American academia’s silence on Palestine reveals its hypocritical embrace of ‘diversity’ principles

On the eve of 2024, Israel was in the midst of its 13th week of war on the Palestinian people, with no plans of letting up. Israel’s action, a retaliation for a terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7 that killed over 1,200 Israelis, at this point meets the definition of a genocide, as South Africa contends in its rigorously argued case in the International Court of Justice.

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the West Bank has included the targeted destruction of hospitals, churches and mosques, and refugee camps, as well as the deliberate killings of civilians, resulting in the deaths of over 21,000 people, the majority of whom are women and children.

With strong support in the country for Israel’s response, the country’s leaders have announced plans for the “voluntary migration” of displaced Palestinians, essentially a project of forced ethnic cleansing. Neither the admonitions of the United Nations, nor the unequivocal identification of Israeli actions as war crimes by international human rights organisations like Amnesty International, nor the Pope’s condemnation of Israel’s actions as “terrorism” have had the slightest deterrent effect on the country.

Given that the United States, the prime supplier of weapons to Israel and its biggest backer, is fundamentally enabling the genocide, it is no surprise that most politicians from both American parties have squarely come out in support of Israel’s “right to defend itself”, a euphemism for engaging in an endless campaign of destruction that puts the attack on Guernica to shame.

Nikki Haley, the Indian-origin politician seeking the Republican nomination to run for president, has strongly endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. American newspapers, including the venerable New York Times, have devised the most creatively convoluted sentences to avoid directly stating that it is Israeli actions that are responsible for carnage and unimaginably horrific destruction in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The silence of American academia on Israel’s violence against the Palestinians deserves a special award for its unique combination of cravenness, apathy and hypocrisy.

It would be hard to find a legitimate American institution of higher learning that does not claim to be committed to universal human rights, dignity, and social justice. The true goal of a college and university education, both university administrators and any number of faculty members will repeat endlessly, is teaching students to think critically about the world and to meet it as engaged global citizens.

American academia, in its image of itself, is a utopian space dedicated to the cherished principles of academic freedom, intellectual autonomy, and the ability to speak truth to power without retribution from either university officials or external figures, such as politicians or wealthy donors.

Yet, none of these values appear to apply to the violence being meted out to Palestinian civilians by Israel, in the context of what is inaccurately described as an “Israel-Hamas war”. Student groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, have courageously spoken up at the risk of retaliation from university administrations and politicians, and some faculty members have defended the groups.

A few faculty groups, like Scholars of South Asia in Solidarity with Palestine and academics at UC Berkeley, to their credit, have also issued statements of support and solidarity.

For the most part, however, the fate of the Palestinians has been met with indifference in the academy. Contrast this with the enthusiastic support for Ukraine in American academia after Vladmir Putin’s invasion of the country in early 2022, which included not just statements of support, but fellowships, psychological support services, and other resources.

Contrast it also with the fact that over a hundred American universities, including religious institutions, have recently affirmed support for Israel against Hamas with not a word about the Palestinian civilians targeted by Israel.

What marks the silence as particularly hypocritical, though, is the fact that America academia has been particularly vocal over the last three years about its commitment to DEI, or the principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Emerging as a widespread institutional response in the wake of the latest round of the BLM or Black Lives Matter protests against the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a White police officer, the DEI movement is an acknowledgement of structural and historical racial injustice in American life and a commitment to the principles that each term in the acronym stands for.

In the wake of what was arguably the largest social movement in the US, and one that drew over 15 million protesters from across the globe taking a stand against police brutality, practically every entity from the CIA and Lockheed Martin and Chevron to the RAND corporation has publicly affirmed its allegiance to DEI principles.

No sector of American life, however, has embraced DEI more enthusiastically than academia. From diversity statements required of candidates for academic job applications to ordering faculty to submit a list of things they have done to promote DEI, from statements on syllabi affirming a pedagogical commitment to DEI principles to new positions and programs created expressly to realise DEI goals, American colleges and universities have gone to great lengths since 2020 to visibly and conspicuously display their DEI credentials.

Whether these changes will make the culture of American campuses more genuinely welcoming for people of color or increase enrollment of students from disadvantaged racial, ethnic, or economic backgrounds remains to be seen. Nevertheless, these are laudable steps, even if they prioritise performativity over addressing the political economy of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Yet, even at the level of symbolic gestures, these principles, as indeed those of empathy or even the basic recognition of human suffering, do not seem to apply to Palestinian and Palestinian-American, Arab-American, Arab, Muslim-American, and Muslim faculty, staff, and students in American academia for many of whom this must be a profoundly disorienting, isolating, and devastating time.

Likewise, the discourse of human rights, global solidarity, and universal values, which large numbers of American academics produce in bulk in their scholarship, at conferences, and on social media, with regard to minority rights, women’s rights, and queer rights, seems not to hold for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

As author Arundhati Roy wrote recently in a powerful and moving piece, while millions across the world have stood up for Palestinians, in contrast, academics, writers, and the like, “risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods” when speaking up for Palestinian rights in the US, and so have remained silent.

This has been true well before this particular moment, of course, in American academia as elsewhere in the US and beyond. In the US, academics have long faced serious consequences for criticising Israel, or for describing it as a settler-colony or as a state guilty of apartheid against Palestinians. These consequences have taken the form of accusations of anti-Semitism, denial of tenure to scholars, or, more recently, attacks by mega-rich donors and pro-Israel fronts like Canary Mission that expressly target students and teachers.

Undergirding this history is a grim and pervasive truth that Edward Said, the great Palestinian-American scholar and author, had identified in Western society: that of the denial of the recognition of the very humanity of Palestinians, their fundamental claim to existence, and their right to imagine themselves as a people and to be acknowledged as such.

Notwithstanding its self-aggrandising claims, American academia has been, and continues to be, complicit in this denial. American academics are generally not shy of criticising the kind of barbaric, excessive, and unneccessary violence that Israel is inflicting upon Palestinians in real time – as long as such criticism does not involve America’s allies or interests or till a few decades have passed and it is safe to express outrage.

As had been the case during America’s blatantly illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, there is silence at the very moment when it is especially urgent to speak up. Academics who see the US military-industrial complex at work everywhere, such as, for instance, when their personal photocopying budget is slightly reduced, seem to have absolutely nothing to say when American arms manufacturers are handsomely profiting from the death of Palestinians. For all the talk of DEI, it would appear that all lives do not matter equally for the American academy.

Rohit Chopra is Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University. He is currently writing two books: a cultural history of disability and a reflection on the memory of the destruction of the Babri Masjid