01.02.24
Editorial Note
On January 24, the International Day of Education is observed annually to honor education. The United Nations General Assembly voted on it on December 3, 2018. The aim is to celebrate the role of education in bringing global peace and sustainable development. The first celebration on January 24, 2019, included a message showcasing the occasion and promising results in the “betterment of an educated individual that constitute a cultured society, which is supported with optimism and opportunities.”
According to the UN website, “Learning for peace must be a transformative process, enabling learners to gain essential knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and behaviors, thereby empowering them to serve as catalysts for peace in their communities. The foundation of more peaceful, just, and sustainable societies is laid through education, a force that permeates every facet of our daily lives and overall prospects. In the face of escalating climate change, democratic erosion, persistent inequalities, growing discrimination, hate speech, violence, and conflict on a global scale, education emerges as a powerful tool to both address and prevent these challenges in the future. Moreover, when effectively shaped and implemented, education becomes a long-term investment with increasing returns. An active commitment to peace is more urgent today than ever: Education is central to this endeavor.”
On the current International Day of Education, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) published a letter addressing the academic community. It stated that as part of its Gaza Genocide, “Israel is targeting Palestinian education. Israeli universities are complicit.” That the Palestinian call to boycott complicit Israeli universities is more urgent than ever because “Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 94 Palestinian scholars in air raids on their homes, including Islamic University president Prof. Sufyan Tayeh and Prof. Refaat Alareer, poet and founder of We Are Not Numbers, in addition to 231 teachers and 4,327 students, with more among the missing. Israel has destroyed ALL Palestinian universities in Gaza, including by placing explosives in empty campuses meant to flatten them, and after some had been occupied and used as military bases and detention centers. It has completely or partially destroyed 346 schools. Israel’s attacks on Palestinian education as part of its genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza.”
According to PACBI, fifteen major Palestinian universities stated that “Israeli universities, complicit in human rights violations, should face international isolation” and called the international academic community to urge for a ceasefire and work to “dismantle Israel’s settler colonial and apartheid system.” Israeli universities have a “long history of actively supporting Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid. They are now supporting genocide.”
For PACBI, Tel Aviv University is complicit in genocide because it has instituted a hasbara (propaganda) course on Israel’s Gaza Genocide; It “bragged about having helped ‘make’ Israel’s propaganda-ridden case before the International Court of Justice; and it “crowdfunded for ‘care’ packages for soldiers committing genocide in Gaza.”
The Hebrew University is complicit in genocide because it provides “diverse logistics equipment to several military units.” It instituted an “Enhanced Financial Package” for student soldiers committing the “Gaza Genocide,” in addition to academic benefits.
The Technion is complicit in genocide, according to PACBI, because it created an AI-driven “army of robots to massively increase the impact of pro-Israel efforts on social media,” pushing “Israeli propaganda whitewashing its genocide and repressing speech on Palestinian rights.”
PACBI states “We urge universities, scholars, unions, departments, and associations to call for #CeasefireNow and an end to Israel’s #GazaGenocide, and to work to end institutional ties with complicit Israeli universities.”
To advance its goals, PACBI recruits non-Palestinians who help spread its messages. Dr. Nicola Perugini wrote in an article, “On International Education Day, we must urge our universities to break their silence by rescinding institutional collaborations with Israeli schools.” Perugini’s article begins by explaining that “On October 11, the Israeli Air Force proudly released a video of its attack against the Islamic University of Gaza, the area’s oldest higher education institution, created in 1978. The Bombardment resulted in the destruction of four of the buildings on campus and extensive damage to university equipment, laboratories and furniture. The message was clear from the beginning of Israel’s attack on Gaza: Palestinian education institutions must be destroyed. On this International Education Day, we should think about tangible measures and actions we must take to counter Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian education system–an aggression without precedent in the history of the region. At the beginning of November, air attacks targeted Al Azhar University, the second largest university in Gaza, followed by the destruction of Al Quds University later that month. Israel Justified these attacks by saying they were in response to the alleged use of civilian infrastructures by Palestinian armed groups to shield ‘military training camps.’ This is an excuse it has used without supporting evidence… But since the beginning of December, the shielding lie about the education sector was further exposed. In fact, Israeli ground troops started occupying and using Palestinian university buildings as military positions, before filling them with hundreds of mines and carrying out controlled detonations of the universities in front of cameras. There was no military threat emerging from the buildings, thus the army’s intent was pure elimination for the sake of elimination.”
