A parent of two, a UWO faculty member (French & linguistics), peace and social-justice activist and trade unionist feminist. Participated in the Gaza Freedom March in December 2009-January 2010, the Canadian Boat to Gaza (CanadaBoatgaza.org) and Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FreedomFlotilla.org) campaigns from 2010 to present.
A clarification by five signatories of the open letter
Why we as linguists support the Block the Ban at MIT petition
We represent our own views, which the other 35 signatories of the letter, circulated originally on 23 December 2024, may or may not share.
In the days that have passed since the open letter was circulated, there have been various questions about the information it contains that we wish to comment on:
Everything in the open letter is based on correspondence between Michel DeGraff and members of the Linguistics Department between 5 December 2023, when DeGraff first submitted his Special Topics course for approval, and 19 July 2024, when the Department finally rejected it. That correspondence is in the public domain, through links in DeGraff's article published in The Tech on Aug 22, 2024 and can be accessed by all (here and here).
The open letter takes under consideration only statements that were confirmed by the Linguistics faculty. For example, we do not refer to the content of the 'heated disagreement' between Fox and DeGraff, on which we have only one perspective. That there was a disagreement, however, is mentioned by both sides.
We urge anyone interested to please look at the entire correspondence [see the two links above]. You will see that the Linguistics Department dragged Michel DeGraff through the course approval process for 7 months, initially expressing reservations about its content based on the title alone, and that their reasons for rejecting it seem to have emerged impromptu over time. You will learn that some months into this process (on 6 March 2024), the Department voted to adopt a new course approval procedure, and followed that by appointing (on 8 May 2024) an ad hoc review committee which rejected DeGraff's proposal. Apparently never before has MIT Linguistics used an ad hoc course review committee nor rejected a Special Topics course proposal.
No pre-existing course approval criteria are available in the correspondence record. The justifications for refusing DeGraff's course seem, to say the least, unprecedented; some include challenges to DeGraff's knowledge of his own research topics and even of basic linguistics.
One member of the ad hoc committee explained the unprecedented review as a need to exercise caution in the current political climate. While we understand the concern, it is neither an academic nor a scholarly reason for course approval. The Palestine Exception is repression, whether enacted by a hostile authority or by colleagues seeking to defend themselves from one.
After the course was finally rejected on 19 July 2024, there was an appeal and negotiations with both the Department and the Dean which led to additional punitive actions against DeGraff. Since these are separate from the course approval process, the open letter did not address them.
We stand by the conclusion in the open letter that the rejection of DeGraff's course is an example of the Palestine Exception. We once again urge our colleagues to sign and share the Block the Ban Petition and to oppose the Palestine Exception wherever they encounter it.
Why we as linguists support the Block the Ban at MIT petition
The petition linked hereis in support of Prahlad Iyengar, a 2nd year Ph.D. student at MIT, and Professor Michel DeGraff of the MIT Linguistics department.
We take support for Prahlad Iyengar to be straightforward, his rights of freedom of speech having been blatantly violated (see here).
Support for Professor DeGraff has become less straightforward, however, due to massive back and forth correspondence made public, extensive published material, and personalized accusations, which have shifted the focus away from the core of the matter to issues of procedure, questions of appropriate and inappropriate speech, and others. In considering whether to support DeGraff and sign the Block the Ban at MIT petition, we made every effort to abstract away from all this, and determine, based on the evidence available to us, whether denying DeGraff’s request to teach a Linguistics Department Special Topics seminar entitled Decolonization & Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine & Israel,is a case of the Palestine Exception.
We have come to believe that it is, since we can otherwisemake no senseof why MITLinguistics would decide to reject this course. We also believe that this decision provides another example of the systematic suppression of free speech on matters of Palestinian rights and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, suppression that would be unthinkable in other cases of oppression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the US and abroad.
