Israel-Gaza war is having a chilling effect on academic freedom – podcast

Across parts of academia, concerns are mounting that the Israel-Gaza war is having a chilling effect on academic freedom. In the second of two episodes of The Conversation Weekly exploring how the war is affecting life at universities, we speak to an Israeli legal scholar, now based in the UK, about the pressures that academics and students are facing to rein in their views about the war.

In the two months since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, Neve Gordon is worried that there’s been a major clampdown on academic freedom in the US, Europe and Israel.

After teaching for 17 years in southern Israel, Gordon moved to the UK in 2016 and he’s now a professor of human rights and humanitarian law at Queen Mary University of London. His research looks at the laws of war with a special focus on Israel-Palestine, and on definitions of antisemitism.

He’s also the vice-president at the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and chair of its committee on academic freedom. In this role, he’s been following the impact of the conflict on free speech at universities, and recently hosted an international webinar on the issue.

In the UK we’ve seen suspension of students and staff from their universities. We’ve seen cancelling of events … of student activities like protests and sit-ins. We’ve seen a few cases of students that were arrested. We’ve seen students whose visas are threatened to be revoked.

In Israel, Gordon told us he was aware of 113 cases in Israel of students and staff who have been suspended or dismissed, and at least ten students who have been arrested for their criticism of Israel’s attack on Gaza. “We have several students sitting behind bars for Facebook or tweets that basically express empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians,” he says.

Meanwhile, in Germany, many protests supporting Palestinian rights have been banned and Gordon says colleagues in Germany have told him that “the situation is untenable”.

All this, Gordon says, is having a chilling effect across academia.

I’m getting phone calls from friends in different universities in different countries saying that they want to cancel their Israel-Palestine course for next semester because they’re afraid that things that they will say in class can be interpreted by students as antisemitic.

Listen to the full interview with Neve Gordon on The Conversation Weekly podcast, where you can also listen to the first of our two episodes on the way the Israel-Gaza war is affecting life at universities, focusing on what’s been happening at one American public university.

This article first appeared in 'The Conversation' on 18 December 2023.