Gaza has shown European universities are no longer places of free inquiry

Jamaican-British academic Stuart Hall once said “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing”. Indeed, universities have an important role to play in upholding the imperatives of academic freedom and critical inquiry, especially today, amid the growing debate and protests over Israel’s war on Gaza.

However, despite their ethical and legal commitments to scholarly freedom, many Western institutions of higher education have failed to protect or even suppressed faculty and students who have expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the United Kingdom, we have observed a worrying pattern in which universities have ended up doing the bidding of a British government fully supportive of a war that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled could be plausibly genocidal and that has potentially left 186,000 Palestinians dead.

Under the guise of upholding “institutional neutrality” or protecting the welfare of Jewish students and staff – which has led to a paternalism that has dangerously homogenised the opinions and commitments of Jewish academics, as the UK Jewish Academic Network writes – universities across the country have cracked down on pro-Palestinian solidarity on their premises.

An open letter released in August by leading Middle East studies organisation BRISMES has documented the types of repression that have been taking place against those expressing solidarity with Palestinians on UK campuses. These range from the cancellation or bureaucratic obstruction of certain speaking events to subjecting staff and students to investigations. According to the human rights charity Liberty, universities have also shared information with the police about their own students’ social media posts and protest activities.

At Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), where one of the authors works, several incidents have demonstrated its administration’s lack of commitment to upholding freedom of inquiry and speech.

A freedom of information (FOI) request filed earlier this year by a QMUL staff member, for example, revealed that the management requested the local council remove a Palestinian flag near their Mile End campus put up by the local community to “support peoples’ rights and freedoms”.

In February, the university also instructed their estate personnel to break into the offices of the local university union branch to remove two posters expressing support for Palestine out of “free speech concerns”.

While trying to suppress expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people, the administration has also shown remarkable disinterest towards the plight of academics who have been persecuted for their pro-Palestinian views.

In April, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a leading Palestinian scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) and global chair in law at Queen Mary, was arrested by the Israeli authorities for criticising Israel over its actions in Gaza. She was subjected to inhumane treatment in prison and harassed by her colleagues at HUJ and the Israeli media.

Yet Queen Mary did not issue a public condemnation of Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s mistreatment even after more than 250 academics at the university signed an open letter calling on its president to do so.

The European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), a leading independent advocacy group that seeks to defend those expressing support for Palestinians, where one of the authors works, has documented scores of disciplinary and punitive responses by British universities since October 7. Its findings – which will be arranged in a “database of repression” and will be released early next year – paint a worrying tableau of crackdowns on Palestine advocacy across British universities.

The precursor to this crackdown was an environment of vilifying Palestine supporters fostered by the previous British government. On October 8, the day Israel began its military assault on Gaza, Home Secretary Suella Braverman called for the police to crack down on any support for Hamas. Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick directed officials to explore revoking visas to foreign nationals accused of anti-Semitic acts or praising Hamas.

These government actions came at a time when support for the Palestinian cause was often equated with support for Hamas, while accusations of anti-Semitism were readily made against people expressing criticism of Israel or pro-Palestinian sentiments.

The conflation between legitimate criticism of Israel with claims of anti-Semitism has been a longstanding issue in UK higher education, with former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson demanding universities adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism which has been condemned by civil society groups, leading lawyers, retired senior judges and the definition’s author.

These ministerial castigations crept into the ivory towers of higher education leadership and shaped how universities handled issues of free speech and protest. This is reflected in three ongoing cases ELSC is supporting.

Twenty-two-year-old Hanin Barghouthi, a student at the University of Sussex and co-president of its Feminist Society, was arrested under counterterrorism laws in October after delivering a speech at a pro-Palestine protest for allegedly expressing support “for a proscribed organisation”. The university also initiated an investigation.

Shortly after, Amira Abdelhamid at the University of Portsmouth was suspended from her work pending an investigation over tweets related to October 7 and criticising the UK’s anti-terror laws. She was accused of bringing the university’s name into disrepute and supporting a “proscribed group”.

She was then referred by her employer to the controversial PREVENT programme – a counterterrorism education programme heavily criticised by human rights organisations and the UN for its abuses.

Abdelhamid then found herself the target of the same counterterrorism laws which she had criticised on X, as police arrested her and searched her home. The case against her was eventually dropped.

Dana Abu Qamar, a student of Palestinian descent at the University of Manchester, faced expulsion from the UK after expressing her support for Palestinians engaging in lawful resistance in a brief interview with Sky News on October 8.

She was mourning the loss of members of her family killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza when the Home Office served her a notice of intention to cancel her T4 student visa on the basis that her presence in the UK was “not conducive to the public good”.

After Abu Qamar submitted a human rights claim and written representations, the Home Office wrote back, rejecting her human rights claim and informing her that her visa would be cancelled. The government then instructed the University of Manchester to expel her, which it obliged only to reinstate shortly after.

ELSC’s work suggests that these are not isolated cases but point towards a pattern of repression across UK campuses, and a convergence between university leaders and the British state, ranging from direct instruction to ideological alignment.

The deployment of counterterrorism laws against academic staff and students is also a serious cause for concern. Not only are they repressive in their disproportionality, but they will likely have a chilling effect on pro-Palestine speech while presaging the normalisation of the use of such legislation to suppress protest and free speech.

But the use of these laws also says something about how the state perceives those it targets. In the case of Barghouthi, Abdelhamid and Abu Qamar – these are three racialised women who are presented as fifth columns and national security threats. The views they express – including criticism of Israel’s genocidal actions – are defined as threatening to academic institutions as well.