# Biographical Reflections on Academic Freedom-Part Two

Didier Bigo, Emma Mc Cluskey, Jim Johnston, Mathias Delori, Laurent Bonnefoy

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Didier Bigo, Emma Mc Cluskey, Jim Johnston, Mathias Delori, Laurent Bonnefoy. Biographical Reflections on Academic Freedom-Part Two. Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS), 2024, 5 (2), pp.119-165. 10.1163/25903276-bja10064. hal-04928873

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# Biographical Reflections on Academic Freedom—
## Part Two

PARISS Collective<fnref n="1" />

parisseditorial@gmail.com

Received 4 November 2024 | Accepted 5 November 2024 |

Published online 10 December 2024

## Abstract

This paper continues our collective reflections on academic freedom in the context of Israel's war on Palestine, and now Lebanon. As academic suppression has flourished within Europe and beyond, a broad constellation of actors has been drawn into the conversation. In this article, we renew 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 the profound deterioration of academic freedom. The first intervention looks to the USA, examining the use of diffuse surveillance, and 'free speech' groups to chill academic discussion in the classroom. The second reflection examines the instrumentalization of the fight against antisemitism in order to silence criticisms of Israel in Germany, and the broad cultural and institutional context which underpins this trend. Lastly, the final intervention highlights the varied recompositions in French academia in wartime, arguing these occur less because of polarization within academia itself, than because of the attitude of external actors which puts pressure on academics.

## Keywords

academic freedom – conflict – capitalism – war – ukraine – palestine – university – freedom of assembly

<footnote n="1">1 This is a collective article, published under the name 'PARISS collective', consisting of (Corresponding author) Didier Bigo, Emma McCluskey, Jim Johnson, Mathias Delori and Laurent Bonnefoy. Each author, however, is responsible for their own contribution, and names of respective authors are listed next to the title of each intervention. The order of contributions (and order of authors who constitute PARISS Collective) has been chosen randomly.</footnote>
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,<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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".<fnref n="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.

<footnote n="2">2 United Nations, Rights expert urges universities to respect pro-Palestinian protests, 4th October 2024 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1155376.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 Le Monde International, Des employés des agences publiques de développement remettent en cause la position de la France sur les guerres au Proche-Orient, 24th October 2024 https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/10/24/des-employes-des-agences-publiques-de-developpement-francaises-remettent-en-cause-la-position-de-la-france-sur-les-guerres-au-proche-orient.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 Collège des Sociétés savantes académiques de France Publication du communiqué: « De l'importance pour les tutelles de défendre la liberté académique », 18th October 2024 https://societes-savantes.fr/publication-du-communique-de-l-importance-pour-les-tutelles-de-defendre-la-liberte-academique/ See more about this NGO at societes-savantes.fr.</footnote>
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].<fnref n="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

<footnote n="5">5 DeMatteo, Lynda, and Mariella Pandolfi. “Anthropology from Dissonance to Ambiguity: Breaking the Deadlock.” *Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences* (PARISS) 1, no. 1 (2020): 39–60.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="6">6 The University of Chicago. Report on the University's Role in Political and Social Action, Accessed 19th October 2024, https://provost.uchicago.edu/reports/report-universitys-role-political-and-social-action.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="7">7 For an approach about the boundaries of democracy, the major book of Jacques Rancière is still a landmark Rancière, J. (1995). *On the shores of politics*. Verso.</footnote>
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 we can 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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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).<fnref n="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.<fnref n="11" />

<footnote n="8">8 Schrecker, Ellen. "Political Repression and the AAUP from 1915 to the Present: How can we most efficiently defend the imperiled academy?" *Academe*, Vol. 109.4, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Wilson, Ralph, and Kamola Isaac. *Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War*. Pluto Press (UK), 2021; MacLean, Nancy. 2018. *Democracy in Chains*. Penguin Books; MacLean, Nancy. *Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America*. Penguin, 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Edsall, Thomas. "Behold the Free Speech Chutzpah of the Republican Party." *New York Times*, Sept 6, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Young, Jeremy, Jonathan Friedman, and Kasey Meehan. *America's Censored Classrooms: Lawmakers Shift Strategies as Resistance Rises*. PEN America report, 2023.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="12">¹² Stone, Peter. "Money and misinformation: how Turning Point USA became a formidable pro-Trump force." *The Guardian*. October 23, 2021.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Tiede, Hans-Joerg. "Exhuming McCarthy (Meet Me at the Book Burning): Faculty members respond to the Professor Watchlist." *Academe*, Vol. 103.5, 2017.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="14">14 Edsall, Thomas. "Behold the Free Speech Chutzpah of the Republican Party." *New York Times*, Sept 6, 2023.</footnote>
demonstrate their relevance for all.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="15">15 Young, Jeremy, Jonathan Friedman, and Kasey Meehan. *America's Censored Classrooms: Lawmakers Shift Strategies as Resistance Rises*. PEN America report, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 German weapon delivery to Israel increased tenfold in 2023 compared to 2022. 84% of the 2023 export licenses were authorized between October 7 and November 2, 2023. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/israel-deutschland-ruestungsexporte-100.html (consulted on October 10, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 This declaration can be found on page 60 of the application of South Africa's proceedings against the State of Israel of December 29, 2023. https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf (consulted on October 10, 2024).</footnote>
proceeding about Germany's complicity in genocide on March 1st, 2024,<fnref n="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 significantly<fnref n="19" /> 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".<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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,<fnref n="22" /> and, more recently, by Paul Ricoeur who argued that a healthy relation to the past should take the

<footnote n="18">18 On April 30, 2024, the ICJ ruled against Nicaragua's request to take provisional measures against Germany, but the court also declined Germany's request to drop the case. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/193 (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 https://www.reuters.com/world/germany-has-stopped-approving-war-weapons-exports-israel-source-says-2024-09-18/ (consulted on October 15, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/baerbock-gazastreifen-israel-hamas-1.6339143 (consulted on October 15, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Karl Jaspers, *Die Schuldfrage*, Heidelberg, Lambert Schneider Verlag, 1946.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Theodor Adorno, "Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?", in: Theodor Adorno (dir), *Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. 10.2*, Frankfurt a.M., 1977 (1959), pp. 555–572, Theodor Adorno, *Erziehung nach Auschwitz. Version en ligne sur*: https://www staff.uni-giessen.de/~g31130/PDF/polphil/ErziehungAuschwitzOffBrief.pdf (*consulté le 24/5/2018*), Frankfurt., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971 (1966).</footnote>
form of a *travail de mémoire* (memory work).<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="25" /> These attacks against freedom of expression and academic freedom<fnref n="26" /> had taken an extreme form one month before our conference, in April 2024, during the organization of the Palestine congress. Two conferencers – 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,<fnref n="27" /> had just been called “antisemitic”

