Are the ‘indigenous’ in British academia the new herrenvolk?
In her monumental work on Jews in Poland between the two world wars, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews in Poland Between the Two World Wars, Celia Heller notes how the right-wing antisemitic Polish parties characterized themselves as the indigenous population to disenfranchise and repress the Jews and other minorities in their midst. They were of course not alone. Fascist parties in Hungary and Romania that unlike their Polish counterparts assumed power and allied with Nazi Germany, did the same in the dark decade before the outbreak of the Second World War – a prelude to the mass atrocities committed by the Hungarian and Romanian armies against the Jews during the course of the war itself.
The same wind is blowing increasingly hot but from entirely different quarters in the war against the Jews, Zionism and Israel and humanity that worrisomely conjures the 1930s yet again.
Claims of superiority on the basis of being indigenous forms the basis of the future vision documents released by leading Arab intellectuals in Israel, with the consent of two leading Arab Israeli institutions: the High Follow-Up Committee and the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel in the first decade of this century.
A good example of the omen of bad times a-coming are the materials disseminated by the initiators of a vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions that will take place in early July in the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies annual meeting.
It begins with mere falsehoods. The letter of the initiators makes due with the preposterous claim that Israeli universities “are playing a key role in planning, implementing and justifying Israel’s illegal military occupation providing justification for military actions and extra-judicial killings, rewarding students serving in the occupation forces, designing and delivering special programs for soldiers and officers, building on occupied land, and systematically discriminating against non-Jewish students” to justify their boycott, when in fact, Israeli academic institutions, true to the liberal tradition, take positions as institutions only in matters relating to assuring internal academic freedom and government aid.
The authors of the letter should be challenged to come up with one statement by any Israeli university president, rector, dean or any of its constituent collective bodies, such as a university senate or board of governors that justify military actions and extra-judicial killings; any university that rewards students serving in the army or any evidence of any discrimination, let alone systematic, against non-Jewish students. In fact, the most hated institution, Ariel University in the Shomron, takes pride in its Arab student body. Arab students, including Arab Jerusalemites, form a sizeable segment of the student body of Hebrew University, arguably Israel’s most prestigious academic institution and all other Israeli universities and centers of higher learning such as the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot.
Even if a university official were to be found inclined to discriminate against non-Jews (and studies have shown that most university faculty and personnel are committed to the liberal foundations of academic life in Israel), he or she would be powerless to intercede in an acceptance process that is almost exclusively determined by state-wide psychometric tests that are indistinguishable from exams applied in any advanced Western state.
ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES also compete fiercely over student enrollment to achieve both economies of scale as well as to secure per capita state funding, meaning that discrimination against Arab students (or any other kind of student) comes at a cost these institutions could hardly bear.
Prevarication, an all-too-common term in anti-Jewish behavior over the centuries, is again supplemented by claiming exclusive and superior rights on the basis of being “indigenous.”
This theme appears all too often in the supplementary material on “Palestinian and Praxis: Scholars for Palestinian Freedom,” a petition signed by hundreds of academics that the initiators of the boycott attach to their letter.
“As scholars, we affirm the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement against a colonial settler state” begins the petition the authors ask you to sign.
It is soon followed by another prevarication – that “Palestinians are barred from academia,” when the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, a Palestinian Authority institution, records 207,382 university and university college students in 2019-20, a seven-fold increase over the past 25 years!
In the name of being indigenous, the wouldbe petitioner is also asked to waiver academic freedom, as for example:
“Scholarship must also be ethical by centering decolonization and raising the voices of Palestinian scholars, as well as other interlocutors, so that they remain sources of authority and not merely objects of study. We believe that the critical theory we generate in our literature and in our classrooms must be backed in deed. Therefore, we affirm that it is no longer acceptable to conduct research in Palestine or on Palestinians without a clear component of political commitment.
“Scholars, a priori, have to commit to Palestinian scholars as sources of authority without regard to the quality of the scholarship and to make a political commitment on the basis of these sources in only one direction of course.”
To what extent a new herrenvolk (“master race”) academic elite is being fostered appears in the concrete guidelines that follow the more general statement above:
“Highlighting Palestinian scholarship on
Palestine in syllabi, our writing, and through invitation of Palestinian scholars and community members to speak at departmental and university events.
“Extending the above approach to any and all Indigenous scholars within the university, and any Indigenous communities within the vicinity... centering Indigenous analyses in teaching and drawing links to intersectional oppression and transnational liberation movements.”
The illogic is astounding and sinister. Who in the British universities are the indigenous? Are they not the historical British stock these “progressives” would like to see supplemented if not replaced by scholars of immigrant origins? Do not the “indigenous” become another exclusive class privileged over the rest?
In 1940, Winston Churchill spoke his famous words, “We shall fight them... ” that ushered in an indomitable resolve to fight the enemies of freedom at all costs.
Will there be a sufficient number of scholars of whatever origin at the Brismes annual meeting who will stand up for freedom, academic freedom, to assure that academia is a free marketplace of ideas? Will there be a few brave academics committed to remaining free of totalitarian commitment to any a priori group of scholars, political inclination or theory, whether fascist, nationalist, critical or liberal?