The academic journal Cultural Studies of Science Education, published by leading academic publisher Springer Nature, recently published an article “Science educators cannot remain silent: A call for Palestinian solidarity”, an Op-Ed format article (which the journal does publish) authored by a range of senior science educators and science education researchers, who noted their membership of various bodies including the British Educational Research Association, the Association for Science Teacher Education and the European Science Education Research Association.

The article focuses on the post October 7th Gaza war and includes assertions such as that the state of Israel deliberately killed at least 60,000 people, mainly civilians, and goes on to stridently support the implementation of BDS. The article also echoes the call of Refaat Alareer, the Gazan academic, poet and activist killed in Gaza in December 2023 to “bear witness” to Palestinian experiences.

It’s necessarily the case that the terrible deaths of thousands of people in Gaza requires pause, reflection and indeed perhaps activism. Yet it’s curious how an academic journal published by a leading publishing house, even one that publishes Op-Ed formats, could consider this article part of critical academic discourse, that is a discourse that looks at evidence, and recognizes nuance and complexity in the assessing of evidence. Of course, I may well be being naïve to suggest that either the academy, or the publishing houses who filter and promote its work, are much interested in critical academic discourse.

There is lots that could be said but I will focus on just a few points that one might have thought might have occurred to the editors of the journal, if not to the authors of the article:

A controversial and disputed figure, Refaat Alareer made many extremist statements. To take one example, on October 13th 2023 Medhi Hasan, a political commentator who is strongly (to say the least) anti-Israel, posted on X that “if you are justifying or defending the kidnapping of children, the killing of children, the parading of bodies… you have lost your damn mind. And your humanity.” In response Alareer posted “”Medhi Hasan is no friend of Palestine. He is a coward. He is a fraud. F*** him up the a**.”

As we now know, Hamas did kidnap and murder babies and children – Ariel and Kfir Bibas were aged four years and nine months when they were taken as hostages, and subsequently murdered, along with their mother Shiri.

So perhaps one might have thought that the authors and indeed the editors, all people who hold significant influential roles in schools and universities, might have just taken pause for a second to consider whether there were two sides to Alareer, and whether they really wanted to so simplistically use as support for their argument the ideas of someone who got so incensed at being told that kidnapping or murdering children was wrong.

Then we have the accusation that Israel deliberately killed 60,000 people. Of course, they bring their sources to support this – but again one wonders whether they might just have paused to note that this is not a fact, but something very heavily disputed in many ways, not least in terms of the ratio of civilians to combatants. Or to mention, “for context”, that October 7th had happened, and that Israel was involved in a war for its survival. Or to consider for a second that perhaps the Islamist fanatics of Hamas had some role to play in what had happened. Or even to consider whether the accusation that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians, as opposed to engaging in legitimate warfare in which civilians died, had echoes of the blood libel.

The article floats free of nuance and critical consideration of debate. Inconveniences such as drawing on the ideas of someone who thinks it is fine to kidnap children, are just that – inconveniences to the narrative, to be ignored. That there might be debates about the ethics or indeed legality of BDS doesn’t register. In fact, complexity in any sense is anathema, too dangerous to be engaged with.

In that sense it illustrates, as David Hirsh, has argued, antizionism without the hyphen. It goes beyond what might a reasoned critical exploration of complex social events, which one might consider feasible as an “Anti-Zionism”, but instead presents an antizionism as a phenomena which collapses all complexity in to an uncritical view of Israel, as Hirsh puts it, as “pure, powerful evil”. Israel, Israelis and any Jews or non-Jews who support Israel become an undifferentiated block of evil in the world. The ongoing threats to Israeli civilians, or the hostage taking, or the murder of kidnapped babies and children, or the pronouncements of Hamas about their intentions, become inconveniences or irrelevancies.  To mention them would be to contravene Alareer’s conspiratorial maxim that Israeli crimes are so evil and so monstrous that anything is justified.

Of course, that anything is justified increasingly becomes the drumbeat of the academy and the products of the academy in the media and the professions, including it seems perhaps some science educators. In their upside-down world, Israel aims to kill civilians, not Hamas, and kidnapping Jewish children becomes a legitimate substitute for political discourse, as easily justifiable as murdering the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies. The article is just one small example, but it continues the work of the academy, in their upside down world, of traducing both the very idea of critical debate which should of course be its foundation, and the principles of liberal democracy.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)