How US, UK, and Israeli Universities are Punishing Speech on Palestine: A Conversation with Neve Gordon, Laurie Brand, Adi Mansour

Today on Speaking Out of Place, we have a special extended conversation on the suppression of Palestine solidarity at universities from the U. S. to the U. K. to within Israel itself. We are grateful to be joined by Adi Mansour, a lawyer with Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Neve Gordon, Professor of Human Rights Law at Queen Mary University of London and Vice President of the British Society for Middle East Studies, and Laurie Brandt, former president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and current chair of its Committee on Freedom of Expression. In our conversation we compare and contrast the ways universities in each country have disciplined dissenting speech both within the university and beyond, breaching civil liberties and exacting punishment in forms including harassment and dismissal. In sum, it becomes a question of what is allowed and what is prohibited, and who belongs.

Laurie A. Brand is Professor Emerita of Political Science & International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California (USC).  A four-time Fulbright grantee, and the recipient of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and numerous other fellowships, she is author of Palestinians in the Arab World (Columbia, 1988), Jordan’s Inter-Arab Relations (Columbia, 1994), Women, the State and Political Transitions (Columbia, 1998), Citizens Abroad (Cambridge, 2006), and Official Stories (Stanford, 2014).  A former president of the Middle East Studies Association (2004), she has chaired its Committee on Academic Freedom since 2007.  

After teaching for seventeen years at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, Neve Gordon joined the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on international humanitarian law, human rights, the ethics of violence, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is the author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press 2008) and co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press, 2015), Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020). Gordon is currently the Vice President of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies and the Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom.

Adi Mansour works in Adalah’s civil and political rights unit. He holds an LLB in Law and BA in political science from Tel Aviv University. He is also a founding member and activist of the Haifa Youth Movement, and he served as the head of “Almuntada” – the Arab Law Students Forum, Tel Aviv University. Upon completing his studies, Adi clerked in the national public defender's office in the field of criminal and administrative law. He joined Adalah as a staff attorney in 2021.