As the Arab Council for the Social Sciences implores global academic community to protest Israel's aggression in Lebanon, is it untimely to wonder about a long-term strategy?

Written By Dr. Piyush Mathur

by Dr. Piyush Mathur

Invoking its October 20, 2023 condemnation of ‘the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank’, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) has called on the global academic community to protest Israel’s aggression against Lebanon. Issued from its Beirut headquarters on October 9, 2024, the statement condemns Israel’s ‘systematic assassinations, air, land and sea shelling’, which have caused widespread loss of life and destruction across Lebanon.

The statement stresses that the ACSS has always sought to end ‘colonial knowledge that supports colonial oppression’, urging academic institutions worldwide to mobilize their networks and moral standing to get Israel to stem its ‘crimes of war and against humanity.’ Claiming that ‘colonial discourses’ have been rising lately within many academic circles, the statement underlines the need to oppose such discourses given that they sustain violent systems and practices; contrariwise, it affirms the Council’s commitment to producing ‘effective knowledge that serves the oppressed and marginalized’.

In the statement, the Council calls itself ‘an institution representing Arab and Southern scientific communities’, insisting that the ‘harsh conditions’ that it has been facing for more than 10 years constitute a strong reason why the global academic community must press for impartial standards of inquiry pertaining to justice, ‘right to resist occupation’, and ‘international humanitarian law’. Apparently seeking to countermand a suspicion that the Council is (or may have become) narrowly agenda-driven or cultish owing to the pressures of the violence that has engulfed the region—or that it would stop functioning at all—the statement concludes by vowing that the Council would continue its work that it began in ‘2011 from its head-office in Beirut in an environment that respects and ensures academic freedom.’

However, in stressing the importance of holding Israel accountable through international legal mechanisms, the Council has also put out a potentially contentious call in the statement asking for expanding the academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Although the statement does not mention the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, its boycott expansion component is located in it by default. The BDS movement, in turn, happens to be part of a much longer history of calls and efforts regarding Israel’s general boycott or non-recognition—efforts whose effect on Israel was minimal even ahead of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, an event that had accrued some instant global sympathy for Israel. Whether Israel’s post-October 7, 2023 attacks on Palestine and Lebanon may have created an atmosphere more conducive to its boycott, especially of an academic kind, remains to be seen.

But if history is any guide, then the hope for an indeterminately expanded boycott of Israel’s academia might be misplaced. Perhaps it would be a better strategy for the Council and its allies to always put out targeted, rather than blanket/general, calls for (expanding) Israel’s academic boycott. These calls must invariably highlight specific Israeli research projects and agendas, and reveal to the world why they are dangerous to the rest of the Levant and need to be excluded from international collaboration. Likewise, while specific individuals and departments inside the Israeli institutions could/should be reported to the world for their unfairly discriminatory (‘racist’/‘colonial’) publications (including speeches or remarks) as well as actions, the ACSS might be better off working with Israel-based free thinkers (as critically few as they might be), and seeking global cooperation in making Israel’s campuses fairer places for regional ‘Arabs’, just the same.

Of course, Israeli universities are far more deeply implicated in the colonial system and Israel’s war machine than can be addressed through specific targeting of its unfairly discriminatory individuals and departments. The Israeli academic network’s embedment into the colonial military-industrial complex is well-illustrated, for example, in this article co-authored by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) and Palestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST), published on the BDS website itself. However, the ACSS and similar, resistant organizations in the Levant would probably be better off starting out by highlighting, pursuing flashpoint cases/incidents in detail—rallying global support for Palestinians and the Lebanese in regard to them—while also proactively seeking, encouraging collaboration with freethinking Israeli academics as well as departments. That sort of an approach would in fact be closer to the Council’s stated ideals.

As impossible as it might seem to reconcile a viciously discriminatory colonial byproduct with the region’s displaced native victims, it is even more difficult to conceive of a scenario in which these two broad camps remain unreconciled through perpetuity. The Council and its allies—while severely underprivileged in comparison with what they are up against—should thus, as a long-term goal, seek to reform the Israeli campus through calls for specific boycotts and by insisting that Israel co-articulate with them an inclusive, cosmopolitan model of regional education and coexistence for all. In very different ways, Germany and South Africa show that reform and reconciliation are possible, not only on the campuses.

Copies of the Council’s statement can be downloaded in three languages via the following links: Arabic English French.

Dr. Piyush Mathur
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