Triple exclusion: Life stories of Jewish migrant academics from the former Soviet Union at a contested university under siege

Abstract

Three decades have passed since the commencement of the largest influx of immigration in the history of the State of Israel, during which approximately one million Russian-speaking Jews from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrated to Israel. Thousands of these immigrants held academic positions in the FSU and sought to continue their work in Israeli academia, which at that time lacked the capacity to include them. Many of the immigrants were directed to work and sometimes live in the West Bank, a contested region acknowledged by the international community as occupied Palestinian land. This study examines the life stories of scholars who emigrated from the FSU and are currently employed at Ariel University, an institution located in the Israeli city of Ariel in the West Bank. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with sixteen academics, this study explores their experiences of immigration, its effects on their academic career in Israel, and their integration into Ariel University in light of the intractable Israeli-Arab conflict. The construct of triple exclusion is used to bring together three layers of participant experiences - as Jews in Soviet society, as Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel, and as academics working at a contested institution. The study provides a nuanced analysis of each of these three layers of exclusion, offering insights for further research in the field of academic mobilities. Moreover, it reveals that many of the interviewed academics de-politicise the conflict, as a survival strategy, and thus contribute to the normalisation of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories of the West Bank.