Thursday, October 08, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, BRISMES, spent years warning that vague political standards, investigations of academics’ speech, and institutional pressure over controversial opinions threaten academic freedom.
But when it comes to Israel, suddenly its opinions do a 180.
In its 2023 report on Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom in UK Higher Education,, which crtiicized the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, was produced with the European Legal Support Center. The report strongly criticized universities for investigating academics over political speech. It warned that even investigations that end without punishment can damage careers, chill speech and make academics afraid to discuss controversial issues. It objected to vague standards being used to determine when political expression crosses some poorly defined ethical line, and emphasized that academic freedom exists precisely to protect the right to question received wisdom and advance unpopular opinions.
Whether or not they apply to the IHRA definition, which includes a lot of caveats, these are reasonable principles. The problem is that BRISMES no longer seems to believe they should constrain BRISMES.
Its current “Mandatory Policy on Ethical Publishing and Participation Standards” gives BRISMES the power to exclude scholars from publication and participation based not merely on their scholarship but on their outside political speech and conduct. An academic may be excluded if BRISMES considers them “reasonably suspected of involvement in public incitement to war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide,” or if they engage in advocacy of hatred amounting to incitement. BRISMES explicitly reserves the right to demand clarification or additional information about an academic’s activities.
In other words, BRISMES created precisely the sort of investigatory mechanism whose chilling effect it had previously condemned.
The policy goes even further with scholarship itself. BRISMES says it will reject work that “glorifies or justifies” war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. But “justifies” is an extraordinarily dangerous word in an academic publication. Scholars constantly dispute whether particular acts actually constitute war crimes. A scholar arguing that an Israeli military operation complied with international humanitarian law could easily be accused by someone who begins with the opposite conclusion of “justifying war crimes.”
That is how an academic question becomes a loyalty test: first determine what the correct political and legal conclusion is, and then decide whether scholarship disagreeing with that conclusion is permissible.
Obviously, this policy is aimed at Zionist academics or anyone who justifies any of Israel's military activities.
The contradiction is even clearer in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, which BRISMES publishes with Taylor & Francis. BRISMES now has a mandatory territorial or land-acknowledgement policy requiring certain authors to include acknowledgements expressing BRISMES’s preferred political characterization of the land on which their institutions are located. Authors who refuse can remove their institutional affiliation instead.
BRISMES itself describes these acknowledgements as an “ethical and political gesture.”
That is compelled political speech as a condition of normal academic publication.
Curiously, BRISMES apparently recognized the problem when the same issue arose with its conference. After academic-freedom groups objected to mandatory land acknowledgements, BRISMES made the conference version voluntary. Yet the comparable requirement for journal authors remains mandatory.
The irony gets deeper because BRISMES has repeatedly argued that controversial anti-Israel and anti-Zionist expression must be protected from institutional censorship. Its 2023 academic-freedom report argued that universities should not suppress lawful political expression merely because it is offensive or deeply contested. Its 2025 statement defending academic boycotts likewise invokes academic freedom and open scholarly debate as core principles.
If BRISMES believes universities should be extremely reluctant to investigate Palestinian activists or anti-Zionist academics for controversial speech, it cannot simultaneously give itself broad discretion to investigate other academics for supposedly “justifying” crimes. If vague speech rules chill academic freedom when applied to Israel’s critics, they also chill academic freedom when applied to Israel’s defenders.
And BRISMES has created another problem for itself. Its ethical standards do not apply merely to outsiders. They expressly cover authors, presenters, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, committee members and others involved in BRISMES activities.
That makes consistency testable.
BRISMES maintains a large public Database of Expertise containing hundreds of scholars, while its journals and conferences have published or hosted many academics writing about Hamas, Palestinian resistance, armed struggle, October 7 and related subjects. There is nothing inherently improper about any of that; these are legitimate subjects of academic inquiry. But under BRISMES’s own standards, the relevant question now becomes whether it applies the same scrutiny to scholars who justify Palestinian violence, like describing it as "resistance," that it reserves the right to apply to scholars accused of justifying Israeli violence.
I have not gone through the individual cases here. That deserves a separate investigation.
The institutional contradiction already exists without them.
In 2023 BRISMES warned that vague political standards, investigations of controversial expression and professional penalties produce a chilling effect incompatible with academic freedom.
By 2025 it had constructed a system containing all three.
BRISMES wrote an excellent critique of its own censorship policy two years before adopting it wholesale.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
