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Activism and political organising in academia: a conversation with Ilan Pappe

Demonstration outside School of Oriental and African Studies, London, of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. 27 April 2017. Wikicommons/ Philafrenzy. Some rights reserved.Carol Que (CQ): An explicit political agenda in
scholarly work is commonly regarded as disreputable. Mahmood Mamdani once
talked about this in a
lecture at the University of Cape Town that considered the role of the
university and scholar – academic freedom true to its classic vision – as a
commitment towards the call for justice. Working as a historian and
activist, how have you brought the two together, especially when, as you have
said before in a lecture at Exeter, historical research works as an analysis of
present reality? Is politics everything?

Ilan Pappe (IP): Yes, for me it’s been a long
journey, finding the golden mean between scholarship and activism. Probably one
of the biggest hurdles was the criticism that my work would be too political,
too politicised… implying that it is of a lesser quality.  It
takes a while to be bold enough, and say that this is almost a ridiculous idea,
that one can write an objective history of a place where a conflict rages on
today. In fact, in almost every case, one would find it quite
presumptuous to think that the historian can provide a neutral narrative.

The only way that you can provide a neutral
narrative, and this is also true for social sciences, not only for analysing
the past but also analysing the present – the only way to do it is to be
extremely boring, to be so careful, to be so literal, that you don’t say
anything of significance.

The moment that you want to say something of
significance, you enter into the realm of moral judgement, which is part of the
kit of politics. The moment you have a position, the research is subjective,
not objective.

It is tough, for most people, that this is the
case, because the whole production of knowledge in the west and in western
universities, is based on the premise that it will be empirical, neutral, and
unbiased. So you really are a heretic if you say these things and they don’t
like it! But if you do it in inductive ways as I did, if you don’t come to
these questions because you sit at home and you ponder these questions. But if
you do it from your own active writing of history for instance, on such charged
topics like Palestine, you are absolutely convinced that it is impossible to
separate political views and moral judgements from the story that is written.

CQ: Is there a possibility for political
organising in academia, political organising conceived as a process based on
attainable and quantifiable goals? Or is this incompatible with the insularity
of academic work and academic discourses? Could we set ourselves the task of transforming
academic research? Of course, this must depend too on the types of institution
we are in….

IP: To politicise the system in that way would be a
far more difficult challenge. It is hard enough for the system to admit that
what it does is as political as it is scholarly. And what you are talking about
is really to draw the logical conclusion from that recognition.

I feel the modes of knowledge production in
academia, especially in the humanities and social sciences where the work is
very individual, is not conducive to working within those organisations or
outfits which are in their essence political. Politics is not the action of the
individual, it is the ability to work collectively. In that respect, it would
be very difficult to change the mode of working for academia… it would require
us to admit that the very basis of the academic production of knowledge is
wrong.

I have taken part in some debates that have been
going on for the past ten, fifteen years, about how to redesign the university
by changing the relationship between the teacher and the student, by
democratising the dissemination of knowledge, by allowing more emotional, more
holistic scientific approaches to research and so on. So maybe within this
bigger transformation, we could do politics.

And thinking about Palestine, in respect to the
movement for academic boycott for instance – this is a movement for change, and
a movement for change is the work of the collective, it is academics
collectively working for a political target within academia, despite their
different qualifications and research interests. So the American Historical
Association debates whether to impose the academic boycott on Israeli academics,
and the American Anthropological Society has a similar discussion. That’s an
example of organisations emulating modes of political activity within academia.
Maybe it is a kind of precursor of something different that can be out there.

CQ: I’ve been observing collective activist
production of oral history, including of student movements such as Rhodes Must
Fall, that are in the process of gathering and drawing together a comprehensive
written (book) form through their activism. This too is using a collaborative
mode of academic production.

IP: The two biggest challenges in the modern
academic production of knowledge are the following: one is the fact that it
totally inhibits any use of the imagination, emotion, and many parts of our
body and our being in limiting research to only a part of our abilities
as human beings. The result is much academic work that is stale and irrelevant
to society. So one challenge is to make it more holistic.

The second challenge is
the one you are talking about, the fact that once you open it up, it becomes a
field of struggle – legitimate struggles similar to political struggles. The networks and modes that you are talking about,
you’re right, would actually be activism within academia. One can also add this
comment: academia is already a very political space to begin with. We call
this, ‘academic politics’, by which we mean people are using power as their
main motivation and the main reason for climbing the ladder, to positions of
strength within the system. They don’t gain these posts because they are better
academics: they’re just good politicians. So this is also part of this argument
that you cannot separate what you know about politics and what you know about
academic production.

CQ: What then are your thoughts on embedding
modes of communal responsibility/civic engagement/forms of political organising
within the curriculum itself? Perhaps you can speak more specifically to the
Palestine studies curriculum you devised at Exeter?

IP: Let’s not be confined to one example. I can
give you three examples and only the last one will be on Palestine. If you
think about medicine, and the neoliberal system that does not allow for
preventive medicine to develop but only wants to develop medicine that comes
after diagnosing illnesses, you would expect that within the academic system,
not everyone is in the hands of pharmaceutical giants. There would have to be
an organised movement of change from within the medical field itself, demanding
different kinds of production for medicine, or preventative methods.

