Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
This article is written by Dr Tim Crowley, Lecturer in Philosophy at UCD. He can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/timcrowley_.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), the largest civil society organisation on the island of Ireland, issued a statement three days after the Hamas attacks that was unambiguous in its condemnation of Israel. ICTU’s ‘Statement on Israel Gaza violence’ was subsequently endorsed without qualification by IFUT, the Irish Federation of University Teachers, in an email to its members on October 25th. ‘As a constituent and fully integrated Union within ICTU’, the General Secretary, Frank Jones, informed the membership, ‘IFUT’s position is the one adopted by Congress’.
Now there is a legitimate question here as to why the umbrella organisation for Irish trade unions, including SIPTU, INTO, and the NUJ, as well as Veterinary Ireland, the Guinness Staff Union, and the Operative Plasterer’s Union OPATSI, feels it needs to take a unified position on the political situation in Palestine. (One might also wonder why ICTU should be sending delegations on trips to Gaza, as mentioned in the statement.) But far more pressing, from my point of view, as a member of the IFUT Branch Committee at University College Dublin, and Academic Freedom Officer in the UCD School of Philosophy, is why IFUT’s leadership would see fit to endorse this position. How is it appropriate for IFUT, a union to which academic freedom has particular relevance, to be in the business of adopting strident positions on behalf of its members regarding complex historico-political conflicts?
The ICTU statement ought to be objectionable to any academic on at least two grounds. The first is its blistering one-sidedness: the second is its brazen plagiarism. Whole sections are lifted without attribution from Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard’s statement of October 7th, and a tweet on the same day by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese—but not without some changes. In the case of the Amnesty Statement, the change, or omission, is startling.
From its very first paragraph the bias is evident. While it begins by condemning unequivocally the ‘attacks on civilians in Israel and Palestine in recent days’, and ends by expressing solidarity with ‘all Palestinian and Israeli families affected’, there are already some hints here as to whom ICTU believes the bulk, or indeed all, of the blame should be apportioned— in the use, for instance, of the terms ‘ongoing’, and in particular, ‘disproportionate’, to describe the attacks ICTU is condemning; but also, as soon becomes clear, in the reference to ‘war crimes’.
Any doubts about bias evaporate in the second paragraph. ‘Israel has a horrific track record of committing war crimes with impunity in previous wars on Gaza. None of this can justify indiscriminate attacks and hostage taking. Palestinian armed groups from Gaza, must also refrain from targeting civilians and using indiscriminate weapons and must immediately release any hostages taken.’d
Aside from the second sentence, this is almost identical to part of the statement from Amnesty Secretary General Callamard, even down to the stray comma after ‘from Gaza’. Almost identical—what ICTU omits is significant, namely, Callamard’s allegation of war crimes committed by both sides in the conflict. Here is what Callamard actually said: ‘Palestinian armed groups from Gaza, [sic] must refrain from targeting civilians and using indiscriminate weapons, as they have done in the past, and most intensively in this event, acts amounting to war crimes [my italics].’ In other words, Callamard explicitly recognises that the actions of ‘Palestinian armed groups’, both in the past, and ‘most intensively in this event’, that is, the event of October 7th, amount to war crimes. ICTU omits this, thus reserving the charge of war crimes for Israel alone.
Strikingly, ICTU makes no mention, anywhere in the entire statement, of Hamas, the group designated as a terrorist organisation by the USA and the EU that initiated this latest outbreak of hostilities, preferring Callamard’s locution ‘Palestinian armed groups from Gaza’. Even Amnesty, in its report of Callamard’s statement, mentions Hamas, and clearly identifies Hamas as the cause of the latest outbreak of hostilities: ‘Today’s escalation in violence began with Hamas firing rockets into Israel and launching an unprecedented operation by its fighters into southern Israel.’ ICTU couldn’t bring itself to repeat that part of the Amnesty report; nor could it repeat Amnesty’s insistence that the ‘abduction of civilians and hostage-taking’, as committed by Hamas on October 7th, ‘are prohibited by international law and can constitute war crimes’. It is truly an extraordinary situation when a left-leaning activist NGO such as Amnesty International is capable of being more even-handed in its account of the situation than ICTU can bear to be.
