More parking spaces for EMBO workshops

Has European science and science governance always been all about a disembodied, decontextualised science, somewhat not incompatible with present-day settler colonialism? A horrifying EMBO email to the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology serves as a starting point to reflect on the tension between science for science’s sake, and science for peace and liberation. An appeal to fellow European early career researchers, and early career researchers in Europe, that this struggle will have to be ours in difference to what proposed and modelled by these institutions.

There is something profoundly unsettling in reading the reply of Fiona Watt, stem cell scientist and director of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), to the January 19th 2023 letter of the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology (PalAST). A letter requesting to stop organising EMBO workshops in apartheid Israel and, even more specifically, requesting to relocate the workshop “Mechanisms of Neuronal Remodelling” set to take place literally on top of the bodies of massacred Palestinian citizens. Under the parking lot of the EMBO workshop venue — explains the letter, and as widely reported — the mass graves of the victims of the infamous Tantura massacre, murdered by zionist paramilitaries in 1948.

PalAST’s letter is worth reading in its entirety, for its content and for it being the very example of what a scientific community and scientific organisation can be and can fight for. EMBO’s answer is also worth reading, but only because it would be unbelievable otherwise. In a chilling reply that strikes if anything for the inhumanity of its near-robotic corporatespeak, Fiona Watt explains that having attendees walk on mass graves refurbished as seaside resorts does not, after all, violate any specific clause of EMBO’s eligibility criteria. “Thank you for your thoughtful and important email”… but the request is denied. No worries though, and this is the extent of what can be offered, as “the history of the site and massacre [will be explained] in their opening remarks”. Such seem to be the imperatives of contemporary science: it is on mass graves that the mechanisms of neuronal remodelling need to be discussed. The meeting was not relocated, the site was advertised as “Israel’s most beautiful stretches of beach […], adjacent to clear blue lagoons, a natural bay, fish, birds, and sunsets. Lush lawn areas surround the houses in all directions, […] the weather […] very pleasant”, and a commemorative photo was taken, immortalising the cheerful group of attendees posing less than 300 metres from the site of the executions.

What does it mean when our so-called reference scientific organisation and self-described centres of excellence are able to organise events in a settler colony built on the killing, displacement, and erasure of the indigenous Palestinians? What does it mean when they themselves and their very own leadership are the ones that enact such erasure? What does it mean when the site of killing and displacement is literally the site of the conference? What does it mean when life science institutions, led by life scientists, are able to display such disregard for human life?

What does it mean when there are bodies buried in the conference’s parking lot?

It means, to me, that there is little meaning in any of this anymore. It means that the plot, clearly, has been lost. It means that if “excellent science” is science which can-, was-, and shall be discussed atop massacred bodies, then “excellence” does not mean anything anymore. The “excellent science” and “excellent institutions” we are asked and expected to pursue, follow, ask for funding from, apply to, celebrate, join the ranks of, seek community in, follow the leadership of, receive training from? They are the same that have asked us, or others among us, to present our science on top of dead bodies.

Is this what it has been all about? Disembodied, decontextualised science and science governance, somewhat not incompatible with present-day settler colonialism and violation of international law? A science that somehow would not necessarily lose all of its meaning when practised, presented, and discussed on occupied territories, on destroyed cities and villages, on mass graves of war crimes? A science of the “both-sides” and of the “no side at all”? It is thus not a surprise, but still profoundly unsettling, that after generations of genocide, displacement and apartheid, the last year of which televised in real time, of increasingly documented scholasticide, murder of Palestinian scientists, doctors, professors, students, postdocs … people …, Israel is still part of EMBO. It is not a surprise that EMBO’s only statement on the matter could not even mention Palestine once. An entire organisation of gargantuan proportions and importance, counting a community with thousands of members, staff, political connections, institutions, presses… and yet, when it boiled down to it, manifestly unable to do/say little more than nothing during a contemporary genocide, a genocide perpetrated by one of its own member states and with EU complicity. Say nothing while one of its member states destroys all of another country’s universities. What is all of this excellence for then?

Clearer than ever, the science, the leadership, the communities that we actually need are other and otherwhere, not the ones that have gained power, space, and legitimacy in the Global North Life Sciences. And in fact many of us have already realised this when engaging in any other dimension of struggle that truly matters: the science, the leadership, the communities we actually need are and have been, indeed, other and otherwhere. The ones that demonstrated categorical opposition to genocide; the ones that we relied upon to call for disarmament and ceasefire; the ones that represented our interest as scientists against apartheid and colonialism; the ones who understand how horrifying and inhumane it is to be asked to present your research posters on an extermination site; the ones that bring forward, in action, a vision of science and education for peace (see e.g. Galamba and Matthews, 2021; Torres Olave et al., 2023), a science for the people, a science and a pedagogy that is “societally embedded and accountable, non-extractive, and anti-oppressive” (see e.g. the work of prof.dr. Icaza Garba), a pedagogy of liberation (Freire and Shor, 1987). In fact the kind of science practice and science governance modelled by PalAST and by our Palestinian colleagues (“The close relationship between academic freedom, human rights, and the right to self-determination remains the crucible in which Palestinian higher education must develop and thrive” Hanna Nasir, as in Silwadi and Mayo, 2014). Clearly, the communities that we actually need(ed) have not been the self-proclaimed “bastions of excellence” that those in power tell us to seek association with. The “bastions of excellence”, these hallowed communities of elected fellows and academics we have been told to desire community with, have instead been those whom we had to speak against, and anonymously. From these “excellent”, Western, life sciences academic spaces, when people have turned to for support, organisation, mobilisation, leadership… the response has been either silence or silencing, complicity.

