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Michael Keefer
I am writing to tell you how dismayed I am by your attempt to have the student
union on your campus suppress the results of a student referendum in which a substantial
majority voted to support the international campaign of boycott, divestment, and
sanctions that seeks, through peaceful means, to induce the state of Israel to comply with
international law and end its oppression of the Palestinians.
I believe that the position you have taken violates the principle of academic
freedomwhich I regard as being not just a privilege to which tenured academics lay
claim, but a foundational principle of the university, and something to be protected for all
members of the university community. Of course, a commitment to academic freedom
implies at the same time a commitment to civil, humane, and rational discourse, whose
goal might be described, in the simplest terms, as one of determining truths (to the best of
our abilities) and disseminating them.
I believe that faculty and administrators have a joint responsibility to ensure that
discourse within our universities lives up to these standardsand a responsibility, as
well, to act in defense of members of the university community who are subjected, from
within the university or outside it, to discourse that violates those standards and that
commitment to truthby, for example, having recourse to smears, defamation, and ad
hominem attacks of the sort that have been heaped upon the organizers and supporters of
this referendum.
I would ask you to consider whether you are living up to this responsibility. The
international struggle in support of the rights of Palestinians is one of the great moral
issues of our time. It is not an edifying spectacle when a university president obstructs
students who are engaging, civilly, humanely, and rationally in that struggle.
I do not ask you to take my word as to the moral import of this struggle. Take
instead the word of one of Israel's most distinguished sociologists, Eva Illouz, a full
professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the recipient of major academic awards
in the United States, France, and Germany, and also concurrently the President of Bezalel
Academy of Art and Design, her country's national art academy.
Professor Illouz proposed in a long essay published in the newspaper Haaretz on
February 7, 2014 that the 19th-century anti-slavery debate in the United States provides a
useful analogue to help us understand the present-day debate over the morality of Israel's
treatment of the Palestinians, which (as other scholars have also observed) has divided
Jews both in Israel and internationally. In that essay, to which she gave the resonant title
47 years a slave, Professor Illouz argues that Palestinians under Israeli occupation are
living in what amounts to conditions of slavery.
Note, please, that Illouz's essay, together with the work of other distinguished
Jewish public intellectuals, including Judith Butler, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Jacqueline
Rose, Norman Finkelstein, Naomi Klein, Shulamit Aloni, and Yakov Rabkin, refutes any
claim that profound and systematic critiques of Israeli policies and structures of