In December, a conference on the topic of forced migration and reparation was scheduled to take place at the University of Sussex. As it was co-organised with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the event caught the attention of a local pro-Palestinian group, who soon organised a protest calling for an end to all associations with Israeli institutions.
The conference ended up being moved to an off-campus location, with the protestors declaring victory and free speech groups criticising the incident as another attack on academic freedom. However, the truth, according to the organiser of the conference, is a little more complicated than that.
Gideon Reuveni is the director of the Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies at Sussex University, which was set to host the conference entitled “Displacement, Forced Migration and Reparation: Comparisons and Controversies”. As he recalls the days leading up to event, controversy had already began to mount before any participants set foot on campus.
“The UCU [University and College Union] Sussex branch sent a letter to almost all participants about 10 days before [the event]” Reuveni told CAF. Some participants did not receive the UCU letter, however, as anyone with explicit links to Israeli institutions were excluded. “It wasn’t just the Israelis” Reuveni recalled, “There was an Italian PhD student from the University of Haifa. He didn’t get the letter either”.
In the letter, which CAF has seen, the UCU urged the participants to “withdraw from this conference as an act of conscience and in line with Palestinian calls for solidarity and international law”.
The letter goes on to allege that to “discuss forced migration in a conference that is organised by Israeli academic institutions that are implicated in Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and now genocide – is to participate in branding and whitewashing Israel as it perpetrates a genocide […] It is to be complicit and condone the unfathomable”.
According to Reuveni, the UCU Sussex Branch only notified the conference organisers of this letter 30 minutes before they sent it out. “After that, I heard from several colleagues,” he recalls “There was apparently a disagreement [about the letter] within the UCU. Some people didn’t want to send it, but I guess they were voted down”.
Evidently, Sussex leadership did not agree with the decision either, as the Vice-chancellor Sasha Roseneil issued a letter of her own, assuring all participants that the University did not adhere to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and that it fully supported the right of the organisers to have the conference on campus.
As word about the conference spread, a local pro-Palestinian group called Sussex for Palestine publicly called for the event to be driven off the Sussex campus, and organised a protest, presumably with the purpose of achieving this goal themselves.
Reuveni recalls an updated security briefing in which the University restated its commitment to ensuring that the conference would go ahead despite the protest: “Security just said that we had to get another, more secure room”. However, when Reuveni went to the new location, it had already been taken over by a small group of protestors. “They didn’t just occupy the room. They had a megaphone, signs, and Palestinian flags”.
The Sussex security team decided to move the event again, this time to an entirely different building. “We left the protestors behind,” Reuveni recalls, “thinking they would just go home now”. Shortly after the workshop got started, however, the demonstrators showed up again, and began loudly protesting, trying to disrupt the meeting.
“I have no idea if someone told them or if they just got lucky”, Reuveni said, attempting to explain how the protestors found the new location so quickly. Eventually, the security team dispersed the protestors, and the conference proceeded as planned. “There was no violence”, Reuveni said of the protestors, adding that “It was uncomfortable. There was only a door between us and them”.
Wanting to avoid similar incidents for the rest of the conference, and aware that an official protest had been planned for the following day, Reuveni decided to move the location off campus. “The point is not where the event takes place”, he explains “but that it takes place”.
Although some participants were unhappy with the decision to move the second day of the conference to a different site, Reuveni maintains that “it was a very pragmatic decision for a specific situation. I don’t even regret it”.
When asked about the role that the Sussex leadership played in the decision, Reuveni has nothing but praise for them: “the University’s management was great”, he said, “and we could have stayed on campus if we wanted to. This was my decision”.
According to Reuveni, they hosted the rest of the conference at a local hotel, and there were no further complications. As he recalls it, “the VC took full responsibility, saying that they should have been more prepared. She even wrote another letter apologising to the participants”.
When asked whether moving the conference could be seen as capitulation to the protestors, Reuveni responded that for him, “the major thing was to continue the workshop”, adding “I am not going to change the mind of the BDS [movement]. I don’t see it as my mission to fight BDS”.
“The bottom line is that the event took place”, Reuveni insists, “and that similar events will take place in the future”. He remains adamant that these future events will continue to be hosted at the Sussex campus: “There’s a Holocaust memorial and an Israeli film screening [coming up]. Maybe there’ll be protests, but it’s going ahead”.
As Reuveni sees it, this was not a case of ‘cancellation’ or the protestors ‘chasing’ the conference off campus, but rather his own pragmatic decision to mitigate an unforeseen nuisance and ensure the continuation of an important academic workshop. Neither does he blame the University’s leadership for disruptions, saying that they “really take this idea of academic freedom seriously”.
It is refreshing to hear that Sussex provided all the support needed to ensure that the conference could go ahead on its premises, even if Reuveni eventually decided to move it elsewhere. We hope that other universities will follow their example when similar situations arise in the future.
The letter from the UCU Sussex branch, however, was deeply unprofessional. It is not the job of a union to shame academics out of participating in any workshop or conference. Refusing to cooperate with researchers based on their nationality is regressive, and the idea that having intellectual discussions with them “whitewashes” or “condones” the actions of their government is antithetical to academic freedom.
Academics are only responsible for their own ideas and utterances, not for the policies of their government, nor even for the actions of the university that employs them. Academic freedom does not merely require independence from interference when conducting research, but also from national, religious, or political prejudice when discussing one’s work with others. It is clear that many members of the Sussex branch of the UCU are unfamiliar with such notions.