This is a guest post by Contentious Centrist

A recent petition by a group of Israeli academics claims that the “meaning of ‘academic freedom’ is fairly obvious. It is … associated with democratic societies, and it is universally held in high esteem, even though its boundaries and limits are often unclear.”

“Basically,” the petition continues, “where there is freedom to teach, study and carry out research in academic institutions, and to publish research-related books and articles, then academic freedom exists. It is clear that there can be no real academic freedom in higher education unless it is possible to reach the institutions where one studies, teaches, and carries out research. … Checkpoints, blockades, walls and fences prevent thousands of students and teachers from leading a normal academic life, and lecturers with non-Palestinian passports, who wish to teach in those institutions, are prevented from staying for long enough to carry out meaningful continuous teaching.”

The petition is well intentioned and I don’t see how anyone can seriously argue with the acute angst and frustration it expresses. Fettered movement is indeed an onerous impediment to academic freedom.

We are all familiar with the sad situation of ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank, whose mobility is greatly restricted due to the presence of IDF “checkpoints, blockades, walls and fences”.

In an Israeli a movie I recently watched, “The Bubble”, the gritty reality and harshness of such an encumbered life at the checkpoints is rendered in crude detail. A bride-to-be is asked to open her suitcase for inspection. The many tulle layers of the white bridal gown spill out onto the dusty road. A packaged bag of ceremonial henna is then punctured and its contents examined, before she is told she can go on her way. Wedding guests are lined up in a row, on the roadside, told to wait their turn, brusquely, impatiently, and rudely. The viewer who imagines himself in similar circumstances can’t but feel bitter anger at the soldiers and pity for the endlessly queuing Palestinians.

I think the knotty flaw in this petition is beginning to come into better focus here. Most Palestinians suffer from movement restrictions in the West Bank; be that a farmer riding his donkey cart, a schoolboy hurrying back home or a scientist on his way to his laboratory at the university. The profession or occupation, of the Palestinian taking a road where a checkpoint was set up has nothing whatever to do with the likelihood, or the reason why, he or she are detained for long hours before allowed to move on.

Relief for academics and students from these restrictions cannot be provided without the removal of same restrictions from all the population. It’s not the academics qua academics that are specifically targeted for delays. The reasons for these checkpoints have nothing to do with academic freedom. They are not meant to restrict or impede the exercise of academic freedom, which is an activity whose main concern is the unhindered and uncensored ability to think, research, write and publish ideas, facts and arguments. The restrictions of movement are a direct result of Israel’s security concerns. And those security concerns have been formed as a response to a certain recorded type of incidents and accumulated experience, which made it necessary to employ these measures.

We know why the checkpoints, fences and walls are in place, don’t we?

It does not seem plausible that the petitioners can be unaware of these unignorable realities. Surely they realize that what they are asking for is not feasible, not under the present circumstances. Israeli soldiers manning checkpoints are not going to give academics a quick laissez-passer just because they are academics. The solution to the difficulties experienced by Palestinian academics in the exercise of their academic ambitions does not lie with selective or preferential, relief. The solution lays in the removal of the reason why these measures were instated in the first place; the cessation of terrorist threats and attempts against the life and well being of Israelis, anywhere.

I would even venture to go further and say that Palestinian academic freedom stands a better and quicker chance to be free of any Israeli fetters if and when Palestinian academics start taking seriously their own role and agency in bringing about that longed-for normalization.

A while ago, Ben Cohen tried to make sense of the unfathomable cruelty of Palestinians celebrating Samir Kuntar’s release from Israeli prison. He reminded us of what the beleaguered Iraqi intellectual, Kenan Makyia, had written about the failure of Arab intellectuals:

Makiya offers us a compelling alternative to the crude slander that Arab cruelty is somehow genetic. “In the Middle East,” he writes, “violence has tended to be ideologized and to fill public space.” Ideas are important and those who formulate and carry them - the intelligentsia - have a special responsibility as a consequence. Makiya’s essential point, first made in 1993 but resonant today, is that Arab intellectuals are guilty of a “glaring collective failure…to evolve a language of rights and democracy to supplement the language of nationalism…Words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy,’ ‘justice,’ ‘human dignity,’ and ‘human rights’ have lost all meaning in the hands of the same intellectuals who go on and on about Western hypocrisy.”

What is needed, Makiya continues, is a “new self-critical discourse…one that is rooted in a thoroughgoing insistence upon the inviolable sanctity of human life and the subordination of everything else to this criterion.”

The Israeli academics’ petition is a righteous initiative. It comes from a deeply felt and broadly-shared longing to see Palestinian academics, as well as the many others, free to pursue their interests without having to worry about checkpoints. It is a correct kind of longing, which must be continually expressed and pleaded. I would like to see the Palestinian academics on whose behalf it was made reciprocate with a similarly articulated longing, on behalf of Israeli academics, and others, in a petition to their own people, extolling such virtues as a right to life free from the fear of random murder and injury.

Engage has a thread about the same subject. The discussion in the comments brings different opinions and points worth thinking about.