The second one is everything to do with
sustainability and ecology, where the curriculum should reflect a call for
struggle for the land we live on, but is instead supposedly a neutral survey of
the climate change debate. In the case of Palestine studies, for me Exeter was
a unique experience. The moment I created the Centre for Palestine Studies that
focuses on postgraduate studies, I didn’t have to do much because the majority
of the people who were most interested in pursuing an academic career in which
Palestine is the main interest, although not all, were already activists as
well. There was little I could provide for them in terms of a curriculum that
enhanced their activism.

Nevertheless, to enhance
activism through the curriculum you focus for instance on the question: what do
you gain as an activist from being in this framework? Did you really need this
framework? Was it not actually enough to be an activist? Why do you need a
degree and why do you need to learn the research methods and why do you need to
be engaged in the theoretical questions and so on?

Engagement of this type
that connects with the big question of trying to democratise the production of
knowledge, involves students becoming participants in the making of the
curriculum. The curriculum isn’t just a dead letter, it is a living thing that
is produced by the joint understanding that if it’s not relevant to our
activism, it is irrelevant altogether. The system at its best can do what it does for me, by allowing me a
small space, if it thinks there will be no spillover to other, more
‘prestigious’, disciplines such as law, medicine, technology, and economy. I
think in the humanities and social sciences you can create your own space: but
they would be very worried if you attempted to sell this as an example to other
disciplines.

CQ: I want to ask more specifically about working
academically on the topics of settler colonialism and indigenous rights. I’m
Australian, so this raises different indigenous rights issues, that
nevertheless have things in common with the Palestinian case. Given that the
term ‘decolonisation’ is still, I believe in a public sense, often misunderstood,
and these days also co-opted as a trend by liberal ‘progressive’ cultural
institutions – what do you think is happening with the use of the term in the
various contexts that it is being used in? Secondly, if the academic’s
responsibility, working within this space, is to support the decolonising project,
how can academics strategically apply pressure on their institutions not only to
provide resources, but also to build public support. What are the difficulties
and perhaps successes you have had in this area?

IL: Let me start with the term itself, and I think
you’re right that the term can be misunderstood or manipulated because there is a false sense that decolonisation is
a painless process by which you take a reality which has in it elements of
inequality, oppression, discrimination, and the next day you wake up and all these
negative aspects disappear. But
to use the term properly comes with a sense of accountability, it comes with
redistribution of natural resources, it comes with the rectification of past
evils, and this is incredibly difficult for those who enjoy the settler
colonialist vantage-point. It is easier to go to the colonised and say,
in the process we’ll upgrade you to be a non-colonised situation. It is far
more difficult to convince the settler to be degraded to the level where most
of their privileges are being taken from them.

So there is this element in it, that academics who
use and abuse the term, tend to ignore. As for the question of the
institutions, I can give you one example. It is typical of the imbalance
between indigenous movements and settler colonialist projects. Settler
colonialist projects have very ably used the premises of western academic
production of knowledge based on empiricism, objectivity, and unbiased
research. And in the case of historical narratives, you need documentation,
because documentation is the ultimate proof that what you say is correct.

Now, archives only exist in the hands of the
settlers: indigenous people don’t have archives, they have oral history, which
was for many years degraded as a lesser primary source. Despite some
achievements in recent years in promoting oral history as a legitimate way of
reconstructing what happened in the past, it’s still suspect in comparison to
rich documentary.

In Exeter, I saw groups of Palestinian academics
and people interested in Palestine, using oral history as cultural resistance –
cultural resistance in the Gramscian sense which is the grand rehearsal for
the big political resistance. You do cultural resistance when you are not
allowed to do political resistance. So you tell the story without the archives
and the documents, you expose the crimes without the archives if you don’t have
them. You demand from the institution, first the local one, then the overall
infrastructure to which we all belong, that it legitimises this kind of work,
to allow this work to be used as cultural resistance, and not just as a step
for an academic career.

And again, it comes down to the other questions we have
talked about. You need to do it collectively, you can’t do it individually. So
I think, it would be right to say that the very introduction of Indigenous
Studies and the very close connection of Indigenous Studies with indigenous
political movements around the world, is one of the indications that what
you’re talking about is maybe unfolding on the ground, without anybody
declaring it properly.

There is also this kind of politicisation that you
talk about, through the curriculum, through the nature of the work that you are
doing. I think the next test is the MA and PhD dissertations, because they are
not allowed, as yet, to be about anything. At best people are told, after your
PhD you could politicise your research. I think this would be the biggest
battle because it would be very difficult for the system to evaluate quality
beyond the conventional ways of evaluating quality.

