SHAME!

For over five years I directed the Jerusalem branch of the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), a British educational charity known locally as the Kenyon Institute. I also served as Deputy Director of the CBRL overall. In an alarming affront to academic freedom and as part of a broader crackdown on anti-Zionist speech in the wake of October 7th, earlier this year, I was hastily dismissed from my role.

The Kenyon Institute [KI] is located in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in territory the UK government recognises as the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is the successor organization to the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, an important British mandate-era colonial archaeology institute established in 1919.

I was directing the KI after October 7th when Israel launched its genocide against the people and institutions of the Gaza Strip.

I am of Palestinian heritage, have an academic specialization in Palestine studies and have authored peer reviewed publications on the Gaza Strip. 

It is not every day that one lives and works in a part of the same territory – the OPT – ‘governed’ by the same state – Israel – accused of committing mass murder just a few miles away in the Gaza Strip.

Given its location, history and academic purpose, CBRL had a moral and institutional duty to respond to the unfolding Israeli genocide, especially in view of the “systematic obliteration” of the education sector in the Gaza Strip, killing staggering numbers of  professors, students and administrators in an act of scholasticide. Our organization viewed the fostering of academic collaborations and partnerships as one of its core activities, together with organizing events that contributed to shaping debate and understanding through informed public outreach and education.

In many ways I was uniquely positioned to fulfill this role given my field experience in the Gaza Strip as an academic, journalist, researcher, and consultant, including for two different UN bodies. For two decades I have written and commented on the situation there, and even noted in an interview published just a few days before Oct 7th that a serious military dynamic and conflagration was brewing in Gaza. In 2018, I wrote an academic article on Gaza’s tunnel infrastructure.

After October 7th,  CBRL’s management committee asked me to keep a low profile and not to speak to the media. They gave me a ‘red line’ warning not to participate in an event entitled “Gaza and the Struggle for Palestine”, organized by Haymarket Books, which was to take place outside of my work hours on 19 October 2023. The Management Committee also repeatedly pressured me to look for a new job as I awaited the renewal of my Israeli visa, which was inconsistent with how previous rounds of applications were handled by the organization, and how other Directors were treated in similar circumstances.

Then, in December 2023, I was disinvited from the organization’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) half an hour before it began. I was secretly blocked again after I managed to enter the Zoom room just as the meeting was about to start. The culprit was my line manager, the former Director (see postscript below), and I have video evidence to back up my claim.   

On both counts, the former Director abused her power in acts of targeted censorship against me as she attempted to suppress the contents of my Annual Report from the Jerusalem branch. The latter included institutional concerns I was raising around how the organization responded to events after October 7th, and how these political developments could impact our work locally and regionally, together with its impact on me specifically, including concerns about censorship and harassment.

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My report also raised concerns about the organization’s governance, including the potential for conflicts of interest arising in the organization, and the delicate balance within the organization between its Amman and Jerusalem branches.

Despite the fact that all trustees were sent a copy of the video showing my unjustified exclusion from the AGM, CBRL never formally acknowledged what had taken place: ‘move along, nothing to see here.’  In my view, the act was a deliberate violation of the organization’s democratic process and should have invalidated the meeting overall.

Instead, about a month after the AGM, soon after the Christmas holidays, I was informed that I would be made redundant on a financial basis and that the Kenyon Institute would be placed on a “care and maintenance” footing. Redundancy meant that the organization was eliminating the oldest position in the organization – the Jerusalem directorship - and for which the organization was named (after its Founder Frederic and Director Kathleen Kenyon).

The financial grounds of my redundancy are also suspect. The oral report provided by CBRL’s Treasurer to CBRL members at the 2023 AGM described the organization as “essentially in good financial health” with no indication that such strategic steps (my redundancy or the KIs ‘mothballing’) were imminent or even possible.

There are also grounds to believe that the decision to terminate my employment was already taken by the time of the 2023 AGM. In that meeting, the CBRL President let slip that it was “[...] time [for me] to move on”.

At the time of these statements, I had a permanent contract and was being paid on the UCU pay scale ladder as a Senior Lecturer. There also had been no formal decision made at the time indicating that it was “time” for me to "move on.” Moreover, the President noticeably failed to identify a financial basis when she made this statement, even though this was the alleged reason for my eventual termination.

