Israel re-occupies academia. posted by Richard Seymour

A while ago, I wrote a piece about Nasser Amin's case. In it, I wrote:

This is not an isolated story. Campus Watch has been behind the hounding of a number of pro-Palestinian academics in the United States, including Professors Joel Beinin and Rashid Khalidi. The website has a page inviting students to tell on teachers who are insufficiently supportive of Israel. It attacked a professor named Joseph Massad who was falsely accused of bullying pro-Israeli students. In part, this is happening because the issues surrounding Israel-Palestine are becoming more urgent, while at the same time a decades-long pro-Israel consensus is eroding. There is also a vast gulf between what is academically known about the Israel-Palestine conflict and the picture generally presented in the media. This has produced a climate in which pro-Zionists and right-wingers feel compelled to try and rein in academic discourse. The treatment of Nasser Amin is a small introduction to that trend, one which began in America and is gathering pace in the UK. So the story is, if you like, about all students and their right to argue points of view that are controversial in mainstream discourse.

It's worth mentioning, by the way, that the piece ommitted to mention that Nasser has been subjected to death threats and racist slurs, and also that both the Financial Times and an oxymoronic publication called The American Thinker tried to insidiously associate Amin with the July 7th bombings.

Jews Sans Frontieres brings news that "Stirling University Socialist Society has been banned from using students' union premises for holding two meetings on zionism. The union, on the basis of a complaint by one unnamed student, argued that zionism is beyond the remit of the group". I expect we're going to see more of this horse shit: the attempt to domesticate and neuter discussion of Israel and Palestine, and to intimidate those who even wish to have a conversation about it, is not organised in the UK in the way it is in America, but give it time. Right now, as Gerald Kaufman MP reported in yesterday's Guardian, Israel is engaged in surreptitious ethnic cleansing, driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank in order to annexe as much of it as possible without inheriting a 'demographic problem'. This is the slow, grinding reality of everyday life in Palestine that Israel and its apologists don't want this to be discussed.

If you feel like defending your right, not in this case to argue anything particularly controversial, but even to talk about Zionism, e-mail the Union president on susa-president@stir.ac.uk, or fax them on 01786 467190.