<footnote n="23">23 Paul Ricoeur, *La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli*, Paris, Seuil, 2000.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 https://cmb.hu-berlin.de/kalender/termin/responsabilite-historique-et-staatsraeson (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 The collective "Archive of silence" keeps a record of the cancellation of events and disinvitation in the German academic and artistic fields. https://bricup.org.uk/article/german-academics-publish-archive-of-silence-listing-instances-of-censorship-on-palestine/ (consulted on October 10, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Freedom of expression is the human right to say or write what one thinks. Academic freedom encompasses the rights of researchers, teachers and students as member of the academic community. Both are protected and limited by law and ethical norms. There are several concepts or "versions" of freedom of expression and academic freedom. Stanley Fish, *Versions of Academic Freedom. From Professionalism to Revolution*, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Moshe Zuckermann, *Der allgegenwärtige Antisemit oder die Angst der Deutschen vor der Vergangenheit*, Frankfurt am Main, Westend, 2018.</footnote>
by the German authorities.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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,<fnref n="31" /> reconciliation,<fnref n="32" /> othering,<fnref n="33" /> and liberal
violence.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="35" />

<footnote n="28">28 https://www.lebenshaus-alb.de/magazin/015060.html (consulted on October 5, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 https://thedigradio.com/podcast/the-german-question-w-emily-dische-becker/ (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 On the democratic challenges posed by the massacre of October 7th and its consequences in Germany, see: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sprechen-in-zeiten-des-gaza-kriegs-100.html (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 Mathias Delori, *La réconciliation franco-allemande. Les oublis de la mémoire*, Les cahiers d'histoire. Numéro spécial. N°100. Dossier coordonné par Mathias Delori, 2007.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Mathias Delori, “Amity Symbolism as a Resource for Conflict Resolution. The Case of Franco-German Relations”, in: Martin Chung et Annika Frieberg (dir), *Reconciling with the Past. Resources and Obstacles in a Global Perspective*, Routledge, 2017, pp. 29–53.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 Mathias Delori et Vron Ware, "The faces of enmity in international relations. Special issue coordinated by Mathias Delori and Vron Ware", *Critical Military Studies*, 5–4, 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 Mathias Delori, *Ce que vaut une vie. Théorie de la violence libérale*, Paris, Editions Amsterdam, 2021, Mathias Delori, “Humanitarian violence. How French airmen kill or let die in order to make live”, *Critical Military Studies*, 5/4, 2019, pp. 322–340.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 I also thank Laurent Bonnefoy and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="38" /> Another problem is the epistemic erasure of the *Nakba*<fnref n="39" /> or, when it is thematized, its framing as an event Germany bears no responsibility for.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="41" /> It generates more security (or a feeling thereof)

<footnote n="36">36 Susan Neiman, *Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil*, London, Penguin, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 Alexandra Oeser, “History”, in: Felicitas Macgilchrist et Rosalie Metro (dir), *Trickbox of Memory: Essays on Power and Disorderly Pasts*, Punctumbooks, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and Genocide”, in: Dan Stone (dir), *The Historiography of the Holocaust*, London, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004, pp. 533–555, Michael Rothberg, *Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization*, Standford University Press, 2009; Kalisky A., “D’un génocide à l’autre. Des références à la Shoah dan s les approches scientifiques du génocide des Tutsi”, *Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah*, 181(2), 2004, pp. 411–438.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39 This erasure culminates when the police ban commemorations of the *Nakba*. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/05/20/berlin-bans-nakba-day-demonstrations (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 Sarah El Bulbeisi, *Tabu, Trauma und Identität. Subjekkonstruktionen von PalästinenserInnen in Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1960–2015* Bielefeld, 2020, 2020, Hannah Tzuberi et Nahed Samour, “The German State and the Creation of Un/Desired Communities”, *Condending Modernities*, February 22, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 Didier Bigo et Tsoukala Anastassia, *Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (In)security Games*, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2006.</footnote>
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).<sup>42</sup>

Whether Neiman was right or wrong to praise the German *Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung*, there is little doubt that it has gone “haywire” – as Neiman recently acknowledged<sup>43</sup> – during the last few years. So have the “anti-antisemitism complex”,<sup>44</sup> 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”.<sup>45</sup> 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,<sup>46</sup> 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.”<sup>47</sup>

<footnote n="42">42 Daniel Marwecki, *Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding*, London, Hurst, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Susan Neiman, “Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire”, *New York Review of Books*, October 19, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 Lorenzo Veracini, “Germany’s anti-antisemitic complex and the question of settler colonialism”, *Settler Colonial Studies*, pp. 1–18.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45 Keith Krause et Michael C Williams, “Preface: Towards Critical Security Studies”, in: Keith Krause et Michael C Williams (dir), *Critical Security Studies*, London, UCL Press, 1997, pp. vii–xxiii.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46 Mosche Zuckermann, ‘Antisemit!’. *Ein Vorwurf als Herrschaftsinstrument*, Promedia Verlag, 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47 Emily Dische-Becker, George Prochnik et Eyal Weizman, “Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part 1 (July 20, 2022)”, *Granta*. https://granta.com/once-again-germany-defines-who-is-a-jew-part-i/, 2022. On Lindner's attempt to reduce these pensions, see: https://www.zeit.de/2022/45/zahlungen-holocaust-ueberlebende-christian-lindner (consulted on October 6, 2024).</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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.”<fnref n="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.

<footnote n="48">48 https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism (consulted on October 5, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 Neve Gordon, “Antisemitism and Zionism: The Internal Operations of the IHRA Definition”, *Middle East Critique*, 33, 2024, pp. 345–360.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50 https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/04/04/human-rights-and-other-civil-society-groups-urge-united-nations-respect-human (consulted on October 5, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 Emily Dische-Becker, George Prochnik et Eyal Weizman, “Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part 1 (July 20, 2022)”, op. cit.</footnote>
His work has contributed to shed some light on the under-scrutinized far-
right antisemitism.<fnref n="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)”.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="52">52 Jamie Allinson, “The Necropolitics of Drone”, *International Political Sociology*, 9, 2015, pp. 113–127.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53 https://jerusalemdeclaration.org (consulted on October 6th 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54 On German philosemitism, see the seminal work of Frank Stern: Frank Stern, “Philosemitism – The whitewashing of the yellow badge in West-Germany”, *Holocaust and Genocide Studies*, 4, 1989, pp. 463–477.</footnote>
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”.<fnref n="55" /> A more radical version externalizes antisemitism and transfers guilt to racialized minorities. Arabs and Muslims are framed, in a good Orientalist fashion,<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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 metaphor<fnref n="58" /> – 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”.<fnref n="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,<fnref n="60" /> Palestinians are framed as objects of public discourse<fnref n="61" /> or, to use Spivak’s terminology, as subalterns.<fnref n="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,

