BY ANTHONY ALESSANDRINI 

The AAUP’s new “Statement on Academic Boycotts,” which reverses its prior opposition to academic boycotts, is a major declaration. Stating clearly that boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education,” it confirms there are instances in which upholding academic freedom may mean withholding our intellectual labor.

The AAUP statement is a framework for understanding the relationship between boycotts and academic freedom in the largest sense and does not mention any specific campaigns. If I use the occasion of this statement to discuss the Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), it is because opponents have so often weaponized the AAUP’s previous 2006 report On Academic Boycotts against this campaign.

As a longtime supporter of the PACBI call and the chair of my union’s Academic Freedom Committee, I have sometimes been accused of a “contradiction”: how can I claim to support academic freedom while supporting an academic boycott?

As the latest AAUP statement confirms, there is no contradiction. The belief that there is one comes from the misconception that PACBI targets individual Israeli academics. On the contrary: while the call takes pains to protect the academic freedom of individual Israeli scholars, it is precisely a call to defend the academic freedom of our Palestinian colleagues. Joan W. Scott has expressed this point in the Journal of Academic Freedom: “It is because we believe so strongly in principles of academic freedom that a strategic boycott of the state that so abuses it makes sense right now.”

Supporting PACBI thus means supporting academic freedom—for our Palestinian and Israeli colleagues and for ourselves.

Why a Boycott for Academic Freedom?

The PACBI call is for an institutional, not an individual, boycott, as affirmed in three different statements. To be crystal clear: the call is for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, not individuals.

But why a boycott in defense of academic freedom? The reasons were clear twenty years ago and even clearer today. In addition to the unspeakable human cost of its genocidal attack on Gaza, funded and supported by the United States, Israel has been carrying out a systematic policy of scholasticide. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed, along with more than 80 percent of all schools, at least thirteen public libraries, and the 150 years of history housed in the Central Archives of Gaza. According to the United Nations, as of April 2024, Israel’s scholasticide has killed at least 5,479 students, 261 schoolteachers, and 95 university professors.

Over 100 students and faculty members from Birzeit University hold a makeshift class at the checkpoint on the Ramallah-Birzeit Road in 2003, after not being able to reach the university due to Israeli closure policies. Photo: Dan Richards, Friends of Birzeit University

This campaign of scholasticide is not new, nor is it confined to Gaza. The repression of Palestinian education has been ongoing for decades, as academic institutions have faced censorship of curricular materials, arbitrary closures, raids, and checkpoints under occupation. From 1988 to 1992, all universities were closed by the Israeli military, and, since the 2000s, Palestinian academic institutions have been almost constant military targets. Between 2000 and 2008 alone, eight universities and over three hundred schools were shelled, shot at, or raided by the Israeli army in the West Bank. Military and settler attacks and arbitrary arrests at West Bank schools and universities have only increased over the past ten months.

Israeli policies have also cut off Palestinian scholars from academic institutions outside Palestine for more than fifty years. Travel restrictions have prevented them from attending academic conferences or accepting visiting positions; in some cases, those who left were not allowed to return. A 2022 Israeli military order grants the Israeli military absolute power to select which international faculty and students can be admitted to teach or study at Palestinian universities and imposes quotas on internationals in these universities. “Foreigners” affected by this law include Palestinians whose residency rights have not been recognized by Israel, including Palestinian faculty who have taught at these universities for years.

In short, Palestinian academic freedom today is nonexistent. Put differently: while the call to boycott Israeli academic institutions does not target individual Israeli academics, Israeli apartheid policies have always targeted individual Palestinian academics.

Are Israeli Academic Institutions Complicit?

This repression clearly meets the standards cited by the AAUP for an academic boycott, since it creates “conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” But many remain skeptical about targeting Israeli academic institutions. Are Israeli universities really to blame? Aren’t they separate from the military and government? Don’t they oppose these policies?

