Image: Wafa (Q2915969) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
Palestinian academics deserve the same support given to those from Ukraine, says Susan Bruce
‘Educide’ and ‘scholasticide’ are unwelcome additions to the lexicon of higher education. Both emerged in the early years of this century: the former to describe the systematic killing of Iraqi academics, the latter coined by the political scientist Karma Nabulsi to characterise a pattern of Israeli attacks on Palestinian scholars, students and educational institutions, which, she argues, began with the mass displacement and dispossession of the 1948 Nakba.
More and more frequently, the term is being invoked in discussions of Gaza, as evidence of the destruction of higher education institutions continues to mount. According to the UN, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have now been killed in Gaza, and at least 60 per cent of its educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed, including all 12 of its universities, along with archives, libraries and museums.
An 18 April press release from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights defined scholasticide as the “systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure”. It is “reasonable to ask”, it observed, if scholasticide is in progress in Gaza.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the British Academy, in collaboration with the Council for At-Risk Academics, and with the support of other national academies, created a Researchers at Risk scheme. This provided two-year fellowships at UK institutions for academics “subject to discrimination, persecution, suffering or violence”. Funding came from various sources, including the Leverhulme Trust, Nuffield Foundation, and Sage publishing, but mostly from government, to the tune of £9.8 million.
The scheme’s name suggests it could apply to threatened academics anywhere, and when it was announced, the British Academy said it wished eventually to open the programme more widely. But it has so far been open only to Ukrainians.
The time to pursue that broad humanitarian aim has surely come. If the threat posed by Russia’s invasion is reason to give Ukrainian academics the sanctuary of a British institution, it is in like measure reason to extend the same degree of assistance to Palestinians.
This is the basis of Early Day Motion 505, tabled by the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas in March, which calls on the UK government to renew the funding for the Researchers at Risk scheme and open it to Palestinian academics “immediately and without delay”. An EDM is technically a call for a parliamentary debate, although in practice they rarely reach the chamber. Rather, they are used to draw attention to an issue within parliament and, more importantly, outside it.
Growing numbers of academics are endorsing this campaign, including most recently more than one hundred fellows of the British Academy. University staff can write to their MPs urging them to sign EDM 505 or to raise the issue in other ways, by tabling a written question, for example, or sending a letter to ministers.
On 20 March, Labour MP Kerry McCarthy tabled a written question asking whether the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology had “made an assessment of the potential merits” of extending the Researchers at Risk scheme to Palestinians. Science minister Andrew Griffith replied that the programme “aims to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has exposed Ukraine-based researchers and their dependants to direct threats”, but was being kept “under close review”.
Let’s hope Griffith’s implication that the programme was conceived as being limited to, rather than beginning with, the provision of support for Ukrainian researchers was inadvertent. Schemes for at-risk researchers should be built on humanitarian considerations, not politics.
Failing to acknowledge the parallel between the situation facing Ukrainian and Palestinian academics, or worse still to deny it, would be to undermine the scheme’s humanitarian principles, exposing it as purely strategic and aimed solely at allies.
Palestinian researchers are among the most threatened in the world and their higher educational infrastructure, once commended by the UN Development Programme, lies in ruins. Their survival, and eventual return home, will be indispensable to the rebuilding of Gaza and its universities once this war ends.
Extending the Researchers at Risk programme to include them would be a significant first step in reaching that objective.
It is imperative that the government’s review of the scheme recognises the value of that first step. The need is urgent, the time is now, and we must act.
Susan Bruce is professor of English at Keele University and the coordinator of the Palacademic campaign
This article also appeared in Research Fortnight