But I think that maybe what you’re talking about,
politicisation, can bring about a parallel process by which you are evaluated,
which is more similar to a political reality than what we call an academic
reality. I can see it happening. Some of my PhD students already know that
they’re doing this PhD not for an academic career – they are already seeing
this as a training in the work together for an activist career. So let us put
it this way: there has to be a self-perception of a curriculum – essays,
dissertations, the classroom, as tools in the resistance movement – that fits the
twenty-first century. And maybe it’s more conducive to do it in this twenty-first
century, because we have found more and more non-violent ways of pushing forth
agendas than in the 50s and the 60s. Then, many of us who were part of the liberation
movements believed that only an armed struggle could work.

Now there are other modes of resistance that emphasise
culture, the importance of spreading knowledge, and see these as non-violent
means of achieving our goals. Suddenly the work in academia is again is being noticed.
So
maybe this is also a part of something that people haven’t grasped fully, and
that, so to speak, Palestine
is just a microcosm of it all. When people say why are you
only boycotting Israel, why don’t you boycott American academics, or Australian
academics? I think the answer is that people understand very well that you
cannot separate activism from scholarship. Maybe what you noticed is very
original and very good, as this also means that you embrace politics inside
academia, in terms of methods, structure, and values. And maybe this was easier
to do in the case of Palestine, which was already very politicised. The remaining
question is whether it is limited to that case study, or if it is happening anywhere
else, or if it can move into other areas.

CQ: You speak of non-violent resistance and Palestine as a microcosm of it
all, and indeed this also relates to the criminalisation of dissent in
academic spaces. This is certainly something you’ve experienced personally, but
students are also experiencing this. For instance at UC Irvine, students known
as Irvine 11  were subjected to
a year-long criminal investigation, and a jury trial resulting in a guilty
verdict, for protesting at an IDF presence at a campus event.

IL: It’s the monopoly of power, and you know, the
monopoly of power can be at the hands of the state, a criminal cartel, or a
university management. Genuine democratisation means decreasing the monopoly of
power which is also the monopoly of violence at the hands of this management.

It’s interesting because the other day, a colleague
of mine from the University of Haifa was sacked because he was teaching the
history of subversive and revolutionary movements. He had apparently conducted
the class not from a historical point of view, but rather as an active
laboratory of resistance. He was so successful that he was kicked out! The
management recognised his curriculum was dangerous despite it being very small
and limited.

CQ: How can academia reinvigorate the knowledge
commons to enable a more integrated and intersectional activism, not just
amongst the student body but also the general public? Is there something to be
explored in the aesthetic and political potential of both academic and activist
uses of narrativisation?

IP: There are two possible scenarios as to how this
can develop. First, we can already see that public universities are being told
by their governments that the humanities and social sciences are not very
important. They really want to separate them as a form of ‘leisure teaching’
compared to ‘functional teaching’ (STEM). And this kind of shock to the system
may allow the outcast disciplines to be more activist because they will fight
for their own life. This might trigger a change in the way they understand the
role of activism in their search for new relevance in society. Many of us are already
thinking that this will force us to create new ideas about the production of
knowledge in academia.

The other possible scenario is in regards to the
local and global crises that have been piling on one after another, like the
financial crisis of 2008, the ecological disasters, the ‘war on terror’ – call
it what you will. It is very clear that academia played no role in either
alerting people about these crises, nor did it play a very constructive role in
responding to these crises. Now that academia has proved itself not to have anything
to do with pre-empting these immense challenges for society, it seems less and
less relevant to most people. In many ways, civil society – the NGOs – seem far
more knowledgeable, far more reliable as associates in dealing with the daily
hardships and daily challenges of large-scale change.

So academia is really in
a crisis. Universities have become institutions ruled by technocrats, which
should have created a kind of rebellion from academics, because everything they
believe in is run by technocrats – promotion, funding and so on. But it seems
that instead they are becoming domiciled, and deactivated in many different ways.

Now, when it comes to narrativisation as you call
it. Probably what emerges from our conversation is that this cannot be left up
to the older hegemonic groups within the production of knowledge. It is not
them who will be able to carry the banner of change in this respect, but rather
those who represent minority groups, marginalised groups, oppressed groups, who
can deal with criminalisation much better than those in the comfort zone –
because they were never in the comfort zone anyway. This certainly deserves
more thinking.

To finish this line of thought, I can only say to
you I still find the idea of ‘academic courage’ an oxymoron. It doesn’t work. Most
academics are very timid, and are easily intimidated. It’s not the first place
where you look for courageous people who would work together to make change
possible.

On the other hand, there are so many objective features,
so to speak, of this system that should have prompted such an outcry, that you would
have expected it to be there. But it isn’t. These are the people who should
come up with ideas. These are the people who should work together towards
changing the system, and yet, they seem to be a poor imitation of the systems
that feed them and intimidate them.

But maybe if, academia were more populated by
people who are already struggling as minorities and so on… we’ll see. There was
a similar hope about feminism, the great hope that the growing number of women
– and there is a growing number of women not just in academia, but also in
senior academic positions – would create fundamental change in the way we do
knowledge, in the way we produce knowledge. Yet the only thing we witness so
far is that they’ve replaced men in positions of power but maintained the same
system. So that didn’t work. But we’ll see.