Unfortunately, the opposite is true. In Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, Maya Wind describes how even before 1948, today’s Israeli universities contributed to the violent dispossession of Palestinian communities, manufacturing weapons and developing expertise used to drive Palestinians from their lands. After 1967, Israeli universities contributed to the growth of settlements and, in Wind’s words, “served as pillars of regional demographic engineering and Palestinian dispossession.”

Today, these universities closely collaborate with Israeli weapons manufacturers to develop technology for the Israeli military and security state. To give only a few examples: Bar Ilan University works closely with Israel’s security services, condemned by the UN Committee against Torture for their use of illegal interrogation tactics; Ben Gurion University hosts the Homeland Security Institute whose partnerships include Israeli weapons companies and the Israeli Ministry of Defense; Technion has numerous joint academic programs with the Israeli military and developed technology for the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer used to demolish Palestinian homes (one killed Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003); Tel Aviv University runs joint centers with the Israeli military and arms industry; the University of Haifa hosts the Israeli Military Academic Complex that trains senior military staff; and Ariel University is located in an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Wind quotes Major General Isaac Ben-Israel, former director of the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop at Tel Aviv University, who sums it up: “Military R&D in Israel would not exist without the universities. They carry out all the basic scientific investigation, which is then developed either by defense industries or the army.”

Other skeptics ask why Israel is “singled out” for boycott. Aren’t there other countries that do bad things? The only possible answer is: of course, and those who support the PACBI call are also broadly involved in organizing against human rights abuses and for social justice throughout the world. PACBI and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement draw inspiration and support from global antiracist struggles, including the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

The Palestinian Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, however, is a specific call for academics around the world to respond with solidarity in support of our Palestinian colleagues. When the United Farm Workers called for a boycott of grapes in 1965, it would not have been an act of solidarity to immediately respond, “What about strawberries?” Similarly, to point to other cases simply as a way to argue against PACBI is to refuse to hear the call for solidarity with Palestinian colleagues.

What Does It Mean for Academics to Support the Boycott?

There are clear guidelines for the boycott, including a statement explaining PACBI as a boycott of institutions that does not apply to individual Israeli scholars engaged in ordinary forms of academic exchange, including presentations or public lectures at campuses or conferences abroad or collaboration on research and publications. It is a pledge not to engage with institutions that support and enable apartheid, occupation, and the ongoing genocide, but it does not compel members of organizations or professional associations that endorse PACBI to do so. Like a picket line, it’s a call for solidarity.

It is also a pledge to create forms of cooperation and collaboration with Palestinian academic institutions, which have been under literal siege for decades. Supporting PACBI is not only a matter of refraining from engagement with complicit Israeli institutions but also an invitation for academics to find ways to support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions as they struggle to counter the unspeakable damage of Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocidal violence.

I don’t dismiss concerns about the academic freedom of Israeli scholars. Identity should never be understood as complicity, and we must oppose the violation of academic freedom anywhere, including among Israeli academics who support PACBI and face increasingly draconian institutional and legal sanctions for doing so.

Academic freedom must, however, at last be extended in a meaningful way to our Palestinian colleagues. Grounded in a defense of academic freedom, PACBI is a call to end Israel’s long history of subjecting Palestinian universities and Palestinian academics to scholasticide—and the deep complicity of Israeli academic institutions in this violent repression.

The free exchange of ideas across borders is fundamental to public intellectual work, now as always. But opponents of the boycott have weaponized this principle, casting those who support PACBI as zealots opposed to “promoting dialogue.” As distinguished Israeli linguist Tanya Reinhart, an early supporter of the boycott, told colleagues in 2003, “The first step in promoting dialogue would be to remove Israeli tanks from the gates of Palestinian universities.”

Academic freedom, like all freedom, is indivisible—or it is meaningless. To endorse PACBI is to contribute to a movement for true academic freedom, in Palestine and everywhere.

Anthony Alessandrini is professor of English at Kingsborough Community College and of Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and the chair of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress Academic Freedom Committee.