It’s a new year, and there’s a new Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester. Duncan Ivison has taken the reins from Nancy Rothwell, and the new leadership’s messaging is all about student engagement and open debate. It’s a step in the right direction after years of Nancy Rothwell’s in-the-ivory-tower style of management, which some students have suggested focused on public relations at the expense of substance and leadership.
The elephant in the room is the university’s financial ties with Israeli weapons, and its broader policies and partnerships surrounding Israel. Students have already voted to boycott and divest from Israel with 90% support last year, while anti-Zionist occupations and encampments lasted months. The protests’ first demand was to cut ties with BAE Systems, which manufactures parts for fighter jets that organisations including Amnesty International and the UN’s Fact-Finding Mission believe have been involved in Israeli war crimes.
While the university is not directly involved with manufacturing these weapons, it helps BAE Systems with research, recruitment and aerospace product design. The specifics of the partnership with BAE Systems do not deny the fact that UoM advertises its commitment to social responsibility, that university partnerships help shield the public image of weapons manufacturers, and that by divesting, high-profile institutions can create public pressure on the governments which really control the weapons trade to stop the flow.
In his first open event, Duncan Ivison faced a number of questions from students about Israel, Palestine and the recent protests on campus. While he said the University has no current plans to divest from Israel, he also said “there’s a debate to be had” around investment policies, which he wants to be open, respectful and inclusive.
Ivison was then asked whether he agreed with Nancy Rothwell’s response to a question last year when she said that the university’s involvement with the arms trade is ethical. It is worth pointing out that Rothwell’s response danced around the question put to her, which specifically mentioned BAE Systems and clearly referred to the Israeli military in the context of campus protests. While the original question talked of “arms companies”, Rothwell gave a generalised answer which she reframed in terms of “defence”.
Ivison appeared to follow suit, saying it is “reasonable to conduct research around national defence in a liberal democracy”. If he was referring to the defence of Britain then his answer was not relevant to the question put to Nancy Rothwell. For a question asked about Israel, the idea that the country is a liberal democracy is distant from reality.
While some use the fact that Israel gives two million Arab Israeli citizens the vote to claim that it is a democracy, it can only afford to do so while remaining a Jewish state because of the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of many other Palestinians throughout its history. The project to create a Jewish government in Palestine, which took off when 78% of Palestinians were Muslim and relied first on British colonial power, and later on violent force, was never at any point democratic.
Israel is not a democracy but an apartheid state – a view supported by voices within Israel, from its oldest-running newspaper Haaretz, to its former Chief of Intelligence, to the human rights organisation B’tselem. Israel denies Palestinian people equal rights to land and housing, denies them the freedom to move freely within their country or to travel abroad, and denies them the freedom to marry and live with whoever they want. What else would you call a system which gives different groups of people different rights according to their geography, ethnicity and religion?
Israel is not “only defending itself”, either. When it comes to Israel’s internal conflicts, we aren’t talking about an equal fight between two armies. We’re talking about a system of apartheid in Gaza and the West Bank, and a conflict in which only one side is among the world’s most organised and well-supplied militaries. We’re talking about an occupation which has lasted 57 years and which still has no end in sight. We’re talking about violence in Gaza so extreme that it would have killed between one to six million people if it was happening in Britain.
No amount of brute force in Gaza will end the cycle of violence as long as Palestinians are oppressed, and Israeli oppression will not end as long as unconditional Western support for Israel continues.
This might all seem far-removed from our campus, but the point is that a power dynamic exists between Israel and Palestine – which the university plays a part in enabling through its partnerships. And yet UoM’s commitment to social responsibility should mean it would cut ties with any system of apartheid which the United Nations suggests is committing genocide.
Duncan Ivison claims that “the university is not a political institution”, but the university regularly takes political positions in other matters, whether by divesting from South African apartheid, publishing words of support for Black Lives Matter, or condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The university’s leadership has not been apolitical when it comes to Israel either, as Nancy Rothwell’s decision to redefine “arms companies” as “defence companies” shows. Rothwell reframed a concept put to her in neutral terms because the word “defence” legitimised the Israeli military and justified the university’s partnership with BAE Systems. It would seem her rejection of divestment did not come from assessing the scale of slaughter and destruction in Gaza, but reflected her own interpretation of Israel’s actions.
The idea that the university is not political seems to come from confusing being balanced with being impartial. Refusing to change the status quo because people have different views is balanced, in the same way that UoM’s reluctance to divest from South African apartheid demonstrated balance between different viewpoints. But being impartial is a question of power, and the university only gives the power which follows from maintaining partnerships and a respectable public image to Israel.
If the university intends to react to student views, a debate can and should be had about its ties with Israel. But if Ivison wants this debate to be genuinely inclusive, then all participants should have equal standing in the conversation. That cannot happen while the university has partnerships with companies like BAE Systems, which facilitate the Israeli military’s oppression of Palestinians.
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