The crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism on European campuses does not differ in essence from the repression students face in undemocratic settings.

Jamaican-British academic Stuart Hall once said “the university is a critical institution or it is nothing”. Indeed, universities have an important role to play in upholding the imperatives of academic freedom and critical inquiry, especially today, amid the growing debate and protests over Israel’s war on Gaza.

However, despite their ethical and legal commitments to scholarly freedom, many Western institutions of higher education have failed to protect or even suppressed faculty and students who have expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian people. In the United Kingdom, we have observed a worrying pattern in which universities have ended up doing the bidding of a British government fully supportive of a war that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled could be plausibly genocidal and that has potentially left 186,000 Palestinians dead.

Under the guise of upholding “institutional neutrality” or protecting the welfare of Jewish students and staff – which has led to a paternalism that has dangerously homogenised the opinions and commitments of Jewish academics, as the UK Jewish Academic Network writes – universities across the country have cracked down on pro-Palestinian solidarity on their premises.

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