UK university rebuffs call by Israel lobby to cancel conference

Southampton University has rejected calls to cancel a conference on Israel and international law, after the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) said it would “have a detrimental impact on cohesiveness.”

The conference, ‘International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’, is billed as “the first of its kind”, and is being organised by Southampton-based academic and former Israeli Oren Ben-Dor, and Palestinian-American law professor George Bisharat.

According to the Jewish News, several “Jewish community leaders” have expressed their “opposition” to the conference and “lodged protests with the university’s vice-chancellor.”

JLC chief executive Simon Johnson said that the organisation is “gravely concerned about this unbalanced, delegitimising conference, which will have a detrimental impact on cohesiveness.”

We have asked the vice-chancellor to reconsider. It’s a fine line between academic freedom, which we all cherish, and delegitimisation and discrimination. This conference seems to hover around that line.

Other pro-Israel groups have also expressed their anger, with the Zionist Federation describing the academic gathering rather bizarrely as “a kangaroo court.”

Organisers say that the conference “constitutes a ground-breaking historical event on the road towards justice and enduring peace in historic Palestine”, and will examine “themes of Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.”

Participants will include “scholars from law, politics, philosophy, theology, anthropology, cultural studies history and other connected disciplines.”

The JLC’s accusation that such a conference will harm some undefined “cohesiveness” seems strange, but pro-Israel groups have increasingly been attacking Palestine solidarity initiatives on the grounds of threats to ‘community relations’.

Thus the Board of Deputies of British Jews claimed that local councils flying Palestinian flags would damage “community cohesion”, while a joint Board-JLC statement last August accused boycott protesters of “importing the Middle East conflict to the UK” and “dividing local communities.”

This from the same people who are very keen for the Britain to continue exporting conflict to the Middle East through our arms sales to serial offenders like Israel.

Two points to note. First, Israel’s apologists often argue against the academic boycott of Israeli universities in the name of ‘academic freedom’, even though it is a campaign based on institutional complicity in human rights abuses and war crimes.

Yet here, when what is at stake is a “platform for scholarly debate and disagreement” – that is to say, ideas – then ‘academic freedom’ is suddenly considered negotiable.

Second, the attempt to cancel an academic conference about international law on such grounds is an instructive indication of what’s really happening in the name of protecting ‘community relations’: protecting Israeli apartheid.