Written evidence from the Centre for Palestine Studies (FSU0090)
1 The Centre for Palestine Studies (CPS) was established in 2012 under the umbrella of the London Middle East Institute (MEI) at SOAS, with a board comprised of SOAS faculty, two external academic members, and the Director of the MEI. The CPS provides an institutional home for the large and important research and teaching on Palestine across a number of disciplines, bringing together world-renowned scholars of the Middle East. We regularly organise lectures, film screenings, seminars, edit a scholarly series of books, run a master’s course on Palestine, amongst other academic activities.
2 In our academic work, when arranging lectures and activities relating to Palestine, we have had direct experience of free speech and academic freedom being actively threatened. Freedom of speech and academic freedom are the foundation of universities’ purposes, and along with freedom of expression constitute core civic rights which all public bodies have a statutory duty to protect, under national legislation for example the Human Rights Act, the two Education Acts, and the Equality Act. Accordingly, the protection of these rights in all areas of research and teaching activities is essential.
3 At SOAS, a number of our events have been aggressively disrupted by groups that are not members of the university, and who have obstructed free discussion through coordinated heckling and physical intimidation, creating an atmosphere of unpleasant controversy. Similar tactics of disruption have been employed elsewhere, including at Cambridge, LSE and UCL in the past year.
4 In March 2017, at the end of the CPS Annual Palestine lecture (which was was also a SOAS Centenary Lecture), delivered by Raja Shehadeh, the distinguished Palestinian author and lawyer, there was disturbance by non-members of the university, who heckled loudly and waved Israeli flags. In this instance, intervention by the chair of the event was sufficient to halt the disturbance and allow the event to conclude peacefully. Other universities have closed meetings to the public in order to avoid this problem, which radically alters the purpose of the university, and suppresses free speech. We cannot follow this path, but are increasingly under pressure to securitize ordinary events.
5 In November 2017, CPS hosted a screening of the film ‘From Balfour to Banksy’ in the SOAS lecture theatre. Attended by over 70 guests, the screening was followed by a Q+A session, with the producer and director. This part of the event was aggressively disrupted by around 12 people, all external to the university, who intimidated panel members and attendees; occupying the stage, loudly signalling and shouting, all waving Israeli flags. They also used a number of rehearsed tactics, such as booking all the seating through the online registration system, and using aggressive language at the doors, as people left, in order to provoke them and intimidate them.
6 These disruptions are not limited to SOAS but are most often caused by the very same people. They are designed not simply to curtail academic freedom, through physical and verbal intimidation, but to cultivate an image of hitherto ordinary discussion on Palestine as controversial, dangerous, and/or extreme. By intentionally turning an important, serious, and popular topic of scholarly inquiry into an object of security and suspicion, the intention is to suppress freedom of expression, and characterize the issue as controversial, when in fact this extremism is being imported into the university by a small group of organized outsiders.
7 This deliberately constructed ‘controversy’ serves as a pretext for increased pressure from certain areas of government, MPs working for special interest groups, and the Israeli Embassy, along with individuals and advocacy groups in the media, in the specific demands made of the university administration. These demands are aimed at ensuring events relating to Palestine become either censored, or enmeshed in laborious security measures. In this environment, distinguished and world renowned lecturers speaking on compliance with the basic tenets of international law have been prevented from speaking on UK campuses, due to the furore imported into the university by these groups. Earlier this year, Middlesex University and the University of East London both cancelled events where Professor Richard Falk was due to speak. Professor Falk is an Emeritus Professor of International Law at Princeton, a former UN Special Rapporteur of Human Rights, author of over 30 books (many of which are currently taught at universities worldwide). Just before his lectures, he had been smeared with fabricated stories on blog-sites, which were then produced to provide the ‘evidence’ of anti-semitism or extremism, and the insistent demands to close these lectures down. Most university administrators ‘google’ speakers, and after reading these stories, are not expert in evaluating or assessing whether it is a substantial issue, or if it is made up; in all cases this is a ‘controversy’, where they have been advised by various guidances to the Prevent legislation to be risk-averse.
9. The Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS understand that the pressure created by manufacturing controversy, in an attempt to have events and academic discussion on Palestine labelled as ‘extremist’ must be resisted, since this represents a dangerous threat to academic freedom at the university for faculty, students, and the larger public, the latter whom must continue to be welcomed at public lectures. Universities must provide and protect opportunities for free discussion and exchange, and cannot be turned into securitised spaces of hostility and hesitancy, due to intimidation by the supporters of, and those working for, any foreign state and their policies.