We should mostly be talking about the genocide in Palestine: the horrifying toll of bodies, the thousands or tens of thousands of amputees, the bereavement at a national scale, the gutting intergenerational trauma. In the face of all this, we should not have to talk about universities in the West. But nowhere in society has the breakdown of liberal institutions under Zionist pressure been faster or more obvious.

In defending the Israeli genocide, Zionists and their allies in the neoliberal university want to impose an individualised and subjectivised conception of safety: the idea of safety as a feeling — an emotion or experience that the individual student-client is entitled to get from the educational product they’re buying.

However strong, emotions must not obscure the fundamental facts: Palestinians are a colonised people enduring one of the most vicious and unshakeable oppressions our times have seen. Israel is a brutal, colonising power, intent on crushing the very possibility of Palestinian life and freedom. The cause of Palestine is the cause of justice and freedom everywhere.

In his new book Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), Nick Riemer mounts a comprehensive argument for the institutional academic boycott of Israel. This edited extract outlines the central rationale for the boycott—Israeli universities’ institutional role in enabling apartheid, occupation and anti-Palestinianism.

In a few weeks, Vice-Chancellors will be discussing a request by a group of federal politicians to endorse the latest weapon in Zionists’ longstanding bid to suppress criticism of Israeli apartheid on campus—the highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Their decision will constitute a watershed moment for universities’ already somewhat threatened credibility as centres of independent analysis and truth-telling.

Instrumentalisation of knowledge by politics runs deep in Australian history: Cook’s very act of appropriation of the continent for the British Crown in 1770 was accomplished under the cover of a scientific mission to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Two hundred and fifty years on, university managers are putting the finishing touches to the total annexation of learning by the market.

The May 18 general strikers asked for boycott because it ‘can directly help to throw a wrench in the economy of settler colonialism’. Deciding whether to support them isn’t some boutique, special-interest question, but a question of how far we’re prepared to contribute to a global struggle for justice for a viciously oppressed and dispossessed people – one that has brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets around the world.

No-one, except our political opponents, particularly cares about, or is monitoring, our consistency on free speech. The consistency that does matter to people is about substantive political content – whose side we’re on, which causes we defend, what reforms we’re campaigning for. What makes the positions of the left consistent is, quite simply, the political goals they embody.

The real threat to liberty of expression and inquiry on campus comes from the unconstrained power of senior university management to accept strings-attached funding, dismiss staff, discipline students and ban speakers.

By partnering with Ramsay, Australian universities are lending their names to an institution that promotes a self-identified sympathiser of the far-right.

The best that can be said about the Ramsay Centre’s proposal to sponsor an elite course in Western civilisation is that it has revived a flagging discussion about the intellectual and political considerations that shape the humanities curricula of Australian universities.

For many writers, especially liberals, thinking and writing about politics isn’t a precursor to changing the world, it is an alternative to doing so. That’s particularly the case since writing and reading are individualistic, middle-class pursuits deeply marked by the cultural logic of capitalism.