Abstract
In my recent work, I argued that the bulk of the responses of the social sciences to the pathologies of late modernity was defined as being classically liberal but politically illiberal—I call this peculiar combination “Symbolic Liberalism.” Corollary to that, we witness a hierarchical polarization in various societies, manifested by the widening of the space between different elites. It is present everywhere including in university campuses and the media where we witness suffocation of academic freedom and intolerance in debates. Interestingly, such intolerance is shown by both the Left and the Right, as it is evident in the subscription to what is known as “cancel culture” by both camps but to different degrees. To illustrate this, I will give two examples mainly from the United States and the United Kingdom to show how such cancel culture has spread widely in liberal democratic countries, and a case study related to the current war on Gaza.
Keywords
We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us. (Kristof, 2016)
Introduction
In October 1992, a student strike hit all over France. The National Union of French Students (UNEF) organized an event with all students' bodies to support the movement. At that time, I was President of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) in France. As soon as I was called to the podium by the Chair, a group of students shouted me down. At the end of the event, I asked them why they did this before I spoke. I was told that they don't like Palestinians.
This incident is not isolated. Society is increasingly polarized between groups that label each other and don’t want to listen to each other. In late modernity, we witness a hierarchical polarization in various societies, manifested by the widening of the space between different elites. Many examples can be cited from the United States with the defeat of Trump in the 2020 election, to Israel after the last election in 2022 and to Turkey in the June 2023 election. The political failure of the Arab Spring reflects this polarization, as we saw for instance in the mistrust between secular and religious elites.
I argue (Hanafi, 2023) that the bulk of the responses of the social sciences and/or sociology to the pathologies of late modernity were definable as being classically liberal but politically illiberal. I call this peculiar combination “Symbolic Liberalism.” Symbolic Liberalism (SL) is not a problem for sociology alone; rather, it manifests itself through many sectors of public life, including in the media, politics, law, and education. Furthermore, the problem of SL is present not only in the Global North but also in the Global South, thanks to a wide range of global convergence forces. Empowered by emotional and neoliberal capitalism, this kind of liberalism seeks to disregard the centrality of reaching a unified conception of justice and to impose a hegemonic and deculturized conception of the good at the expense of a plurality of the conception of the good. In this meaning, it is politically illiberal as it cannot respect how people deliberate their moral reasonings, and it contributes to extremely divisive identity politics. 1 In other words, Symbolic Liberals have violated the basic promises of political liberalism. Corollary to SL, we witness a hierarchical polarization in various societies that attracts many writings under different labels (e.g. war of cultures, cultural backlash, and politics of outrage), and which is particularly deepened over issues of identity politics. According to Lane Kenworthy (2024), polarization has two dimensions: a movement away from the center toward the extremes (deeply divided), and sorting into distinct groups (closely divided). Society can have either dimension or both. Often we see two types of political/social polarization: “closely but not deeply divided” (e.g. in the US case: two big political parties), or “closely and deeply divided” (e.g. the cases of the Arab world and France, where many issues have polarized society with the presence of far left and far right). The latter is dangerous as there is a possibility of it spilling over into other realms of life, generating excessive identity politics and favoring hybrid/tactical parties over traditional right/left parties.
In his project on polarization, Mark Freeman (2023) argues that while the problem of polarization is nowhere on par with civil war, authoritarianism, genocide, and other such evils, it can – if ignored – become their harbinger and accelerant. A profusion of qualifying adjectives routinely are attached to the word “polarization” (e.g. affective, ideological, symmetric, asymmetric, political, social, ethnic, religious, racial, elite, mass, pernicious, toxic, benign, and so on). One might call it a hyper-problem, the type of problem that makes the solution to every other problem harder (Freeman, 2023). Let me be clear here that I accept it is very normal to have conflict in society, but polarization is more than that. As Mark Freeman (2023) defines it, polarization is a prominent division or conflict that forms between major groups in a society or political system and is marked by the clustering and radicalization of views and beliefs at two distant and antagonistic poles. It is often hierarchical as it entails dimensions of power and domination.
Today, such a phenomenon is present everywhere, including on university campuses and in the media. This is seen through a high degree of intolerance in debates surrounding political, cultural, and social issues, in which taking sides and positions has taken priority over making sound and explanatory arguments. Interestingly, such intolerance is shown by both the Left and the Right (with differences between both in their motivations and in their mechanisms), as it is evident in the subscription to what is known as “cancel culture” by both camps. This phenomenon has now taken such an unprecedented level that it has alarmed many scholars and has led to the signing of the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” (Harper’s Magazine, 2020). This letter was not only signed by conservatives but also by scholars and intellectuals known from the Left such as Noam Chomsky, Martin Amis, Gloria Steinem, Salman Rushdie, and Margaret Atwood. For the signatories, cancel culture is defined as “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” The call for a reckoning “has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity” (Harper’s Magazine, 2020).
Disqualification and diabolism (such as in symbolism of virus, illness, pandemic, Islamo-leftists, infiltrators, and so on) are heavily and easily used in reference to those opposing views. The outcome is the clustering and radicalization of views and beliefs at two distant and antagonistic poles. This has resulted in the subscription to a greater risk aversion by many academics, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the apparent consensus within their camp, or even if they are seen to lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
The intolerance of debate is not only based on anecdotal information but on data. The famous journal Science published an editorial arguing that researchers have experienced harassment, threats, prosecution, or even violence, for the opinions they express or for their work in relation to high-profile issues, and all this comes not only from the “outside world” but also from and within academia itself. 2 For instance, a survey among political scientists worldwide (The World of Political Science survey) in 2019 showed that the reply to the questions that constitutes Cancel Culture Index “reflects the experience of growing restrictions on academic freedom of speech, pressures for ideological conformity, and the enforcement of politically correct speech. The results confirmed the significant effects of Left-Right ideology which consistently predicted scores on this index” (Norris, 2020: 16).
In the same vein, another 2022 global survey interviewing 468 climate scientists carried out by Global Witness found that 39% of all scientists polled have experienced online harassment or abuse as a result of their climate work, and the level of exposure to harassment was linked to the number of academic publications and the frequency of media appearances (Global Witness, 2023). The report on this survey highlights the tremendous effect of social media (particularly X and Facebook) in incitement and harmful speech, because of their business models and lack of serious moderation and transparency. The algorithmic systems that determine which content is shown to users are kept opaque by the companies.
The neoliberalism immersed in each sphere, including academia, has reinforced polarization and cancel culture. The spread of the “culture of safetyism” among administrators (particularly in the new managerial system, where they are not academics) has resulted in their delivery of hasty decisions and disproportionate punishments against some professors, sometimes for simple quoting of the works of literature in classrooms, or for not giving advance warnings to students (trigger warnings), all in a spirit of panicked damage control.
