Boycott of Israeli universities: prestigious EHESS breaks “thick silence”
At the end of November, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) adopted a statement calling for the end of all partnerships with Israeli universities, following months of high tension within the student and research community. The result of a delicate balancing act, carried out in the name of the “unbearable” deadly escalation in Gaza.
On November 22, 2024, the faculty assembly of the EHESS adopted a statement explicitly calling for the end of “any partnership with Israeli institutions or suppliers until a permanent ceasefire is achieved”. Back in June, the University of Strasbourg announced that it was ending its partnership with Tel Aviv's Reichman University, following a stormy vote by its board of governors.
While a number of institutions abroad have already taken a stance on this issue (in Spain, the UK, Belgium and Canada, for example), the EHESS's decision is highly symbolic on a French scale. The school is one of the country's most important and prestigious social science research centers, and the vote took place within the collegial assembly of tenured lecturers / researchers, a historic and central body at the EHESS, charged, among other things, with debating major strategic and scientific orientations.
However, many of the 220 potential voters from this assembly did not attend the debate. In the end, 35 voted in favor, thirteen against and two abstained. This remains “quite an impressive victory”, assures Chowra Makaremi, an anthropologist in an associated laboratory. Even if, as in Strasbourg, it was first necessary to break through a “thick silence”, according to the researcher, who was one of the architects of this text, but without the right to vote.
“We have to remember where we started from,” confirms sociologist Francis Chateauraynaud, an official member of the assembly. On October 8, 2023, a somewhat unsensitive statement signed by a student’s union had circulated, affirming its solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, when the least it could have done was to underline the horror of the situation. As a result, there was an immediate backlash, which subsequently led to denunciations for apology for terrorism, and people were even summoned by the police! It was a traumatic experience that seriously fractured the EHESS.
Since the beginning of the conflict, petitions and texts simply calling for a ceasefire had never managed to get past the stage of simply being put on the agenda, despite hundreds of supportive signatures from the wider EHESS community. “Among the students - not all, of course, because there is always a plurality of experiences and points of view - many did not understand that the school could block the discussion process to such an extent,” recalls Francis Chateauraynaud.
“When we wrote our first letter to the President, we even considered sending it on paper so we wouldn't have to use our emails – that's how tense it was,” says Chowra Makaremi. There was intimidation, of course, but also a lot of self-censorship.” In September, however, the informal Ceasefire collective at EHESS took up its pilgrim's staff again.
To the word
If we voted [in November - editor's note] for this text, which is relatively advanced on the European academic scale in its formulation, it's because of this refusal to discuss rather sober texts on two occasions,” confirms researcher Emmanuel Szurek, also a member of the assembly, “added to which the understanding of what's going on in Israel has grown gradually darker, and the realization that something extremely serious is happening in Gaza and the West Bank more clear.”
However, the text was not widely publicized by the institution: adopted in November, the statement was only published on the website on Friday December 6, “on the sly”, as several of the institution's researchers complain, while Romain Huret, President of the EHESS, refers to a normal delay in putting it online.
The president, who disagrees with the position of boycotting universities “as a matter of principle”, is lucid about the “emotion” that the adoption has aroused. My institution doesn't live in an ivory tower,” he says, ”but it is affected by the same questions as other teaching and research establishments, and more broadly as all sectors of society. How can we talk about the drama unfolding in Gaza without forgetting October 7th? How can we criticize Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism? The EHESS is divided, but we has made the effort, particularly during this assembly, to broach opposing positions, to listen to each other, to debate.”
A first version, including the term “genocide” and explicitly using the term “boycott”, was rejected. It was replaced during the debates by a text that speaks of “suspension of institutional cooperation or cooperation with suppliers” and refers to “crimes committed against the Palestinian people”. The reference both to an “unwavering commitment to the existence of the State of Israel within the 1967 borders”, and to the creation of a fully “sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem” was also weighed down to the last word.
There are intellectual and political divisions among colleagues working on Jewish history, anti-Semitism, genocides or the Middle East, but these divisions go beyond specialists and have weakened the EHESS as a whole,” describes Juliette Rennes, a sociologist who took part in the vote. “Some were worried about how the statement might be received or recuperated”.
In fact, reactions were in abundance. From the benches of the French National Assembly, Caroline Yadan, a member of the Ensemble (ex-presidential majority) party, spoke out at the end of November against these “academic boycotts”, “discriminatory decisions”, “symptomatic of the poisonous climate that feeds anti-Jewish hatred in higher education”.
In an article published on the website of the newspaper Libération, teachers and researchers Laurence Croix, Eva Illouz and Yann Moulier-Boutang spoke of an “incoherent and counter-productive boycott”, and accused their colleagues of giving in to “Islamist blackmail” that would open the door to “unabashed and violent anti-Semitism for all”.