Grave procedural violations occurred throughout the course of my termination, including eviction from my residence in early April 2024, mere days after the holding of my official redundancy consultation (18 March) and outcome (communicated on the eve of 21 March.)

Dozens of CBRL members, ex-members, and former trustees would mobilise in response to witnessing the circus of the 2023 AGM, later voicing their concerns in a collective statement sent to the Board. Several potential trustees even withdrew their candidacies at the AGM, expressing discomfort with what they had witnessed and raising concerns that they had been misinformed about the state of the organization. Several others would also resign not too long after.

In an effort to appease the collective outcry of members at the AGM, the then Chairman of the Board promised to hold a special organizational meeting in January. But the meeting was only held in May 2024, long after my redundancy was announced and made effective, together with the KIs mothballing. Members were not allowed to speak at the meeting but were only talked to by the Trustees. Members, however, could forward questions, though the organization refused to discuss anything related to my case, clearly fearing legal consequences.

CBRL management’s fears on that front were well founded. I have filed a legal case against the CBRL in the UK Employment Tribunal. CBRL is attempting to evade legal accountability by forcing the issue of my unfair dismissal into Israeli courts, effectively bestowing de facto recognition upon the illegal Israeli annexation of east Jerusalem. Clearly an Israeli court, governed by the state’s openly racist apartheid laws and institutions, is not in a position to fairly adjudicate a matter concerning the anti-Zionist beliefs of a Palestinian scholar who worked at a historic British institution alleging an assault on his academic freedom.

What CBRL did to me was consistent with what has been happening in many academic organizations and other parts of civil society in the wake of October 7th 2023. In the crudest terms, the Israeli genocide has ‘stress-tested’ wide aspects of CBRL’s activity, orientation, composition and finance, including across decision-making processes, byelaws, formal and informal power structures, to say nothing of the institution’s moral compass and priorities.

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Academics and universities in particular are on the front lines of the battle for opinion formation because they are sites where expertise and authority can be generated through knowledge production. In this respect, the battle of ideas around the genocide in Gaza and the related crisis of Zionism can have real world impact and implications, particularly when it comes to the question of ending institutional complicity in the genocide.

This helps explain why Palestinian scholars, Palestine studies scholars, advocates for Palestine at universities, and the discipline of Palestine studies overall, have all come under enormous political and institutional pressure since October 7th. This is not an accident. Genocides don’t just happen. They need to be conceived, financed, equipped and ultimately justified. They also benefit from silence, inaction, confusion, ignorance and deception.

Universities and research play a crucial role in shaping the battle of ideas, which in turn impacts the extent to which governments are able to justify their policies to their citizens, including by references to the constraints imposed by international law.

A key arena in which these battles take place - and where control over narrative can be exercised  quite effectively - is that of finance, and how resources are allocated across programs, departments, activities and personnel. 

The CBRL knew this all too well. The organization’s access to funding was attacked by Zionist trolls because of an event I co-organized at the University Edinburgh in November 2022, less than a year before Oct 7. At the time, these groups attempted to get the event shut down and to have CBRL defunded, taking their appeal to the UK House of Lords. The government refrained from intervening, but the incident ruffled many feathers both within the CBRL Board and at the British Academy (BA).

The British Academy administers and allots the government grant from the UK Department for Science, Innovation & Technology that covers CBRL’s core costs because it is one of the British International Research Institutes, a coalition of nine “global research partners” supported by the BA, with several having their origins in the British empire.

CBRL was placed under excessive scrutiny by the BA during and after the Zionist attempt to prevent our University of Edinburgh event. The BA also seems to have asked CBRL to consider adopting the widely discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism in the wake of these matters, even though the IHRA definition has been eviscerated by the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES) for its conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism and for infringing on academic freedom and freedom of speech, while also harming the mental health, reputation and career prospects of students and staff.

It is also noteworthy that the UK Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, which supplies CBRL’s core grant via the BA, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the State of Israel for cooperation in science technology, research and innovation – less than a month before Oct 7. It also issued a grant scheme that incorporates OPT researchers with those of Israel – a change in the UK government’s traditional granting practice, which has observed a separate status for the OPT. This hints at the existence of interests keen to develop relations with Israeli research institutions upstream within the UK funding universe, and who feel comfortable normalizing schemes that group the occupied with their occupiers.