This article will investigate how this hierarchical polarization is present everywhere, including in university campuses, supposedly the very places of safety for free expression, locations where such polarization is not supposed to occur. Thus, our focus here will be on the stifling of academic freedom. To illustrate this, I will give three examples, not from the Arab world where academic freedom is catastrophic (el-Amine, 2018; Hanafi, 2021), but from two liberal democratic countries – the United States and the United Kingdom. I will show how cancel culture, often driven by the Symbolic Liberal (but not only by them), has spread widely in places that actually pride themselves on their academic freedom. Then, I will present a case study related to the current war on Gaza, as this has been so revealing of all the contradictions of societal polarization and academic freedom, affecting not only campuses but also the media, political, and judicial fields. As this case is loosely or partially related to SL and cancel culture, I will advance five factors that can explain the Western pro-genocidal Israeli position 3 : (1) a certain instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust; (2) the transformation of Zionism into Symbolic Liberal and religious Zionisms; (3) the false image of Israel as a secular state; (4) Islamophobia and the image of Hamas as a fanatical religious organization, disregarding the anticolonial component of its agenda; and (5) the Euro-American colonial legacy. Before that, however, I will spell out some features of the debates on academic freedom.
Debates on academic freedom
Recently, many incidents have indicated the stifling of academic freedom. Some scholars were sacked from their positions in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Israel because of their position criticizing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, as in the case of the renowned and internationally respected anthropologist Ghassan Hage. 4 Students in many American universities were arrested in April 2024 because of their protest against American foreign policy on the “war in Gaza.” In relation to that, Laëtitia Atlani-Duault and Stéphane Dufoix (2014) have noticed that the increasing number of cases of suing researchers for defamation in courts have posed a tremendous challenge to the autonomy of the academic profession and have put researchers who are working on some sensitive topics in dangerous situations. 5 Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) clearly put it that some stress might be good for students' resilience, while coddling their minds is not. We do not talk any more about risks as positive things, and small risks are manageable. To understand the current form of risk aversion in universities, Frank Furedi (2017) highlights particularly neoliberal-driven processes of individualization and psychologization, where is it argued that the “infantilization” of society in general, and in particular students, can be located within a “therapeutic turn” in Western contexts. This therapeutic turn is evident in the protection of the legal and market-oriented interests of Higher Education institutions.
In order to understand fully the nature of academic freedom, I address three fundamental issues: the first is what distinguishes it from freedom of expression; the second is about the importance of academic autonomy; and the third is about the tension between this freedom and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).
For the first point, let me put it clearly that there are differences between free speech and academic freedom. The latter is indeed more demanding of social responsibility, intellectual integrity, and professional ethics. What a professor can write, which readings they select for teaching, or what they say in the classroom, should all be framed by these principles, while, in general, a layperson can make utterances in the private and public spheres more freely. About the first principle, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) founder Alexander Meiklejohn wrote that “our final responsibility, as scholars and teachers, is not to the truth. It is to the people who need the truth” (Kirk, 1955: 31). To account for that point, Stanley Fish (2014) placed professionalism at the center of academic freedom – professionalism that can be translated into submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom. Needless to say, it is often very difficult to craft exceptions to general free speech principles. “Hate speech” is a category with no fixed legal definition, 6 and so I suggest dealing with it more socially (depending on context) than legally (see the conclusion of this article). The locus of academic freedom is not only the classroom but off-campus as well. Roland Dworkin (1998) highlights the importance of off-campus activities and even equates politicized activities with one's civic duty.
Concerning the second point, while the principle of intellectual integrity is related to how peers assess research robustness, the principle of social responsibility is more complex as it requires moral deliberation in order to evaluate a statement, as I will outline below. Academic freedom is threatened by the lack of autonomy in Higher Education institutions. Historically speaking, we may argue that in the Global North, the big threat comes often from donors, particularly in managerial universities, while in the Global South it comes from authoritarian governments and to a lesser degree conservative groups. Yet the picture is much more complex when different university traditions (Humboldtian, Napoleonian, and managerial) blend, and we have little evidence of a direct relationship between the type of funders (private vs. public) and the extent of autonomy (el-Amine, 2018). But we do have more evidence as to how autonomy is impacted upon by the type of elite (liberal, conservative, and Symbolic Liberal) and the type of political regime (authoritarian, liberal democratic, and popular democratic). In her seminal book Academic Freedom and The Transnational Production of Knowledge, Dina Kiwan (2023) unfolds a complex picture of stifling academic freedom beyond the divide of North/South under the effect of transnational production of knowledge, based on analysis of her interviewees' replies from four countries, the United Kingdom, the United States, Lebanon, and UAE.
In the authoritarian states, the internalized “red lines” experienced by scholars are frequently referred to in relation to producing “sensitive” knowledge (e.g. concerning gender, sexuality, security, and sectarian politics). On the other hand, this “forbidden knowledge” can be found in many countries, including in liberal democratic countries. For Kiwan, this knowledge of “knowable unknowns” is deemed to be too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce. One must know what knowledge not to produce. As such, forbidden knowledge entails not only content but also the structural and sociopolitical processes that operate in policing this sensitive/taboo knowledge. She proposes three dominant discourses of forbidden knowledge: first, concerns relating to the misapplication of research findings; second, “uncomfortable truths”; and third, taboo topics.
In contrast to forbidden knowledge, Kiwan examined the conception of “legitimate” knowledge, where legitimacy is constructed in terms of the “right to authority” and its public acceptance. This leads us to the last point, as there are ongoing polemical debates concerning the issue that principles of academic freedom sit in tension with principles of diversity of inclusion. Following philosophers of education Eamonn Callan and Sigal Ben-Porath as well as Judith Butler, Kiwan construes that inclusivity is a threshold condition for academic freedom, or, in effect, a “precondition” for academic freedom. This preconditionality is a way to resolve the debates that have become politicized between right-wing conservative and left-wing and/or liberal positions. Right-wing conservative responses defend arguments in favor of academic freedom, while left-wing and/or liberal responses perceive such arguments as disingenuous attempts to weaponize academic freedom against inclusive knowledge. Kiwan considers that the processes of forbidding knowledge and legitimizing it “act through the transnational processes of publishing and dissemination. This occurs at the level of the individual researcher trying to publish their work and/or being blocked from giving guest lectures” (Kiwan, 2023: 137).
Building upon Kiwan's invitation to weigh free speech together with inclusion, this equation does not work well in the chilling climate of polarization. Using this equation, most of the protests against the genocidal war on Gaza become suddenly an act of antisemitism. This “inference” cannot be possible without the mushrooming of “psychologizing” literature on harm and trauma that mediates between free speech with inclusion, as we will see below. This literature often calls for restricting free speech and academic freedom by conjuring up “harms” or “rights-violations.”
The question I raise here is this: harms and rights-violations for whom and for what? In the era of excessive identity politics, a group's rights can conflict with another group's rights, and the harm cannot be without qualification. The problem is that the discussion is not pitched any more in ethical terms but in legal terms, and you may be sued, or not recruited, or even sacked, if you cross the line, particularly regarding the holding of certain political or gender opinions, as we will see in the next section. While Dina Kiwan invites us to the ethical terrain of such discussion, scholars like Ann Cudd (2019) extend this to legal terrain and make the notion of harm jeopardize critical thinking: Expressions that create a hostile environment oppose inclusion because those who are victims of this hostility are made to feel that they do not belong in the university and claim that it poses a threat to their safety and wellbeing… Trauma can be triggered by experiences that shatter our assumptions that the world is benevolent and meaningful, and that the self is worthy. Toxic and oppressive speech are harmful forms of speech because they shatter these assumptions about the world and the self. (2019: 444)
For Steinhoff, First Amendment law is very robust, and conjuring up “harms” or even rights violations caused by certain forms of free speech is insufficient to make a case for their restriction. Of course, using the social responsibility principle of academic freedom (which for me distinguishes between academic freedom and free speech) can make us denounce some “shattering experience” but it does not make us legally restrict speech as a wholesale application of this conceptualization. The sections below are about this wholesale application in specific contexts.
