Free speech: has Durham Uni blundered?
A debate on Israel and the Palestinians was cancelled by the university because of threats to public safety: did the authorities do enough to protect free speech?
There will be elements of this which are non-committal or provisional, because the incident in question only took place on Friday evening, but the essential facts are these. The Durham Union Society, Durham University’s debating society which was founded in 1842 and trumpets its support for free speech, organised a debate for Friday 7 June on the motion “This House believes Palestinian leadership is the biggest barrier to peace”. Speaking in proposition were Natasha Hausdorff, of UK Lawyers for Israel, investigative journalist David Collier and Lance Forman, briefly a Brexit Party MEP. Opposing the motion were Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, Dr Peter Shambrook, trustee of the Balfour Project, and a mathematics and physics undergraduate of the university, Mohab Ramadan.
The university authorities had been made aware of the debate and gave their full support, in accordance with their policy on freedom of expression. They had been notified that there would be a protest, had consulted Durham Constabulary and then made “appropriate security arrangements”. One of the organisations involved in the protest was Durham Students for Palestine. At some point, the the university authorities decided to stop or cancel the event, citing “further intelligence and advice from the police about a risk to public safety”. Protestors left the area and those inside the Union’s building on Palace Green were able to leave within a short time.
It is not entirely clear at what point the plug was pulled. The university asserts that “the event was underway”, but Hausdorff, preparing to speak, told The Daily Telegraph that:
Around a dozen students were preparing the chamber for the debate then a mob formed a human chain blocking them inside. They were stuck inside the debate chamber for more than two and a half hours.
Forman said on Twitter that the university “cancelled the debate at last minute”. The official student newspaper, Palatinate, recorded that the speakers never reached the building and were having dinner elsewhere in the city. Perhaps it does not matter. The Telegraph reported that protestors, chanting “From the river to the sea” and banging on the windows, formed a human chain around the building and prevented anyone from leaving.
In any event, the debate does not appear to have taken place in any meaningful sense. The protestors objected to its nature, and to the participants, with Durham Students for Palestine accusing the university of allowing the Union to be used as a “Zionist mouthpiece”. It has been suggested that Durham “chose not to use police force to remove protestors from the building entrance on the grounds of trespassing”. Hausdorff said that “the police took no action because the university refused to give them a mandate to take action”.
There are two major issues to address at this early stage. The first is the correctness of the university’s decision to cancel the event, and the second is the nature of formal debates.
To take the university at its word, it had initially supported the debate but cancelled it because of fears for public safety after receiving “further intelligence and advice” from the police. Without knowing what this intelligence was, it is impossible to say categorically whether that decision was right or wrong, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the overwhelming presumption should be in favour of enabling citizens to engage in lawful activities in the face of what was, in essence, intimidation. After all, if the police and event hosts erred heavily towards caution, it would take very little effort to ensure that almost any event to which one objected was cancelled because of a theoretical threat to public safety. The police should be there to enable as well to protect.
The bar should be especially high when it is an issue of freedom of speech, and when it is clearly the objective of one side to stop an event going ahead. This was not, let us remember, some extremist rally, but a six-person debate at one of the country’s oldest student debating societies. I would need to be persuaded that the threats of which the university were made aware were firstly, both substantial and realistic, and secondly impossible to mitigate, prevent or counter. This is the job of the police: if violence or intimidation was being used to stop people speaking lawfully in public, that is unacceptable.
The wider point here is the nature of debating. I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of St Andrews in and around the Union Debating Society, of which in theory every matriculated student was automatically a member. It was a surprisingly common misconception among those who paid little attention that the motion for a debate was somehow a pre-ordained statement of belief on behalf of the society or, more outlandishly, the university. It is clearly not. A motion is simply a mechanism to facilitate a debate: it advances a proposition, in whatever terms, the speakers in support of it explain what they take it to mean and why they support that meaning, and the speakers on the other side offer arguments against it. This is not new or complicated or difficult to understand.
The arguments, therefore, that the Durham Union was a “Zionist mouthpiece” are absurd. There were to be three speeches supporting the motion, and three speeches opposing it. Contributions would then be invited from any other students in attendance. The society itself is wholly neutral, simply a forum for the speakers to debate their views. If anyone who was a member of the Union Society did not like any of the speakers, they were fully entitled to attend and explain why they disagreed. I doubt that the president would have allowed the debate to end until everyone who wanted to contribute had done so.
