Academics for Palestine is supporting the national day of action organised by university staff and students on campuses across the island on 17 April 2024. We endorse the demands being made as part of this initiative on all third-level institutions, on the Department of Further Education, Research, Innovation & Science and the Higher Education Authority in the south, and on the Department of the Economy in the north. This includes urgent calls for a review of all ties with Israeli universities, cultural institutions and the Israeli industrial sector, as well as for divestment from any holdings in companies associated with arms manufacture and for the implementation of a sector-wide BDS policy to boycott and divest from companies involved in violations of Palestinian rights. The day of action also includes calls for material support to be given by Irish institutions to Palestinian scholars, students and universities.

In February 2024, the University of Galway commendably committed to “review our university’s relationship with Israeli institutions”. This is the minimum first step that every institution of higher education should be taking with a view to immediately conducting such a review and enacting measures to suspend all ties with Israeli institutions and any other complicit organisations, companies, suppliers and investments. As universities and institutions of education, this is both the very least and the most concrete thing we can do towards ending the systematic oppression and extermination of the Palestinian people.

We recall that in early November 2023, a letter from more than 600 scholars to The Irish Times (subsequently rising to almost 1,000 signatures on the Academics for Palestine website) had condemned the Israeli state’s onslaught in Gaza which was already clearly showing itself to be genocidal at that point. This letter included “a call on all universities in Ireland to immediately sever any existing institutional partnerships or affiliations with Israeli institutions”.

The order issued by the International Court of Justice in January 2024 judged that it is indeed plausible that the Israeli state is perpetrating genocide. The ICJ ordered Israel to immediately cease and desist from doing so, and to prevent any further acts of genocide by its military in Gaza.  All states have a legal responsibility to prevent genocide when it is occurring or at risk of occurring. After the ICJ order was issued, leading genocide and Holocaust studies scholar Raz Segal wrote: “With the ICJ ruling that Israel’s attack on Gaza is plausibly genocidal, every university, company and state around the world will now need to consider very carefully its engagement with Israel and its institutions. Such ties may now constitute complicity with genocide”.

In early March 2024, Academics for Palestine and a range of students’ union groups wrote to the heads of the other 21 higher education institutions (HEIs) across Ireland, north and south, respectfully now asking them to individually and collectively commit, as a matter of urgency, to suspending all such ties with Israeli and complicit institutions. To date, we have received responses from only two institutions, which have mirrored some previous university management statements and internal communiques in their inadequacy – hiding behind contrived positions of “neutrality”, misleadingly invoking academic freedom as grounds for inaction, and avoiding the substance of our request. To be clear, it is not legally or morally defensible to be “neutral” on the matter of genocide or systematic war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law.

Prior and in parallel to this request from Academics of Palestine, over recent months thousands of university staff and students and affiliate campus groups across the country have written to various authorities in their respective higher education institutions asking them to take more meaningful positions and action in response to Israel’s war on Gaza. We continue to respectfully urge all HEIs collectively and individually to take a strong and principled position on the situation in Palestine, as was done in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We do not need to rehearse the details of all the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military in Gaza over the past 6 months. The scale of the death, destruction and unbearable human suffering inflicted every day on Gaza and its people are unprecedented in too many ways. Palestinians have been killed at a higher rate than any other modern conflict, and even more so when it comes to the number of children killed. In the words of the UN Secretary-General, Israel has turned Gaza into ‘a graveyard for children’.

In our own field of higher education, every university campus in Gaza has now been partially or totally destroyed by Israel’s bombardment from the air and controlled demolitions from the ground. The extent of this destruction and the devastating number of university professors, scholars and students killed has led to experts and UN officials describing this element of Israel’s onslaught as ‘scholasticide’ or ‘educide’.

Since the ICJ’s original order in January, as well as the UN Security Council ceasefire resolution and the additional measures ordered by the ICJ in March 2023, Israel has only continued its direct violence and massacres, as well as escalating its measures designed to force Palestinians into starvation. Almost the entire population of Gaza has now been displaced and is at risk of enforced starvation and famine. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food has put it, “since the Second World War, we have never seen an entire civilian population made to go hungry this completely and quickly”. The Special Rapporteur concluded that Israel has been intentionally starving Palestinians to death as a mode of genocide.

Palestine is a defining moral issue of our time. Universities are public institutions that play a leading role in society and public life. This comes with ethical and intellectual duties to pursue truth and knowledge and to stand, speak and act for justice and freedom. At the absolute minimum, this means ensuring that our universities are in no way complicit or associated with apartheid and genocide. Universities around the world, from Norway to California, have actively begun to cut ties with Israeli institutions and divest from complicit companies. This trend will only continue to spread, as it did in the global campaign against apartheid in South Africa. And as was the case with the anti-apartheid movement, because of Ireland’s own particular history and understanding of colonial oppression, the Irish state, public institutions, trade unions and civil society can and must play a distinct and leading role in this regard.