Indeed, unlike Amnesty, ICTU makes no clear condemnation at all of the events of October 7th, the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. It is mentioned only obliquely in ICTU’s statement, and even then, it is immediately contextualised: ‘The violence must also be put in context. Almost six decades of hostile military rule over an entire civilian population are in themselves a form of violence, and a recipe for more insecurity for all.’ ICTU is thus keen to characterise Hamas’ act of terrorism of October 7th as retaliation to Israeli aggression. In fact ICTU uses the term ‘terror’ just once, and this with reference to the actions of Israel’s government and military: ‘What is happening is not a conflict of equals but rather a government with one of the most powerful armies in the world inflicting terror on the 2 million people of Gaza’.
This last quote is one of several in the second half of the statement that is simply recycled from an ICTU statement from 2021. As for the claim about putting the violence into context, this, it should be noted, is copied verbatim from UN Special Rapporteur Albanese’s tweet of October 7th. Albanese came in for strong criticism for this tweet, which was widely seen as blaming Israel. Her call for contextualisation of the Hamas massacre was nevertheless echoed in the comments of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on October 24th. It is ‘important’, Guterres said, ‘to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum’. His remark was condemned by the Wall Street Journal as ‘disgraceful… nothing less than an apologia for Hamas terrorists’.
One commentator makes the point that framing October 7th as an understandable reaction to Israeli occupation has the effect of denying to Palestinians agency, as if the slaughter of innocents was the only way to respond to oppression. This point may be pushed a little further. By repeating the rhetoric of contextualisation, and moreover by describing Hamas as a ‘Palestinian armed group from Gaza’, ICTU adds its voice to a growing chorus apparently unable to distinguish between a terrorist organisation and the general population of Gaza. This failure effectively paints all Palestinians as either terrorists, or supporters of terrorism. Such a move ultimately justifies not only Hamas’s actions, but the reactions of the Israeli Defence Forces too.
IFUT’s leadership had two weeks to take note of the criticism of statements such as Albanese’s, or, of even more relevance to a university-based union, of the backlash to shrill statements of support, bordering on antisemitism, for Palestine from academics and student groups on US campuses. The latter, indeed, has raised important questions about free speech and academic freedom. Nevertheless IFUT’s General Secretary saw fit to endorse ICTU’s statement, which is not merely one in a genre of such responses, but, as we have seen, copies the very words.
The ICTU statement goes on to ‘reiterate our support for the… Boycott Divestment and Sanction BDS movement’, and calls on the Irish Government to ‘publicly acknowledge’ that Israel is an ‘apartheid’ state. These are far from uncontroversial positions to adopt: the former movement has been condemned as antisemitic; the latter has been criticised as a counterproductive slander. Yet ICTU’s position is, as Frank Jones puts it, ‘IFUT’s position’.
It shouldn’t be. Individual academics may hold such positions. Plenty do; perhaps the majority. But it is not the academic who agrees with the majority that is most in need of the protection of academic freedom, but the one who dissents. And when one joins a union that proudly identifies the ‘defence and the promotion of Academic Freedom as one of its primary aims’, one does not expect that union to dictate to its members an official view of the Israel-Hamas war—or, for that matter, of any other issue of socio-political controversy. In adopting without qualification the ICTU statement, IFUT’s hierarchy is betraying its foundational aim.
At a time when illiberal policies and dogmatic initiatives fomented by hive-minded EDI cells are being proudly paraded at increasingly shorter intervals by Irish university presidents either indifferent to, or ignorant of, their statutory duties, the need for a champion of academic freedom to hold fort has never been so great. We need a union ready to go to war in defence of diverse views, not one supinely parroting stale, partisan—and plagiarised—political slogans. If IFUT won’t rally to this task, who will?
This will close in 10 seconds