Q&A: Ireland shares Palestine’s pain of occupation

On November 5, the Irish Times published a letter signed by more than 600 Irish academics calling on all universities in Ireland to sever partnerships or affiliation with Israeli institutions until Tel Aviv ends its occupation of Palestinian territory.

The academics said in the letter that Israeli universities are "major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel's regime of occupation and its military infrastructure".

A few days later, the Irish Times published another letter criticising the language of the first and opposing the academic boycott. The second letter, signed by 12 academics, said that "universities are vital bridges for connecting critical and dissenting voices worldwide".

The two letters come amid a brutal Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has left thousands of Palestinian civilians — most of them children — dead and injured in the narrow coastal enclave, home to more than two million people.

Amid the opposing views in Irish academia – even though the pro-Israeli voice is minuscule – a founder-member of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and of Academics for Palestine, Conor McCarthy, spoke to TRT World about a range of issues related to the Palestinian cause.

Author of The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said – a well-researched book on the Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist – McCarthy clarified why he defended the academic boycott against Israel, his personal experiences in advocating the Palestinian cause, the debates about academic freedom and why such a large number of Irish academics signed the letter for academic boycott against Israel.

Edited excerpts from the conversation with McCarthy:

TRT World: We know you are a founder-member of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and of Academics for Palestine. You were also part of the letter published in the Irish Times, calling for an academic boycott against Israel. Why do you think academic boycotts are important to put pressure on Israel?

Conor McCarthy: When you are colonising a land in a conflict like this, it is, in fact, an act of war. One of the interesting things about BDS or boycotts is that it is coming from the ground up, not from the top down. It's not coming from presidents and prime ministers. It's coming from ordinary people, students, workers, people in the trades unions, teachers… And that is where it came from in Palestine as well. In every country, leaders are always much more conservative than the people.

The value of a boycott, whether academic or cultural, lies in its way of showing a society that what it thinks is normal is not normal. Boycott is a technique, not a principle. It is not a philosophy.

After Russia invaded and occupied parts of Ukraine, there have been all sorts of boycotts imposed on Russia, be it economic or political, implicit cultural boycotts, people not reading Dostoevsky anymore, people not performing Tchaikovsky anymore, people not showing Russian films anymore, all sorts of things going on. Why is it that Russia can be boycotted and not Israel? I think a boycott is actually a fairly gentle thing to do as a way of protest. And boycott is in many ways kind of related to democracy. This is a way of exerting nonviolent pressure.

Have you faced negative feedback while defending the academic boycott against Israel or signing the letter?

CM: I will tell you one story which may seem a little obscure. When the big letter was being assembled a week ago by colleagues of mine, one signature was sent in by somebody called Garrett Deasy. It turned out that this was a kind of a pretend name, a spoof name, because in James Joyce's great novel about Dublin, Ulysses, the hero of which is a Jewish man, Mr. Bloom.

In that novel, there is a very anti-Semitic character called Mr Garrett Deasy. So, somebody gave this name to the letter as a way of mocking the petition. Then there's the reply letter. So, some people are hostile to the boycott, or they are afraid of the boycott.

But when the (first) letter went to the Irish Times, it had about 630 signatures. When the Academics for Palestine added the letter to their website, it added more signatures and now has nearly 1,000 academics. That's quite something in a little country.

There will always be people who are nervous about adding their name to such a thing. Anybody who tries to speak out about Palestine, and not just now, someone will say you're an anti-Semite. So you have to be ready for this kind of argument.

What do you think about the criticism in the counter-letter – that universities must remain a kind of dialogue channel and the argument that there are dissenting voices among academics in Israeli universities?

CM: The problem is that universities, having a variety of opinions, can also have institutional links. If you look at Trinity College – like Ireland's Harvard or Oxford – it has documented links with defence industries in Israel. MIT, too, is deeply involved with the defence industry. Universities are run like businesses. They're run in a manner to increasingly make money in the West. So, the universities want to find all sorts of ways of making money, and collaborating with the defence industry is one way to do it.

Secondly, I think the counter-boycott letter is a bit naive in its sense of the level of dissent in Israeli universities. I don't think there is as much protest in Israeli universities as people would think.

For instance, a recent letter quoted Israeli doctors as saying that hospitals in Gaza should be bombed. So if doctors, who are meant to care for people and keep people alive, are saying that hospitals should be bombed, then they are following the same extreme ideology.

Why do you think European countries must suspend ties with Israeli academic institutions urgently?

CM: The European Union has a funding programme for university research called Horizon 2020. Israel is not an EU member but has a special trading status in relation to the Union. Israel has also been made a member of the Horizon programme. Israeli academics can look for funds for a research project from this European programme.

