A New Academic Year Confronts Gaza

On Gaza's universities and ours, plus this week's MENA Academy roundup and a very special offer.

Source: AFP, February 15, 2024.

Be sure to read all the way to the bottom for a very special offer from Abu Aardvark

It’s back to school for most of us in higher education over the next two weeks. But not in Gaza, not really. Israel’s devastation of Gaza over the last ten months has been comprehensive: it has bombed virtually the entire physical infrastructure of Gaza into rubble, displaced virtually its entire population, created conditions for famine and the spread of long-eradicated infectious disease such as polio, and killed at least 40,000 — primarily women, children and civilians — but in reality far more whose bodies remain uncounted beneath the rubble.

That indiscriminate destruction has included the near complete destruction of Gaza’s universities and colleges. A team of UN experts reported in April that the scale and scope of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s academia amounted to “scholasticide”: “the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.” The UN report detailed the damage at the time as such: “more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.”

From our perspective as educators, professors and part of the global higher education sector, we have a special responsibility to bear witness to the systematic destruction and killing of our colleagues, students, and partners. And that destruction has not ceased. As Ibtisam Mahdi recently reported in +972, “the decimination of Gaza’s academia is impossible to quantify”, as entire complex educational systems have been disrupted and destroyed at every level. Sondos Faoyumi, writing in The Nation, tell the heartbreaking stories of Palestinian students facing the reality that “every university in Gaza has been destroyed.”

In that context, I want to draw attention to a new report issued by Ibrahim Rabaia and Lourdes Habash of Bir Zeit University on what they term the “educide” of Gaza’s higher education. Building on earlier work done for a POMEPS collection, Rabaia and Habash document the damage done to each of Gaza’s universities with new research conducted between April and June in anticipation of the coming academic year. Rabaia and Habash go beyond bringing together the documented physical destruction of campuses, killings of university leaders and faculty, and other direct impacts. They look at the impact on the lives and careers of faculty, including the disappearance of professional opportunities and networks (as well as salaries and benefits), and consider the long-range implications for the future of the proud educational sector in Gaza and Palestine more broadly. They also highlight the impact not only on current university students but also last year’s high school graduates who have nowhere to go and whose potential risks becoming one more hidden casulty of this brutal and unending campaign.

The ongoing destruction of Gaza ensures that students returning to campus in the U.S. and Europe (and beyond) will almost certainly resume the protests — and the ill-conceived draconian crackdowns — which peaked last last spring. I want to draw attention here to a statement issued a few days ago by the American Association of University Professors condemning the anticipatory repressive measures being put into place by many campuses. As the AAUP bluntly states: “These policies, which go beyond reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression… With harsh sanctions for violations, the policies broadly chill students and faculty from engaging in protests and demonstrations.”

I strongly agree — and have been arguing the same for months — with the AAUP’s articulation of the stakes of these repressive campus approaches for not only pro-Palestinian students and Middle East Studies faculty but for everyone who "cares about higher education and democracy”. As the AAUP lays it out, “these policies severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education. Free inquiry and free expression are indispensable for the transmission of knowledge, the development of students, and the well-being of democracy. Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs." The AAUP also notes that “these new policies trample on the rights of students”, “are being imposed with little to no faculty input,” and “curtail the rights of faculty, who are entitled to freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing as citizens.”

Campus administrators who think that they can appease right wing politicians by ostentatious abuse of their own students and faculty aren’t just abandoning the mission of higher education and betraying their purpose for existence — they are also wrong. Students won’t stop protesting one of the great human rights catastrophes of any generation, and heavy handed efforts to prevent them to do so will inevitably backfire. Attacks on higher education will continue to escalate and evolve, regardless of attempts to appease those agitating for them. Our universities and colleges need to learn the right lessons from last spring, and recommit to creating robust spaces for intellectual inquiry and exchange — which very much includes the right to peaceful protest on matters of moral urgency.

And now for this week’s MENA Academy Weekly Roundup. We’ve got a number of interesting articles this week, several of which have their origins in POMEPS projects over the years. We feature Erin York’s work on constituent service in the Moroccan legislature, Heba Khalil’s incisive look into the regime-sustaining features of the rule of law in Egypt, an important look at climate justice in Kuwait and the Gulf by Deen Sharp, Batil Satliwala and Abrar al-Shammari which draws on an earlier POMEPS contribution, and an intriguing look at Israeli twitter. And please be sure to scroll all the way down for two exciting offers!