DeGraff’s competence to teach this seminar has been questioned, as he supposedly lacks expertise on the “weaponization of language”. This is false:
he has taught similar classes at the interface of linguistics and the politics of
privilege, e.g. hereand here,
he has published extensively on “the weaponization of language”: how language
is used for societal oppression and racialization in places where Creole languages are
spoken and in movements elsewhere, including in #BlackLivesMatter. Some representative
examples of this published scholarly and outreach work are here, here, here, hereand here.
DeGraff’s course content has also come under extraordinary scrutiny:
An Ad Hoc Review Committee was brought in to review his seminar, a first in the
Linguistics Department, as far as we know.
His course format has been challenged based on (1) the number of invited speakers, (2) a
syllabus with some details still to be filled in, (3) his content area falling outside the department's
regular curriculum. However, if (1) and (2) were compelling reasons to reject a course, then other
Linguistics Department courses should also have been rejected, but were not (see here and here.)
And (3) is also not a valid reason to reject the course, since BY DEFINITION Special Topics seminars
fall outside a department’s regular curriculum.
We find the questioning of DeGraff’s expertise in the face of his accomplishments demeaning and condescending; the exaggerated scrutiny that the Department has given his course is disingenuous. And these actions have a particular irony given the praise he has received by the department, not only for his scholarship but also for his activism:
In 2022, DeGraff was elected as a fellow of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), which Professor Fox celebrated, “It is good to see a professional organization like the LSA promoting scientists not just for their research, but also for the kind of activism that might accompany it: battling prevalent misconceptions about the nature of the world, identifying their detrimental consequences, and fighting for change. Michel has been involved in all these activities,” (see here).
DeGraff’s course exactly answers the call to linguists by John Rickford in his 2016 LSA keynote address: “more of us need to get out of our offices, labs, or libraries and make a difference in the world.” (Rickford and King, 2016).
Finally, we also fail to understand why Professor Fox, Chair of Linguistics, did not recuse himself from the Ad Hoc Review Committee after heated disagreements between him and Professor DeGraff on matters relating to the politics of the Middle East (reported by DeGraff, not denied by Fox).
In conclusion, we believe that preventing DeGraff from teaching this course was indeed a case of a Palestine Exception. It is for this reason that we have signed Block the Ban petition and we call on more members of the linguistics community (as well as academia in general) to step forward in support of Michel DeGraff’s academic rights and dignity.
Signed by 40 linguists from 28 universities in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, France, Greece, Haiti, Italy, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, USA and UK.
Canadian academic David Heap last year took part in an activist mission to challenge the Israeli military blockade of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.
The Israeli government claims the blockade is necessary to maintain security for its citizens and prevent terrorism. Palestinians, their supporters and human rights experts say the policy amounts to collective punishment that is damaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
After a previous aid flotilla to Gaza was raided by Israeli special forces in 2010, leaving nine activists dead, more attempts to send boats carrying supplies to Gaza were launched, including the Canadian Boat to Gaza, carrying Heap.
Here Heap explains why he risked his own safety to stand up for an issue he passionately supports.
Last year, at the University of Western Ontario campus where I work, a student group called Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights joined with other community groups in London, Ontario to help raise tens of thousands of dollars in support of the Canadian Boat to Gaza, a civil society campaign to challenge the blockade of Gaza.
The illegal blockade of course affects students and university staff along with everyone else in what has aptly been called the world’s largest open-air prison.
The security justification
Despite marginal improvements following the pressure arising from the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, aid deliveries to Gaza still supply a fraction of what the population needed before the current blockade was imposed in 2007.
As the Israeli NGO Gisha documents extensively, the Palestinians of Gaza have been deliberately “put on a diet” by the continuing military blockade which allows in only a calculated minimum of restricted supplies: a form of collective punishment. The situation in Gaza is recognised as dire by international humanitarian NGOs, and the blockade has been characterised as a serious violation of international law by experts at the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR) as recently as September 2011.
As my colleague, Dr. Ziad Medoukh (head of French and coordinator of the Peace Studies Centre at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza) notes: schools supplies, computer equipment and books are still among the goods that are severely restricted and only sporadically available in blockaded Gaza.
The hopes and aspirations of a whole generation in Gaza are being needlessly stunted due to senseless restrictions which have nothing to do with anyone’s “security”.