He then repeats his call for an academic boycott of Israel. “At the individual and academic institutional level, we should honor the call of our Palestinian colleagues for a full academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions by intensifying existing boycott efforts.”
Perugini is teaching International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Interestingly, the University of Edinburgh student organization Middle East and North Africa Society (MENA) officially announced on August 21, 2023, a sponsorship agreement with the Qatar Embassy in London. This alliance “stands as an emblem of mutual commitment to enhance understanding and respect for the multifaceted cultures, histories, and dynamics of the MENA region. Expanding Horizons: With the generous platinum sponsorship from the Embassy, MENA is poised to upscale its initiatives, ranging from larger events, and diverse community engagements, to deeper academic outreach… As MENA Society progresses, its primary focus will be on intensifying efforts to spotlight Arab Heritage.” As IAM noted before, such student groups often run anti-Israel activities.
As can be seen, Perugini ignores Hamas’ atrocities and the tunnels under Gaza. His scholarship is based mainly on writing against Israel, as his research interest reveals: “He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015), Morbid Symptoms (Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017), and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020). Perugini has published articles on war and the ethics of violence; the politics of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law; humanitarianism’s visual cultures; war and embedded anthropology; refugees and asylum seekers; law, space and colonialism; settler-colonialism. Nicola is currently working on three research projects. The first, ‘Decolonizing the Civilian,’ examines decolonization and national liberation wars, international law, and the status of civilians in armed conflicts. The second is an exploration of the global history of the University of Edinburgh during the mandate of one of his imperial chancellors, Arthur James Balfour… He has taught at the American University of Rome, the Al Quds Bard College in Jerusalem where he also directed the Human Rights Program, Brown University, and the University of Bologna. He has served as consultant for UNESCO and UN Women. His opinion pieces have appeared in Al Jazeera English, London Review of Books, Newsweek, Internazionale, The Nation, the Huffington Post, The Conversation, Just Security, Open Democracy, Counterpunch, The Herald, The National, Jadaliyya, +972 Magazine, e-flux.”
The propaganda unleashed on the UN-sponsored International Day of Education should not be surprising. It is one more example of how pro-Palestinian networks penetrated international organizations, including human rights, women, and education groups. Of course, universities, where the neo-Marxist critical paradigm dominates the social sciences, have been at the forefront of this process. Instead of providing a forum for airing multiple points of view, they resemble a religion where only the official dogma is permitted. And, as IAM repeatedly pointed out, according to this dogma, Israel is cast as an oppressor and the Palestinians as the eternal victims of the Jewish state. According to this narrative, Israel cannot do anything right, and the Palestinians cannot do anything wrong. The power of the dogma is so strong that none of the detractors of Israel could find enough decency to condemn the most horrific attack on the Jews since the Holocaust. They could not even criticize Hamas for its brutal control over the Palestinian population that turned them into human shields. As widely known, the Fourth Geneva Convention makes it illegal for militants to embed among the civilian population.
The International Day of Education, as inaugurated by the UN, should not be used by anti-Israel groups to spread antisemitic and anti-Israel tropes.
REFERENCES:
https://bdsmovement.net/news/killing-learning-israels-attacks-palestinian-education
“The Killing Learning.” Israel’s Attacks on Palestinian Education.
January 24, 2024
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
Today, on International Education Day, we remind the academic community that as part of its #GazaGenocide, Israel is targeting Palestinian education.
Israeli universities are complicit.
The Palestinian call to boycott complicit Israeli universities is more urgent than ever.
