The Gaza war has accelerated a climate of repression in French universities

Talking about Palestine and Israel in France is a high-risk activity, even in the sanctuary that the university is supposed to be, as the ultimate place for debate, development of knowledge free from dogma, and transmission of critical knowledge.

The latest victims to date, on 3 March, were three students expelled for 30 days from Sciences Po, the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies, following a rally organised in February at the call of student unions to demand recognition of the genocide in Palestine and the severing of partnerships with complicit Israeli universities.

Earlier, a seminar organised for a year and a half by students from the Ecole Normale Superieure, a French “grande ecole”, were targeted by a violent campaign of defamation and Islamophobic insults on social media after hosting the authors of two books, titled Against antisemitism and its instrumentalisations and Anti-Zionism: a Jewish History. The campaign prompted the school to postpone the next session indefinitely. 

A few weeks before, Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute of Strategic and International Relations (IRIS) and a long-time target of accusations of antisemitism by supporters of Israel in France for his reading of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saw his conference at the university of Villetaneuse, in the Paris region, cancelled by its president for "security reasons", before being postponed to an unknown date following student protests.

This climate of French-style McCarthyism started permeating the country’s university the day following the 7 October attack.

Researchers denounced and prosecuted

Researchers have been denounced to the management bodies by their colleagues or students for posts on social media or internal mailing lists, or even reported to the public prosecutor's office by MPs or Jewish organisations for simply having framed the 7 October attack in its historical context and recalling that Hamas acts as a component of the Palestinian national resistance.

Some have been subject to university sanctions, while others are being prosecuted for “apology for terrorism”.

The student pro-Palestinian protests, whose intensity peaked in the spring of 2024, were the subject of a political and media barrage.

Denouncing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the students demanded that their institutions publicly supported a ceasefire and review their partnerships with Israeli universities and French arms companies whose activities contribute to the genocide or the colonisation of Palestinian territories.

'Student cards are checked, while conferences mixing academics and activists are prohibited. The university as a space for free public discourse is over'

- Vincent Geisser, IREMAM, Marseille

In accordance with its policy of solidarity with Israel, which equates support for the Palestinian cause with support for Hamas and antisemitism, the government sent the police to remove the demonstrators, who were described in the media as “putschist thugs” or supporters of “Islamist soft power”.

During a hearing in the Senate on 10 April last year, Bruno Retailleau, then president of the culture, education, communication and sports committee of the upper house of parliament (and interior minister since last September), accused the chairman of France Universites, an organisation that brings together directors of academic institutions, of being in denial about "the rise of antisemitism in higher education", which support for the Palestinians is equated with.

At the beginning of the summer, a dozen universities finally took an official stance to deplore the destruction and civilian victims in Gaza and call for a ceasefire, at a time when this watchword had become almost consensual. They nevertheless avoided contentious words such as "genocide" or even "Israeli war crimes".

In an opinion dated 14 June, the ethics board of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research ruled out the possibility of questioning partnerships with Israeli universities or arms companies.

This winter, only the increasingly isolated students of two academic institutions tried to keep rallying on the issue of partnerships: at the University of Tolbiac (Pierre Mendes-France Centre) in Paris and the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Strasbourg.

A lead weight

The heavy political, administrative, judicial and media apparatus deployed to marginalise the voice of researchers and students on Palestine has therefore ended up restoring “order,” which is dressed in reassuring terms such as “peaceful dialogue” or “balance”.

Even “laicite,” which historically designates the separation of church and state but which has become the pillar of a state “secular religion” in France, is invoked to prohibit any academic expression on political issues. Luis Vassy, ​​the new director of the prestigious Sciences Po university, close to President Emmanuel Macron, has proposed a policy of "institutional reserve" whereby the institution cannot express an opinion on an ongoing conflict.

Any academic discourse is now regarded as a matter of public order. This trend is particularly noticeable in everything that concerns the Arab world, Islam or terrorism

"Any event relating to Palestine immediately triggers a vetting process," Vincent Geisser, director of Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds (IREMAM) in Marseille, told Middle East Eye.

"The guests and program are submitted to the administrative authorities. The public is limited to 70 people, prior registration is mandatory, student cards are checked, while conferences mixing academics and activists are prohibited. The university as a space for free public discourse is over."

His concerns are shared by Jerome Heurtaux, a political scientist and lecturer at Paris Dauphine university, who is coordinating a book on the challenge to academic freedoms in Eastern Europe.

