December 2023
Over the past two months, people of conscience and organisations in every field around the world have expressed their shared sense of outrage and solidarity in response to the horror that has been unfolding in Palestine. The Israeli military’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip has amounted to the most severe onslaught of violence, death, destruction and displacement of Palestinians since 1948.
Israeli forces killed more civilians within the first 30 days of this war than Russian forces have killed in over 600 days of their brutal war in Ukraine to date. The rate at which Palestinian children, in particular, have been murdered by the Israeli army is beyond comprehension. The UN Secretary-General has highlighted that the level of civilian death is ‘unparalleled and unprecedented’ in the context of modern conflict, and has described Gaza as a ‘graveyard for children’. In two months, Israeli forces killed more than 10,000 Palestinian children according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor – many multiples of the already shocking figure of 560 children killed in the Ukraine war over the past two years. On top of this, many more Palestinian children have been left in the category devastatingly rendered as: ‘wounded child, no surviving family’. Israeli forces have destroyed large parts of the hospital and healthcare system. 80% of the total population of Gaza has been displaced, with no safe place to go. All eleven institutions of higher education in Gaza have been bombed by the Israeli army, and hundreds of university staff and students have been killed. Recent investigative reports have detailed the particularly pernicious use of digital technologies and algorithms in enabling a ‘mass assassination factory’. Israel has effectively imposed a state of permanent war against the population of Gaza ever since it declared the entire territory to be an ‘enemy entity’ in 2007. Israeli officials have now indicated in the context of this current intensification following a temporary ‘pause’ in late November 2023 that they are planning for a ‘long war’ in Gaza over the coming year or more.\
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We know from history that genocide in a settler colonial context is based on a logic of elimination of the native population which unfolds as a process over time, and is not confined to a single event. In the context of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, this process began with ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence against Palestinians in the Nakba of 1948. A constitutionally and institutionally discriminatory apartheid regime was then imposed by the Israeli state, and the violence of domination, colonisation and military occupation proliferated. In 1982, the UN General Assembly declared that an act of genocide was perpetrated against Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Israel’s 2008-09 war on Gaza was found by international fact-finding investigations to have involved the crime against humanity of extermination. Its 2014 war on Gaza was more severe again, and prompted examinations of genocidal discourse and incitement by Israeli officials.
The elements of genocide, however, have been more distinctly visible than ever before in the 2023 war on Gaza. From the outset, Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the already besieged territory, prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water and other essential necessities. We have all seen the catastrophic consequences that followed: starvation, sickness, surgeries being performed without anaesthetic, newborn infants dying in incubators with no power. The dehumanising language and tropes that are typical of genocidal incitement and intent have been deployed across the board by Israeli leaders. Israeli cabinet ministers and senior officials have made clear that they view the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ and that the emphasis of the military onslaught in Gaza ‘is on damage and not on precision’. The utterly harrowing footage of the limbs and corpses of Palestinian men, women and children being pulled out from under the rubble, day after day after day, is what this ‘damage’ looks like.
More than 800 scholars of international law and Holocaust and genocide studies warned from early on that this was genocide unfolding. In an almost unprecedented collective statement, 36 United Nations Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts subsequently came together to declare that Israel’s attacks amount to ‘genocide in the making’. The leaders of states across the world, including Brazil, South Africa and many more, have stated that Israel is perpetrating genocide. Palestinian human rights organisations have submitted evidence and documentation of crimes of genocide committed by Israeli forces to the International Criminal Court. A leading legal organisation in the US has submitted a case to court there accusing President Joe Biden’s administration of aiding and abetting Israeli genocide, and of breaching its duty to prevent genocide. All states indeed have duties under international law to take concrete action to prevent genocide from occurring where the risk of it arises. Somehow, US officials and some western leaders continue to maintain the deceit that Israel is not acting in breach of international law. It is worth recalling a haunting precedent: in June 1994, two months into the Rwanda genocide, the US administration under Bill Clinton was still refusing to describe the situation as genocide, with government spokespeople actively instructed to ‘avoid’ doing so. This type of denial is what again underlies the western world’s failure to act.
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One day after Russia’s war in Ukraine began in February 2022, Maynooth University issued a public statement to make it clear that ‘Maynooth University condemns the invasion of Ukraine’. The University has subsequently engaged in a wide range of activities in support of Ukrainian self-determination, Ukrainian scholars and students, as well as Ukrainian refugees. The University also supported the suspension of all ties with Russian universities.
In contrast to its immediate and unequivocal condemnation of the Russian war in Ukraine and the range of actions initiated, Maynooth University has not to our knowledge undertaken any substantive action in response to the Israeli war on Gaza. The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on 29th November has come and gone, and the University has not condemned Israel’s ongoing invasion, ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence as such. Staff and students, particularly students of colour, have expressed some distress over this. There has been a growing sense that the University considers Palestinians less worthy of solidarity than Ukrainians. At this point, it is hard to avoid the double standards.
In a recent ‘call for justice and humanity’, 15 Palestinian universities from across the West Bank and Gaza came together to urge the international academic community to fulfil its intellectual and academic duty to seek truth and accountability. We would urge Maynooth University to actively and publicly respond to this call, and to take the specific concrete actions that the Palestinian universities have asked international academic institutions to take:
1. Call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, guaranteed by the UN
2. Urge immediate entry into Gaza of sufficient amounts of life-saving humanitarian needs (incl. water, food, fuel, medicine), equitably distributed throughout the whole territory of Gaza Strip.
3. Demand UN protection for the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians trapped under siege in Gaza
4. Issue clear positions rejecting any ethnic cleansing
5. Support in dismantling the settler colonial and apartheid system and achieving a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace.
As a recent letter to The Irish Times signed by almost 1000 Irish(-based) academics emphasised, with genocidal atrocities unfolding there can be no such thing as ‘business as usual’ continuing on the part of our institutions. As things stand, we as staff and students of the university community in Maynooth feel compelled to make our own position clear. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people. As members of the international academic community, we stand in particular solidarity with Palestinian academics whose universities have been destroyed by Israeli bombardment, and with the academic community that has lost so many scholars killed by the Israeli army. This includes world-renowned leaders in their field such as Professor Sufyan Tayeh – UNESCO Chair in Astronomy, Astrophysics & Space Sciences, and President of the Islamic University of Gaza – who was killed on 2 December 2023 by an Israeli attack on a six-floor residential building in which civilians were sheltering. We stand in solidarity with Palestinian students who have been killed, maimed or detained by Israeli forces in Gaza and the West Bank, and with Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli staff and students alike in universities in Israel who are being repressed and disciplined for speaking out against the occupation or the genocide. We support the calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, for full delivery of requisite humanitarian supplies, for protection of Palestinian civilians, and for an end to the military occupation of Palestinian territory. We strongly reject any initiatives that advocate the forced transfer or ethnic cleansing of people from Gaza to other states in the region or beyond, and we support the right of all displaced Palestinians and refugees to return home.
Over the past two months, across our various groupings we have been organising teach-ins, walk-outs, vigils, public readings, fundraisers and other events on campus and online – to learn together, to provide mutual support, to mark and mourn the catastrophe that has been unfolding, to hold space in our hearts for all of those who have borne the brunt of this atrocious war and the longer siege and occupation of which it forms part. We will continue to do so, and to do whatever little we can to support the Palestinian rights to freedom, equality and justice.
Academics for Palestine, Maynooth Branch
Maynooth Students’ Union
Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation, Maynooth
IFUT Maynooth Branch Committee
SIPTU Admin Maynooth
academicsforpalestine.org 