<footnote n="55">55 https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/scholz-antisemitismus-deutschland-100.html (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="56">56 Edward W Said, *Orientalism*, New York, Vintage Book, 1978.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57 Esra Özyürek, “Muslim Minorities as Germany’s Past Future: Islam Critics, Holocaust Memory, and Immigrant Integration”, *Memory Studies*, 15(1), 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58 Judith Butler, *Frames of War. When is Life Grievable?*, London, Brooklyn, Verso, 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">59 Hans Kundnani, “The failure of Germany’s memory culture”, *Project Muse. University of Pennsylvania Press*, 71–2, 2024, pp. 66–73, p. 72.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60 Hanan Badr et Nahed Samour, *Arab Berlin. Dynamics of Transformation*, Transcripts, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61 Hanan Toukan, “Refusing Epistemic Violence: Guernica-Gaza and the ‘German Context’” (https://www.afterall.org/articles/refusing-epistemic-violence-guernica-gaza-and-the-german-context/#footnote-reference-6-1-0470)”, *Afterall*, 57, 2024.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in: Nelson Cary et Larry Crossberg (dir), *Marxism and the interpretation of Culture*, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–316.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="66" /> Whatever one thinks of Hage’s post<fnref n="67" /> and his response,<fnref n="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

<footnote n="63">63 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/27/german-minister-says-she-was-only-applauding-israeli-filmmaker-at-berlinale (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64 He is the author of many books on the topic. The last one is: Ghassan Hage, *The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism: White Nation, Against Paranoid Nationalism & Later Writings*. Sydney: Sweatshop, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">65 https://www.mpg.de/21510445/statement-ghassan-hage (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66 https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/chef-der-max-planck-gesellschaft-uber-israel-wissenschaft-kann-selbst-in-aussichtslosen-situationen-brucken-bauen-10893949.html (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="67">67 https://magazin.zeitneth.de/gesellschaft/forschung-deutschland-und-der-gaza-krieg (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="68">68 https://arena.org.au/statement-regarding-my-sacking/ (consulted on October 10, 2024).</footnote>
Israel perpetrates apartheid and genocide, but it is being debated in academic events and in the mainstream media.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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*.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="73" /> Yet this statistic also fuels Elad Lapidot’s analysis regarding the common epistemic basis of antisemitism and anti-antisemitism.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="75" />

<footnote n="69">69 Bartov Omer, “What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide”, New York Times, November 10, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">70 https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/management/max-planck-gesellschaft-trennt-sich-von-ghassan-hage-6228 (consulted on October 9, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">71 Following Bourdieu, I call “nomos” the cognitive and normative matrixes which a social agents take for granted within a given social field. Bourdieu applied this notion to the academic field in: Pierre Bourdieu, *Homo Academicus*, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1984.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">72 https://thedigradio.com/podcast/the-german-question-w-emily-dische-becker/ (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="73">73 Following the example of Moshe Zuckermann, some Jews do make fun of those accusations of antisemitism coming from German secular institutions: “I can boast of having been officially classified as an anti-Semite by the German government”. https://overton-magazin.de/top-story/ich-darf-mich-ruehmen-von-der-bundesregierung-offiziell-als-antisemit-eingestuft-worden-zu-sein/ (consulted on October 3, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="74">74 Elad Lapidot, *Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism*, Albany, SUNY Press, 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">75 Jean-Paul Sartre, *Réflexions sur la question juive*, Paris, Paul Morihien, 1946.</footnote>
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 Buberian<fnref n="76" /> 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.<fnref n="77" /> Mbembe, an internationally renowned specialist of postcolonial theory, was invited to give a talk at the *Rührtriennale* 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,<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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-right<fnref n="80" /> 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.<fnref n="81" />

<footnote n="76">76 On the interest of Martin Buber's thought in the current context, see: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/martin-buber-zu-den-antisemitischen-massakern-von-1929-19309954.html (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="77">77 Collective, “Palestine Between German Memory Politics and (De-)Colonial Thought”, *Journal of Genocide Research*, 23, 2021, pp. 374–382.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">78 Natan Sznaider, “The Summer of Discontent: Achille Mbembe in Germany”ibid., pp. 412–419.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">79 Gert Krell, “Germany, Israel’s Security, and the Fight against Anti-Semitism: Shadows from the Past and Current Tensions”, *Analyse & Kritik*, 46–1, 2024, pp. 141–164.</footnote>

<footnote n="80">80 https://table.media/research/standpunkt/die-aktivitaeten-des-netzwerks-wissen-schaftsfreiheit-sollten-uns-mit-tiefster-sorge-erfuellen/ (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="81">81 https://aoc.media/opinion/2024/02/26/terreur-postcoloniale-en-alamagne-la-fabrique-dune-panique-morale/ (consulted on October 14, 2023).</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="84" />

At the time of this press release, on October 23, 2023, the publicly documented massacre of Palestinians, including scholars and students,<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="82">82 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-12-10/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/in-germany-a-witch-hunt-rages-against-israel-critics-many-have-had-enough/0000017f-dbod-df0f-a17f-df4fa21b0000.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">83 Press release of the *Hochschulrektorenkonferenz* of November 15, 2023. https://www.hrk.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/pressemitteilung/meldung/hrk-fordert-entschiedenes-eintreten-gegen-antisemitismus-an-hochschulen-5016/ (consulted on October 9, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="84">84 https://www.hu-berlin.de/de/pr/nachrichten/oktober-2023/nr-231012-1 (consulted on October 5, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="85">85 https://pomeps.org/the-hidden-war-on-higher-education-unmasking-the-educide-in-gaza (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="86">86 Judith Butler, *Frames of War. When is Life Grievable?, op. cit*, p. 38.</footnote>
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”.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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.”<fnref n="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

<footnote n="87">87 Judith Butler, *Frames of War. When is Life Grievable?*, op. cit., p. 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">88 https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/10/23/germany-bans-public-grieving-and-solidarity-with-palestine/ (consulted on October 4, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="89">89 Emily Dische-Becker, George Prochnik et Eyal Weizman, “Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part II (November 1, 2023)”, *Granta*. https://granta.com/once-again-germany-defines-who-is-a-jew-part-ii, 2022.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">90 Emily Dische-Becker, George Prochnik et Eyal Weizman, “Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part II (November 1, 2023)”, op. cit.</footnote>
their institution.<fnref n="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*,<fnref n="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,<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="95" />

