Mike Cushman is a prominent British Jewish activist and retired academic who taught at the London School of Economics (LSE) for many years, specializing in information systems and organizational research.
In the academic sphere, Cushman is known for his research on socio-technical systems and knowledge management. He has been a long-time active member of the University and College Union (UCU), serving as the branch secretary at LSE. He specializes in analyzing power dynamics within organizational structures and utilizes this expertise to expose how institutions use administrative measures to suppress dissent.
He co-founded “Free Speech on Israel” (FSOI) to counter political attempts to label criticism of Israel as antisemitism. As an officer of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), he has long campaigned for the academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in the occupation. He was a founding member of “Jewish Voice for Labour” (JVL), consistently advocating for Palestinian human rights within the UK Labour Party. He has been deeply involved in mobilizing against the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, arguing it is being used as a tool to compromise the freedom of academic and political discourse. He frequently organizes international webinars and public meetings to systematically articulate the fundamental distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, while providing legal and academic support to suppressed scholars.
He profoundly discussed his opposition to Zionism:
The founding of Israel was in fact a disaster not just for the Palestinians but also for Jews. The mistakes, in my view, were not in 1948, but back at the beginning of the 20th century, when the Zionist project was set up as an exclusionary project from the start. The aim was not for Jews to live among and alongside Palestinians, but to displace, and Zionism picked up from Fascism the idea of purification – getting rid of Yiddish, getting rid of the idea of the weak speccy type of Jew and replacing it with the idea of Sabra, the strong farmer on the land. The Sabra has no connection with Europe, he was born in Israel.