Intolerance in the US and UK academic fields
According to Academic Freedom Index, 7 there is a worldwide trend of declining academic freedom in many countries in the world, including the United States and the United Kingdom, 8 and this is in close relationship with both political and societal polarizations (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute, 2024). In the case of the United States, the statistics provided by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) indicate that 149 professors were targeted for their speech in 2022 (up from 30 in 2015) by being subjected to warnings, investigations, suspension, and termination. Scholars were also likely to be targeted for the expression of their views on such issues as partizanship (25% of incidents) or gender (23%), or for their views on institutional policies (25%). 9 The same trend can be noticed in information provided by The National Association of Scholars (NAS), which maintains a database of American academics who have experienced campaigns calling for their dismissal. The database records 4 incidents documented in each year of 2015 and 2016, 9 in 2017, 13 in 2018 and a striking 65 in 2020 (Kaufmann, 2021). This trend is increasingly covered by the media. An art professor was fired in 2023 from Hamline University following a complaint from a Muslim student that she showed ancient images of the Prophet Muhammad in a global art course. The Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School denied former Human Rights Watch executive Kenneth Roth a fellowship because of his purported “anti-Israel bias,” and so on.
We have much evidence that this chilling climate of polarization reflects the general opinion of students and faculty. Pano Kanelos (2021), the President of the University of Austin, refers to a survey in the United States demonstrating that: nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of academics and PhD students expressing out-of-favor social or political views say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their positions. 80% of American PhD students are willing to discriminate against scholars holding minority perspective… The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker [(Kaufmann, 2021)] … In Heterodox Academy's 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believed. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive…, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey.
10
Disinvitation incidents
FIRE defines the term “disinvitation incident” as “controversies on campus that arise throughout the year whenever segments of the campus community demand that an invited speaker not be allowed to speak, as opposed to merely expressing disagreement with, or even protesting, an invited speaker's views or positions.” FIRE distinguishes between an attempt to censor a speaker and the actual end result of a speaker not speaking. These “disinvitation incidents” can include “unsuccessful disinvitation attempts” (such as shouting down speakers, and intimidating them but not banning them from speaking). 11 In late 2023, FIRE reported in its database at least 574 disinvitation campaigns since 2000 in all sorts of Higher Education schools (public, secular, or religious, respectively, 44%, 33%, and 23% of total incidents). Roughly 60% were successful and more than two-thirds came from those to the political Left of the targeted speakers (see Tables 1 and 2). We also notice that from 2001 to 2022 the number of disinvitation campaigns multiplied by 10 (from 4 for 42) (see Figure 1). Of course, we expect the figure to be much higher as some interviewees mentioned that they abstained from inviting guests on controversial issues for fear that such campaigns would be banned by the administration.
Disinvitation incidents per year. Source: FIRE database (compilation: Sari Hanafi).
Disinvitation incidents by type of school and political orientation of protestors (coming from the left of speaker or from the right of speaker).
Source: FIRE database (compilation: Sari Hanafi).
Disinvitation incidents by political orientation of protestors.
Source: FIRE database (compilation: Sari Hanafi).
Incidents also involve canceling talks on American campuses about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with the justification that such talks would upset the “sensitivity” of some students, without mentioning who those students were or saying anything about many others whose feelings were not hurt. 12 More generally, this problem of intolerance of debate does not concern only the United States but also similar countries like Canada and, to a lesser degree the United Kingdom, as we see with the surveys in these countries (Kaufmann, 2021), including official governmental reports, 13 and indeed worldwide.
At this stage, let me qualify how I read these figures, using two points and two examples.
First, I am aware that FIRE and the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), for whom Eric Kaufmann wrote his report, are close to certain political conservatives and may produce these reports as part of their libertarian approach to academic freedom. This is why I took only some factual data provided rather than their opinion surveys, and why I am not espousing their conclusions as to the victimization of conservative faculty, and so I am approaching them critically. I am fully aware of how such organizations can push for a problematic agenda. At this stage, I want to show that there is clear evidence of a chilling climate on academic campuses. I used these data as we do not have such comprehensive databases and figures coming from nonpartisan centers. The trend they describe concurs with other studies conducted by serious research groups, such as Scott-Baumann et al.'s (2020) Islam on Campus: Contested Identities and the Cultures of Higher Education in Britain, and Brown's (2002) critiques of US higher education, as well as some data from Academic Freedom Index, the World of Political Science survey, Global Witness, and the Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey in the United States.
Second, I used FIRE and CSPI data exclusively to show a clear trend in academia to restrict academic freedom, but I am aware that incidences and no-platforming should always be qualified and considered as part of societal intolerance carried out by both the Symbolic Liberals and right-wing populists (reducing the debates on the plurality of the conception of the good into a single hegemonic conception of the good), or simply as a necessary measure to prevent racism and discrimination. Needless to say, I do not systematically consider disruption of talks as necessarily unethical. Denouncing politicians who have a long career of supporting wars can be justifiable. Universities should remain sites of protests, open discussion, and disagreement about the politics of hegemonic authorities, as was the case from the Vietnam War to Apartheid-era South Africa. However, many other examples fit into the definition of cancel culture and societal intolerance. Some examples to justify my statements can be given.
The first example concerns the work of Scott-Baumann et al. (2020). It provides some evidence of how the current counter-extremism measures known as “Prevent” are implemented in UK universities, raising a major issue in terms of academic freedom. Religious identity is politicized by state actors with an erroneous conflation of perceived social conservatism with extremism. This is responsible for a chilling effect on free speech at universities. Attitudes toward Prevent were significantly negative (expressed by over half of participants and interviewees), and not only from the perceptions of Muslim staff and students. For these authors, students are often accused of being either “snowflakes” who melt at any contact with controversy, or proto-terrorists who foment radicalization. The authors conclude that “instead of opening up debates on difficult issues there is undoubtedly a rising tendency to deal with controversy through silencing, marginalizing, and delegitimizing positions with which one disagrees. This is undeniable as a trend across the higher education sector in recent years” (2020: 132). This securitization of campuses comes mainly from populist conservatives (such as the 2015 report of the Henry Jackson Society) claiming that campuses (such as SOAS) have given a platform to radical Islamists. 14
Another example concerns intolerance in discussing issues related to gender identity or intolerance to hearing different versions of feminism. These are common in many universities. At Oxford University, Professor Kathleen Stock, a gender-critical philosopher who was hounded out of her job at Sussex University by trans activists, needed security in order to speak at the Oxford Union, but still had her participation disrupted. Also, when Dr Helen Joyce, an Irish academic and journalist, was invited to speak at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge on 25 October 2022, its senior leaders criticized her invitation, describing her views as “hateful to our community.” 15 There are other cases of disinvitation in the United Kingdom called “no platform.” 16 Thus, one cannot claim that preventing these speakers from speaking is important for balancing the power structure between a powerful group (e.g. conservatives in some countries) and a marginalized group, as these speakers often come from the Left and have a specific understanding of feminism. As far as a talk does not generate clear hate speech (see as per above the Brandenburg v. Ohio case decision of the US Supreme Court), it ought not to be banned. In the same vein, Dina Kiwan (2023) points out that in the UK context, the production of knowledge with alternative narratives for certain topics is seemingly blocked from both public domains as well as academic fora. Kiwan cites a professor of sociology describing his difficulties in publishing work about the highly publicized case of 2019 protests in Birmingham against the inclusion of LGBT (No Outsiders) in primary education curricula: “I've not been able to get anything published around the No Outsiders [issue]. Within newspapers, no letters to a newspaper, no offer to write something for a paper, [no] article for The Conversation, which is like the house newspaper of universities, they were not interested in having anything on No Outsiders… They don't wish to publish on this topic with a view that is other than the mainstream view of a deficit in the attitudes of Muslim parents” (Kiwan, 2023: 165).