<footnote n="91">91 https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2023/fup_23_300-stellungnahme-aktion-hoersaal/index.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">92 Jacques Derrida, "The university without condition", *Without Alibi*, Redwood City, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 202–237.</footnote>

<footnote n="93">93 On the ethical and historical importance of critique in the present context, see: Didier Fassin, *Une étrange défaite. Sur le consentement à l'écrasement de Gaza*, Paris, La Découverte, 2024.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">94 Ferdinand de Saussure, *Cours de linguistique générale*, Paris, Bally et Sechehaye, 1971.</footnote>

<footnote n="95">95 Achille Mbembe, “Qu’est-ce que la pensée post-coloniale? Entretien avec Achille Mbembe”, *Esprit*, Décembre, 2006, pp. 117–133, p. 120.</footnote>
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 5479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors had been killed.<fnref n="96" /> Six months later,

<footnote n="96">96 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza (consulted on October 10, 2024).</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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”.<fnref n="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*.<fnref n="99" /> Some academics resist<fnref n="100" /> but others seem to be willing to surrender without condition.

<footnote n="97">97 https://www.hu-berlin.de/en/press-portal/nachrichten-en/october-2024/nr-24108
(consulted on October 20, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="98">98 https://www.dw.com/en/when-germany-targets-jewish-artists-as-antisemitic/a-70180570 (consulted on October 8, 2024).</footnote>

<footnote n="99">99 Jacques Derrida, "The university without condition", op. cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="100">100 https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2024-08/resolution-zum-schutz-juedischen-lebens-bundestag-kultur-reaktion (consulted on October 14, 2024).</footnote>
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.<fnref n="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’.<fnref n="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’.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="101">101 Nordstrom, Carolyn. *A Different Kind of War Story*, Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 272 p.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">102 For more on the publications of the project, see: https://pomeps.org/category/memos/the-middle-east-and-middle-east-studies-after-gaza-memos.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">103 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 'War on the front lines' in Robben & Nordstrom (eds.), *Fieldwork under Fire. Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival*, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 137.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">104 Baczko, Adam, and Gilles Dorronsoro. "For a Sociological Approach to Civil Wars", *Revue française de science politique*, vol. 67, no. 2, 2017, pp. 309-327.</footnote>
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.<fnref n="105" /> The context of Israeli-Palestinian conflict has also been described as one which produces a specific economy of expertise and ‘peace business’.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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

<footnote n="105">105 Literature on the topic is varied: Boyer, Dominic. "Thinking Through the Anthropology of Experts", *Anthropology in Action*, vol. 15, n°2, 2008, pp. 38–46. See also Miller, David and Mills, Tom, "Counterinsurgency and terror expertise: the integration of social scientists in the war effort", *Cambridge Review of International Affairs*, vol. 23, n°2, 2010, pp. 203–221; Rakowski, Cathy. "The Ugly Scholar: Neocolonialism and Ethical Issues in International Relations", The American Sociologist 24, 3–4 (1993), 69–86. and Bliesemann de Guevara, Berit (ed.). Knowledge Production in Conflict: the International Crisis Group, *Third World Quarterly* (special issue) 35, 4 (2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="106">106 Bouillon, Markus. *The Peace-Business. Money and Power in the Palestine-Israel Conflict*, London: IB Tauris, 2004, 272 p.</footnote>

<footnote n="107">107 Nordstrom, Carolyn. 'War on the front lines' in Robben & Nordstrom (eds.), *Fieldwork under Fire. Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival*, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 310 p.</footnote>

<footnote n="108">108 Venayre, Sylvain. "L'art de choisir ses victimes. Ce que nous apprend l'histoire des guerres lointaines de l'Europe", *La revue du Crieur* 23 (2023), 6–21.</footnote>
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,<fnref n="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.<fnref n="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.

<footnote n="109">109 Bonnefoy, Laurent. "Revolution, War, and Transformations in Yemeni Studies", *MERIP*, 301, 2021, online.</footnote>

<footnote n="110">110 Early on in his career, Robert King Merton specified the four imperatives that determine "*the social structures which provide an institutional context*" for scientific development. He mentioned 'communism' (favouring collaboration), 'universalism' (existence of "pre-established impersonal criteria"), 'disinterestedness' (acting for the benefit of common scientific knowledge), and 'organised skeptcism' (detached critical scrutiny). Through these he advocated for a sociological study of scientific institutions. Merton, Robert K. "The Normative Structure of Science (1942)", in Merton, Robert K. (ed.), *The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations*, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 267–278.</footnote>
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 publication<fnref n="111" /> 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.

<footnote n="111">111 Cooley, Alexande. "The Uprisings of Gaza: How Geopolitical Crises Have Reshaped Academic Communities from Tahrir to Kyiv", *Political Science Quarterly* (2024), online.
112 *PARISS* Collective. "Biographical Reflections On Academic Freedom – Part One", *Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences* (*PARISS*) 5, 1 (2024): 5–37.</footnote>
Fragmented Fields

*An Unwritten Etiquette*

Interest for the Levant among academics in France is part of an old tradition. Starting with Christian congregations which developed projects in archaeology in the late 19th century, orientalists serving as diplomats such as Paul-Emile Botta helped gradually establish French institutions, based in Israel and Palestine, that are still active today. These have funded, trained or accompanied generations of specialists of the history and societies of the region that is typically called the Near-East in France.

The Ecole biblique et archéologique française (established in 1890) headed by Dominican friars in East-Jerusalem, the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO, originally established under another name in 1922 in Damascus, and with a dedicated branch in the Palestinian territories), and the Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem (CRFJ, originating in 1952, and which encourages research on Israeli history and society) all contribute to fostering a field of specialists in all disciplines of the humanities. The last two are government funded (managed jointly by the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique – my own employer) and the French ministry of Foreign Affairs) and have few equivalents in these territories except the Kenyon Institute which acts as the Jerusalem branch of the Council for British Research in the Levant. The two French public research centers offer access to the field as well as scholarships, organize conferences, maintain specialized libraries, and manage collective projects, including ones funded by the European Research Council. They operate mainly in collaboration with French or European universities, as well as with local academic institutions. While they are not the exclusive actors operating in the French academic field – some researchers may prefer to carry out work independently, or through other channels, including ones linked to political or religious movements, they play an important role in structuring the field and embody the ethics of public research in France, guaranteeing a standard level of academic freedom (free choice of research object, anonymity of informants if necessary, possibility to develop critical approaches, including of public policies and institutions).