Erin York, “Constituency Service and Electoral Accountability in Autocratic Legislatures,” Comparative Political Studies (August 2024). ABSTRACT: How do political outsiders in autocratic legislatures use institutional authorities? I argue that legislative authorities tailored to offering constituency service help to level the playing field between regime and opposition candidates competing for the crucial resource of public support. Though regime candidates may have the ear of those in power through backdoor channels and personal connections, opposition politicians can use ‘by the book’ politics – the legitimate authorities that accompany their office – to supply the constituency goods voters expect. I construct a database of activity from recent legislative terms in Morocco, including more than 27,000 unique queries submitted by elected members of parliament to government ministers, and find systematic evidence that voters reward parties and MPs that engage in more constituency service via institutionalized action. Yet the relationship between activity and voteshare is exclusive to opposition parties: regime-linked parties do not see electoral gains from increased legislative activity, but neither are they punished for shirking in office.

Heba Khalil, ““This Country has Laws”: Legalism as a Tool of Entrenching Autocracy in Egypt,” American Behavioral Scientist (August 2024). ABSTRACT: This article investigates the role of legalism and legal processes in entrenching autocratic rule in post-revolution Egypt. In the aftermath of the spectacular street protests that swept Egypt, the movement for change was channeled into legal challenges handled by the legal system and judicial experts. This judicialization of politics ensured that an emerging autocrat could not only use the judiciary and the legal system to control the process of democratic transition but also reverse it. In examining the rise of autocratic rule in post-revolutionary Egypt, this article illustrates how the legal system, constitutionalism, law-making, and electoral politics became integral pawns in the consolidation of an illiberal agenda. Legalistic strategies, such as rewriting electoral laws, reforming judicial regulations, strengthening presidentialism, rewriting and amending the constitution, and other legislative reforms, enable the rise of autocratic legalism in the country. As the case of Egypt illustrates, autocratic legalism is a dangerous mode of entrenching autocratic rule that uses the legal system to reach power and then abuses the same legal processes to ensure no one can challenge the power capture. Although elections, parliaments, and judiciaries remain in place to maintain a façade of legality, they are increasingly captured by the executive within a context of growing policing, and restrictions on freedoms and rights.

Deen Sharp, Batil Satliwala and Abrar al-Shammari, “Recognising the right to urban climate justice in Kuwait,” Geoforum (August 2024). ABSTRACT: In 2016, the Kuwait Mitribah weather station recorded a scorching 53.9 degrees Celsius, among the highest temperatures ever recorded on earth. Today, temperatures in Kuwait frequently exceed 50 degrees Celsius during the summer, accompanied by a host of extreme weather events such as severe droughts, dust storms, and floods. These climate challenges threaten and transform Kuwait’s social and ecological landscape. To address these pressing issues, this paper adopts an urban climate justice framework, emphasizing the right to the city, recognition justice, and advocating for a climate-just city. Through this lens, we examine how climate change disproportionately affects Kuwait’s structurally vulnerable populations, particularly the majority non-citizen groups: the Bidoon (stateless) and low-wage migrant workers. This paper highlights the necessity of including marginalized groups in climate change discussions along with climate adaptation and mitigation policies. By examining the everyday urban lives of Kuwait’s non-citizen residents – including their struggles with access to civil and political rights; poor housing and labor conditions; and inequitable access to basic urban services, such as water, electricity and transport − this paper demonstrates how these factors significantly increase their vulnerability to the detrimental impacts of climate change. In highlighting the vulnerabilities of low-income non-citizens and advocating a shift to a climate-just city approach, this analysis aims to guide decision-makers in Kuwait and beyond. The impact of climate change, we contend, offers an opportunity to re-open debate about the fundamental rights and concepts of citizenship, belonging, community and justice.

Eitan Tzelgov and Steven Lloyd Wilson, “The Political Twittersphere as a Breeding Ground for Populist Ideas: The Case of Israel,” Social Media + Society (August 2024). ABSTRACT: This study employs a neural network approach to investigate the dissemination and content of populist ideas within the Israeli political Twittersphere. By analyzing a data set of Twitter activity by Israeli lawmakers from 2013 to 2022, the study reveals a consistent increase in the frequency and concentration of populist ideas, particularly among legislators from religious-nationalist parties. The analysis of the topical content of populist ideas spread on Twitter highlights the significant impact of legal proceedings against the Prime Minister on political discussions. It delineates the development of a Manichean discourse among the center-left and a complete populist cosmology among the right, reaching its peak in 2022. The study demonstrates the utility of such approaches in understanding the evolution and dissemination of populist ideas, as well as the challenges faced by the backsliding Israeli democracy.

Finally, the offer: Making Sense of the Arab State — the hot new book I edited with Steven Heydemann for the University of Michigan Press — has now officially been published. We have made it open access for anyone to download and read. But if you’d like to have a physical copy, I’m delighted to announce a special giveaway offer to start the new academic year: any new paid subscriber (or existing paid subscriber who asks) will receive a free, signed paperback copy… either mailed to you, or hand-delivered at the POMEPS reception at APSA (Friday, September 6 at the Loewe’s Hotel from 7:30-9:00). I’m excited to see as many of you as possible there - and if you’d like your free copy of our book, you know what to do!