I

was going to a conference (Yet more reasons for an academic boycott of

Israel).

At the time of this writing, the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography
is taking place in Palestine. Together with a few hundred participants from
around the world, I was registered for the conference and would give a
presentation on planning theory. However, to my big surprise I was not allowed
to participate by the Israeli authorities, as I was detained at the Ben Gurion
Airport and sent back to Sweden.
Holding a geography conference in Palestine is very interesting for a variety of
reasons from its location in the politically unstable Middle East, to its
extraordinary geographical history as a meeting place for cultures, peoples and
religions. Some keywords in the discipline of human geography are borders,
territory and colonialism; also in this respect, Palestine is a highly pertinent
choice of host for a geography conference. Here, these keywords denote not
merely fascinating research subjects, but are real and substantial problems for
many people, since Palestine still is under occupation by Israel.
On the 24th of July I myself experienced a small piece of this injustice as I was
denied entry to Israel. After interrogations and waiting for 6 hours I was
informed of being a security risk. I find this hard to understand as my only
crime is having been present at a demonstration in the West Bank in the fall of
2013, and being the partner of an Iranian-born medical doctor from Sweden who
was denied access when she going for internship at a hospital in Nablus in 2014.
Being sent back to Sweden after a day at the airport and a night in custody is of
course nothing compared to what the thousands of Palestinians presently in
Israeli prisons many without charges endure, not to speak of, for instance, the
500 killed children during last year Gaza war. But my case is yet another example
of how Israel impedes academic freedom in Palestine. The 7th International
Conference of Critical Geography unlike the previous once being hosted in
places like Frankfurt, Mumbai or Mexico City is directly thwarted by an
occupational power on different levels: from generally making the working
conditions unbearable for Palestinian academics and people doing research
in/on Palestine, to forcing the organisers of this conference to be cautious on
information and openness and also directly preventing people from attending
the conference (many Arab and Muslim/Middle Eastern colleagues, from
countries such as Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iraq could only dream of
entering the conference). Not to mention the situation in Gaza, where students
need to smuggle in their own books!
At the conference I was, as mentioned, going to give a presentation on urban
planning and planning theory. And in this respect, it is interesting to see how the
Israeli universities and academic society are interwoven with the regimes actual
occupation of Palestine. That universities and research are closely related to
government policies we know from all over the world, but in few places do such
connections have such dire consequences. In terms of spatial planning and
architecture, the universities and the Israeli government are closely related in a
number of issues: for example the planning of settlements and the wall,

infrastructure and water management, the allocation of building permits in

Jerusalem, as well as physical displacement of people as a colonial strategy.
Since the state of Israel continues to ignore international rights and UN
resolutions; since it continues relentlessly to attack academic freedom in
Palestine in all kinds of ways; since the Israeli universities are so interwoven
with the actual occupation, there are no other alternatives than an international
academic boycott of Israeli institutions including academic ones. Just
kilometres and miles from where Palestinians are deprived their right to
education, the Israeli universities produce the knowledge on how to strengthen
the occupation. For the sake of humanity, please join the The Palestinian
Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel at http://pacbi.org/.


Stle Holgersen, Malm, Sweden, 28th July 2015.
(Stle Holgersen is a researcher (post-doc) at Institute for Housing Research
(IBF), at Uppsala University, Sweden.)