Universities should never have speech guidelines. This one is designed to stifle criticism of Israel — and is an attack on the very idea of the university itself.
Universities should never have speech guidelines. This one is designed to stifle criticism of Israel — and is an attack on the very idea of the university itself.
With a new right and hard-right coalition government starting up in Israel, you might think that now would not be the best time to stifle criticism of the country.
For decades, one of Israel’s safeguards against completely collapsing into a thug state has been the Supreme Court and separation of powers. Now Israel Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s new partners in government — one-time followers of the Zionist terrorist Meir Kahane — have insisted the new administration push through limits on the court’s purview, at the same time as the hard-right take the police ministry.
This is a recipe for killing and oppression in the occupied territories on a whole new scale. Arguably it represents a totalitarian impulse within Zionism, something former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir expressed openly and explicitly when he led the violent LEHI movement in the 1940s. Shamir became prime minister in the 1980s, and oversaw the government’s sponsorship of the West Bank settlement program. So you could say that current policies, and the onslaught to come, are the continuation of that belief.
Read the article by Guy Rundle in Crikey.