When Politics Disrupts Progress, Everyone Loses
Imagine a researcher who spends years studying how a small, embattled territory could lift itself out of poverty by developing the one valuable resource sitting off its coast. He publishes peer-reviewed work arguing that this resource should be developed for the benefit of the people who live there. You might expect applause. Instead, he is branded complicit in “violence,” and the academic journal that published him is bullied into apologizing for having done so.
That researcher is Dr. Elai Rettig, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He shared his story during a recent webinar hosted by my organization, Canadian Friends of Bar-Ilan University. His offense was co-authoring a study on the Gaza Marine gas field – a modest offshore reservoir that has sat untouched since its discovery in 2000 – and how it might be developed once the current conflict ends. He and his colleagues mapped several political scenarios for the future of the Gaza Strip, arguing that under any future scenario, even extreme ones, those living in Gaza still maintain the exclusive legal right to develop the gas field to serve Gaza’s reconstruction and the energy independence.
For this, he was condemned. On social media, a Canadian academic called it “an appalling article that entertains the annexation of Gaza,” and “a form of violence masked as ‘research’.” A boycott campaign descended on the journal. Within weeks, the Leiden Journal of International Law – published by Cambridge University Press, no less – issued a formal “expression of concern” and apologized to anyone who felt the article normalized annexation. It went so far as to examine whether the paper could be withdrawn and ultimately concluded that it doesn’t have the legal basis to do so. It then promised to publish more Palestinian scholars in their journal as compensation.
Set aside, for a moment, whether you agree with every scenario the authors examined. Mapping a range of possible outcomes, including ones you find distasteful, is precisely what scholars are supposed to do. Ask instead a simpler question: would any of this have happened to a non-Israeli academic?
We know the answer, because Dr. Rettig told us during the webinar. By his own account, he collaborates more easily with scholars from Syria, Lebanon and Gaza than with many of his Western counterparts. The people his work is meant to help are willing to sit at the table with him. It is the Western gatekeepers – the professors, the activist-academics, the journal mobs – who refuse. The very people who claim to speak for those living in Gaza proved more hostile to a paper about their prosperity than the people themselves.
That should stop us cold, because the casualty here is not one professor’s feelings. It is knowledge itself. When an Israeli scholar cannot publish research aimed at benefiting the people without a coordinated effort to erase it, the conversations that might actually produce solutions – about energy, water, reconstruction, coexistence – simply never happen. A boycott does not advance the cause.
Let us be clear about what this is. At Canadian Friends of Bar-Ilan University, we have seen a disturbing pattern: Israeli and Jewish academics censored, cancelled, excluded and defunded – not for what they argue, but for who they are.
We call it what it is: academic antisemitism.
It rarely announces itself in slurs. It arrives dressed as principle, as “international law,” as concern for the oppressed. But strip away the language and the mechanism is an old one – single out the Jew, presume bad faith, and demand they answer for it.
What is striking about Dr. Rettig’s story is not that he was attacked. Sadly, that is now routine. It is that he did not fold.
He refused to let the work be withdrawn, even under pressure. He could do that because Bar-Ilan University stood behind him, with a legal team that exists precisely to defend its scholars against this kind of pressure. He has said as much: had he been an isolated Israeli at a Western university, he is not sure he would have found the courage to hold the line.
That is what institutional backbone looks like, and it is not free. When donors support Bar-Ilan, they are not only funding laboratories and lectures. They are funding a scholar’s ability to publish inconvenient findings and to refuse to recant when the mob arrives. They are defending something Western academia is quietly surrendering: the freedom to ask hard questions out loud.
Dr. Rettig’s research may one day help light homes in Gaza. The tragedy is that some of the loudest voices in our own universities would rather it never see daylight – so long as the wrong person wrote it.
Randy Spiegel is CEO of Canadian Friends of Bar-Ilan University.
