Write-up in in Anadolu Agency
Text of article
When one looks into Balfour’s legacy, some of today’s truisms fall apart. The one most concerning for us, as Jewish staff members in Scottish universities, is the conventional wisdom so deeply rooted in our public discourse and institutional frameworks that anti-Zionism is, by default, antisemitism.
We, therefore, welcome the recent landmark Review of Race and History issued by the University of Edinburgh last July. As Jewish academics, including Israeli dissidents, we find the section of the report on Palestineand Balfour’s legacy in the present especially insightful.
In Appendix Three, the authors identify “Balfour’s afterlife” in the present, a legacy revived through Edinburgh University’s investments in industries actively involved in the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Edinburgh is not alone in continuing Balfour’s legacy. Other Scottish universities are also complicit in the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians.
Recognising this, we call for action to end that complicity, and of anything that stands in the way of reversing it. We endorse this report and reject the implication that Jewish safety is compromised by supporting Palestine.
Furthermore, many of us, including Israeli dissidents, vehemently criticise the Israeli occupation, oppression, and genocide of the Palestinian people. And for good reasons, as outlined in this excellent report. Balfour’s embrace of Zionism in 1917 was inseparable from his antisemitism, which viewed Jews as “aliens” to the UK – a form of racism which was enshrined in British law in the Alien Act of 1905.
Balfour, then prime minister of the UK, was also an avid advocate of “scientific racism” under the respectable academic garb of the Eugenics Education Society.
For Balfour, his desire to forge a Jewish majority in Palestine by erasing the indigenous population served his agenda to prevent the increase of the UK’s Jewish population fleeing deathly persecution in the Russian pogroms.
Balfour’s term as the chancellor of Edinburgh University between 1891 to 1930 runs parallel to the implementation of settler colonialism in Palestine. The World Zionist Congress, founded in 1897, is of the same period.
The academic community under Balfour’s leadership was fully aligned, to the detriment of Palestinians now currently paying the heaviest possible price of colonisation – genocide.
The Edinburgh report further refers to the role played by Zionists in the colonisation of Palestine, academic institutions among them.
It notes the role of the Zionist statesman Chaim Weizmann, the Hebrew University, and the Jewish National Fund in the co-creation, alongside Balfour, of policies and academic knowledge that bolstered Zionist settler colonialism.
Balfour's racist and colonial legacies, the report goes on to say, constitute terrible harm to the Palestinian people.
As Jews, we must not downplay our agency in this historical process. We are, after all, often given a privileged platform on these matters because of the Holocaust and centuries of antisemitic persecution.
We must speak out now when our safety is the pretext for silencing opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Our Jewish staff network includes Israelis, besides citizens of the UK, the US, and EU countries – all states which abet the genocide. We are all obliged to call out our governments’ complicity, just as any other citizen should.
Two recommendations, out of several in the report, aim at preventing institutional complicity with the Israeli genocide.
One of these made headlines in the British media because it concerns the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, guaranteed to produce loud soundbites in the public sphere.
However, beyond the noise and commotion, the report accurately identifies the entanglement of academic knowledge production with the economy of genocide. We, too, recognise the urgent need to both de-adopt the IHRA definition and to divest from companies and institutions that contribute to genocide and ecocide.
The Scottish Universities
Jewish Staff Network has been advocating against the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, mindful of the risks to academic freedom and pluralism, the bread and butter of liberal civil society.
Right now, 22 months into the Gaza genocide, we can clearly see the disastrous harm of stifling criticism of Israel by the weaponisation of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, at times without even adopting it as an official institutional policy.
Rather than tackling antisemitism as this quasi-legal instrument purports to do, it has created the false equivalence between Jews and Zionism, associating us all, including dissident Israelis, with the horrendous genocide that we unequivocally oppose.
We therefore call on our institutions for the following:
- To reject the IHRA definition and rely on existing EDI policies against racism to address anti-Semitism without separate measures.
- To divest from all organisations which sustain or are linked to the Israeli state.
- To actively engage with Palestinian scholars and institutions to rebuild Palestinian higher education in the wake of Israeli scholasticide in Gaza.
By Ophira Gamliel, Stephen Reicher and Matt Mahon, on behalf of the Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network