Active researchers, whether historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, like Veronique Bontemps, Sylvaine Bulle, Sarah Daoud, Alain Dieckhoff, Kamel Doraï, Stephanie Latte-Abdallah, Vincent Lemire, Sbeih Sbeih, Yann Scioldo-Zürcher, Frédérique Shillo, and Dany Trom have all at some point been affiliated or collaborated with either of these two research centres. Their works continue to feed the bibliography in French, English, Arabic and other languages on a wide range of scientific objects.

Due to the areas they operate in and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict itself, both the IFPO and the CRFJ are dominated by a seemingly antagonistic
institutional culture that is evidently politically loaded, and can involve biases. Despite being located only a few kilometres away in Jerusalem (but on each side of the so-called 'Green line' separating East and West which serves as the basis for the border between the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel according to UN resolutions), being affiliated with one or the other can mean very different things when it comes to analysing the conflict, creating bonds with informants and academic institutions or think-tanks. While some of the successive directors of IFPO and CRFJ and researchers may have tried to bridge differences, polarization due to the almost century old conflict has its own implications on the way the fields of Israeli and Palestinian studies, to a large extent separate, are structured in France.

When they intersected or collided, the unwritten etiquette of academic production and the claim to maintain debates at a so-called rational level have yet for long controlled the division in departments or research centres with a focus on Middle Eastern studies. Mertonian norms of modern science appeared to be preserved. A generally "pacific coexistence" prevailed and it did not entail accusing colleagues of infamy or illegitimacy, at least not within universities. It however episodically did not prevent the cancellation of events organized for instance by student unions in solidarity with Palestinians like in Aix-en-Provence University in November 2022, despite the participation of renown academics.

## Research, Expertise, Activism

Evidently, intersections with activism exist among researchers affiliated with French academic institutions working on either Israel or Palestine due to the political context and their personal trajectories and identities. Focus on international law, colonial practices, debates on apartheid or calls for an academic boycott of Israel are then present, although probably less structured than in North America. These favour the emergence of specific 'activist scholars'<fnref n="113" />, probably more active in the sub-field of Palestinian studies due to the structuration of an active civil society and important political mobilizations. The dilemmas induced by such a position are neither specific nor new. They have been the object of much methodological and epistemic debates recently.<fnref n="114" />

<footnote n="113">113 Bird, Gemma, and Liska Bernet. "Reflections from 'the Field': the Activist and the Activist Scholar in Conversation", *Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences* (PARISS) 3, 2 (2022): 144–167.</footnote>

<footnote n="114">114 Bashiri, Farzana. "Conceptualizing Scholar-Activism Through Scholar-Activist Accounts." In *Making Universities Matter*, 61-. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2024. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-48799-6_4.</footnote>
The intersections between academic circles focusing on Palestine and Israel with the field of expertise, which has developed an important access to public space, also exist. A number of figures often heard in French media and solicited by public institutions (like the ministry of Foreign affairs or the presidency) can claim an affiliation with a university, often as a teacher, but have a production that is poorly linked to disciplinary standards, in particular in terms of methodology and connections to the field, and often rightly seen as biased.<fnref n="115" /> In the eyes of the public, their interventions can blur the borders between a scientifically informed knowledge, one which sticks with a scientific ethos, and politically loaded commentary. These can negatively affect conceptions of what academic production actually is and entails, for example in terms of peer-reviewing and data collection, protection and disinterested sharing.

These intersections can help define a number of structural differences between categories of expertise and academia. The aim here is certainly not to engage in a blame-game or to stigmatize the production of expertise by think tanks or in-depth reporting from certain media whose journalists have become specialists of so-called 'Palestinian' or 'Israeli' affairs, or of the 'conflict of the Near-East', nor to claim the alleged purity of scientific research. The production of knowledge (understood in a broad sense as the accumulation of data and its analysis, most often along implicit subjective lines and values) is always structured around dilemmas and mixed methods, at times even taking the form of political activism. Nevertheless, expertise can be defined as an instrumental production of knowledge intended mainly to guide decision making, be it in public institutions or in companies. Research, for its part, is embedded in disciplinary questions and mostly based on long-term fieldwork, implying an overspecialization on objects and areas as well as the belonging to a self-delimitated epistemic community. Its main focus is ideally independent from demands formulated by political powers – although it remains at times permeable to these, in particular in political science and international relations. Yet, one of the cornerstones of research, in particular when it projects itself as 'critical', is self-reflexiveness. The fact researchers remain tied to “their” field for decades implies specific challenges when it comes to transparency and

<footnote n="115">115 Frédéric Encel is a good example. A specialist in geopolitics, formerly a member of Zionist extreme-right groups such as the Betar, he teaches at Sciences Po and is a regular speaker on public radio on issues liked to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In parallel, he participates to pro-Israeli lectures. One of these, organized in late May 2024 by an NGO called Diploact France which aims to “reshape the global narrative on Israel” presented on its invitation Frédéric Encel as a “professional in the defense of Israel”. https://x.com/DidierBillion/status/1790260984025665762.</footnote>
ethics, also generating frequent mechanisms of sympathy and friendship. The management of these feelings built in the long run becomes a significant issue in war-torn societies.

## Researchers under Israeli Pressure

Building on such conditions of knowledge production, for academics focusing on Palestinian and Israeli societies, the attacks of October 7, 2023 on civilians and the military in the vicinity of the Gaza strip were hardly surprising. Research on Palestinian political mobilizations had widely highlighted the persistence of activism and armed militancy despite repression by the Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian issue was still very much depicted as alive regardless of its disappearance from the international media and diplomatic agendas over the decade before. Publications focused on how Islamist and nationalist movements had restructured around a new generation of militants and a military wing created within Hamas and other armed groups, in and out of the Gaza strip. The livelihoods of Palestinians (concerned for example by what Stéphanie Latte-Abdallah labels a 'prison web' and the fact that around 40% of the adult male population has at some point been held in custody by Israelis<fnref n="116" />) was generating desperation and frustration. The Israeli repression of pacific marches in 2018–2019 which had left 270 Palestinian protestors dead and 25,000 wounded (including more than 7,000 by bullets shot by the Israeli army) over the course of a little over a year according to UN figures was undoubtedly feeding violence. In parallel, the political field in Israel was 'radicalizing' election after election, and the state was being appropriately analysed through its all-encompassing colonial structures.