Third, Zeina Al Azmeh and Patrick Baert (2025) offer insightful explanations of the growing prevalence of cancel culture and the intolerance of debates, including deplatforming as a method of collective positioning. Drawing on positioning theory that consider the intrinsic quality of intellectual interventions is not the full story, they argue that intellectuals employ various rhetorical devices to attribute certain qualities to themselves (self-positioning), thereby aligning with or distancing themselves from others. Social media and digital culture amplify this phenomenon, fostering the formation of echo chambers and reinforcing divisive “Us vs. Them” dynamics. At times, these platforms also provide a space for individuals who have been canceled academically (e.g. the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson).
Academic freedom under fire as Gaza burns
During the war on Gaza, 17 we witness Western genocide-enabling silence, not only at the political level but also among large sectors of media and academia. We can roughly speak of a division within the international community: the Global North is heavily dominated by the uncritical stance against Israeli colonial practices in Gaza and beyond (with perhaps the exceptions of the governments of Slovenia, Spain, Scotland, and Ireland), while the Global South, including the heavyweights of Russia, China, and Iran, is in favor of permanent ceasefire and a serious peace process.
The pro-Palestine demonstrations – despite some bans – were colossal in almost all major cities worldwide, including in the West. These increased significantly following the Israeli bombardment of al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 13 October 2023, which killed nearly 500 Palestinians and triggered global outrage at the slaughter of people, many of whom were taking shelter from the relentless Israeli bombing of the besieged enclave. Some Western countries – particularly Germany and France – do not merely support the Israeli colonial project, they are also attempting to ban Palestinian flags and kufiyas in demonstrations against genocide. They pretend that it is antisemitic to hold Israel accountable to international humanitarian laws. In the United States, the government has taken several steps to silence speech that is pro-Palestine and critical of Israel. A new bill (HR 6090) seeks to silence dissent on college campuses, the threats of sanctions to ICC and family members of ICC staff, the banning of TikTok, the violation of the Leahy Law (that prohibits the American administration from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights with impunity) and many more actions are all examples of actions taken to silence free speech and end academic freedom in the United States. Since Trump took office in January 2025, many visas and green cards have been revoked from individuals who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza.
This does not concern only politicians who care about groups of interests necessary for their funding and re-election, but also media and academia. Today, we can read more criticism about the Israeli genocide in Gaza in Haaretz than in mainstream American, Canadian, or European newspapers. Even some Israeli sociologists 18 are more critical of the Israeli violation of international laws than are some academic associations in Europe.
Needless to say, in the West there are many honest scholars and human rights defenders, such as Craig Mokhiber, director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He resigned on 31 October 2023 with a scathing resignation letter, blasting UN and Western complicity in Israeli abuses. We are also witnessing how - despite universities' institutional support for the Israeli colonial regime – university students demonstrate strong support for the struggle of the Palestinian people. 19 And in 2024, we have seen thousands of Western scholars and writers denounce the war on Gaza and call for an end to the Occupation, despite the witch-hunt that has been conducted since October 7 by the Israeli lobby and its allies. In liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, and Australia, a researcher posting against genocide on Facebook and X can be considered an apologist for terrorism. In France, nearly 400 investigations for complaints linked to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were launched between October and December 2023, according to the investigative website Mediapart (Middle East Eye, 2024). For instance, some 1557 French jurists and scientists signed a statement entitled “Defending Freedom of Expression on Palestine: An Academic Issue.” 20
If philosophically speaking, censorship over Palestine may well be viewed as a case of cancel culture, I acknowledge that sociologically this is a very different phenomenon, shaped by different forces and motivations. In wide strokes and in the following sections, I will advance five factors that can explain not only the Western pro-genocidal Israeli position and its double standard (e.g. treatment of Russian occupation to Ukraine vs. Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories), but also the (physical and legal) violence with which the dissenting voices have been silenced. These factors are the memory of the Holocaust oscillating between sincerity and certain sorts of instrumentalization and guilt-washing; the surge of Symbolic Liberal Zionism; the idea that Israel is a secular state that can do no wrong; Islamophobia and the image of Hamas as a fanatic organization rather than as a liberation organization; and the Euro-American colonial legacy.
Of course, no factor can explain alone violation of academic freedom and of freedom of expression, and there are also other factors, which in my sense play less important roles, like how crucial Israel is to the Western military-industrial complex. In the United States, the vast majority of the military aid never leaves Washington, it goes right into the coffers of the arms manufacturing and distribution companies. The scale of all these sales and purchases is directly tied to military aid to Israel. Israel is literally the foundation of the military economy of scale 21 that solidifies the overwhelming power of what Israeli political economists Nitzan Bichler (2002) termed the Weapondollar–Petrodollar Coalition. 22 We can also advance how Biblical goals play a part, particularly among Evangelists. 23
Memory of the holocaust: Sincerity and guiltwashing
The memory of the Holocaust remains vivid. There is no doubt that the 7 October Hamas attack, which did not discriminate between civilians and combatants, brought back some memories for many Europeans in a sincere manner. Antisemitism also remains vivid in some areas of the world and requires to be combated by all means possible. It denotes “abhorrent conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, finance, and governments, blood libel accusations, Holocaust denial tirades, and dehumanising caricatures of Jews.” 24
However, the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and its illustrative examples 25 have become an essential tool for the Alliance's work on tackling antisemitism in many Western countries. This definition conflates antisemitism with anti-Zionism as well as with criticism of the Israeli actions and policies, including campaigns holding the Israeli government accountable to international law, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The definition also makes it antisemitic to draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. This is a nonlegally binding definition, yet it is being used legally, which is definitely a way of weaponizing antisemitism. Some US states have passed legislation incorporating the definition into law, making it legally enforceable.
The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Tendayi Achiume, has warned against the use of the IHRA definition “due to its susceptibility to being politically instrumentalized and the harm done to human rights resulting from such instrumentalization.” 26 In the same vein, the European Legal Support Center and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) show in a 2023 report 27 that “there is widespread agreement among genocide scholars and legal experts (including the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern) that the IHRA definition is not appropriate for academic settings where critical thought and free debate are paramount.” The report presents case-based evidence of infringements of staff and students” fundamental rights caused by the implementation of the IHRA's definition. The evidence is supported by 40 documented cases in 14 UK universities involving allegations of antisemitism that invoked the IHRA definition.
The 2020 Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism 28 was drafted to counter the IHRA definition, precisely because the majority of genocide scholars believe it is unfit for purpose. 29 This declaration states its opposition to the IHRA Definition: “Because [it] is unclear in key respects and widely open to different interpretations, it has caused confusion and generated controversy, hence weakening the fight against antisemitism. The IHRA Definition includes 11 ‘examples’ of antisemitism, 7 of which focus on the State of Israel. While this puts undue emphasis on one arena, there is a widely felt need for clarity on the limits of legitimate political speech and action concerning Zionism, Israel, and Palestine.”
