Europe and the Occupation of Palestinian Territories Since 1967 by Federica Bicchi

Author:Federica Bicchi [Bicchi, Federica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780367542269
Goodreads: 54499477
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

The (re-)politicization of the debate on campus

The first sign that the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was changing came in 2002 when a number of UK-based academics called for a boycott of Israeli universities.3 The call asked for a moratorium on grants allocated to Israeli universities by the EU4 and by the European Science Foundation until Israel were to comply with the relevant UN resolutions.5 This call was followed by an open letter in which academic signatories announced their refusal to cooperate tout court with Israeli institutions, and with Israeli universities in particular (but excluded Israeli individuals).6 However, the outcome of the 2002 call was mixed.7

The campaign for an academic boycott gathered new steam as the international BDS movement, which emerged in 2005, made it into one of its main initiatives,8 and reached out to non-governmental actors across the globe. The BDS movement,9 which advocates a number of general goals,10 justified the academic boycott as a way to protest against the complicity of Israeli academic institutions in supporting the occupation,11 thus embracing the academic boycott sponsored by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI, one of the founding members of BDS).12 It quickly became “the most contentious of the BDS mechanisms” (McMahon, 2014, p., 71).

As the BDS movement spread across UK academia, groups were formed with the explicit goal to promote or resistit. Countless pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli entities also took a (more or less explicit) stance. For instance, the British Committee for the Universities in Palestine (BRICUP)13 and the Boycott Israel Network (BIN)14 were created, among their aims the boycott of Israeli universities. Several groups organized their responses against the spread of BDS, including Engage15 and Academic Friends of Israel.16 The discussion of the academic boycott reverberated onto Israel, where it was often considered as posing a de-legitimation risk to the state of Israel and action was taken accordingly, both in law and available resources. Israel’s President Rivlin, for instance, described the academic boycott as a “strategic threat of thefirst order.”17 The Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs has also made it part of its mission to address the challenges posed by the BDS movement.

The issue remained unsettled on UK campuses and was played out in a ritualized way, generally within a well-established repertoire of campus politics’ instruments. Based on existing rules, resolutions were passed, actions agreed and then both would be challenged again. Dynamics in the association of UK university staffmembers, the University and College Union (UCU), were paradigmatic in this sense. In June 2007, it voted to support the boycott campaign, but after taking legal advice, it backtracked in September of the same year. The issue would not lie, though. Motions related to the academic boycott and BDS were tabled, discussed, passed or opposed at UCU annual Congress meetings in 2008–2011, before the issue landed in court, as next section analyses. Conflict in Gaza in 2009 provided new (and, according to some, decisive)18 impetus to BDS, and thus to the debate. For instance, in

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