[On 21 March 2022, Students for Palestine, a group at Leiden University in The Netherlands, organized a panel discussion on “Apartheid, Racism & Intersectionality.” The panel was convened in the context of Israel Apartheid Week, an annual series of events and activities that are held to place Israel’s racist policies under the spotlight.
The event was not designed as an open debate about the pros and cons of Israeli racism, nor as a panel discussion in which support for and opposition to Israel’s system of apartheid would enjoy equal consideration. Rather, different speakers were invited to highlight different aspects of Israeli racism in order to promote public awareness of Israeli practices and support for Palestinian rights.
The event was initially scheduled to be held at Leiden University’s satellite campus in The Hague. Responding to pressure from advocates for Israeli apartheid, and presumably the Israeli embassy in The Netherlands as well, the university administration withdrew the permission it had given Students for Palestine to host the event on university premises.
The justification provided by University Rector Hester Bijl for this act of censorship was that it was in fact a principled defense of academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. Without naming the panel’s moderator, Dina Zbeidy, a Palestinian academic accredited in The Netherlands, or providing a shred of evidence, Bijl implied that a panel chaired by Zbeidy was incapable of providing “students and staff with different opinions” the opportunity to “speak freely and safely.” Absent even an attempt at substantiation and seemingly oblivious to the irony of her position, Bijl was clearly taking the position that a discussion on Israeli apartheid cannot and should not be moderated by a Palestinian.
When Students for Palestine complained about the university’s conduct, sympathetic staff sought to arrange for the event to be held at the main Leiden campus instead. But the university administration again intervened. Resorting to familiar tropes about “the intensity and emotion of this subject,” it offered to let the event proceed, but only if the organizers agreed to replace Zbeidy with Dean Mark Rutgers of the Faculty of Humanities. In other words, Students for Palestine would need to concur that a Palestinian is incapable of leading a panel discussion about Israeli apartheid, and in the process become openly complicit in Israeli racism. Should they refuse, the event “cannot go ahead.”
Understanding the trap that had been set for them, Students for Palestine rejected the university’s ultimatum, and convened the event at the Koorenhuis, a cultural center in The Hague apparently more committed to academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas than one of Europe’s oldest universities.
Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani was invited to speak at this event about the differing Western responses to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Israeli aggression in Palestine. His remarks are reproduced below.]
Are Palestinians who advocate a boycott of Russia to demonstrate opposition to its invasion of Ukraine anti-Semites? Terrorists? Enemies of peace?
What if they advocate a boycott of Israel on account of its settler colonial policies towards their own people? These policies encompass what leading human rights organizations have termed an apartheid regime, which has now lasted several decades longer than the white minority regime of South Africa. These policies entail more than half a century of violent military occupation, including various acts of annexation, as well as the permanent expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their homeland. These policies include a succession of atrocities, committed with deliberate intent, against civilians spanning seven decades and counting.
Israel not only claims Palestine has no right to exist; it has thoroughly transformed Palestine’s geography and demography in an effort to systematically eradicate it from the face of the earth. Israel’s leaders not only insist that Palestinians do not constitute a people; they have implemented a strategy that the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling termed “politicide” in order to make their presumption a reality. Israeli politicians and their foreign apologists routinely claim that Palestinians do not exist, while they simultaneously and systematically demonize, delegitimize, and criminalize those who take the position that the Palestinians are a people with inalienable rights. As recent events at Leiden University demonstrate, this campaign of slander and intellectual terrorism – a term I hesitate to use because there is nothing intellectual about it – extends to Dutch university students who would organize a discussion of Israeli policies.
Let us consider the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month, as it compares to the response to Israel’s elimination of Palestine that commenced last century.
A good starting point would be 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula. In response, Western governments immediately declared a series of sanctions against Russia, which remain in force to this day. By that time, Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem was nearly half a century old. Yet these same governments had for decades refused to consider similar measures against Israel, claiming that doing so would damage the prospects for peace. They instead pursued a policy that amounted to a de facto normalization of Israel’s annexation, a process which reached its logical culmination in 2017 when the United States formally recognized Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem.
International organizations have behaved similarly. The European and international soccer federations UEFA and FIFA, for example, consistently have refused to expel Israel from their ranks on the grounds that politics should be kept out of sports. In 2017, FIFA issued a statement that it had a statutory obligation to remain neutral in political matters and would no longer consider such demands. Yet within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, FIFA’s purported obligations went out the window. Both UEFA and FIFA expelled Russia and barred Russian participation in any of their activities, including the 2022 World Cup. Within days Russia, and increasingly individual Russians as well, were summarily ejected from every competitive sport on the planet.
The most interesting phenomenon for the purposes of this comparison concerns boycotts promoted by popular campaigns. These have sought the participation of corporations, universities, authors and artists, musical bands and orchestras, and others to hold Israel accountable for its crimes. For several decades, supporters of Palestinian rights around the world, and increasingly in the West, have been advocating a boycott of Israel similar to that against the white minority regime in South Africa endorsed by the United Nations.