Complete blockade
Those who finish their studies and earn scholarships abroad are often caught by restrictions on human movement (a freedom which should be enjoyed by everyone under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) which cruelly curtail travel for academic, medical, commercial or family purposes.
While the occasional partial opening of the Rafah border with Egypt for some people (though few goods) is a positive development, Palestinians also have the right to free shipping traffic through the port of Gaza — the only Mediterranean port closed to shipping — and to the peaceful use of their own territorial waters, which they are currently denied.
They cannot depend on the whims of a neighbouring country to keep goods and people flowing in and out of Gaza.
The Canadian Boat to Gaza
These are some of the reasons why I was aboard the Tahrir, the Canadian Boat to Gaza which was part of the Freedom Flotilla II in July 2011, when we attempted to sail from Greece but were prevented by Greek authorities under international pressure.
A Google Maps screenshot showing the Tahrir was in international waters when confronted by Israeli naval forces. Lina Attalah, Almasy Alyoum, Cairo
The Israeli blockade of Gaza had been effectively outsourced to Greek ports, but our campaign continued undaunted. When the Tahrir, together with the Irish boat to Gaza (MV Saoirse), sailed from the southern Turkish port of Fethiye on November 2, 2011, I was again on board.
Though fewer in numbers than in July, the volunteers on the Tahrir were united in our determination to challenge the blockade of Gaza peacefully, through non-violent direct action. Apart from our Greek captain and five international journalists, our numbers included three Canadians, a U.S. citizen, Michael Coleman of Free Gaza Australia, and Palestinian student Majd Kayyal who has never been able to travel to Gaza directly, a mere 135 kilometres from his home in Haifa.
After about 50 hours at sea with almost continuous media coverage, our satellite communications were cut by the Israeli navy shortly after noon on Friday November 4, in stark contrast to the Greek authorities, who never interfered with communications or with media professionals when they stopped the Tahrir last July. Our last recorded GPS position was some 45 nautical miles from the port of Gaza, in international waters with a course set towards Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza. At no time did we set a course for Israel or Israeli waters.
Israel’s overwhelming use of force
In July, Greek authorities managed to take control of the Tahrir and more than 40 people on board, using only one small cutter and two Zodiacs carrying a total of six coastguard officers; in contrast, the Israeli navy deployed overwhelming force against our two small vessels.
The Tahrir, now with just 12 people on board, and the Saoirse, with 15, faced hundreds of heavily armed Israeli troops on at least three warships and between 15 and 20 assault boats equipped with water cannons and mechanical lifts.
Despite recognising that we were unarmed and would present no active resistance, the Israeli navy sent about two dozen heavily armed commandos to storm our vessel. I was tasered during the assault, and later bruised while being forcibly removed from the Tahrir.
Detention in Israel
Ironically, after being illegally kidnapped on the high seas, we were told we had illegally entered a country we never had any intention of visiting. Our six-day detention was marked throughout by manipulation and misinformation on the part of the Israeli authorities.
For example, we were told that if we signed a document waiving our right to appeal before a judge we would be deported home within 24 hours: Ehab Lotayef of Montreal signed such a waiver twice within the first 48 hours, and was nonetheless detained for six days, just like those of us who signed nothing.
Although cut short, the voyage of the Tahrir served to draw attention to the injustice of the blockade of Gaza, as well as to educate and mobilise Canadians and others against the blockade.
An ongoing campaign
Pulitzer Prize winner and civil rights activist Alice Walker from the US Boat to Gaza says challenges to the blockade of Gaza are the Freedom Rides of our time – and like the 1960s civil rights movement in the U.S. South, we must keep up the struggle despite attempts to intimidate us.
As my colleague Ziad notes, the Palestinians of Gaza are left with “a hope in international civil society solidarity which is organising throughout the world in order to try, through peaceful actions, to break this blockade.” (author’s translation)
He observes that though we did not reach the shores of Gaza this time, our message of solidarity was received throughout Palestine.
That is why we have to keep on challenging this blockade.
