We are publishing, below, letters from PACBI and from Academics for Palestine to recipients of Israel’s Dan David Prize for history scholars, asking that they do not accept it. Our own letter is addressed specifically to Dr Anita Radini of UCD’s School of Archaeology, the only Irish-based recipient. We reached out as a way to reflect on what each of us can do to forward international justice and solidarity, rather than in judgment on any individual’s decisions. Moreover, we wish to emphasise how systemic issues – including the structural underfunding of the humanities and social sciences and the casualisation of the academic workforce – also play a relevant role in a decision to withdraw from monetary prizes, especially for relatively early career colleagues. 

Letter from PACBI to recipients:
Dear Dr. Saheed Aderinto, Dr. Ana Antic, Dr. Karma Ben Johanan, Dr. Elise K. Burton, Dr. Adam Clulow, Dr. Krista Goff, Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Dr. Anita Radini, Chao Tayiana Maina,

We are writing from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the global, nonviolent, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. PACBI is endorsed by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), as well as by a broad cross-section of Palestinian academics and academic associations. We hope this finds you well.

We understand that you have been awarded Israel’s Dan David Prize. We wanted to reach out to provide you with additional background information on the prize and its context, and to urge you to reconsider accepting it.

As we write, Israel’s most racist, fundamentalist government to date is escalating the violent oppression that has dominated our lives for decades. We are facing pogroms by violent settler militias, supported by the Israeli military and incited by government ministers, burning down Palestinian towns, killing sprees by Israeli soldiers taking our young and elderly alike, and expanding illegal Israeli settlements forcing us into shrinking bantustans in our homeland.

As you may know, after years of denunciations by Palestinian scholars and before this government came to power, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, together with Israel’s most prominent human rights organization B’Tselem, recently concluded that Israel is committing the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians.

What you might not have considered is how accepting the Dan David Prize would bolster Israel’s human rights and international law violations by legitimizing its violent apartheid rule over Palestinians.

Indeed, the prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University, two institutions that are deeply complicit in Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid. 

The complicity of the very institutions administering the prize in Israeli apartheid makes accepting it even more problematic. Please allow us to illustrate some examples of this complicity below.

The Dan David Foundation counts among its partners the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority (NPA), both government organizations actively involved in Israel’s gradual ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians.

The IAA is headquartered in Israeli-occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, in violation of international law. The IAA and the NPA, in partnership with the far-right Israeli settler organization Elad, oversee excavations in occupied Jerusalem as part of a planned Israeli archeological park that is forcing Palestinians from their homes.

The IAA carries out excavations throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), looting Palestinian cultural heritage and designating Palestinian land as off-limits to Palestinians. This IAA map showing an “Archaeological Survey of Israel” completely erases the OPT.

The IAA also houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in the Qumran caves in the Palestinian West Bank in 1947 and subsequently held in the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem. Israel seized the scrolls in 1967 when it illegally occupied Jerusalem along with the rest of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

The NPA appropriates and designates Palestinian land as national parks in order to force Palestinians off the land. It operates numerous parks, including the Qumran National Park where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and nature reserves across the occupied Palestinian territory, as this NPA map shows. Once again, the Occupied Palestinian Territory has been completely erased.

The Dan David Prize’s host, Tel Aviv University (TAU), is fully enlisted in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.

TAU maintains partnerships with Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers and just recently announced a new joint “Air and Space Power Center” with the Israeli Air Force (IAF). The IAF has carried out multiple aerial bombings of the besieged Palestinian population in Gaza, killing thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children.

TAU houses the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which boasts of having developed the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” of disproportionate force. Adopted by the Israeli military, the Dahiya Doctrine calls for “the destruction of the national [civilian] infrastructure, and intense suffering among the [civilian] population.”

TAU also regularly hosts recruitment events for the Shin Bet, Israel’s notorious domestic intelligence agency. Shin Bet has been condemned by the UN Committee Against Torture over its use of violent and degrading interrogation tactics on Palestinians.

International calls and actions, including by individuals, taken to isolate the apartheid regime in South Africa helped to dismantle it.

Now scholars are responding to the call from Palestinian civil society and taking action to help dismantle Israeli apartheid. In 2016, historian Catherine Hall declined the Dan David Prize, following “discussions with those who are deeply involved with the politics of Israel-Palestine.”

