17th November 2023
A letter organised by Academics for Palestine and signed by over 600 scholars calling on universities in Ireland to sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions was published in The Irish Times on 4th November 2023. That letter remains open for signature by academics and scholars in or from Ireland via the Academics for Palestine website, and now counts upwards of 900 signatures.
In response, a small number of academics wrote to express their opposition to our call to suspend ties with Israeli institutions, and instead proposed doing nothing.
They emphasised the need for dialogue with Israeli academic colleagues, but it is important to be clear that suspending institutional collaborations and complicity does not stop dialogue between scholars – there are many ways and spaces where those dialogues can and do continue to happen.
The responses to our letter also highlighted the need to stand with critical and dissenting scholars in Israeli universities. Those making that call are very welcome to join Academics for Palestine in the work that we are actively continuing to do on this front – such as intervening in defence of scholars like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Nurit Peled-Elhanan who have been suspended or threatened with dismissal by their own universities in Israel for voicing anti-war or anti-genocide positions.
The reality is that while plenty of individual scholars in Israel may not support the occupation or the siege of Gaza, at an institutional level their universities do – in a whole variety of ways. Israeli universities have joint projects with arms and weapons companies. They are heavily involved in the research and development of Israeli military security and surveillance technologies. They train personnel, advisors and lawyers for an army that has now bombed all 11 of Gaza’s universities and killed thousands of students. They hold the corpses of some Palestinians killed by occupation forces at their campus facilities. They are in some cases physically built on illegally expropriated lands in occupied Palestinian territory. And at this moment in time they are heavily engaged in the repression of Gaza solidarity positions adopted by Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian staff and students alike.
So yes, dialogue is important, but entrenched military occupation, colonisation and siege won’t be ended by dialogue between scholars. It will require a whole range of international sanctions and pressure to support the Palestinian movements for freedom and equality. An institutional academic boycott is the one small but concrete step that we as scholars and university communities can take in that direction, and is the one thing our Palestinian colleagues have asked of us. Those who continue to object to it (especially now as the Palestinian death toll continues to mount and the effects of mass displacement and collective punishment get worse by the day) seem scarcely different from those who opposed the boycott of apartheid South Africa for its duration, before later trying to claim they had supported it all along.
academicsforpalestine.org 