Mick Hartley

SOAS – the London School of Oriental and African studies – has a well-deserved reputation for antisemitism. And here we go again:

A prominent London university has been accused of breaking free speech rules by hosting a conference where Israeli academics must declare their institutions are built on land taken from Palestinians.

Academic freedom campaign groups have written to Soas University of London raising serious concerns about demands being made by the organisers of a Middle East conference due to be hosted on its campus next June.

The event in question is the annual conference for the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (Brismes), described as “the largest and most prestigious annual UK gathering of scholars and practitioners focusing on the region”

The campaigners’ concerns centre on a mandatory policy published by Brismes last month on “territorial and land acknowledgment”.

It requires conference participants to acknowledge the “traditional owners of the land on which the institution to which they are affiliated is located, and/or, in the case of military occupation, acknowledge the status of the land under international law”.

The policy further demands academics make a public acknowledgment if their papers are underpinned by research “conducted on land that is: traditionally owned by indigenous peoples (in settler colonial contexts) or under foreign military occupation in violation of international law”.

Oh boy. And will the Israeli academics have to wear yellow stars?

Israel is, of course, the Jewish ancestral home. Arabs arrived later, as part of the Islamic imperial spread in the 7th and 8th centuries. Is any acknowledgement of that bit of history required?

These requirements are said to apply to all authors and participants who are “working and studying at an institution located on land appropriated from Indigenous peoples by settler colonial regimes”. Such areas are said to include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel.

See here for more on settler colonialism, and why Israel doesn’t fit.