"In reality, the most effective weapon is self-censorship. Some questions - about Israel's right to defend itself or Hamas’ nature - are simply unspeakable," he told MEE.

"I thought that the university was a place where you could question everything without being judged. But the French university has not lived up to its mission. I am deeply shocked to see that the Israeli narrative, i.e. the confrontation between civilisation embodied by Israel and barbarity embodied by the Palestinians, which is already hegemonic in the media, has found so many mouthpieces among academics."

Following the student protests in spring 2024, a parliamentary mission on antisemitism in higher education resulted in a bill that would require teachers to undergo training on antisemitism. Given the controversy surrounding the definition of this term, the measure, which is currently being examined by parliament, risks further restricting academic discourse.

State thought

The academic world’s rallying for Gaza has accelerated the political takeover of the university.

"University leaders are increasingly subject to the injunctions of the executive branch," Geisser said. "We are mainly observing a phenomenon of securitisation of research." This means that political and social issues are reduced to a security dimension, leading to an increasing weight of police, intelligence or defence authorities in decision-making processes.

Any academic discourse is now regarded as a matter of public order. This trend is particularly noticeable in everything that concerns the Arab world, Islam or terrorism.

'Apology for terrorism' row in France shows silencing of debate about Palestine

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"As soon as researchers have a comprehensive approach to their object of study, be it Muslims, Hamas, jihadists... they are seen as accomplices and accused of participating in a process of justifying terrorism. It is considered that speech, even scholarly speech, kills," Geisser continued.

This intellectual shortcut has been established as "state thought". After the assassination of a teacher, Samuel Paty, in October 2020, by a young fanatic Chechen, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer condemned "intellectual complicity with terrorism".

A few months earlier, in June 2020, Macron accused the French intellectual equivalent to what is called in the English-speaking world "critical race theory" of having "broken the Republic in two".

"The academic world has been guilty. It has encouraged the ethnicisation of the social question, thinking that it could capitalise on it," Macron said.

In February 2021, the Higher Education Minister Frederique Vidal announced her intention to entrust the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) with an investigation into “Islamo-leftism”. The CNRS immediately refuted its scientific value and refused the mission.

But at the same time, a group of academics created an Observatory of Decolonialism to track the influence of this school of thought in scientific work. Pierre-Edouard Sterin, patron of the far-right press, has just taken control of the body.

By proposing a reading of the Palestinian question and Israel no longer from a perspective centred on the Holocaust and antisemitism, but within the more general framework of the history of relations between western powers and the Middle East, as well as social relations of domination, and by mobilising categories such as "settler colonialism" and "apartheid", critical thinking has shaken up dominant narratives and provoked a violent rejection from the highest levels of the state to the mainstream media, including within the academia.

According to this hegemonic thinking, "wokeism" is now assimilated to "antisemitism" and "Islamism" - a repellent term in the French public debate, which encompasses the entire spectrum of signs of Islamic religiosity and political expressions that refer to Islam, from the most moderate to the most violent forms.

Discrediting critical knowledge

But well beyond the Palestinian issue, "state anti-intellectualism [is] all about containing the influence of critical knowledge on society, that is to say, work that questions the world order instead of conforming to it," as sociologist Eric Fassin puts it.

The shock of 7 October and the accusation of antisemitism have thus been weaponised to marginalise academia a little more and disqualify scholarly discourse when it contradicts the leadership’s directions.

"The government no longer asks academics for a detached, critical perspective... it wants ‘neutral’ science that legitimises its orientations," Geisser said.

The subjugation of French universities during the pro-Palestinian rallies could lay the groundwork for a Trump-style inquisition should a far-right majority come to power

The Observatory of Attacks on Academic Freedoms, a French non-governmental organisation, has voiced similar concerns. “In the common sense, the credibility of science lies in its ‘neutrality’ (i.e. its lack of values ​​and/or stance) rather than in its own methods for validating knowledge,” it said.

We are currently seeing in the United States how this resorting to “common sense” is fuelling a conservative revolution that is devastating academic freedom and critical thinking as well as, more generally, social justice and democracy.

The subjugation of French universities during the pro-Palestinian rallies could lay the groundwork for a similar inquisition should a far-right political majority come to power.

This shows that academic freedom is a reliable indicator of the state of democracy - but also that justice for the Palestinians and global justice are inextricably linked.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.