The furious response by Israel and its apologists to such boycott initiatives is a matter of public record. It essentially boils down to the proposition that boycotts of Israel cannot possibly be motivated by legitimate political agendas, and therefore can only be the product of anti-Semitic sentiment or genocidal intent. Most public figures and institutions rejected requests to participate in such boycotts out of hand. They did so either on the grounds of a claimed apolitical mandate or because, so they argued, such tactics were an excessive or illegitimate means of political protest. The professional, financial, and often personal consequences endured by many who did take a stand, gleefully levied by Israel and its apologists pour encourager les autres, doubtlessly also play a role.
Fast forward to February-March of this year, and every measure advocated by supporters of Palestinian rights has been adopted wholesale against Russia, often by the very same corporations, institutions, and notables who, until 24 February 2022, proclaimed a principled commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of choice, free exchange, and whatever other freedumbs they could muster to reject holding Israel to account.
In addition to boycotts as conventionally understood, we have seen university courses purging Dostoevsky, orchestras refusing to perform Tchaikovsky, Russian cats banned from international exhibitions, and relations with individual Russians severed not because of their complicity in Russia’s war on Ukraine but rather their refusal to publicly condemn their own repressive government and autocratic leader. These profiles in sudden Western courage in fact extend well beyond Russia and Russians. Earlier this month, the government of Lithuania cancelled a delivery of Covid-19 vaccines to Bangladesh to punish the latter’s government for abstaining on a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion.
Are Western governments, institutions, and notables guilty of hypocrisy? Yes and no. If one takes the view that agreed standards and rules of conduct only have meaning if they are applied equally in identical circumstances, the hypocrisy is self-evident. On the available evidence, Western leaders who today claim to be standing up for principle or acting to defend norms of international conduct forfeited their credibility on such matters long ago.
But those accused of hypocrisy do not see things that way. They assert that they are being perfectly consistent because they view Ukraine and Israel as victims, and Russia and the Palestinians as aggressors. It reflects a long historical tradition in which the West and its allies invariably see themselves as acting in defense of freedom, democracy, indeed civilization itself. Thus, the real victims in Haiti and Algeria were the French. In Palestine and Kenya, the British insist, it was they who were being mercilessly attacked. Similarly, in Indonesia it was the Dutch who were the victims of savage natives, and in Vietnam and Iraq it was the Americans who demonstrated the courage and decency required to defend liberty and democracy from barbarian hordes. Dressing up aggression committed against entire societies on distant continents as a defense of freedom and civilization is in fact very deeply ingrained in Western political culture, and therefore, it will not disappear anytime soon.
Will the West’s current experience of military aggression on its doorstep increase its sensitivity to Palestinian rights? Don’t hold your breath. One need only go back to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 to understand that Western leaders long ago determined that there are good occupations and bad ones, annexations that should be condemned and others that deserve toleration. Some crimes demand solidarity with the victims, others impunity for the perpetrator. If we go back a little further to the 1990-1991 Iraqi invasion, occupation, and annexation of Kuwait, a primary demand of the Western powers throughout the crisis was “no linkage,” meaning that holding Iraq to account for its actions in Kuwait should under no circumstances be allowed to serve as a precedent for confronting Israeli aggression against the Palestinians.
And finally, will the unprecedented governmental, institutional, and public sanctions against Russia during the past month create political space to advocate for similar measures against Israel for its crimes against the Palestinian people? These include policies that the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court in The Hague defines as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Again, don’t bet on it. As the attempts to censor this panel discussion at Leiden University demonstrate, the opposite is more likely to be the case.
Never underestimate the West’s cognitive dissonance when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. The campaign to perpetuate Israel’s impunity for its crimes against the Palestinian people and repress public discussion about the need to hold it accountable is seen by Western elites as entirely consistent with the campaign to punish Russia for its aggression in Ukraine. Of course, there is racism involved, but this goes far beyond the racial animus that is deeply ingrained in Western elites.
The campaign to prohibit a panel discussion on Israeli apartheid organized by Students for Palestine at Leiden University, and to delegitimize the accredited scholar selected to chair this event demonstrates several things. First, there is simply no expression of opposition to Israel or its policies – no matter how peaceful or non-violent, whether by Palestinians or anyone else – that Israel or Western elites consider legitimate. Second, Israel and its apologists will continue to work ceaselessly to suppress public discussions of Israeli practices. They do so not only because they know it is a debate they cannot win, but also because they realize it is one that they cannot participate in without thoroughly shredding their moral and political credentials. And third, Israel and its apologists prefer to act through the medium of useful idiots like university rectors who are willing to weaponize their standing and authority to make specious arguments about the need for neutrality between occupier and occupied, between apartheid and its victims, and between ethnic cleansers and the refugees they have created.
Finally, the racist insinuations shamefully deployed by Leiden University and its rector, Hester Bijl, against panel moderator Dina Zbeidy demonstrates that there is much work left to do. This notwithstanding, the commitment, perseverance, and creativity that Students for Palestine have so admirably demonstrated this past week to ensure the convening of this event inspires confidence that such efforts will ultimately be crowned with success.
