Opinion: The Gaza war has accelerated a climate of repression in French universities
Talking about Palestine and Israel in France is a high-risk activity, even in the sanctuary that the university is supposed to be, as the ultimate place for debate, development of knowledge free from dogma, and transmission of critical knowledge.
The latest victims to date, on 3 March, were three students expelled for 30 days from Sciences Po, the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies, following a rally organised in February at the call of student unions to demand recognition of the genocide in Palestine and the severing of partnerships with complicit Israeli universities.
Earlier, a seminar organised for a year and a half by students from the Ecole Normale Superieure, a French “grande ecole”, were targeted by a violent campaign of defamation and Islamophobic insults on social media after hosting the authors of two books, titled Against antisemitism and its instrumentalisations and Anti-Zionism: a Jewish History. The campaign prompted the school to postpone the next session indefinitely.