Recently, hundreds of Jewish scholars, writers, and artists have signed an Open Letter arguing that all criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. 30
The Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon (2023) traces the transformation of antisemitism from its traditional meaning to the “new antisemitism.” The logic of the latter can be formulated as a syllogism: (i) antisemitism is hatred of Jews; (ii) to be Jewish is to be Zionist; and (iii) therefore anti-Zionism is antisemitic. For him, the error has to do with the second proposition, which will open the door to banning any criticism of the Israeli colonial practices (Gordon, 2023). A good example of the easy political use of IHRA concerns the then UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Michelle Donelan. At the end of October 2023, she published an open letter to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), an independent public funding body that directs academic research. In it, Donelan attacked several academics the body had appointed, pointing to their “extremist views on social media”, which she said included references to genocide and apartheid. The UKRI immediately launched an investigation, promising “swift and robust action.” Over 3000 academics countered by signing an open letter to the UKRI. pointing to “the current wave of repression and attempts at censorship led by the government against lawful expressions of solidarity with Palestinians and criticisms of the Israeli military's heavy bombardment of the Gaza Strip since 7 October.” 31
When it comes to Germany, the witch hunt against scholars who criticize Israel started in the late 1990s, including disinvitation incidences and campaigns, in line with the new definition of antisemitism (Younes, 2020). 32 Media actors have opposed the participation of Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian historian and political theorist, at the Ruhr triennale, the international festival of the arts in the Ruhr metropolis. 33 The best explanation of this sort of action is provided by Anna Younes (2020) with her concept of “War on Anti-Semitism” (an analog to the War on Terror). Esra Özyürek (2023) points out that German politicians, journalists, and academicians “subcontract” guilt about the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, particularly Arab Muslims. The “general German social problem of antisemitism” is projected onto this minority, who are then further stigmatized as “the most unrepentant antisemites” in need of additional education and discipline (Özyürek, 2023: 22–25). Thus, the instrumentalization of the new antisemitism becomes one of the avatars of orientalism, that is, how the “Orientals” were historically portrayed as uncivilized. This subcontracting was also demonstrated by Al-Taher and Younes (2023) after the antisemitic act in Halle against a Synagogue in 2019. 34 This was perpetrated by a white supremacist German man. The German Rectors” Conference published a statement in relation to the events in Halle. Instead of targeting and condemning white supremacy, the statement advises banning BDS activism from university campuses. While one can expect a pro-American/pro-Israeli position from the right and far right, what is astonishing is the position of the Left. Whether at the level of Leftist political parties (e.g. the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party) or leftist academia, the Left was particularly silent and even apologetic about the Israeli genocide in Gaza (Shahriar, 2024).
This goes beyond Germany. The Center for Security, Race and Rights' report entitled “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse” (Aziz and Plitnick, 2024) is very compelling, arguing that “when Muslims and Arabs in America defend the rights of Palestinians or criticize Israeli state policy, they are often baselessly presumed to be motivated by a hatred for Jews rather than support for human rights, freedom, and consistent enforcement of international law.”
The radical Indian historian Pankaj Mishra (2024) refers to the American historian Andrew Port's study Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust (Port, 2023), which allows one better to understand the widespread indifference in Germany to the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza. Examining the German response to mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans, Port (2023: 54) suggests that the Holocaust “may have unwittingly desensitized Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.”
In the same vein, the Iranian-American professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University Hamid Dabashi is right when he elegantly notes: “We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel's slaughter of Palestinians over the past century (not just the past 100 days)” (Dabashi, 2024). In Germany, some prizes were canceled in 2024. Cases here include those of Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli and Jewish Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen. Gessen was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, but it was canceled because she compared Gaza before 7 October to the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe. The American political scientist and author of Hannah Arendt's biography Samantha Hill (2023) rightly argued that Arendt, who was critical of the nation state of Israel from its founding, would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany today. On 14 December 2023, a group of students at Freie Universität Berlin, occupied a lecture hall in an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people. They received letters from the police notifying them that the university administration had pressed criminal charges against them for “trespassing.”
35
The Egyptian writer Omar Sabbour refers to this incident as guiltwashing [that] is leaning in the direction of anti-Semitism – as well as anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia – because it operates on a superficial level and does not genuinely internalize the lessons of the past… Germany has adopted a robotic, mindless, unidimensional reactive position. “Never again” is promoted in the narrowest sense – which is not altogether surprising considering the lack of education within Germany about its colonial past and other victim communities of the Nazi regime. It refuses to accept that never again should mean never again for genocide against any people. (Sabbour and Students for Palestine, 2024) “Antisemitism” as a subject shuts down debate and discussion. In the USA, while requesting a ceasefire in a war zone where civilians were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, university students chanted “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” Many banners of their demonstrations clearly spelled out that this is a call for a democratic and secular state for all its residents. Yet this chant was interpreted in a rhetorical phantom as “calls for genocide of the Jewish people” by the republican congresswoman Elyse Stefanik, during the hearing of three presidents of Ivy League schools (Harvard, MIT, and The University of Pennsylvania) who were called by Congress on December 5th 2023, to testify about “antisemitism on college campuses.” Even Stefanik is not a symbolic liberal some American democrats they are and they participated in the hearing. Most of these demonstrations were co-organized by Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, so many of the demonstrators were Jewish themselves. I cannot help pondering over the fact that these three presidents were women and that one of them was black. The outcome of the non-debate has been the banning of talk in certain American campuses where the speakers requested a ceasefire, while polls showed that 80% among Democratic voters and 56% among Republican voters, supported an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza.
42
University administrators are guided by the same playbook: First, invest in fundraising and development that would be attractive to billionaires looking for philanthropic opportunities to avoid taxes. Second, leverage your assets by taking on bond-funded debt for new buildings. Third, shrink your workforce down to the bone by reducing the number of tenured faculty positions, outsourcing food and cleaning services, and paying graduate student workers as little as possible. Then, get rid of unprofitable departments in the name of productivity. Finally, establish and copiously reward administrators who will execute those policies with alacrity. (Liu, 2023)
Transformation of Zionism into symbolic liberal and religious Zionisms
The Zionist movement emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as a minority ideology among Jews, advocating for ethnic-national emancipation in contrast to the movement of assimilation that Jews had been either voluntarily or forcibly adopting. Over time, however, this movement underwent various ideological transformations, including the rise of socialist Zionist pioneers during the greater emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine which lasted from the 1870s until the 1920s. The movement shifted from its initial project to a colonial endeavor in Palestine, with socialist, liberal, and religious Jews reshaping it in response to the specific historical contexts of the Holocaust and antisemitism in Europe (Fadel, Forthcoming)
As I showed above, since the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted its working definition of antisemitism in 2005, there have been attempts to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and even to redefine Zionism not as a national doctrine but as an ethnicity. According to this redefinition, Zionists are seen as a nationality, akin to Arabs, Mexicans, or French, and any criticism of this nationality is labeled as racist.