Israel has deliberately targeted and killed 94 Palestinian scholars in air raids on their homes, including Islamic University president Prof. Sufyan Tayeh and Prof. Refaat Alareer, poet and founder of We Are Not Numbers, in addition to 231 teachers and 4,327 students, with more among the missing.
Israel has destroyed ALL Palestinian universities in Gaza, including by placing explosives in empty campuses meant to flatten them, and after some had been occupied and used as military bases and detention centers.
It has completely or partially destroyed 346 schools.
Israel’s attacks on Palestinian education as part of its genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza has been defined as the crime of “educaricide,” or “killing of learning,” by UN Special Rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal.
15 major Palestinian universities stated that “Israeli universities, complicit in human rights violations, should face international isolation,” calling on the international academic community to urge #CeasefireNow and work to dismantle Israel’s settler colonial and apartheid system.
Israeli universities have a long history of actively supporting Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid.
They are now supporting genocide.
Tel Aviv University has:
- instituted a hasbara (propaganda) course on Israel’s #GazaGenocide;
- bragged about having helped “make” Israel’s propaganda-ridden case before the International Court of Justice;
- crowdfunded for “care” packages for soldiers committing genocide in Gaza.
Hebrew University boasts of providing “diverse logistics equipment to several military units.”
As most Israeli universities, Hebrew University also immediately instituted an “Enhanced Financial Package” for student soldiers committing Israel’s #GazaGenocide, in addition to academic benefits.
Technion boasts of a student who enlisted professors and alumni to create an AI-driven “army of robots to massively increase the impact of pro-Israel efforts on social media,” pushing Israeli propaganda whitewashing its genocide and repressing speech on Palestinian rights.
The time for the global academic community to act is now.
We urge universities, scholars, unions, departments, and associations to call for #CeasefireNow and an end to Israel’s #GazaGenocide, and to work to end institutional ties with complicit Israeli universities.
If not now, when?
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Gaza’s education system is suffering. Impose an academic boycott on Israel
On International Education Day, we must urge our universities to break their silence by rescinding institutional collaborations with Israeli schools, argues one academic.
NICOLA PERUGINI
24.01.2024
On October 11, the Israeli Air Force proudly released a video of its attack against the Islamic University of Gaza, the area’s oldest higher education institution, created in 1978.
The bombardment resulted in the destruction of four of the buildings on campus and extensive damage to university equipment, laboratories and furniture. The message was clear from the beginning of Israel’s attack on Gaza: Palestinian education institutions must be destroyed.
On this International Education Day, we should think about tangible measures and actions we must take to counter Israel’s aggression against the Palestinian education system–an aggression without precedent in the history of the region.
At the beginning of November, air attacks targeted Al Azhar University, the second largest university in Gaza, followed by the destruction of Al Quds University later that month.
Israel justified these attacks by saying they were in response to the alleged use of civilian infrastructures by Palestinian armed groups to shield “military training camps.” This is an excuse it has used without supporting evidence to also legitimise the devastation of hospitals, schools, civilian buildings, and other infrastructure in Gaza.
But since the beginning of December, theshielding lie about the education sector was further exposed. In fact, Israeli ground troops started occupying and using Palestinian university buildings as military positions, before filling them with hundreds of mines and carrying out controlled detonations of the universities in front of cameras.
There was no military threat emerging from the buildings, thus the army’s intent was pure elimination for the sake of elimination.
Israeli soldiers would then share the videos of themselves committing these crimes and pulverising Palestinian higher education infrastructures online.
For example, the case of the Faculty of Medicine at the Islamic University in December, and more recently the destruction of Israa University in Gaza City. The building of Israa, which also hosted 3,000 rare artefacts that were looted by Israeli soldiers, was used as an interrogation and sniping centre to target civilians in the adjacent areas, before being blown up.
The systematic destruction of Palestinian education centres (a process Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi has called “scholasticide“) and the attacks on Palestinian spaces of knowledge and culture production and circulation (what scholars call “epistemicide”) is a structural feature of Israel’s regime of settler colonial dispossession.