Francis Chateauraynaud laments: “We are now sometimes accused internally of being militant anti-Zionists. This is obviously misleading, and reflects the discrediting processes at work in today's public arenas. But we have Israeli colleagues calling for sanctions against their own country! Even the [Israeli] newspaper Haaretz has reached this point! In certain historical moments, you have to break out of this kind of loop of silence.”
Ron Naiweld, a researcher and member of a joint laboratory at the EHESS and the CNRS, is one of a thousand or so Israeli and Franco-Israeli citizens (many of them artists and academics) who called on “the international community to apply all possible sanctions against the Hebrew state in order to obtain an immediate ceasefire”, in a tribune published in October. “This protects me for the moment from accusations of anti-Semitism... And then, when I speak from my Israeli identity, when I say that we must be supported instead of supporting the Israeli right and institutions, I hope to contribute to shaking up the academic world, where denial of the colonial fact remains very strong”, adds the researcher.
Intellectual, scientific and political journeys
Many of his colleagues have nevertheless “budged a bit”, deviating from their line, assures Juliette Rennes, notably because of the scholasticide underway in Gaza, which is now well documented. In fact, partly under pressure from students and researchers, the EHESS has entered into new partnerships with what remains of Palestinian universities.
With regard to the very term “genocide”, some people now use or hear the word, “whereas they were still cautious at the end of 2023”, reports the researcher. Finally, the participation and even “embedding” of Israeli universities in the war effort, and even in the settlement process with the Netanyahu government, has also been well documented.
Emmanuel Szurek, who also fought for the adoption of this statement, explains this personal and intellectual path, without ironing out all the differences. “The Palestinian cause has the misfortune of being the outlet for all the world's anti-Semites. And that's why this notion of 'genocide of the Palestinians' is so hard for us to accept,” explains the researcher and historian at the EHESS. I'm not advocating the use of the word 'genocide'. But like others, I question its plausibility.
“The academic boycott is not an end in itself, but the argument that we would thereby undermine the healthy part of Israel no longer works.” Emmanuel Szurek, Lecturer and Researcher, EHESS
At the heart of the tensions, and sometimes the anathemas, the question of boycott, its symbolism and effectiveness, remains just as central, even if individual working relations with Israeli researchers are not barred by the statement. Unlike other French institutions, the EHESS has no formal agreements with Israeli universities. So it's a question of abstaining, rather than breaking off.
“Once we've said that we are fundamentally attached to the State of Israel within its 1967 borders, the aim is to break the talisman of immunity that this country enjoys,” says Emmanuel Szurek. Here again, personal positions are evolving: “Twenty years ago, I was against the boycott, but I could already hear my Israeli family's argument that as long as there were no economic sanctions from the Americans and Europeans, we would be participating in this murderous and dramatic rise in power,” explains the researcher. The academic boycott is not an end in itself, but the argument that we would thereby undermine the healthy part of Israel no longer works.”
The teacher also sees it as a way of helping to create a political space in France “that doesn't exist”, in a saturated political and media sphere, between, on the one hand, a left “completely paralyzed by the idea of attacking Israel too harshly” - a milieu that the former Peace Now activist knows well - and “the other pole”, “groups who are very committed to Palestine, but who are sometimes incapable of cleaning up their act, of becoming aware of problematic, even downright anti-Semitic elements in their discourse, or of questioning the very existence of the State of Israel on the grounds that it is committing war crimes or even crimes against humanity”.
Others cite “double standards”, particularly with regards to Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, which led to the end of partnerships with Russia in 2022. A permanent banner on the front page of the EHESS website refers to initiatives in support of researchers and students in Ukraine.
It was not the EHESS that took the decision to boycott Russian universities, but the French government,” says Romain Huret. Like any other university, we complied with this request. I remember that, at the time, many people questioned the meaning of the boycott and argued in favor of maintaining individual links.”
Francis Chateauraynaud, recalling the stance taken by illustrious researchers Madeleine Rebérioux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, professors at the EHESS, forcefully denouncing the colonization and the imprisonment of Yasser Arafat in the Mouqata'a in 2001, ultimately takes issue with the fear of displeasing the “supporting public authorities”.
Resigning Higher Education Minister Patrick Hetzel, very shortly after taking office in October 2024, warned universities of their duty of “neutrality and secularity” in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a warning taken by many as yet another blackout placed on academic and university freedoms. “It's unthinkable that a school like ours should bow to a law of silence dictated by a government. Should we bend over backwards in the hope that we won't be punished when we ask for resources?” asks Francis Chateauraynaud. The simple fact of having to ask the question is unacceptable.
While the decision taken by her colleagues is symbolically powerful, the aim of anthropologist Chowra Makaremi, deeply influenced by her research into Iranian women's actions and resistance, is “to open up the debate on the implementation of this statement in concrete terms, and for it to have a snowball effect. It's a question of tearing apart the hegemonic discourse, which is based on power relations rather than arguments and facts. Now things are starting to move.”