A global epistemic community of researchers, with an increasing implication of Palestinian academics and some Israelis like Ilan Pappe and Eyal Weizman, was already confronted to restrictions coming from the Israeli government in terms of mobility and access. Gaza itself was generally out of bounds for foreign researchers due to the policy of Israel which fully controlled entries, repeatedly refusing to grant entry to academics. Over the years, numerous French academics working on the Palestinian territories were barred entry into Jerusalem, rejected access to the Ben Gurion international airport, imposed entry through the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the West Bank – but under Israeli control, expelled, and almost systematically questioned for hours by Israeli officials at border crossings or at checkpoints. They had their phones, computers and personal items searched in the name of security, often ending

<footnote n="116">116 Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, *A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web*, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, 416 p.</footnote>
up in their underwear for a body search. While journalists affiliated with Western mainstream media would consider this policy as a clear violation of the freedom of press, this remains the standard experience of academics who focus on Palestinian society and of ones seen as critical of Israeli policies. It highlights the urgency of mechanisms of protection for academics in all contexts, including in ones described as democratic.

While these political and social dynamics were being highlighted in academic publications, lectures and interventions in the media, they were also faced with accusations by pro-Israeli government outlets or in the social media – outside of academia itself. Manifest attempts by certain groups and organizations, including members of French Parliament and members of government, to create an equivalence between the critique of Israel and of Zionism with antisemitism repeatedly put pressure on public speech and on the expressions of academics.<fnref n="117" /> World renown sociologist Edgar Morin, an active resistant to Nazism during the Second World War, had been sued in 2002 by pro-Israeli government groups for an op-ed in *Le Monde*. It took four years of procedure to decide that his critique of Israeli policies had to with the freedom of expression, and not with antisemitism.

As elsewhere in Western Europe and North America, the polarization of the academic fields was certainly growing. It appeared to be somewhat cyclical, connected to the state of the stalemate in the Near-East and then often fuelled by public intellectuals or political activists more than between academics themselves, or by students. No equivalent to the infamous *Campus Watch* in the United States which serves since 2002 as an aggressive pro-Israeli government whistle blower in universities<fnref n="118" /> appeared to exist in the French scene. As a consequence, despite evident fragmentation and polarization, the space of academic expression and ethos were then to a certain extent preserved in what may have seemed like an ivory tower.

## Increased Pressures after October 7

### *Beyond Sideration*

The coordinated attacks of October 7th, 2023 in Israel left many in shock. The military response by the Israeli army, leaving tens of thousands of

<footnote n="117">117 Vidal, Dominique. *Antisionisme = antisémitisme? Réponse à Emmanuel Macron*, Paris: Libertalia, 2018, 128 p.</footnote>

<footnote n="118">118 Benin, Joel. "The Israelization of American Middle East Policy Discourse", *Social Text* (2003) 21 (2 (75)): 125-140.</footnote>
Palestinian civilians dead and the whole of the Gaza strip turned to rubble generated massive debates and criticism, including among Israelis, and within international academic circles. The successive rulings by the International Criminal Court calling for Israel to halt its war highlighted the plausibility of genocide and yet had little if any effect on the military strategy of the Israeli government. It did not either transform the policies of most governments, North American or European, which supported Israel's so-called right to self-defence – a category that specialists of international law frequently view as specious.<fnref n="119" />

Both the attack of 2023 and the subsequent war – chapters of a century old confrontation, appear to have deep implications, transforming the ‘warscape’ of French academia on Palestine and Israel. The level of preservation of the scientific ethos was then evidently put to test, less because of internal competition to the field than because of external interventions. The most manifest implication is linked to the rise of institutional scrutiny on what academics say or publish, pushing forward an ever-extensive definition of what antisemitism and support for ‘terrorism’ mean. While mobilizations in solidarity with Palestinians by students in universities across the globe deserve a specific scrutiny, pressures on academic freedom are somewhat different as they target actors with a status linked to their domain of expertise and potential support by a community of peers.

The days following the attacks launched by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups against civilians and military which left 1,143 dead and 251 hostage became a trying period. Instantly, ministries advised local authorities in France to be especially cautious. On October 9th, the minister of Higher education Sylvie Retailleau in particular sent a directive to the presidents of public universities inviting them to transfer the names of people (teachers, researchers, employees and students) who could be seen as supporting Hamas, developing non-conforming ideas and ideological “drifts” (“dérives”). Such a letter was paving the way for denunciations, as well as self-censorship among academics. Three days later, the chairman of the CNRS, Antoine Petit, wrote a letter to all of the 32,000 CNRS employees stating: “*CNRS employees may speak publicly. They have complete freedom of expression, provided they do not use their position to express their personal political or philosophical opinions.*” He then added that “*any infringement of memory laws (lois mémorielles*<fnref n="120" />), *apology for*

<footnote n="119">119 Rezagui, Insaf. « Israël a-t-il, le droit de se défendre? », Yaani, April 25, 2024: https://www.yaani.fr/post/isra%C3%ABI-a-t-il-le-droit-de-se-d%C3%Agfendre.</footnote>

<footnote n="120">120 In France, these *lois mémorielles* generally refer to four distinct laws adopted by parliament which acknowledge the uncontested reality of specific historical events in particular massacres and slavery. The most significant of these laws is the ‘loi Gayssot’</footnote>
terrorism, incitement to hatred or violence or any other breach of the law, may be
subject to criminal and disciplinary proceedings”. No such direct clarification
of the latitude on researchers affiliated with the CNRS had ever occurred
before. The timing and its link to one specific event, that of October 7 attacks
in Israel, was in itself indicative of the types of offenses that could be targeted,
expressing a certain form of pressure of researchers by public institutions.

Consequently, a number of academic meetings that were due soon after the
attacks were postponed, more or less spontaneously by the organizers or by
host institutions. Some were cancelled pure and simple following demands
by the police. Such was the case of a lecture in Montpellier by Joseph Daher
formerly affiliated with the European University Institute of Florence and with
the University of Lausanne. Fayard the publisher since 2008 of the French
translation of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's seminal work *Le nettoyage ethnique
de la Palestine* on the forced displacement of over 700 000 Palestinians in
1948 suddenly retrieved the monograph from its catalogue without giving
explanations. Rights were transferred by the author to an alternative publishing
house La Fabrique.

In at least two instances, specialists of the contemporary Arab World were
denounced by colleagues and faced serious consequences. The first, was forced
to resign from a number of collective positions, for a post on social media that
was interpreted as support for Hamas. Despite a swift removal of the post
and public excuses, his reputation was durably affected. Another scholar,
an anthropologist with a long-lasting interest for Palestinian society, faced
internal charges by the CNRS for forwarding a text on a professional list of her
university that linked the attacks of October 7th to acts of resistance. She was
tried in a "disciplinary procedure" of the CNRS and sanctioned, confronting
her to a range of insults and threats as her case was made public. This very
example highlighted a manifest breach in the unwritten etiquette or ethos of
academic debate with colleagues denouncing colleagues for a political matter,
then rejecting the Mertonian principle of organized skepticism and implicitly
calling for an academic 'witch hunt'.

