Out of bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine.

• Author: Parsons, Nigel
• Position: Book review

OUT OF BOUNDS: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine

Author: Matthew Abraham

Published by: Bloomsbury, New York and London, 2014, 379pp, US$25.99.

[ILUSTRACION OMITIR]

Matthew Abraham is an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona and a man on a mission. It is a mission that resonates with this reviewer. The question of academic freedom and the rights and duties of an academic engaged in research and teaching on the Palestine/Israel dispute has long been fraught. In Abraham's view the struggle is intensifying. Two events during 2014, neither of which could be covered in the book, provide evidence for Abraham's thesis. One occurred very recently during Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip codenamed Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014). Further to the 2000-plus death toll, one prominent non-military casualty was US citizen of Palestinian descent Steven Salaita. A well-published and popular teacher, Salaita was fired by the University of Illinois for pro-Palestine commentary during the campaign.

In a contrasting case closer to New Zealand, Associate Professor Jake Lynch at the University of Sydney's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies prevailed in a high-profile legal case brought by an Israeli non-governmental organisation on account of his support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign. The Salaita and Lynch cases attest to the timely value of Abraham's study; this is a moment in which anyone engaged with the Palestine/Israel conflict is keenly aware that public speaking and media commentary supportive of Palestine are pretty much certain to generate brickbats and quite possibly worse.

Abraham's stance is indicated by his dedication to the International Solidarity Movement volunteer Rachel Corrie, a young American woman crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in southern Gaza more than a decade ago. And he is personally invested in the subject matter. In 2006 Abraham found seed funding for the project that became this book, awarded then promptly rescinded by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. One year or so after that and now a faculty member at DePaul University in Chicago, Abraham witnessed first-hand the highly controversial decision to deny tenure to the respected academic and pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein. Marked by these events, Abraham sets out to 'interrogate the degree to which academic freedom and the activities it supposedly protects are shaped and mediated...