Academic Boycott of Israel Grows amid Mounting Pressure over Gaza
The wave of suspensions and cancellations reflects mounting pressure from students, staff, and rights groups, who argue that Israeli universities are not neutral spaces but play a direct role in sustaining the regime’s military apparatus, according to the Guardian.
Campaigners point to research partnerships in fields such as artificial intelligence, surveillance, and weapons technology as evidence of complicity in Israel's genocidal war against the people of Gaza, which, according to a leading genocide scholars’ association, amounts to genocide.
The Israeli regime's 23-month-long war has claimed the lives of more than 64,700 people, most of them women and children, with the true toll likely far higher, according to health officials.
The University of Amsterdam has now declared that it has ended a student exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The European Association of Social Anthropologists also said it will not collaborate with Israeli academic institutions and has encouraged its members to follow suit.
Read More:
However, a few institutions in Britain, France, and Germany have announced they are cutting ties with Israeli academia, with Universities UK (UUK) saying it does not support an academic boycott.
UUK spokesperson said as a representative body, Universities UK does “not endorse blanket academic boycotts, as this would represent an infringement of academic freedom.”
Likewise, the Royal Society has declared that it opposes academic boycotts, despite acknowledging that the Israeli regime’s “approach to Gaza has been hugely disproportionate, harming civilians, including young children, in the thousands.”
Last year, the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil cancelled an innovation summit with an Israeli university, while a host of universities across Norway, Belgium, and Spain have cut ties with Israeli institutions. Others, including Trinity College Dublin, followed suit this summer.
Stephanie Adam of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel said Israeli academic institutions are complicit in “Israel’s decades-long regime of military occupation, settler colonial apartheid and now genocide.”
Read More:
According to him, there is “a moral and legal obligation for universities to end ties with complicit Israeli universities.”
Supporters of the boycott campaign say Israel’s universities are not neutral spaces but deeply tied to the regime’s military-industrial complex, providing research and military technologies used in Gaza.
According to Israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappé, the vast majority of Israeli academics do not refuse to serve in the regime’s military.
“They provide courses and degrees to the secret service, police, and are agencies of the government that are oppressing the Palestinians daily,” he said.
Ghassan Soleiman Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon and a leading advocate of the boycott campaign, believes that “the threat of academic boycott is sufficient to push the Israeli government into ending this genocide.”
He said that students and academics across the UK have pushed for academic boycotts of Israel, but are being blocked by the governing bodies of universities. As a result, he said, researchers are taking unofficial action.
According to Abu-Sittah, "The threat of academic boycott is sufficient to push the Israeli regime into ending this genocide."
Source: Press TV
