The Palestine Exception

The decolonisation agenda aims to overcome inequalities and so enable equity by challenging colonial thinking and structures. Many universities espouse this aim, especially for their curriculum. For consistency, they should reject all settler-colonial projects.

However, most Western universities make a big exception, namely: Israel as a coloniser in an asymmetrical power relationship with the colonized Palestinians. As the big picture, since at least 1967 Western governments have exempted Israel’s crimes from international law, while anti-Israel stances have been exempted from free speech by various means. They have treated Israel-Palestine as a state of exception. Likewise Western universities (see Resources below). What drives the Palestine Exception there? To overcome it, what are the barriers?

The OU Palestine Solidarity Group has turned those questions into a research theme within the OU’s Open Societal Challenge programme. Our Challenge aims to de-exceptionalise Israel/Palestine through research, education, partnerships with other university Palestine solidarity groups and national campaigns to build a transdisciplinary decolonisation research programme. See details athttps://societal-challenges.open.ac.uk/challenges/tackling-inequalities-through-transdisciplinary-decolonial-research-the-palestine-exception-/470 Click on Find out more

At this webinar, team members will present the following:

1. Conceptual insights about the Palestine Exception in universities, from a literature review.

2. OU examples such as: its October 2023 statement, ‘The Israel-Hamas War’; EDI policy being inverted to marginalize pro-Palestine views; and an OU administrative investigation into our group.

3. Our survey questionnaire design, based on an auto-ethnographic method, for the OSC programme,

https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/openuniversity/palestine-exceptionThe survey aims to include staff and students at many UK universities. We encourage everyone to answer the questions before the survey closes on 31 October.

Presenters will include: Tracie Farrell, Kristina Hultgren, Les Levidow, Julia Molinari

The webinar will have time for questions and discussion.

Speakers from the OU Palestine Solidarity Group