporters of Israel and pro-Palestinian campaigners, with accusations of antisemitism against Jewish students and cries of censorship from Islamic societies and left-wing activists. Is there still a space on campuses for civil debate? If not, what can be done to resolve the tensions threatening to divide a generation of students? (Guardian 2010)

In his contribution to this debate, the president of FOSIS made his appeal in juridical terms. Focusing on the legal right to freedom of expression ‘except that which incites violence’ and citing the liberal philosophy of John Stuart Mill, he opposed the call for campus cohesion as an underhand form of censorship. Instead, he framed pro-Palestine activism as grounded in rational principles of social justice, universal human rights and international law (Hanjra 2010a, 2010b). The university was invoked as an exemplary site for the expression of legitimate critical debate in which freedom of speech takes the form of the right to assert truth claims and to justify moral and political opinions. Conforming to the theoretical assumptions of classical liberalism, these claims for universal rights were grounded in the British legal framework and so in terms of national citizenship. As Universities UK’s report Freedom of Speech on Campus: Rights and Responsibilities in UK Universities stated: ‘It is the law alone which can set restrictions on freedom of speech and expression and on academic freedom – it is for the law and not for institutions or individuals within institutions to set the boundaries on the legitimate exercise of those rights’ (Universities UK 2011: 44). Responding in the Guardian, the campaigns director of the UJS criticised FOSIS for supporting ‘hate speech’ on campus, on the basis that incitements to violence infringed students’ rights to ‘freedom from harm’ (McKenzie 2010). In this way, the UJS mirrored this contractual language to emphasise the legal responsibility of universities to protect students’ welfare.

As well as affirming a contractual model for responding to conflict, the UJS also drew on an established discourse emphasising the need to cultivate ‘good campus relations’. While this differed from the purely juridical language of rights, it also appealed to a liberal imaginary. The ‘good campus relations’ agenda has gradually emerged over the last decade as a series of policy reports have focused attention on relations between student groups (Equality Challenge Unit 2005, 2007), complemented by ongoing research studies exploring issues of religious and cultural diversity on campus (Andersson et al. 2012; Gilliat 2000; Weller et al. 2011). As Dinham and Jones (2012) describe, the emergence of this ‘good campus relations’ agenda in higher education has reflected the development of a broader policy discourse of ‘community cohesion’ following the 2001 ‘race riots’ in northern English towns and the high-profile Cantle Report that followed in 2006. Under the 2010–15 British coalition gov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s foreword
• Introduction: unsettling subjects of justice and ethics
• 1 Contested framings: democratic conflict and the public university
• 2 Finding the words: towards ethical ethnography
• 3 University melodramas: the claim of reason
• 4 Tragic action: ambiguous passions and misrecognition
• 5 Ordinary ethics: conversation, friendship and democratic possibilities
• Conclusion: good relations, free speech and political activism
• Postscript: unfinished conversations
• References
• Index