I was going to a conference… (Yet more reasons for an academic boycott of Israel).
At the time of this writing, the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography is taking place in Palestine. Together with a few hundred participants from around the world, I was registered for the conference and would give a presentation on planning theory. However, to my big surprise I was not allowed to participate by the Israeli authorities, as I was detained at the Ben Gurion Airport and sent back to Sweden.
Holding a geography conference in Palestine is very interesting for a variety of reasons – from its location in the politically unstable Middle East, to its extraordinary geographical history as a meeting place for cultures, peoples and religions. Some keywords in the discipline of human geography are “borders”, “territory” and “colonialism”; also in this respect, Palestine is a highly pertinent choice of host for a geography conference. Here, these keywords denote not merely fascinating research subjects, but are real and substantial problems for many people, since Palestine still is under occupation by Israel.
On the 24th of July I myself experienced a small piece of this injustice as I was denied entry to Israel. After interrogations and waiting for 6 hours I was informed of being a “security risk”. I find this hard to understand as my only “crime” is having been present at a demonstration in the West Bank in the fall of 2013, and being the partner of an Iranian-‐born medical doctor from Sweden who was denied access when she going for internship at a hospital in Nablus in 2014. Being sent back to Sweden after a day at the airport and a night in custody is of course nothing compared to what the thousands of Palestinians presently in Israeli prisons – many without charges – endure, not to speak of, for instance, the 500 killed children during last year Gaza war. But my case is yet another example of how Israel impedes academic freedom in Palestine. The 7th International Conference of Critical Geography – unlike the previous once being hosted in places like Frankfurt, Mumbai or Mexico City – is directly thwarted by an occupational power on different levels: from generally making the working conditions unbearable for Palestinian academics and people doing research in/on Palestine, to forcing the organisers of this conference to be cautious on information and openness and also directly preventing people from attending the conference (many Arab and Muslim/Middle Eastern colleagues, from countries such as Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iraq could only dream of entering the conference). Not to mention the situation in Gaza, where students need to smuggle in their own books! At the conference I was, as mentioned, going to give a presentation on urban planning and planning theory. And in this respect, it is interesting to see how the Israeli universities and academic society are interwoven with the regime´s actual occupation of Palestine. That universities and research are closely related to government policies we know from all over the world, but in few places do such connections have such dire consequences. In terms of spatial planning and architecture, the universities and the Israeli government are closely related in a number of issues: for example the planning of settlements and the wall,
infrastructure and water management, the allocation of building permits in Jerusalem, as well as physical displacement of people as a colonial strategy. Since the state of Israel continues to ignore international rights and UN resolutions; since it continues relentlessly to attack academic freedom in Palestine in all kinds of ways; since the Israeli universities are so interwoven with the actual occupation, there are no other alternatives than an international academic boycott of Israeli institutions – including academic ones. Just kilometres and miles from where Palestinians are deprived their right to education, the Israeli universities produce the knowledge on how to strengthen the occupation. For the sake of humanity, please join the The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel at http://pacbi.org/.
Ståle Holgersen, Malmö, Sweden, 28th July 2015.
(Ståle Holgersen is a researcher (post-‐doc) at Institute for Housing Research (IBF), at Uppsala University, Sweden.)