A month after the beginning of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, another breech
in the unwritten etiquette of academia occurred between renown academics

<footnote>adopted on July 13, 1990 which restricts the expression of doubts regarding the existence
of the crimes against humanity as defined by the International Military Tribunal of
Nuremberg. Its adoption followed a controversy around the publications of Robert
Faurisson, a lecturer in literature at Université Lyon II, who negated the existence of the
Holocaust of the Jews. Since then, making such claims is considered a criminal offence
in France. Many prominent historians have however been critical of these laws. See:
Sébastien Ledoux, *Les lois mémorielles en Europe*, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2020,
264 p.</footnote>
following the publication by Didier Fassin (professor at the Collège de France in anthropology, thus himself not a specialist of Palestinian history) of an article in which he drew a parallel between the genocide of the Hereros in Namibia in 1904 and the war in Gaza.<fnref n="121" /> Days later, in the same online journal, AOC, colleagues of Fassin, including sociologists Dany Trom and Luc Boltanski wrote a slanderous response accusing him of “reactivating a classical antisemitic gesture”.<fnref n="122" /> In another format, the same Didier Fassin further analysed the processes through which the criminalization of solidarity as well as the construction of consent for the massacre of civilians in Gaza were a form of moral defeat and a historical renunciation of French society and elites.<fnref n="123" /> His essay published a year after the beginning of the war, triggered controversy but was yet important as it came from a prestigious academic external to the field of Palestinian studies. Still, the context generated widespread self-censorship among the community of specialists of Palestine in the social sciences, many feeling that the situation was an infringement of their academic freedom.

## Academic Freedom at Risk

Breaches grew deeper as the whole of the public space was being constrained by a number of accusations against discourses seen as pro-Palestinian. Constraints imposed by public authorities in France coalesced both conservative discourses against the so-called woke ideology as embodied by the Observatoire du décolonialisme (which was rebranded Observatoire des ideologies identitaires involving academics such as historian Pierre Vermeren and sociologist Nathalie Heinich), and 'antiterrorism laws'.

Indeed, pressure put on voices seen as sympathetic to Palestine, including among academics, was put into effect through the recycling of a 2014 law against the 'apology of terrorism'. While the law had been voted in the context of the transfer of over a thousand French citizens to the armed front in Syria and Iraq in the mid-2010s and as a way of preventing the spread of such jihadi ideology, it became years later a tool to pressure not only civil society actors, including for example members of workers' unions and local Muslim leaders, but also academics.<fnref n="124" /> Renown international specialist of Islamist movements,

<footnote n="121">121 Fassin, Didier. « Le spectre d'un génocide à Gaza », AOC, November 1, 2023: https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/10/31/le-spectre-dun-genocide-a-gaza/.</footnote>

<footnote n="122">122 Collective. « Un génocide à Gaza? Une réponse à Didier Fassin », AOC, November 13, 2023: https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/11/12/un-genocide-a-gaza-une-reponse-a-didier-fassin/.</footnote>

<footnote n="123">123 Fassin, Didier. *Une étrange défaite. Sur le consentement à l'écrasement de Gaza*, Paris: La découverte, 2024, 198 p.</footnote>

<footnote n="124">124 Bonnefoy Laurent. "In France, freedom of speech flouted and repressed", *Orient XXI*, November 17, 2023: https://orientxxi.info/magazine/in-france-freedom-of-speech-flouted-and-repressed,6883.</footnote>
François Burgat, a former director of IFPO, was summoned for interrogation by the police in July 2024 allegedly for a tweet. At the time of writing, exact charges held against him for ‘apology of terrorism’ had not been made public. In the context of repression of freedom of expression in solidarity with Palestinians, he publicly considered that such an accusation was a “* badge of honour*”.

This form of public pressure unfolded at a specific time. In early 2021, French university had been attacked by the intellectuals close to the Observatoire du décolonialisme, allegedly for being dominated by “*islamo-leftists*”. The accusation had even been repeated by the minister of Higher education Frédérique Vidal as she claimed universities were “*turned gangrenous*” by this ideology, consequently calling for a public inquiry. The CNRS itself, as well as the Conference of presidents of universities, had responded that no such thing as “*islamo-leftism*” existed, giving a temporary halt to these somewhat absurd, but politically loaded accusations.

Universities were further put under pressure as of late September 2023 when the Union des étudiants juifs de France (UEJF) funded a study by Ipsos, one the main French polling institutes, to measure antisemitism within higher education. In the weeks and months after October 7, the report served to dramatize and politicize incidents that would otherwise have gone unnoticed: a professor making bad jokes or the stupid comments of a student. It was followed in mid-2024 by a report by the higher chamber of Parliament, the Senate, to support accusations of widespread antisemitism among students as well as faculty in French universities. The authors of the report, coming from a multipartisan background, gave direct relevance to an impressionistic concept of “*atmosphere antisemitism*” as described by the UEJF in its testimony before the senators.

All these enquiries served to portray a university that was complicit with racist biases against Jews and accused it of turning a blind eye to the issue. It was in this context that a series of lecturers, none with permanent academic positions though or specializing on the Middle East, were sacked paving way to often defaming media campaigns. One teacher had for instance called for academic boycott of Israel in front of his students – some of whom had recorded him to later have it broadcast by a pro-Israeli government social media account Sword of Salomon, then forcing members of government to react.

A highly inflammable object in its own right due to its function as the institution which traditionally (re)produces the political elites in France, Sciences Po embodied in the spring of 2024 the direct involvement of the French government in the stigmatization of universities and social sciences in the context of the war in Gaza. On March 13th, 2024, only weeks after being
nominated as Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal popped up uninvited during a board
of administrators of Sciences Po to scold the institution, claiming it embodied
the impression "*that a fish always rots from the head* [ie. its elites]".125 His
intervention was allegedly a reaction to a mobilization by students in support
of Palestinians that had given way to poorly substantiated accusations of
antisemitism by other students. The pressure put on Sciences Po, irrespective
of academic freedom, served as a means by the government to show its
commitment to tackle what it labelled anti-Jewish discourses. It also was meant
to pay lip-service to anti-elite and anti-woke discourses that had been widely
broadcast among conservative mass media and frequently targeted Sciences
Po. It defamed students that had mobilized and called for internal disciplinary
procedures. Conservative parties followed suit with the head of the Ile-de-
France region, Valerie Pécresse, deciding to defund the university (suspending
a one million Euro budget line) due to a "*radicalized minority advocating for the
hatred of Jews*". She then called for a necessary "*outburst of authority*". In April
and May 2024, and then again in October 2024, police interventions to evacuate
student camps supporting Palestine (a kind of security measure that had never
been taken at Sciences Po before despite numerous student mobilizations and
occupations over its 150 years long history) shocked the academic community.
In October 2024, as a new academic year had started and a new director of
Sciences Po had been elected, four students were accused of chanting pro-
Palestinian slogans at a gathering with companies, thus allegedly defaming
the University. As they were waiting for a disciplinary committee to gather,
they were barred entry in the premises of the university for weeks, forced to
study on-line. For the new director, such a measure was apparently a sign of his
willingness to prove his authority in the eyes of the mass media and decision
makers, as well as in those of private donors. The whole situation highlighted
just how universities are weak institutions in the face of the state (and private
companies), most often largely incapable of generating their own financial
resources, and then subject to such pressure.

