In March 2024, Academics for Palestine and a large number of Irish students’ unions wrote to the executives of higher education institutions – other than the University of Galway, which had already issued a strong statement and commitment to reviewing relationships with Israeli institutions. Our letter, published below, prompted several replies but no further meaningful statements or actions.

Dear President          ,

We write on behalf of Academics for Palestine, a group of academics of diverse backgrounds in or from Ireland who are committed to justice in Palestine, as well as the numerous student union bodies across the country listed below. In our advocacy on Palestine, we are committed to opposing racism in all its forms including Islamophobia and antisemitism. We work to support Palestinian students, academics, scholarship and institutions of higher education, and to support the Palestinian call for boycott and divestment from Israeli institutions that are complicit in Israel’s military occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory. As you may know, all of the leading Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organisations from Al-Haq to B’tselem and Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International are consistent in their analysis that Israel’s long-standing oppression of the Palestinians amounts to an illegal apartheid regime.

You will also be aware that thousands of university staff and students and affiliate campus groups across the country have written to various authorities in their respective higher education institutions over recent months asking them to take more meaningful positions and action in response to Israel’s war on Gaza. We are respectfully urging all HEIs collectively and individually at this point to take a strong and principled position on the situation in Palestine, as was done in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We are sure we do not need to rehearse the details of all of the atrocities perpetrated by the Israeli military in Gaza over the past 5 months. You will have seen the scale of the death, destruction and unbearable human suffering inflicted every day on Gaza and its people. 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’.

Almost the entire population of Gaza has now been displaced and is at imminent risk of enforced starvation and famine. As the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food has written: “To put things into a global perspective, Gazans now make up 80% of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide. Since the Second World War, we have never seen an entire civilian population made to go hungry this completely and quickly”. The Special Rapporteur has concluded that Israel is intentionally starving Palestinians to death as a mode of genocide.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and dozens of other UN experts have also repeatedly described the situation in Gaza since October as an unfolding genocide. The order issued by the International Court of Justice in January judged that it is 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. Israel has only escalated its violations since then.

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”.

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.

The University of Galway has 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. We are respectfully now asking you and all Irish HEIs to individually and collectively commit, as a matter of urgency, to suspending all such ties with Israeli and complicit institutions. 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 elimination of the Palestinian people.

Many thanks and we look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Academics for Palestine
Comhaltas na Mac Léinn Ollscoil na Gaillimhe, University of Galway Students’ Union
DCU Students’ Union
Maynooth Students’ Union
NCAD Students’ Union
TCD Students’ Union
TU Dublin Students’ Union
UCD Students’ Union
UL Postgraduate Students’ Union