Dr. Rana Baker
The global backlash against Israel has reinforced the age old strategy by openly Zionist organisations to maintain what little public support exists for the apartheid state: the targeting and intimidation of Palestinian academics. Attempts to silence Palestinian voices speaking out against the abuse of their people is a well-known tactic aimed at erasing Palestinians and their struggle for freedom from public discourse. Academic institutions, created to be educational spaces of open discourse to facilitate critical inquiry, ought to support their staff members who are subjected to unsubstantiated attacks from media outlets, institutions, and individuals that seek to censor even legitimate academic debate about Israel.
King’s College London’s own Dr Rana Baker, a Gazan lecturer in the History of the Middle East, is the most recent victim of such a vile campaign. Articles written by various media outlets known for smearing Palestinians and their supporters have accused Dr Baker of indoctrinating students with “pro-Hamas propaganda,” an inflammatory and baseless claim intended to generate a public response and to silence her voice. Reading a document written by a political organisation and critically discussing its contents is no more indoctrination than reflecting critically on “The Iron Wall,” a political pamphlet written by Ze’ev Jabotinsky who led the Irgun, a once-proscribed Zionist militia which carried out the infamous King David Hotel bombing against British troops and officials in Jerusalem in 1946. This Zionist pamphlet, which called for the destruction of the Palestinians, was indeed assigned as part of Dr Baker’s syllabus, demonstrating her balanced approach to teaching. Teaching history necessarily involves intellectual engagement with different political, institutional, and social factors and with the impact of historical events on the world we live in.
However, Dr Baker is not being targeted because of her pedagogical philosophy. She is targeted because she is a Palestinian unapologetic about her people’s right to freedom, as we all must be. Despite the myriad of statements of support for Palestinian freedom by academics at King’s College London, only Dr Baker was targeted. We as the students of King’s College London categorically reject the libellous claims made against Dr Baker, and protest the anti-Palestinian racism underlying this defamation campaign.
We demand that the University, which prides itself in protecting free speech and in fostering critical thinking, to stand firmly and publicly against these racist and baseless allegations. Indeed, these allegations aim at depriving Palestinian scholars of the right to engage critically with historically relevant movements, a right extended to all other academics. The onus is on academic institutions such as KCL to safeguard the freedom of its community and to protect its students and staff from racial abuse and vitriolic rhetoric designed to punish them for simply speaking truth to power.