If a participating country in the trade agreement or a participating country in the university funding agreement has a poor human rights record, its membership can be suspended.

The state and the economy benefit by exporting defence technology to other parts of the world. The Irish army is very small. When they bought drones for surveillance, they bought Israeli drones. Many of these technologies are developed, planned, or worked out in conjunction with universities.

What do you think about the debates over academic freedom?

CM: The freedom of academics also includes the freedom to boycott. I can exercise my academic freedom by saying, 'Actually, no, I don't want to work with x or I don't want to work with y institution. And when people talk about academic freedom, they must talk more about Palestinian academic freedom.

The universities in Gaza have been bombed. Universities in the West Bank are regularly invaded by soldiers, and students are arrested or harassed on the way to college. Visiting professors can't get visas to come and give talks or to do usual academic things, say, in the occupied West Bank. Lots of people are very worried about Israeli academic freedom and it being compromised. But they don't think at all about Palestinian academic freedom.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was built on confiscated land. There is a university in one of the largest settlements, a place called Ariel. It was built on a settlement in the West Bank after 1967. A lot of very sophisticated military technology that Israel has has come from the US. But some of it is developed at home as well. A lot of these research projects are developed in universities. Military strategies are developed in universities as well as in the army.

Also, Israel is a very militarised society. If you do your military service, you can go to university with certain kinds of funding and assistance. But, of course, if you're a Palestinian, then you can't go to university without funding. So, the connection between Israeli society, the military and the universities is very dense and complicated.

The image of the dialogue-driven or dialogue-based university these counter-boycott writers gave is naive. Irish universities are deeply embedded in corporate and other kinds of links with Israel and other countries.

Why are so many Irish academics supporting academic boycotts against Israeli institutions?

CM: Many Irish people feel that Ireland and Palestine have certain shared historical backgrounds. Ireland was for a very long time, arguably 800 years, a colony of England. Obviously, Palestine was part of the British Empire for a shorter time, but during a very important period between the 1920s and '40s. Palestine underwent what I would call a process of colonisation by the Zionist movement from the 1890s onwards.

We have a history of colonisation, too. If you were to look at the history of Northern Ireland, we had the Troubles, a sort of low-level civil war between the 1960s and the 1990s that was a legacy of colonialism.

And then lastly, there is the history of partition in Palestine by the UN and by the British. Palestine was meant to be divided in 1948 into two states: a Palestinian Arab state and an Israeli Jewish state. But only one state emerged.

But Ireland was partitioned in 1922, and we're still dealing, as I say, with the Troubles and other things, Brexit, all sorts of further complications. We're still dealing with the legacy of a split territory. Palestinian critic Edward Said was also fascinated by the comparison between Ireland and Palestine.

How have these historical similarities led to sympathy for the Palestinian cause among Irish people?

CM: I think a lot of Irish people have a strong sense of sympathy and identity with Palestine and Palestinians. The Irish feel themselves to be members of a little country that has again historically had a big, strong neighbour that was not always very nice to us.

However, it should be said that at other times in our history, Irish sympathy for Zionism was much stronger than it is now. So, there has been a kind of complicated process since the 1890s when Zionism was born with Theodore Herzl and the Zionist movement. Later on, things changed. Now, Ireland is one of the most pro-Palestine countries within the European Union.

What led to this change toward a pro-Palestinian stance?

CM: I think there was a time, not just in Ireland but in Western Europe and the US, in the 60s when sympathy with Israel and sympathy with Zionism were very pronounced. It was a very cool left-wing kind of argument. In America and Europe in the 60s, young students or hippie people would go and work on kibbutz, the farming collectives in Israel, in the summer. And they had the impression that Israel was this wonderful, very relaxed, very liberal, egalitarian country and people were equal. What they didn't understand was that the kibbutz was only open to Jewish people.

This attitude changed in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. It was a very brutal war. There were massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and it became very obvious that Israel was oppressing Palestinians very aggressively and on a huge scale.

The nature of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza was covered more in the media, people gradually assembled more critical views. The first Intifada in the late '80s was also important because it was beamed worldwide on TV. The first Intifada and the early Palestinian movement were mostly non-armed. It was mostly people with just stones and sticks protesting against gun-toting Israeli soldiers. So, the unequal nature of the conflict was very obvious. It was also a propaganda disaster for Israel.

And I'm sure that would have swung Irish opinion as well. You could see TV footage of Israeli soldiers beating young Palestinian teenagers off the streets with butts of rifles and with batons. And, of course, it has to be said that in Ireland, we've seen people being beaten up by the police in Northern Ireland as well. So again, the comparison starts to fit.