BY MALAKA SHWAIKH AND REBECCA RUTH GOULD

February 2017 was a watershed month for the Palestine advocacy movement in the UK, although we only later came to realize its significance in our own lives. That month, amid a wave of cancellations of events critical of Israel, we were smeared in mainstream and local print and online newspapers and simultaneously supported and censored by our universities. The following month marked unprecedented censorship of Israeli Apartheid Week events across the UK. As we later learned, these events were linked to UK government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

In the tumultuous year that set the stage for much of what was to follow, Malaka was completing her PhD on Palestinian hunger strikers at the University of Exeter and Rebecca had recently moved to the University of Bristol. Three years after the events detailed below, we told our stories together for the benefit of other academics attacked for their advocacy of Palestinian rights. The full version of our story appeared last month in the academic journal Biography.

Although we did not know each other at that time, we have since become allies and coauthors with a shared interest in and commitment to Palestinian rights. We were attacked by the same organization for statements we had made about Israeli politics several years earlier. In both cases, media outlets distorted our words and in response to these smears, our universities initiated inquiries into our words. Even though they ultimately decided in our favor, the agonizing process was itself problematic and demonstrates the limits to academic freedom in the UK. By intertwining our stories, we aim to contest the university’s institutional complicity in silencing Palestinian voices and perspectives.

Malaka’s Case

I was born in Palestine and my parents were refugees from Jaffa and Beersheba who taught me to not be silent in the face of injustice. I grew up in Gaza, where Israeli violence killed people very close to my heart.

I was targeted on the last day of the elections while running for vice-president of the Exeter Student Guild. An organization—one that came to dominate much of the conversation in the UK concerning antisemitism in universities—tagged me in a tweet that claimed antisemitic graffiti on university residence halls had been ignored by the university. An exchange between the organization and the University of Exeter’s Twitter account showed that the group sought to implicate me in these antisemitic events without evidence, for tweets I had made six years before. The university uncritically adopted my accuser’s guilt-by-association techniques and failed to challenge the unfounded link. In response to the organization’s tweet complaining about my impending election to the student guild, the university responded, “Hi, you can read a statement on antisemitism from our Vice-Chancellor here.” The university reposted this statement without consulting with me or considering my interests.

Despite the mounting attacks I won the election and spoke out against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, in my victory speech. Images of me circulated on social media apparently intended to stoke hatred and fear of Islam, Palestinians, and women in hijabs. Instead of defending my academic freedom, the university treated me as guilty-until-proven-innocent for comments made on Twitter many years before I joined the university. I asked the university to step in and protect me from online threats. After several conversations, university representatives determined that the responsibility to respond lay with the Student Guild, an entity legally autonomous from the university. The university never publicly referenced my academic freedom or free speech rights, or its duty of care toward me, despite their extensive social media involvement that resulted in threatening messages and hostile media commentary.

Rebecca’s Case

My story begins with an article published in the left-wing magazine Counterpunch in 2011, entitled “Beyond Anti-Semitism,” that I wrote while living in Bethlehem. At the time, I was working in Jerusalem and commuting across Palestinian checkpoints, witnessing life both under occupation and within Israel. The article was brought to the attention of UK media outlets by the same organization that had initiated the attack against Malaka.

In January 2017, I was informed by the head of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol that a student who had never spoken to me but who had attended one of my lectures deemed my 2011 article, which he had found on a research profile, antisemitic. The student condemned my article in the student newspaper, initially concealing his name and my own.

The day of Malaka’s victory speech condemning racism and two weeks before Israel Apartheid Week was cancelled and interrupted across UK university campuses, a story appeared in the Telegraph, distorting my words. The head of my school alerted me to the dangers of its presence on a public website. Like Malaka, I was pressured to self-censor from numerous directions. Knowing how reliant I would be on the university’s support in the days ahead, I bent to their pressure (albeit only temporarily; the article is now available here).

When university administrators first learned of my article published four years before joining the university, they appropriately assured me that they saw no grounds for taking any kind of action. Only after the article attracted media attention was a panel convened to render a decision concerning the allegations. I was not informed who comprised the panel, and its findings contained mistakes that could have been corrected had they consulted more closely with me.

Our longer article attests to the censorious tactics becoming normalized across Europe and North America following shifts in governmental positions regarding Israel and Palestine. Meanwhile, efforts to shine a light on Israel’s violations of international law are increasingly stigmatized and censored. What can universities do? As Lori Allen argues, the first step in protecting academic freedom is insuring that the threats to it “be revealed and made a matter of public debate.” Rather than responding in a knee-jerk manner to newspaper headlines, universities should seek to shape these debates by protecting faculty and community members’ rights to extramural speech. While they cannot and should not police speech, they can ensure that academic freedom is equitably applied, and that graduate students and faculty members with controversial views are not penalized for speaking out against injustice.

The guest bloggers are both based in the United Kingdom. Malaka Shwaikh is a lecturer and researcher of peace and conflict at the University of St Andrews. Rebecca Ruth Gould is professor of the Islamic world and comparative literature at the University of Birmingham, director of the ERC-funded project Global Literacy Theory, and author of The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).