Lessons from the censure scandal about the Palestine exception to academic freedom and collective organizing
In 2021, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Council voted to censure the University of Toronto for failing to address academic freedom concerns. The censure came after the Faculty of Law cancelled Dr. Valentina Azarova’s appointment as the new director of the International Human Rights Program, contrary to the unanimous decision of the hiring committee. The Faculty’s Dean Iacobucci withdrew her offer after David Spiro, an influential donor to the law school, raised concerns that Azarova’s human rights work on Israeli occupation would damage the University’s reputation. Spiro is a former board member of the Centre of Israel-Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a lobbying group that shores up support for the State of Israel. Unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitism were weaponized against Azarova by CIJA and its supporters.
The scandal unearthed to what extent money governs the University’s academic environment. It revealed deep-seated problems concerning donor interference, the absence of collegial governance, and the Palestine exception to academic freedom. In their article “The Storm Over Academic Freedom, Collegial Governance, and International Human Rights at UofT’s Faculty of Law,” Faculty Professors Anver M. Emon and David Schneiderman define the Palestine exception. They explain that “despite claims to freedom of speech and academic inquiry, study or talk of Palestine is often subjected to scrutiny, critique and censorship in ways few if any other subjects are.” The Palestine exception is apparent in the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups like CIJA on academic decision-making and what the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association identifies as anti-Palestinian racism in a recent report.
On October 27, 2022, Censure UofT—a group of faculty members—hosted their inaugural lecture titled “Facts, Speech, Censorship: A View from the Question of Palestine.” The event is the first of a lecture series hoping to continue the conversations that the Censure movement sparked, especially following the failure of the University to take accountability following the scandal. Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American writer and anthropology professor at Columbia University, gave the talk. She mentioned that she herself experienced censorship during her run for tenure when the David Project, a pro-Israel campus group, relentlessly targeted her.
Ongoing Censorship of Speech on Palestine
El-Haj acknowledged that public opinion concerning the State of Israel’s ongoing occupation and violations of Palestinian human rights has shifted in recent years, which can be attributed to the decades of collective organizing and mass mobilization by Palestinian solidarity activists. Reflecting on what felt like an impossible climate of silence not long ago, El-Haj—a Palestinian herself—admits, “I had kept my mouth shut my entire college career.”
Supporters of Israel recognize that the State is losing support on the international front. Meanwhile, pro-Israel groups are intensifying their efforts to silence criticisms of Israel, including harassing people through a stream of legal suits and doxing individuals on websites like Canary Mission. In Europe, the United States, and Canada, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which risks equating criticism of the State of Israel to antisemitism, has been used by groups such as CIJA to censor speech on Palestine. This flawed definition effectively creates a climate of fear around speaking up about Israeli human rights violations. In October 2022, Independent Jewish Voices published a report entitled Unveiling the Chilly Climate: The Suppression of Speech on Palestine in Canada, which quantifies this climate of fear by documenting the lived experiences of repression of various academics, students, and Palestine solidarity activists across Canada.
Confronting antisemitism, to be clear, is not what is being contested. However, as activist Harsha Walia points out in her book Border and Rule, pro-Israel lobby groups are rather unrigorous in their confrontation of antisemitism, often aligning themselves with actual antisemites and white supremacists as long as it means continued international support for the State of Israel—all the while portraying Palestinian resistance and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as antisemitic, regardless of the facts at hand. In her lecture, El-Haj underscored the importance of looking at the facts and asking whether such speech is actually antisemitic. Otherwise, we risk playing into the disinformation campaign that any critique of Israel, regardless of its merits, constitutes antisemitism.
To return to the Censure, El-Haj questioned if Azarova’s critics read her work at all. “Did anyone have to prove or make an argument for why it was antisemitic?” she asks. The room remained silent. The fact that these unsubstantiated accusations could transform so swiftly into fact, El-Haj continued, shows just how sticky of a charge antisemitism is and how deeply-rooted the notion that raising Israel’s human rights violations equates to antisemitism has become.
“What [political] work does secrecy do?” El-Haj asked. She explored how removing something from public view endows it with power. For example, the Israeli state moved quickly to classify documents that acted as evidence of the 1948 nakba, or catastrophe, which permanently displaced over 700,000 Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of villages. “The role of deception itself,” El-Haj continued, “is crucial to the transformation of a democratic state into a security state.” However, she questioned whether we can map the power of the Israeli state today in such a simple manner: “might state power in Jewish democracy [today] operate effectively without classification and secrecy?”
Indeed, the difficult question that El-Haj asked the audience to consider—a question which she herself was reluctant to give clear answers to—was, what if in the context of Israel, censorship is no longer necessary to preserve state power? What if Israeli settler-colonial nationhood can act seamlessly in the face of facts that state otherwise?
Attachments to the State of Israel
What if the nakba—and here, El-Haj does not just refer to the event occurring in 1948, but to ongoing Palestinian dispossession—is not just a state secret but a public secret? This idea challenges the popular liberal assumption that the public simply does not know the extent of Israel’s human rights violations. Instead, El-Haj challenges the audience to ask themselves, “What more do we possibly need to know to compel some sort of difference?”
El-Haj raised the philosopher Stanely Cavell’s clarification of the terms “knowing” and “acknowledging.” In his book Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell writes:
“A “failure to know” might just mean a piece of ignorance, an absence of something, a blank. A “failure to acknowledge” is the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness. […] To know you are in pain is to [either] acknowledge it, or to withhold the acknowledgment.”