In my view, Zionism is primarily a nationalist doctrine that can be colonial, chauvinistic, exclusionary, or emancipatory – much like any other form of nationalism. However, I believe the major transformation of this ideology occurred within two contexts: first, how liberals came to violate liberalism itself and turned it into a symbolic liberalism and second, how religious forces radicalized it. I will focus here on liberal Zionism, using the seminal work of Egyptian-Canadian legal scholar Mohamad Fadel, who distinguishes between different iterations of this doctrine and heavily critiques its mainstream form, which he labels “liberal Zionism” (Fadel, forthcoming). I would argue that this form is more accurately described as Symbolic Liberal Zionism.
Fadel defines it aptly as “a recognition that Palestinians are victims of something, but that their victimhood demands only a humane response, not a legal response in line with general liberal principles of justice” (Fadel, forthcoming). This form of Zionism fails to take Palestinian equality seriously, and this failure manifests in three key dimensions:
The problem today involves not only the prevalence of this nonreasonable form of liberal Zionism but also the rise of a religious version, which takes the form of a messianic strand aiming to realize the vision of Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel), an Israel stretching “from the river to the sea.” However, in the original and current platform of the Likud Party, the “river” is not the Jordan River, but rather the Euphrates River, meaning the vision calls for the annexation of not only Gaza and the West Bank but also parts of Syria and Jordan. 43
Israel as a secular state
For some in the West, Israel is a secular country that can do no wrong. However, if we look at one indicator alone – the expansion of illegal settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – one will quickly realize that the Israeli leaders – both secularists and religious actors, both leftists and rightists – have engaged in this land theft (Hanafi, 2013). I recall a public talk by the late French sociologist Alain Touraine at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris in 1993, where he evoked the Israeli “miracle” of absorbing 100,000 Russian Jews in a short period of time. When I contested this “miracle” with the fact that most of these Russians were settled illegally in Occupied Palestine, he replied: “Mister Hanafi, those migrants will change the equation: grown up in the Soviet Union, they are secular, so they will support the peace process.”
Demonstrating perverse naivete, he did not realize that these illegal settlers would establish some of the most colonial far-right political parties in the Israeli regime – such as Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) – and have allied themselves with the religious settlers' movement in the West Bank. After the time of this anecdote, we met many times and from time to time I reminded him what he said, but each time I only received either a laugh or a big smile from him.
This secularistic trend continues to flourish through the writing of scholars such as Elie Barnavi (2024) and Gilles Kepel (2024). They were interviewed in the French political magazine L'Express, where they argued that there is conflict today between two religious nationalist movements: Hamas/Islamic Jihad from the Palestinian side, and the Israeli religious parties. As such, they could not criticize Israel as a secular state but could only criticize the excesses of some political fringes. Kepel went so far as to analogize Hamas to Al-Qaida and ISIS, and to compare 7 October to 11 September. Such a perspective is incapable of seeing Hamas as an expression of a national liberation movement. This is something that has been repeated many times by François Burgat (2016), according to international law there is an illegal settler colonial and apartheid project at least in the (post-1967) occupied Palestinian territories. 44 I will extend my criticism here also to the hard secularists in the Arab world, such as the Tunisian political scientist Hamadi Redissi who apparently cannot see how Hamas is an expression of a Palestinian nationalist project and who takes the occasion of 7 October to denounce the whole military raison d'étre of this organization. 45
Islamophobia and Hamas
The third factor in my formulation is that the position taken against Hamas has a close relationship to the creeping Islamophobia in many Western countries, albeit to different degrees. In both European media and academic work, particularly in France, there is sometimes denial of the rampant racism against Muslims, most of whom are integrated into national societies but who refuse to be assimilated into cultural majoritarianism. In the last decade, many social scientists in France have been using the word Islamophobia with quotation marks (i.e. “Islamophobia”), as if they do not believe that it constitutes a dangerous social phenomenon that even deserves a label (Hajjat, 2021).
Francois Burgat (2020) and Nacera Guénif
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have insisted on the fact that the tensions and rifts between Europe and the Muslim world, whether domestic or regional, may be analyzed as resulting from various historical dynamics. The most important of these rifts has little to do with global religious affairs; rather, it is internal and political in nature. It is by far the most structural, and the most decisive, for over the past 5 years, that has no longer been the sole preserve of extreme-right political forces. From Italy to Denmark, Sweden, and Austria, this posture has become the position of a quasi-majority of the political landscape. For instance, in Denmark Sofie Aaltonen gives us a detailed report on policies in this country that target Muslims: The Danish parliament has ratified at least 58 bill proposals, in which the parliamentary debate has concerned Islam or Muslims, in the past seven years alone [since 2017], along with 38 resolution proposals aimed at disciplining religious practices within Islam and belonging as a Muslim and Dane … These resolutions have sought to restrict practices and spaces such as wearing the hijab or niqab, establishing or maintaining prayer rooms, mosques, Muslim free-schools, performing circumcision, adhering to halal food practices, and even challenging the formal recognition of Muslim religious communities in Denmark. (Aaltonen, 2024: 7)
In the same vein, Dina Kiwan (2023: 164) argues that “the production of knowledge on Palestine in the US and UK contexts attests to experiences of a hostile working environment and constraints on academic freedom in several interviewee accounts” that were given in her book.
Listening to many debates in French media about Gaza involves a slippery slope when talking about Islam, but “what is debated is not Islam as a phenomenon and as an object of investigation, but Islam as a filter and a criterion for demarcating the belonging to the political community” (Dupret and Ferrié, 2024).
The Euro-American colonial legacy
If I accept the saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, I will not be surprised by those figures of the far-right who, being islamophobic, have become very supportive of Israeli colonial practices. These positions are a continuation of the Euro-American colonial legacy and colonial method, as they are described by Afreen Faridi (2023): “wait for a people to die, make a museum of their genocide, then set up departments of decoloniality over their mass graves.”
Two focal points here are to be discussed. First, what counts for constructing universal categories? Second, the gap between liberal values and their application, particularly outside the confines of the nation-state. Regarding the first point, the outstanding Iranian-American literary critic Hamid Dabashi has made a bitterly compelling criticism of European philosophy: “those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; or people in Asia, Africa and Latin America – we do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers, except as a metaphysical menace that must be conquered and quieted” (Dabashi, 2024).
For me, it is more complicated. Each thought has its own (ideological) blind spot. Not only do the social sciences and humanities influence culture, but culture also influences knowledge production. Such observations explain how universal categories are influenced by the bias of an author's positionality. Yet, humanistic values and universal categories are salient for comparing social and political phenomena and for mobilizing humanistic solidarity.
Constructing universal categories is not an easy endeavor, particularly in relation to (il)legitimate violence. At the University of Pennsylvania, professor of law Claire Finkelstein (2023) has made a Call for Restricting Free Speech on Palestine. She sees the debate only in terms of potential “violence” and “(in)safety” 47 in American university campuses. The violence in the form of genocide and war crimes in Gaza is apparently invisible. Only debate and discussion can enhance our understanding of (soft) universalism, but the tension is not only between the Western world and the rest. For instance, there are those among Arabs who are sensitive to the Palestinian cause, but who cheer the mass killing by the Syrian regime of its own people. We see the Israeli war on Gaza as a crime against humanity, but we do not see the Syrian dictatorship at the same time (Chibli Mallat, 2015).
