Book Review: Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities

Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities, by Cary Nelson, is a book-length research paper that exposes the true threats to academic freedom in Palestinian territories.

Unlike what BDS activists claim, the problem is not Israel.

For this book, Nelson has expanded one chapter of his masterful Israel Denial book into this comprehensive treatment of the subject of how Palestinian students have no academic freedom at all, at least when it comes to political speech about Israel and Palestinian leaders.

He describes how the (very) few Palestinian scholars who are moderate in wanting dialogue with Israel have been threatened and nearly killed, noting that pro-Hamas academics are also threatened in the West Bank.

Palestinians like to claim that the annual elections of student bodies at their universities are proxies for regular elections that haven’t been held for 17 years and show how important democratic processes are to them. In fact, these elections are accompanied with intimidation, threats, violence and even armed interference by the Palestinian Authority (and, by proxy, Hamas) to push their own student groups to lead the campus. 

Palestinian academia is a fun-house mirror of American liberal campuses. If a professor says something that makes students uncomfortable, he or she can be threatened by students much more directly and physically than today’s cancel culture.

In Gaza, the idea of academic freedom is a sad joke. All students at Islamic University of Gaza must take one full year of Islamist indoctrination courses.

One amazing section of the book shows an IUG literature  class dissecting a humorous children’s poem by British poet Roger McGough called The Cat’s Protection League about a feline protection racket.  The students are prompted and encouraged to interpret the poem in the most outrageous antisemitic ways, such as assuming that the cats represent Jewish gangsters. Antisemitism pervades academia in Gaza, and no one can oppose that without facing real world consequences.

That is only the tip of the iceberg. West Bank universities compete as to which of them have had students kill the most Jews. Universities are the ideological homes of terrorism, and often the physical homes as well –weapons labs have been built in Gaza universities and one of them held kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a time. Many terrorists during the second intifada came from West Bank universities, including Ahlam Tamimi who helped bomb the Sbarro pizza shop.

The universities also often praise terrorism. The most infamous case was the exhibit, complete with bloody body parts,  of the same Sbarro attack at An Najah University: The same university more recently displayed mock-ups of a man stabbing a religious Jew and a bloody model of a car running over Jews.

Nelson does point out times that Israel interfered with campus curricula, but that all ended at the end of the first intifada. Palestinian government control and intimidation continues on campus today, to the point that students and professors are self-censoring to stay out of trouble. (He does talk about Israel’s relatively rare raids on campus since then, which are understandable when there is an imminent terror threat but often could be more effective by detaining students at home.)

Nelson also shows how other claims by BDS, that Israel blocks students from going abroad or foreign instructors to come to teach, are exaggerated – Israel does not have any more strict restrictions on those movements than most Western democracies.

Small details in the book are illuminating. For example, Nelson points out that while Israel is roundly castigated for administrative detention, the Palestinian Authority detains hundreds of  people without charge as well, although they are not as forthcoming with the statistics as Israel is. (I follow Palestinian media closely and have never seen any mention of this.)

Another section has a footnote that mentions that Norman Finkelstein actually defended Hamas’ policy of murdering “collaborators” with Israel.

This is the sort of hypocrisy exposed in Not in Kansas Anymore.  The boycotters’ pretense of caring about Palestinian academic freedom is clearly just an excuse to attack Israel as they ignore the far worse crimes that Palestinian students and professors are subject to every day from their own leaders and peers.