Just last week, philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell withdrew from an ethics conference in Israel over “the longstanding failure of the State of Israel to accord basic human rights to the Palestinian people.”

The work you have done to preserve and broaden our understanding of history deserves to be recognized. However, and we hope you will agree with us, accepting recognition from institutions so deeply complicit in the silencing and erasure of an entire population would do a disservice to your extraordinary achievements.

It is our hope that you will reconsider accepting this prize and join the many international scholars and academic departments, programs, unions and associations taking a stand for Palestinian rights and calling for Israel to be held accountable for its crimes. 

Sincerely, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

Letter from Academics for Palestine to Dr Anita Radini:
We hope this message finds you well. We are writing about the Dan David Prize, on behalf of Academics for Palestine. More than 400 academics in or from Ireland across all scholarly disciplines are signatories and supporters of the Academics for Palestine pledge.

We would like to respectfully appeal to you not to accept the Dan David Prize. We are conscious that it is no small thing for an academic to refuse any award, but we also know that you will be conscious yourself that no personal academic research or reward is bigger than the fundamental questions of humanity and justice at stake in Palestine and Israel today. As you know, Israel’s long-standing colonisation and annexation of Palestinian land, displacement of its people, and demolitions of their homes has only continued to intensify in recent years. The suffering and oppression this has wrought for Palestinian communities and families is immense, and Israeli institutions like Tel Aviv University are complicit in a host of ways. We understand that our Palestinian colleagues have written to you via the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and would have set out the gravity of the situation in more depth, as well as the specific complicity of the Dan David Foundation and Tel Aviv University.

Things have reached the point now in 2023 that Israel’s own press describes the situation as one of ‘full-fledged apartheid’. To accept the Dan David Prize in 2023 is to condone and normalise this situation. Through the Dan David Prize, as the historian Esmat Elhalaby puts it in his compelling open letter, ‘scholars of history are enlisted in a PR project hosted by Tel Aviv University and Israel…to legitimize Israel’s presence on the global stage’. We are appealing to you not to become enlisted in this project, and not to place yourself on the wrong side of history at this crucial juncture.

We would be very happy to meet with you to discuss this further, and in any event we look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Academics for Palestine

As part of the widespread protests against the Israeli government’s plans to reform the judicial system and move Israel’s regime further towards a right-wing dictatorial system, and in specific response to the dismissal of the Minister for Defence by Prime Minister Netanyahu, the heads of Israel’s universities and research institutions decided to suspend classes indefinitely. The decision, according to Prof Daniel Haimovich of Ben Gurion University, was made because ‘we have only one nation, one state and one common future’. This demonstrates that the ‘democracy protests’ are about preserving the status quo of a Jewish state which purports to be a democratic state, but which in fact both discriminates against and excludes Palestinians – generally with the approval of the Supreme Court and the judicial system.

This response by Israel’s academic institutions joins mass protests by senior army officers, high tech industry workers, economists, academics, artists and many other middle class Israelis, and is likely to be followed by a general strike declared by the country’s largest trade union. However, the democracy these protesters are fighting for in impressive rallies throughout Israel, is in fact democracy for Jews only. Even if they were to be successful on their own terms, these demonstrations would not disrupt Israel’s apartheid regime or the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians – a situation that the majority of the Israeli Jewish protesters remain blind to or actively supportive of. While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has now announced a temporary ‘pause’ in the judicial reforms, this has been accompanied by the formation of a new ‘national guard’ under the command of the far-right Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and settler violence and Israeli military incursions in the West Bank continue apace.

Academics for Palestine is aware of the role Israel’s institutions of higher education have played in colonising and occupying Palestine since the establishment of the state. In recent years academics working in Israeli universities and research institutes partook in developing the ‘battle proven’ weapons and security systems which Israel exports worldwide, and have provided special third level courses for military and security industries personnel on Israeli campuses. Only last week Tel Aviv University blocked Palestinian students from having an Arab book fair while at the same time holding a ‘democracy week’ in which very few Palestinian speakers were invited to speak.

Academics for Palestine continues to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and reiterates its full support for Palestinian academics and students living under Israel’s occupation and siege in the West Bank and in Gaza, and for Palestinian citizens of Israel.