Returning to the Western position on the genocidal war on Gaza, the problem does not lie in the universal values of human rights and international conventions, 48 or in denying them and exposing their fallacious nature, but rather in exposing how they are emptied of their content through interpretations that they are subjected to by vested interests and power relations (Bishara, 2024). I fully agree with Azmi Bishara, observing that our criticism of double standards should not lead the Arabs to talk about religious or civilizational conflicts with the West. Even if the West is motivated in its support of Israel by Islamophobia, this latter is a political phenomenon more than a religious one (for example, many Islamophobes are atheists).
Are liberal values applicable outside the nation-state or beyond European borders? Historically, and thinking of colonialism, not at all. Currently, the stark contrast between universal principles and their real-world application is exposed with the selectivity of enforcement and interpretation of international and human rights laws. The case of Jürgen Habermas is exemplary, whose work has a strong appeal to liberal theories of politics and ethics, as well as solid philosophical foundations for both democratic communication and the ethics of difference. Yet he stumbles when it comes to the right of Palestinians for national liberation. He co-signed the Research Center “Normative Orders” at the Goethe University Frankfurt's “Principles of Solidarity: A Statement.” 49 It is a one-sided statement without any regret as to what Israel did in Gaza. He has shown complete insensitivity to what Israel is doing in the Palestinian territories, which I became aware of when I met him over dinner in Jerusalem during the early period of the Second intifada. I was taken aback by his position at that time, so his denial of Palestinian national rights is not simply a political faux pas. Regardless of one's interest in Habermas as a human being and his political views, we have to deal with his broader system of thought and his dialogical communicative theory.
Here I would follow Michael Gill's (2023) two-part justification and I would develop the two parts to three. First, the “conceptual isolation” of some thoughts of a problematic scholar from what is considered as racist or flawed views. Second, “division of intellectual labor”; that is, some of us will focus on the positive contribution of a problematic scholar to our knowledge, and others will focus on their racist or otherwise flawed views (Gill, 2023). Some will understand nineteenth century America using Alexis de Tocqueville's text Democracy in America, while others will offer more inclusive and nuanced perspective using Harriet Martineau's Society in America as a way of criticizing Tocqueville. Third, “historical development of scientific/moral views”; that is, humanity has developed a conception of otherness different from what it was in the past and what today we believe ethical may possibly be considered racist or otherwise flawed in the future.
I will, therefore, engage with Habermas' dialogical communicative theory, even if I disagree with his political position on Palestine. Having said that, I can observe some patterns. With the partial exception of Herbert Marcuse, all the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School project were just so utterly and radically inattentive to movements from what we today call the Global South. In that sense, Habermas is just simply being a good Frankfurt School theorist. 50
I would use the same reasoning dealing with Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, Locke, Kant, Hume, Marx, etc. This also should be extended to (current and historical) politicians, celebrities, and leading public figures, so that we may celebrate what can be considered good deeds while criticizing their position taken in political practice, particularly as regards remaining conscious of colonial legacies. One good example could be the National Museum of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, where they add to each painting of historical Dutch personalities an additional label explaining their role in the slavery trade. I would prefer this approach over the removal of David Hume's name from the “David Hume Tower” at the University of Edinburgh. 51 It was initially suggested to rename it “Julius Nyerere Tower”, in honor of the anticolonial Tanzanian leader who graduated from this University in 1952. It was then pointed out that Nyerere's leadership was characterized by despotism and homophobia (Gill, 2023). In the same vein, one Arab sociologist suggested we should not teach Durkheim, because of his complete silence on French colonialism in Algeria and to teach instead W.E.B. Du Bois. Can we imagine undergraduate students in sociology not engaging with the founder of sociology? Then what to do if we know that our friend Du Bois disregarded what happened to the Palestinian people while praising the establishment of the State of Israel? We will never end this spiral of exclusion by dichotomous thinking: angel or demon, guilty or innocent, etc. Only the three-part justification suggested above overcomes such a self-defeating approach.
In brief, Euro-American knowledge production should be treated like Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) did, considering it as necessary but not sufficient knowledge. This is the ultimate meaning of provincializing Europe. We can question some scholars” position after Gaza in the same way that has been done after WWII on the positions of some scholars. However, I am afraid of the “populist” attitude that wants to throw out modernity and the universality of human rights in the name of such inquiries and inconsistency.
I would today remind any Western scholars who come to advocate against domestic violence against women in the Middle East that they should have advocated against the Israeli mass killing of civilian women in Gaza (in case they had not yet done it). In the same vein, because European politics and its organic intellectuals have lost their knowledge authority or referentiality and even credibility, I would engage today more with African and Latino human rights scholars and activists who better understand and address human suffering than their European counterparts (thinking here particularly of German, British, and French agencies that often fund human rights organizations in the Global South). 52 In this way, one can recognize the importance of certain topics that are particularly significant to Europeans (e.g. domestic violence), while other issues (e.g. mass human rights violations against colonized subjects) receive less attention. In this context, examining African or Latin American human rights agendas becomes especially relevant. Only by disentangling the universality of human rights (embodied for instance by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) from the Euro-American mainstream politics (currently and historically) can we save the former.
Conclusion: Intolerance and critical dialogue
While I was doing final checks on this article, I learned that the renowned French political scientist, Francois Burgat, emeritus senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), was detained by the French police on 9 July 2024, accused of being an “apologist for terrorism” and taken into custody. Suddenly erupted in my mind a conversation I had with Ghassan Hage about his fieldwork in Lebanon during the civil war in 1978. One of his interviewees (from a right-wing militia) talked about how the Palestinians in Lebanon aim to take over the country and create an alternative homeland for themselves. When Hage asked him whether he had any evidence about that, he replied angrily after a glowering silence, reproaching the questioning and the questioner as politically heinous: “I will go to get my revolver from the car.”
I feel today the level of discussion about the Israeli war on Gaza is at this level of “evidence.” In the same vein, when giving a talk in Oslo about the war on Gaza, I had someone from the audience keep repeating how much today antisemitism is increasing in Europe, attributing this to demonstrators who call for a ceasefire in Gaza and a political solution to the Israeli occupation. I was unable to stop him before asking whether it was normal during the Battle of Algiers in the 1950s or the German genocide in Namibia in the 1900s to claim that Algerians were anti-French and Namibians were anti-German, or worse, that Algerians and Namibians were anti-Christian?
Despite this nightmare, it is more urgent than ever to create some shared perspective without alienating another group. How do we engage between two parties when one of them is so powerful? By becoming a moral community, does academia set norms that constrain the questions scholars may ask?
In this article, I showed that the intolerance in the debate had to do with the polarization in a society where both Symbolic Liberals and conservatives play a role in this chilling political climate. Each group becomes rigid and dogmatic, something that reminds us of the situation of the Progressive Patriotism of Woodrow Wilson's era or the McCarthy era, in the campaigns against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. However, I insist, following my findings, how campuses, the locus of liberal arts, have moved into illiberal positions, eroding their autonomy with the extreme polarization among faculty, students, and indeed administrators.
Let me clarify: the two geographical case studies on stifling academic freedom in the United Kingdom and the United States, along with the specific case study on academic freedom and freedom of expression during the war on Gaza, are not always “caused” by Symbolic Liberals – whether university administrators, faculty, students, media actors, or politicians. Instead, the broad framework provided in this article allows us to recognize a rising trend of intolerance in debates that coincides with the increasing power of SL and populist Right-wing.