Unfortunately, it is clear that some of the protestors, and some supporters on social media, did not want the issue of Israel and the Palestinians debated at all. If you fall into this category, on any subject, I can only assume that it is because you don’t think it is a legitimate subject for debate, and therefore, by extension, that there are not multiple valid or justifiable views. That is always a red flag for me: anyone who is so certain of his or her own rightness, and the existence of only one correct view, is rarely someone who has applied much critical thought to an issue. It is, let’s be honest, the hallmark of the fanatic.
Even if there were an issue on which I believed anyone who took a different stance from mine was a priori malign, it is surely to the benefit of the “right” side of the argument for people who are obviously “wrong” to put their views forward in a forum in which they can be rigorously and robustly challenged. If I’m debating against you, and your argument is (in my view) preposterous and discreditable, that’s to my advantage, as I can make everyone there aware of that, and explain why it is so absurdly wrong.
Of course there are guardrails. We do not allow people to incite hatred, but that has been against the law for decades under the provisions of the Public Order Act 1986. So the limits of free speech—which most people accept do exist, and simply differ on their scope—are in place to provide protection. But there is no protection against hearing arguments with which you disagree, and, crucially, there is no specific right not to be offended. There cannot be, because offence is utterly subjective.
There is a certain piquant irony in the Durham case. The pro-Palestinian protestors, at least some of whom seem to have found the very idea of the debate so noxious that it was unacceptable, are alleged to have been chanting “From the river to the sea” (the full version is usually “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). This is a phrase which at least some people consider abhorrently offensive and antisemitic, as one can infer from it a meaning of the eradication of the State of Israel (the “river” being the River Jordan, and the “sea” being the Mediterranean Sea). It is certainly strongly associated with Hamas, whose 1988 Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, its foundation document, is expressly antisemitic and genocidal; some have argued that the Document of General Principles and Policies the group issued in 2017 removes antisemitic elements, but leading figures still regularly call for the elimination of Israel, while Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, justified the 7 October 2023 atrocities on the grounds that “Israel is a country that has no place on our land”. That some of the same people will assert an absolute right to use such a controversial slogan but insist that a debate, with arguments expressed on both sides, is intolerable does not speak well of their critical thought or open minds.
No doubt more details of the events of Friday 7 June on Palace Green in Durham will emerge. My instinct is that the officers of the Durham Union Society are probably least at fault: they may have followed the instructions of the university but, as far as I know, it is the university which technically owns the Pemberton Buildings in which the debating chamber is located, so it is hard to see how far they could have defied the authorities even if minded to. The protestors have, I think, acted as mobs tend to: bullying, intolerant, unwilling to engage with anyone who disagrees, and using weight of numbers and the physical threat that inevitably entails to shut down any dialogue they don’t want to happen.
The university is the organisation under real scrutiny. It is being reported that the man who took the decision to stop the event was Dr Shaid Mahmood, pro-vice-chancellor (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion). He is also chair of the Luminate Education Group, a Yorkshire-based collective of education providers which promises to “go out of our comfort zones to challenge ourselves, and others, on the systematic prejudices that exist and how we move forward”. Perhaps Friday evening’s situation was too far outside Dr Mahmood’s comfort zone. Unless the intelligence gathered by the police was of a very serious degree, I think Durham University, and to an extent Durham Constabulary, have caved to intimation in a pretty shameful way. The debate was wholly legal and it was their duty to facilitate it. They failed to do so.
I’m afraid I also do wonder if the university would have been quite so ready to abandon the event had the subject been something other than Israel, and if it had not been under a motion which, to the easily confused, seemed critical of the leadership of the Palestinian movement. Imagine if it had been “This House believes that Benjamin Netanyahu is the biggest barrier to peace”, and there had been some passionate Zionists or Likud supporters standing outside objecting to its terms. Do you think the university would have stopped it happening? I cannot imagine it.
Free speech doesn’t just matter, it matters more than almost anything else. If you don’t want to hear views with which you disagree, then don’t attend. If you want to challenge them, attend and do so. If you just don’t like them being articulated, well, within the confines of the law, tough luck: you don’t have that luxury any more than the rest of us. But really, what should concern you is this: if you cannot bear to hear an argument other than your own, is yours really that robust? Why does challenge frighten and enrage you? And how are we ever to move on as a society if we cannot argue?
Surely if the university had permitted this event it ought to have risk assessed the potential for disorder etc so therefore it may have permitted the event to placate the organisers and then it cancelled it using public order threat. Thus it can say it supported free speech, but puts public safety etc first. A win win especially legally.