To return to the story of the Israeli state classifying, declassifying, and then later partially reclassifying documents on the nakba, El-Haj pointed out that this story is widely known in Israeli society today. Why, then, in Cavell’s terms, the withholding of this acknowledgement? If it is not ignorance, what compels ongoing investment in the “virtue and necessity,” as El-Haj deemed it, of the State of Israel?
Perhaps the same thing that had compelled middle-class Syrians in Damascus, who originally opposed the Assad regime, to realign with it despite its clear brutality. Some felt they could still live a comfortable life in Damascus and that the Assad regime’s atrocities had little to do with them.
Similar investments in the Israeli state illustrate for El-Haj the “ordinary moments of disavowal” of Palestinian realities: not so much “it happened, and I support it;” but rather, “it happened, but what does that have to do with me?” To confront this sort of disavowal thus requires a radical rethinking of the very terms of our arguments and political strategies.
Way(s) Forward?
While El-Haj is open-ended about what such political strategies might look like, it is worth thinking through Black scholars’ and activists’ critiques of the “spectacle” of Black death. Such critiques also grapple with El-Haj’s earlier question of “what more do we possibly need to know?” For example, following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis Police in 2020, reporter Char Adams writes:
“With the advent of the Internet, countless videos are circulated in order to prove that Black people haven’t been lying about the abuse we’ve suffered. Arguments for sharing these videos largely rest on claims that they lead to justice, and the flawed notion that white people need to see Black people dying in order to care.”
While videos of Black death might have led to the odd conviction, they do nothing to challenge the underlying racism and broader carceral institutions that produce these killings. In fact, they arguably reinforce existing power hierarchies by placating white guilt and normalizing Black death.
When it comes to the issue of Palestinian human rights, El-Haj noted that the accusation does not always have to be one of antisemitism, but could be that Palestinians are “too biased” to speak on the conflict. Such an accusation imposes demands on Palestinians for “evidence,” similar to the demands on Black communities for footage of Black death as “evidence” of police brutality. El-Haj explained that Israeli historians possess a certain kind of epistemological authority to speak on Israel-Palestine, which Israeli scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay considers a product of their “imperial citizenship.” This can be seen in how Israeli historians are far more widely cited than Palestinians, who are not considered reliable witnesses of their own histories, let alone the histories of the other. To illustrate this point, El-Haj returned to the nakba documents classified by the Israeli state. When the state declassified these documents and Israeli historians finally gained access to and wrote about them, the facts of the nakba were no longer dismissed but became public knowledge. “These Israeli historians were [considered] reliable witnesses precisely because they were Israeli Jews,” El-Haj explained, even though they were now “demonstrating what Palestinians knew and had been writing about for years.”
Any political strategy we pursue, then, must be cognizant of these critiques.
Reclaiming the Law School Space
Vincent Wong, an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law and a former member of the committee that voted to hire Azarova, found it “powerful and symbolic” that Censure UofT’s inaugural lecture would “reclaim the law school space by directly confronting the chilling effect on Palestinian rights and featuring a prominent Palestinian academic who is herself a target of Israeli nationalists and their harassment campaigns.”
The Censure UofT movement is inspiring for the lessons it teaches student organizers about power. When asked how U of T students might combat institutional censorship, El-Haj suggested “the growth of faculty that will protect them.” However, the law faculty’s own Ariel Katz and Mohammad Fadel—both members of Censure UofT—remind students that “you bring the university money.” Their observation speaks to the formidable power that mass mobilization and collective student organizing can hold, even in the face of an increasingly corporatized academic environment.
Dania Majid, staff lawyer with the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, president of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association and programmer for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, believes the Censure movement offers us many valuable lessons for organizing. “A lot of people think, well we’ll just battle this out in the courts,” she says, “but the courts don’t have a role in isolation. […] The courts are conservative. You really need the movement behind it.” Majid continued, “that’s what the success of the Azarova campaign demonstrates. The success came from the fact that the movement was built through awareness building, talking across faculties, talking to artists and students and academics and media folk and politicians.” To Majid, “this is what actually empowers people, it’s not doing this work in isolation, it’s creating these networks. At the end of the day, it’s the movement that directs the work, and lawyers are in service of that.”
The CAUT lifted its censure of the University on November 25, 2021. While the underlying issues have not gone away, student organizing around the Censure has lulled. Majid encourages students to see potential in these slower periods. “The lulls in movements, because we’re so productivity centered, scare us. A lull is an okay time, it allows for reflection, and I think we need reflection after the Azarova scandal—what worked, what didn’t work, what are long-term things we want to see coming out of this.”
Majid went on to speak to the difficulties in sustaining momentum within student movements: “what I see in student movements is that every new cohort is coming in, and every new cohort is reinventing the wheel, because transfer of knowledge has not happened.” Majid’s observations help us understand why it is so critical to continue conversations about the Censure movement, even though the Censure itself has since been lifted: it allows us to build institutional memory at the University to support student movement work to come.
Editor’s Note: Fatima Aamir was an organizer with the Students for Censure movement in the summer of 2021 before starting law school and currently leads the University of Toronto Law Union’s transnational solidarity working group, which includes hosting events and conducting legal research on Palestinian human rights and censorship.
Editor’s Note: This article replaces an earlier unabridged article published in Volume 24, Issue 3.