When it comes to the influence of SL, its relationship to each case can be seen as follows:
Its disregard for the conception of justice either locally (e.g. the right to dissent from the mainstream, as in the case of gender-critical feminism) or globally (e.g. the right to national liberation for colonized peoples; selective application of liberal principles due to pro-Israeli bias; and selective blindness to violence only on US campuses and not in the mass killing in the Gaza Strip). Its imposition of a hegemonic and deculturalized conception of the good (e.g. the repression of some Muslims' conceptions of the good under the UK's Prevent policy). Its framing of a group's aims as rational but not reasonable, on the grounds that these aims fail to seek a common basis for reciprocal cooperation with other groups (e.g. Liberal Zionist claims in Israel disregarding the Palestinian claims).
I leave it to readers to use a narrower brush to analyze each case individually.
The great conundrum of academic freedom in the time of symbolic liberalism, excessive identity politics, guilt, and guiltwashing is that both the absence of academic freedom and total academic freedom lead to political indoctrination. How to walk this thin line? In the line of Dialogical Sociology, a sociology that offers the possibility of mediating between different civic actors before defending a normative stance (Hanafi, 2023), I will advance four recommendations on how this sociology would struggle against labeling the other, and against politics and media that are dominated by powerful and wealthy groups and lobbies, but would work in favor of inclusivity of critical voices and of resolving the tension between academic freedom and “Diversity, Equity and Integration.”
First, intolerance often starts by labeling the other. For instance, “woke” has become so divisive that it is harming support for the issues it is meant to be highlighting. It is considered as a shutting down way to delegitimate any critique of dominant forms of knowledge production, but “antiwokism” also plays this shutting down game. This is why I abstain from using these terms, and even when I use the term “cancel culture”, I show it is not a label for a specific group (the pure product of the Left or “the woke”) but concerns a situation which you also find among the Right and conservatives. How many times have I heard colleagues in academia and activists during the Arab Spring argue “no democracy/dialogue for the enemy of democracy”, hinting particularly about the Islamists?
Second, stifling academic freedom has serious consequences involving the undermining of critical voices, which is against the inclusivity of dialogical sociology and the dialogical liberal project. The typical social science and humanities scholar trades free speech for emotional safety. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s (1974) classic concept of a “spiral of silence” was developed almost four decades ago, drawing upon studies in social psychology and interpersonal communications. This concept describes situations where, for fear of social isolation or loss of status, people are hesitant to express their authentic opinions contrary to prevalent social norms (Noelle-Neumann, 1974; cited by Norris, 2020). Yet the balance of public opinion is far from static; instead, it evolves over time in line with processes of societal development. This is what is very well documented, for instance, in Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's Cultural Backlash (2019).
Following this, Dialogical Sociology is not naïve about the power structures between groups, and there is an issue of how to deliver critical thinking in the case of imbalances of power. While criticizing the powerful, we also need simultaneously to open up a dialogue with the very forces being critiqued. This is exactly how I can criticize all colonial practices in the Palestinian territories, but at the same time open the space for dialogue, for talking with some Israelis (Hanafi, 2022). This is how the German literary critic Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (2024) both criticizes the Israeli longstanding colonial regime but also shows us a possibility of friendship between Muslims and Jews historically, taking the example of a group of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Among them are Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, who came together across religious lines in a sensitive moment of possibility within a history of Israel/Palestine, working the reasonable (and not simply the rational) for living together. Even in the time of extreme violence, Amaney Jamal and Keren Yarhi-Milo (2023), two Palestinian and Israeli deans in American Universities, remind us in a joint article that when the discourse is toxic, universities can only help free speech when there is vigorous counter-speech.
More roughly, the role of Dialogical Sociology is to show that there is no pure evil or pure good. Sociology equipped with sociological imagination reminds us of the complex nature of social phenomena, the importance of the agency of actors, and the logic of gift and love. This logic can defeat extreme polarization. Power cannot always come from authority and hierarchy (through domination and competition mechanisms), as many Symbolic Liberals think, but rather through collaboration and overabundance of care, as it is theorized by the sociological school of social love (Iorio, 2016). This school is sensitive not only to how people ethically justify their actions, but also to how sociologists can take seriously this suffering and to approach it as a hermeneutics of presence (Cataldi, 2020).
Third, chilling polarization will remain as far as politics and media are dominated by powerful and wealthy groups and lobbies. Let me develop this in relation to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. We saw from the youth and student encampments how the old elite is completely destabilized in the United States and Europe, particularly among Jews. This latter curb the political tide against Israel's privileged status in the West and against Israeli colonial practice and apartheid. For the old elite, there should be no debate or discussion about the Israeli genocidal war. The goal is not to squelch critique of Israel but to outlaw it.
The war on Gaza is a paradigm shift, not only in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict but definitely in the crisis of Western liberal democracy and the relationship between Global North and Global South – more populism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. It reveals tensions and polarization, not only between different generations concerning the decolonization of Palestine, but also in the relationship between mainstream media and different neoliberal centers of power, including the Israeli lobby. It shows how much the new generation mistrusts mainstream media and relies on social media (including the Chinese TikTok). The outcome of this paradigm shift is neither fully negative nor positive. Many factors will be at work to swing toward privileging the negative or the positive. However, the salient factor is the organized social movement. What is heartening is that those groups who demonstrate in the streets in support of the ceasefire in Gaza, are mostly the same ones who defend the rights of oppressed minorities, including LGBTQ+, and who defend the environment. 53 In the language of Rana Sukarieh (2024), there is “a continuum between an anticolonial Third World Internationalist imaginary and a pragmatic rights-based imaginary as central to the trajectory of the [BDS] movement.” Therefore, they deserve to be described as moral groups, but we must acknowledge that their weight in the political arena is limited as long as they are not organized within influential frameworks, such as political parties, or at least as long as they are not politically organized. The emergence of young new actors, faculty and students, in campuses, challenging the injustice or business-as-usual of old elite formations (whether Symbolic Liberals or conservative) is a major breakthrough in the direction of a dialogical liberal project.
Fourth, both Dina Kiwan (2023) and Tariq Modood (2022) are interested in resolving the tension between academic freedom and “Diversity, Equity and Integration” (DEI). Kiwan considers EDI more as a pre-requisite for academic freedom, while Modood () treats them equally by considering that “neither commitment can be absolute, because each must be open to being qualified by the other, and the two sets of commitments will clash at times.” For me, Dialogical Sociology and a dialogical liberal project need to keep renegotiating a stretch of the border between these two regions, through dialog and not legal action or recourse to disinvitation/no platforming, in order to hear all views (including all forms of dissent) and not to commit what Miranda Fricker (2009) call epistemic injustice. It is more complicated when it comes to the content of speech (critique versus prejudice); what to do with speech or writing that is not unlawful, but which our commitments to DEI call upon us to censure? In other words, how to distinguish criticism between Islamophobia/antisemitism? Modood has suggested that the answer could not be determined solely by examining the proposition itself. Rather, it requires consideration of a broader context: does the proposition stereotype the other? Does it invite a dialogue with the other? Is the language civil and contextually appropriate? Are there insincere criticisms or ulterior motives? It depends on how we reply to determine whether we are indeed dealing with Racism/Islamophobia/antisemitism or not (Modood, 2002).
In brief, working against intolerance and for the reconciliation between academic freedom and DEI is a long process that needs to engage parties in critical dialogue – the dialogue that I advocate by working against the illiberal trend of SL and the populism of the conservatives.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