These discourses and decisions stigmatizing universities further ended up
putting into question the scientific production of academics, irrespective of
the fact no examples of problematic articles or contributions by specialists of
either Israel or Palestine within the university, Sciences Po or more generally,
could ever be quoted. It also put into question the quality of teachings and of
the knowledge transferred to students, implying these were biased and were

<footnote n="125">125 Bayart, Jean-François. "Sciences Po, Université bananière?", Le club de Mediapart, March 16, 2024: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-francois-bayart/blog/160324/sciences-po-universite-bananiere.</footnote>
feeding antisemitism or even ‘terrorism’. The whole of the sequence clearly highlights just how academic freedom is fragile and how the specific dimensions of research and knowledge production are increasingly instrumentalized by political figures with a populist agenda.

*In Defence of Academic Freedom*

Unsurprisingly, public scrutiny and pressure on the academic field following October 7 triggered reactions within the academic field. Petitions in support of the defense of academic freedom were signed to by impressive numbers either to defend colleagues specifically,<fnref n="126" /> or general principles.<fnref n="127" /> An informal newsletter called Libertés Académiques sur la Palestine (Libacapal) was created by young researchers, aiming to document breaches in academic freedom in France but also beyond. It for instance gave updates on the case of professor of law Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian suspended by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and briefly detained by the police following statements on Zionism.

Among academics in France, the surprise intervention of Gabriel Attal at Sciences Po was also rather unanimously criticized. Professor of public law at Panthéon Assas University, Olivier Beaud described it as a *“blatant violation of academic freedom”*.<fnref n="128" /> Within Sciences Po, a series of texts published by departments and research centres following the Prime Minister's visit also defended students from blunt accusations of antisemitism and rejected political instrumentalization. These called for an increased role of researchers to ease tensions, contextualize and historicize rather than for a public scrutiny of academic discourses. Members of the faculty in Sciences Po were themselves very much aware of issues linked to academic freedom at the international level following the incarceration by Iran of two colleague researchers, Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal. The former had been liberated in mid-October 2023 after more than four years in custody, while the latter had spent nine months in the jails of the Islamic Republic.

<footnote n="126">126 Collective, “François Burgat. Soutien à la liberté d’expression et de recherche”, L’Humanité, July 12, 2024: https://www.humanite.fr/en-debat/libertes-publiques/francois-burgat-soutien-a-la-liberte-dexpression-et-de-recherche.</footnote>

<footnote n="127">127 Collective, “Défendre les libertés d’expression sur la Palestine. Un enjeu académique”, Le club de Médiapart, November 15, 2023: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-invites-de-mediapart/blog/151123/defendre-les-libertes-dexpression-sur-la-palestine-un-enjeu-academique.</footnote>

<footnote n="128">128 Beaud, Olivier, “L'intrusion de Gabriel Attal dans le conseil d'administration de Sciences Po est une flagrante violation de la liberté académique”, Le Monde, March 21, 2024: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/03/21/l-intrusion-de-gabriel-attal-dans-le-conseil-d-administration-de-sciences-po-est-une-flagrante-violation-de-la-liberte-academique_6223249_3232.html.</footnote>
Gradually, mobilizations and debates among academics highlighted how much the link between Gaza and academic freedom goes beyond matters related to tensions within the fields of Israeli and Palestinian studies in France, and to the pressure being put on students by public institutions. A different framing gradually emerged, one that highlighted the destruction of all twelve universities in Gaza and a wide range of schools because of the bombings of the Israeli army. The spread of a new concept, ‘scholasticide’ (as coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi in 2009) or ‘educide’, turned the focus on the experiences of Palestinian academics and students and on the fact the war was obliterating their capacity to participate to the international academic community.<fnref n="129" /> In France programmes funded by universities to offer safe havens for Gazan academics, in particular one called ‘Pause’, were little more than symbolic, in particular as invited academics most often had no possibility to leave Gaza.

The focus on ‘scholasticide’ and the context which had in 2022 favoured an almost unanimous and instant boycott of Russian scientific institutions following the invasion of Ukraine only seemingly legitimized discourses on the boycott of Israeli universities. The debate, as structured by the wider BDS movement (Boycott, divestment, sanctions), had been only marginal in French context in the years prior to 2023. It is still met with resistance from many in the academic community, often using rational argumentation.<fnref n="130" /> The possibility to address the complex issue of such an academic boycott, despite being informed for instance by the existing connections between certain partner universities like Bar-Ilan and the Israeli army, and also by international conventions,<fnref n="131" /> remained largely elusive and to a large extent taboo. This fact generates many misunderstandings with students who mobilize in solidarity with Palestinians since October 7, and also at the international level.<fnref n="132" /> They

<footnote n="129">129 Ibrahim S.I Rabaia and Lourdes Habash, *The Hidden War on Higher Education: Unmasking the ‘Educide’ in Gaza, POMEPS memos, April 2024*: https://pomeps.org/the-hidden-war-on-higher-education-unmasking-the-educide-in-gaza.</footnote>

<footnote n="130">130 Von Buzekist, Astrid, “Boycott des universités israéliennes: ‘Divorcez des meilleurs critiques du gouvernement Nétanyahou serait une grave erreur’”, *Le Monde*, May 21, 2024: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/05/21/boycott-des-universites-israeliennes-peu-d-universitaires-serieux-defendent-la-poursuite-de-l-occupation-des-territoires-en-cisjordanie_6234613_3232.html.</footnote>

<footnote n="131">131 Wind, Maya. *Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom*, New York: Verso, 2024, 288 p.</footnote>

<footnote n="132">132 Uddin, Tasnima and A H Misbach, “Gaza has shown European universities are no longer places of free inquiry”, *Al Jazeera English*, September 1, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/1/gaza-has-shown-european-universities-are-no-longer-places-for-free-inquiry.</footnote>
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