JONATHAN JANSEN | The cowardice of our universities while Israel massacres Palestinians is staggering

Throughout the world, universities are grappling with how to respond to one of the greatest tragedies of this century: the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Protests, the things university students and faculty routinely do, were inevitable, given the atrocities being beamed live on television as the government of Israel kills civilians with a ruthlessness supported by several of the most powerful Western nations. Even if you have a stone-cold heart, the ongoing slaughter of 14,000 children must move you at some level of your humanity.

When students started to protest with tent dwellings across American campuses, the response of administrations was to find ways of shutting them down. No doubt, in that country university presidents (vice-chancellors, we call them here) were under fire from a right-wing congress to act in ways that snuffed out any democratic protests on the charge of anti-Semitism. University heads have lost their jobs because of these political attacks.

Let me say this to my colleagues across the country: you do not deserve to teach our students values such as decency, solidarity and the value of human life if you cannot signal to them where you stand on the genocide of the Palestinians

Let me be clear, I find anti-Semitism utterly abhorrent, but this is too easy and convenient a dismissal of all protests where, I am assured, the majority of protesters are not so minded.

In the process of shutting down protests, something valuable is being lost — and that is the kind of academic values we have come to treasure across time and continents and those include academic freedom, the right to protest and the gift of solidarity. Lose those, and our universities become anaemic institutions with the narrowest of tasks: to convey knowledge without worth, skills without conscience and values without decency.

The truth is, every university in the world upholds a commitment to social justice somewhere in their visions and missions, the notion that we do not produce and disseminate knowledge for its own sake but because of its transformative power for changing society (climate change, for example) and improving the human condition (such asempathy towards others).

South African students have been remarkably quiet, no doubt because of a narrowness of political ambition centred only on their own problems — we have yet to teach solidarity as a value across the curriculum. But university senates have thankfully been quite active in raising the alarm around the genocide in Gaza and surrounds. Some universities have taken a clear and unambiguous stand through simple resolutions like calling for an end to the genocide and the release of hostages on both sides of the conflict. Others have resisted even the simplest statements of decency that would signal where the institution stands in relation to mass killings.

It is a cowardice that confounds me. I have listened in recent times to a disturbing repetition of apartheid tropes. 'But if we make a statement on Gaza, why not South Sudan and so on seriously?' This is exactly how whites reacted when the call was made to take a stand against apartheid.' But what about the aboriginal people in Australia?' This is what I call moral abdication in the face of evil. Avoid responsibility through distraction. As one of my colleagues said in a senatorial debate this week, “if there are other atrocities, bring it to the table”, but don’t try to look away from the one being presented.

There are enough academic reasons for universities to take a stand on what is happening in Gaza — the killing of children who should be in school. The destruction of places of learning, schools and universities. The loss of lives of teachers, lecturers and professors in the course of the war. Forget the pandemic; here are accumulated learning losses for Palestinian children because of non-attendance in educational institutions.

No, don’t insult the intelligence of those who stand for something by arguing that universities are not political. For more than a century, our elite universities have been exactly that — reproducing apartheid knowledge and defending the racial state without flinching. What is this? Mass amnesia? No, universities, whether they like it or not, are always political because by their very nature they exclude whether on the basis of race or class. They exclude because teaching is always based on a selection from the global treasure of human knowledge.

South Africans should know this. The reason apartheid survived for so long was because of this empty sophistry I see in some senate debates. It cleverly conceals Old Testament religious prejudices (Jews are after all the chosen people of God). And dare I say it, the Jews are white and the Palestinians are not and so let’s be honest, many of our compatriots are taking racial sides here and not religious ones.

I cried when Hamas murdered and abused Jewish citizens on October 7; it is an atrocity that must be condemned out of hand especially by activists on the Palestinian cause. As I have said often before, there is a humanity that precedes politics.

The people of Gaza have had their October 7 over and over and over again, and yet some of our universities have lacked the backbone to take a simple, unambiguous position on the genocide in Gaza. Let me say this to my colleagues across the country: you do not deserve to teach our students values such as decency, solidarity and the value of human life if you cannot signal to them where you stand on the genocide of the Palestinians. Period.