University of Aberdeen – We Demand Free Speech on Genocide

Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) and the Palestinian Solidarity Society (PSS) at the University of Aberdeen today issue a letter to the senior administration at the University of Aberdeen. It sets out the administration’s steady backsliding from the spirit of the settlement they had reached with PSS in the summer of 2024, which satisfied the society to suspend their encampment. It has now been more than twelve months since the encampment, and in that time, the administration has set about suppressing the speech and activities of its students who speak up for Palestinian liberation. Its methods are largely indirect and opaque, using intermediaries bearing veiled threats to chill PSS speech, and formal procedures conducted inconsistently with official policy, but with no right of appeal, such as in its censuring of Sanaa Al-Azawi. Those who criticise Israel and question the ideology of Zionism are silenced with accusations of antisemitism.  

The spurious weaponisation of antisemitism on university campus has ensured that these very real questions for Palestinian liberation are left untouched, while silencing the speech of those struggling for that liberation and placing them under enormous stress. How is it that the university, with its extensive policies and programmes for student wellbeing, can treat its own students in that way? Why is antisemitism, a very serious and real hatred, abused on university campuses to reach over and silence speech against the crimes of Israel? 

Before we consider this, it is instructive to remember what the encampments were and what they achieved, particularly in Aberdeen. The encampments were not just student protest. They were expressions of the university body: students gathering on campus, exchanging ideas and crucially, putting those ideas to use to change the university they were part of.  

Encampment 

In October 2023 when Israel accelerated its decades long project of erasing the Palestinian people, students around the world raised serious questions about the potential complicity of their institutions, particularly in North America and Europe. Students and staff - the people who make the university itself - took space within their own campuses to address these questions and divest the university from genocide.  

The encampments were not welcomed by the university administrations and several swiftly turned on their student body to evict them from spaces within their own campus, frequently resorting to police violence in the USA. The administrations of British universities tended to show a softer, more genteel face. Principals and Vice-Chancellors would make occasional diplomatic visits to perform ritualistic handwringings before the interrogation of the students as to when would the university withdraw its investments from an evidently genocidal regime.  

And an early victory was in Aberdeen. In June 2024, it became too much for the university's administration as it nervously watched the date of summer graduations creep closer, when hundreds of students and their visiting guests from around would descend upon the ancient collegial backdrop featured in the sales brochure ('prospectus'). But now the quad had been put to good use for Palestine by students to critically investigate where their university's money was going. And so the students of the encampment movement, led by PSS, negotiated a settlement with the administration who promised it would extend its ethical investments policy to cover the entire arms sector and companies involved in illegal Palestinian settlements, to create a citizen assembly that would scrutinise financial dealings with respect to divestment, and to abstain from creating bilateral institutional ties with Israeli universities. 

This was a tremendous victory, one of the earliest successful negotiations in the UK built on the tactic of the encampments, and the first in Scotland. PSS in their victory statement said: ‘We treasure the community we have created in our time here’. The encampments therefore were not just a weapon of disruption, they were direct expressions of what the university is for: free speech put to public use. 

The staying power of the students had won a small but important victory. Some might describe the characterisation of the administration's motivations as cynical, to say that they were driven by international graduation branding and the challenge the encampment therefore posed to the university's marketability. The community of the encampment had interpreted sincerity in the administration’s pledges and voluntarily left on that basis. The administration's attitude and conduct since then have brought that sincerity into question. 

Antisemitism 

It has become increasingly common for academics to risk being disciplined by their own institutions for identifying and criticising Zionism for the racist ideology that it is, either on or off campus, and for this to be on the charge of antisemitism. In 2014, Steven Salaita’s job offer at the University of Illinois was withdrawn following a campaign by private donors to withdraw their funding. Maura Finkelstein was sacked from Muhlenberg College for her social media posts in support of Gaza during the current genocide, and the Zionist lobby group StandWithUs nearly succeeded in having Lara Sheehi sacked from George Washington University. Thanks to the efforts of the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and over 200 Jewish scholars in her field defending her, she was cleared of charges of antisemitism. 

Perhaps more importantly and worryingly than prominent academics, the wider student body of British universities is facing pressure for pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist speech. Students do not enjoy the same protections or recourses to justice that university employees do. Being at much earlier stages in their academic journeys, they are more vulnerable to threats of discipline. Nevertheless, as the encampment movement showed, they have much greater power than academics when they come together. This combination vulnerability but strength to struggle against Zionism makes them an ideal target. 

Antisemitism has been subject to especially intense and formal debate as to what it actually is. Competing definitions have been developed by international colloquia, such as the IHRA or signatories to the Jerusalem Declaration. Zionists recognise that if they can make a direct equation between their ideology and the Jewish people, so that any criticism of Zionism becomes antisemitism, this will protect them under the values of diversity, equality and inclusion which university administrations such as the University of Aberdeen espouse. Where such universities are more interested in what diversity and equality can do for their marketability than for the wellbeing of the university itself, then the perfect conditions are in place for anonymous complainants or Zionist lobby groups to monitor the activities of Palestinian solidarity organisations or even trawl the personal social media accounts of students in order to lodge complaints against them. 

Knowing that this false equation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is far from assured – and in fact in the case of the University of Aberdeen, the IHRA definition which does this has been rejected under the university’s official policy – the complaint lodged against the offending student is a weapon itself for trying to close this gap between these two obviously different things. As universities are ultimately more sensitive to their public relations (untapped market) than student relations (tapped market), this tactic of false accusations of antisemitism pulls the administration to an excessively cautious approach to the point of simply being wrong, as in the case of the University of Aberdeen’s use of the IHRA definition directly contrary to university policy. 

Who is targeted by these complaints? In their most recent report on institutional censorship of support for Palestine in the UK, CAGE International found that in the two-month period after 7^th October 2023, 98% of cases of censorship that they handled involved Muslims. In Aberdeen, there has been a clear tendency of the administration to suppress and discipline Arab Muslim women. So called concerns with antisemitism, which are in fact semantic efforts to push the racist ideology of Zionism beyond reproach, are therefore being used to perpetuate bigotry elsewhere. In targeting those who feel deep solidarity with the Palestinian people, it manages to succeed on two fronts. 

There is therefore a deep irony to the suppression of pro-Palestine speech within academia which exposes the conditional nature of both free speech itself and institutional aspirations towards equality, diversity and inclusion. For an institution such as the University of Aberdeen which positions itself as a seat of learning ‘open to all’ and ‘dedicated to the pursuit of truth in service of others,’ and which has proudly and prominently made efforts towards embedding decolonisation in teaching and research, one wonders what these words really mean for the university administration. We are calling on the University of Aberdeen to reevaluate their actions against these principles, to have the confidence to recognise real antisemitism and to likewise take concrete actions against islamophobia and anti-Arab racism which has been widespread in the UK and in many areas unchecked. 

Above all, students must not forget the spirit of the encampment movement and that they are the body which constitute the body and soul of the university, not its administration. Zionists know this and that is why it is students who are being targeted. While we call on the administration to release its grip on student speech, we know that the safeguarding of the university’s future will come from the work and perseverance of the students themselves.