The failure and, I would say, structural incapacity of the “who’s who” of Global North academic leadership, institutions, and organisations to lead on the most pressing issues of our time is, to me, more obvious than ever. The moral bankruptcy on what really matters, the having little or nothing of substance to offer. I have written about this before with regards to Developmental Biology and equitable publishing. We are now livestreaming a genocide. And the contrast between the hollowness of these hallowed European institutions and what is instead outside of it could not be clearer. One just needs to compare the PalAST letter and the EMBO reply. One has just to read the statements issued by other universities. And this failure is maybe what has brought our generation of early career researchers to have to navigate a Western academia where diversity stats powerpoint slides can be presented on massacre sites, where “revolutionary” journals can fire their anti-genocide editors (see below), where women in science awardees can also end up greenlighting workshops organised on mass graves. A sort of post-truth academia for the post-truth world. An academia where everything and its opposite can always be true at the same time and where nothing really matters anymore beyond image, reputation, maintenance of power.

Examples of this have abounded if just across the past year, and in fact while EMBO’s reply to Palestinian colleagues may well end up being one of its most striking declinations, it is the pervasiveness of such governance and organisational failure across Western life science spaces that strikes me the most.
The editor in chief of eLife, one of the leading reformative journals in the field, was fired for daring to express sympathy for the Palestinian cause. The same journal is still continuing to ask us to submit our essays on diversity, equity, reform boasting its “support of inclusive and empowered communities”, and yet, when it was the moment for it, it could not make space on its agenda for denouncing genocide and scholasticide. What are these scientific spaces for then? What can they be for, if they cannot be for this?
There was also something profoundly unsettling in discovering the sheer number of zionist professors and administrators thriving in the life sciences, complaining against protestors in the streets and nearby conferences, revendicating their delusions of neutral and apolitical science. Something profoundly unsettling realising that zionism is not an obstacle to career progression in these systems and in these circles.
There is something profoundly unsettling in being, still now, cheerfully encouraged to apply to institutes/programmes/funding of the Max Planck Society, as if the Society was not so historically and presently embedded in zionism that some of its members had to denounce it anonymously.
There is something profoundly unsettling, one year deep into the televised genocide, scholasticide, murder of scientists, doctors, professors, and among global calls for institutional boycotts, to see community publishers such as the Company of Biologist expand existing deals with Israeli institutions. Israeli institutions historically and documentedly complicit in Palestinian oppression.
There is something profoundly unsettling in reading of the same publishers entering in new partnerships with companies funded by former IDF commanders. There is something profoundly unsettling in noting, among calls for full disarmament and divestment, the proportion of European funding allocated to Israeli research. There is something profoundly unsettling in the deproblematicisation of conducting research in an apartheid state, funnelling even more European students into Israeli laboratories.\

But even if we were to follow the optics of the non-human that clearly dominates the perspective of European institutions of Palestinian lives, even if what really mattered was indeed just the impact on their own academics, then what are these institutions and these administrators asking of us? To follow their lead? To get leadership roles… at the head of zionist institutions? To celebrate equitable gender representation… in organisations whose members are committing genocide? For our big moment to be that of giving a keynote talk… on top of mass graves? For our highest career achievement to be getting tenure… in apartheid states? To write, move, and practice science for the sake of itself? None of us want that. And yet this is what we see and what is proposed to us. What a colossal failure.
Primo Levi’s¹ “Covare il cobra” comes to mind, on the moral responsibilities of the scientist, and on knowing whether the egg one is brooding will give rise to a dove or to a cobra. But when it is the nest itself that is the problem, when the nest is a nest of cobras, then there is in fact no point of brooding anything more at all: it’s time to find- (or demand for) a different nest. Among the preying birds of Amado Hernandez’ fame, scientists were not spared.

“We call on all academic […] organizations to join us […] and demand that governments worldwide hold Israel, the occupying power, accountable for this clear violation of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), the right to education enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966)” Palestinian universities were writing already years ago. “By continuing a business-as-usual approach with its apartheid regime and complicit institutions, you are, regardless of intentions, signaling to Israel that it can continue to deny our students, researchers and faculty members their right to study in the occupied Palestinian territory and abroad, severely restrict opportunities for Palestinian and international students and scholars from abroad to study and teach at our universities, and prevent our universities from importing textbooks and lab equipment. In the meantime the genocide continues and is allowed to continue, the destruction of libraries and universities, the murdering and execution of Palestinians” was what PalAST tried to make clear to EMBO in early 2023. “the University urges […] the international community to put an end to the genocidal crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and work effectively to end the scholasticide and hold the Israeli occupation accountable for its crimes” was urging again Bizreit University just last month. And yet EMBO needs to organise workshops, and needs parking spaces.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The header banner image is by Etienne Girardet, and under Unsplash licence.

I sincerely thank Mariana Alves for critical reading, feedback, and discussion on early versions of this post and for discussion throughout. These blogposts are written in my personal capacity. The views and opinions expressed here are my own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my University, my Lab, PI, colleagues, or those of the members of any association or society I am affiliated with.