Well, they did it. eLife fired Michael Eisen. Absolutely outrageous. The bounds of allowed thought tighten. Any criticism of Israel is out of bounds. A new McCarthyism, except instead of communists under the bed, it's people who think it matters both when Israelis are slaughtered AND when Palestinians are slaughtered. And many, many in the academic community, seeing this, are afraid to speak, especially those without tenure, & even w/ tenure especially those from Middle Eastern countries other than Israel. How easily they can be slandered as anti-semitic should they speak.
Please sign our petition calling for this *not* to happen, and to defend academic freedom: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfdJyIQzIsTypmmZXIi-RfSjbe4Psp1RIvjXz-DxWJKA5hHIQ/viewform
I do wonder if it was a “last straw” situation. A lot of editors (myself included) were quite upset with Eisen’s performance as EIC, particularly how the new process was announced and implemented. Many Review Editors have quit in protest around that alone. I wonder if the reaction to his Onion tweet (I posted the same article, so I am sympathetic to the sentiment) was a tipping point of losing editorial staff and that was what forced eLife’s hand.
@tdverstynen I don't think their hand was forced. They were under very strong pressure from a group of Israeli scientists who took offense, for reasons that are still somewhat opaque to me. It was a last straw, perhaps, in that the eLife Board's explanation was "his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife’s mission. It is against this background that a further incidence of this behaviour has contributed to the board’s decision." But it was succumbing to pressure from the Israeli side, and I'm afraid this Board was sympathetic to the arguments that suppress criticism of Israel in many contexts. Fundamentally, if they had other reasons to fire him, they should have cleanly separated them from an incident of his political expression; instead, that incident was the precipitating incident for dismissal. It led to controversy, outrage from the group of Israeli scientists, and so that made it for them another example of his detrimental social media side, rather than being a sincere but unfair and one-sided attack. The Israelis insist that it is not his politics but something about how he expressed his politics in a way that gave them great offense and was insensitive to their grieving, and tho I don't fully understand their point I think that it still comes down to politics -- his emphasizing Palestinian suffering without first focusing on their own, and his doing so in a bitter or sardonic joke or ironic piece (the Onion piece) rather than just a show of empathy, was, in the end, I think just unacceptable to them, they found it hurtful and offensive. They're entitled to their feelings, but unfortunately they used them to very narrowly circumscribe the allowed range of political expression, and to make many people afraid of publicly criticizing Israel or supporting the Palestinians.
