Uproar at the Open University: Students protest an assignment in a philosophy, economics and political science course, which they claim includes text that constitutes anti-Israeli propaganda.
The "Dror" student cell of the Religious Zionism Party this week appealed to the university administration in protest of the demand to analyze in an "objective" manner an article entitled "From an Economy of Occupation to an Economy of Destruction", from a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Territories, Francesca Albanese.
The article claims that Israel is carrying out a massacre in Gaza, and that the IDF's actions amount to "ethnic cleansing" and "conducting a colonial war." It also claims that the continued fighting in Gaza stems from the economic interests of international corporations.
The student cell's statement reads, "We came to strongly protest an assignment we received this week. Unfortunately, the university forces students to 'objectively' analyze an article that is spitting in the face of IDF soldiers, and clear anti-Israel propaganda."
The students claimed that the requirement in the assignment is to analyze how the serious accusations can be substantiated according to the thought of Thomas Aquinas and Niccolò Machiavelli, without providing an answer to the possibility of rejecting the content of the article: "The requirement requires students to engage solely in examining the theoretical ways to justify claims that present the IDF as an operation of massacre and ethnic cleansing."
It also wrote: "This presentation is a clear attempt to engineer consciousness, it does not try to challenge thought but simply to move the boundaries of legitimate discourse to areas that are contrary to our very existence, not to mention our values. It is clear to everyone that academia will never require first-year students to study the writings of Rabbi Kahane."
According to them, "This is not academic critical thinking, but coercion and mind engineering that gives academic legitimacy to claims that are incorrect and unbalanced." They emphasized that if the assignment is not replaced, they will boycott it and will not submit a response.
The university administration submitted the following response to the students’ complaint: “Course assignments at the Open University are determined solely by the academic staff, based on professional and academic considerations. They are not subject to negotiation or modification in response to external pressures, certainly not on behalf of political parties."
"In the course “Introduction to Political Thought,” students were instructed to analyze a political text-an entirely appropriate task for a class focused on political theory-using the theoretical tools they had studied, in this case those of Machiavelli and Thomas Aquinas. The assignment does not evaluate agreement with the views expressed in the text, but rather the students’ ability to conduct a critical, academically grounded analysis.”
“There is even a certain irony in the fact that the chosen framework is Machiavelli’s theory. As students delve deeper into his concepts, they will recognize that the assignment itself reflects Machiavellian methodology: examining a contentious text, adopting a rational rather than emotional approach, and distinguishing between politically charged content and the theoretical tools used to analyze it. The assignment was set for clear academic reasons, and therefore it will not be changed,” the response concluded.