It is also worth noting the longstanding calls to boycott Israeli higher education institutions because of their complicity in Israel's military industrial complex and occupation regime. The recent spate of ICJ advisory opinions and judgments relating to the situation in Palestine, when coupled with the landmark ICC arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials, further supports the contention that British academic institutions should be urgently reviewing their ties to complicit Israeli institutions.

Given this broader context, it is not difficult to see how CBRL, which sustains itself on grandfathered British government grants, came to see my academic and political beliefs as a threat to the organization’s funding and desired public image, especially in a context where the UK government is both complicit in and provides cover for Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

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Today, 29 November 2024, the CBRL will hold its AGM at the British Academy where its organizational headquarters are based.

I publish these words as a protest against that meeting and all it symbolises: censorship, targeting, bullying, gaslighting, stonewallling, and hidden agendas.

Through these words, I aim to publicise what happened to me, writing my case into the history of attacks on academic freedom around Palestine in this era. I feel I owe this to myself and to the members who stood with me and attempted to defend me, their organization and their rights throughout this sorry episode.

In truth, before October 7th,  I was deeply engaged in attempting to build an organizational vision that saw the KI acting as an institutional hub where UK academics could realize their research ambitions based on real partnerships between UKHEIs and the local research community.

These efforts were already in full swing when I was terminated. They included efforts to cohere an International Palestine Studies Association from the various university departments and institutions in the UK, the OPT and beyond, and; creating a postdoc fellowship in British-Palestine relations with the University of Edinburgh. We were already hosting a seminar for researchers from the OPT and were equally keen to continue to deliver more interesting lecture series like those we held marking the Centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine, or which considered the important contributions British academics made to documenting the Islamic cultural heritage of Jerusalem.

While in office I also carried out significant upgrades to KI’s beautiful Ottoman-era facility to be able to accommodate these projects and this broader vision. This included establishing an archive room, digitization lab, podcast lab, and teleconferencing room while also making improvements to the dormitory, grounds, utilities and internet. We also secured funding from the British Library to begin digitization of our archives. We did all this while laboring under considerable constraints on our finances and human resources.

I undertook these tasks because I believed in the potential of the KI and CBRL. Unfortunately, I now find myself among many members, ex-members and ex-staff who have lost hope that the CBRL is capable of reform. The organization’s democratic processes have been thoroughly stymied and exhausted, leaving a husk that is completely failing to reflect and advance the interests of its full membership, let alone the interests of the wider UK academic community that works on ‘the Levant’.

The current head of the Board is a banker and former diplomat. There is also a solicitor, a priest, and a former senior executive from a major media agency. As for what remains of the academics on the board, they are ‘archaeology-heavy’, with little representation from scholars whose disciplinary focus relates to the modern history and languages of the Middle East. The organization also stopped accepting new members this year, a step it took without informing its members.

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What happened at CBRL saddens me, not least because I put enormous efforts into attempting to realise the potential of an institution in Jerusalem built on ethical, reciprocal, no harm relations between UK higher ed and academics and institutions in the OPT and wider region.

At the same time, I understand why this vision could not be realized at this moment in history. As the genocidal horrors taking place in Gaza continue to unfold with no end in sight, and as Zionism enters a potentially terminal crisis, the space in which to critically interrogate Israel is under sustained attack.

While this time in history will certainly be remembered for many unflattering things, it is safe to assume that a dissertation or two will be written about the struggles in universities and amongst academics regarding how they behaved during the Gaza genocide. Assuming such publications are indeed forthcoming, wouldn't it be nice to read the chapter where UK academics, institutions and students played a key role in the movement to end the Gaza genocide?

Inshallah one day.

For now, we write that book through our actions and inactions, with history and students as our judges.

Toufic Haddad

Former Kenyon Institute Director and CBRL Deputy Director (2020-2024)

29 November 2024

For purposes of clarification: Dr. Mandy Turner, the former Director of the Kenyon Institute, has absolutely no relation to the events described and was never the Director of the CBRL overall. T.H. edited 30 Nov 2024 16:00

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