In the occupied West Bank, Israel has been repressing Palestinian education and attacking students, educational personnel, schools and universities for decades. Schools, universities, students and personnel in Gaza have also been subjected to the same treatment until the 2005 “disengagement,” to be then bombarded in all the rounds of Israeli aggression which followed the beginning of the siege of Gaza in 2007.
However, these most recent attacks have passed the threshold of imagination. Thefigures are horrifying. According to Euro Med Human Rights Monitor and the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education, 94 academics, 4,327 students, 231 teachers and administrators have been killed since Oct. 7.
All university buildings in Gaza have been completely or partially destroyed. Some 281-run public schools and 65 United Nations schools have been completely destroyed or damaged. In other words, the Palestinian space of education in Gaza has been obliterated, to such an extent that when the genocide will be over, there will not be an education system to return to.
In an open call, Palestinian academics haveinvited their colleagues abroad to take action against the genocide and the destruction of education institutions.
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Since October, Israeli academic institutions have suppressed academic freedom and freedom of speech by suspending, investigating and expelling students for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.
But how has Israeli academia responded to the extermination of their colleagues and the unprecedented destruction of education infrastructures? So far, we have not heard any institutional condemnation of Palestinian scholasticide and epistemicide.
On the contrary, this deafening silence has been accompanied by systematic attackswithin Israeli academic institutions, mainly against Palestinian students and staff, but also against internal Jewish Israeli dissenters, for their solidarity with Gaza.
The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) has reported how since the beginning of the attacks in October, Israeli academic institutions have suppressed academic freedom and freedom of speech by suspending, investigating and expelling students for expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.
In addition, Hebrew University has issued a public letter potentially inciting verbal and physical violence against Nadera Shalhoub-Kovorkian, a Palestinian professor who signed a petition in support of a ceasefire in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the David Yellin Academic College suspended Nurit Peled Elhanan, a Jewish professor and Sakharov Prize laureate, for criticising a comparison between Hamas and the Nazis in a colleagues’ Whatsapp chat.
This picture is part of a historical trend of complicity of Israeli academic institutions with the repression and dispossession of Palestinians, both within Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Universities in Israel collaborate on the development of weapons, military doctrines and ideological discourses which facilitate and normalise the settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
Just to mention a recent example closely related to ongoing events in Gaza, Joel Roskin, a geographer at the Hebrew University and a “geolocation expert” who works with the Israeli military, penned an opinion article in the Jerusalem Post advocating for the depopulation of Gaza and the expulsion of Palestinians to Sinai as a “humanitarian solution.”
One of his colleagues, Meir Masri, who according to his Twitter bio teaches politics and international relations at Hebrew University, recently posted that Gaza must be destroyed and “razed to the ground.”
This is really an unprecedented situation in which we have to understand that the epistemicide and scholasticide in Gaza are not a metaphor. They are part of the destruction of Palestinian collective life and they are ultimately genocidal acts which require our immediate action and mobilisation.
So what can be done?
At the international institutional level, UNESCO should honour this International Education Day by taking concrete measures to protect the human right to education of Palestinian students and staff, and more broadly the existence of the Palestinian education sector which is under existential threat in Gaza.
It should also immediately exclude Israel from its member states. This step was indeed taken by UNESCO’s regional groups in 1974, in the same year in which the organisation issued the “Recommendation concerning Education for International Understanding, Cooperation and Peace and Education relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms,” a key document that inspirestoday’s celebrations. However, it was rescinded a few years later.
At the individual and academic institutional level, we should honour the call of our Palestinian colleagues for a full academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions by intensifying existing boycott efforts.
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We have to act immediately as responsible colleagues who care for those who are being eliminated with their education system, in Israel’s settler colonial effort to erase the conditions of possibility of transmission of Palestinian culture, memory and presence in Gaza.
This is the only concrete tool we have to act immediately as responsible colleagues who care for those who are being eliminated with their education system, in Israel’s settler colonial effort to erase the conditions of possibility of transmission of Palestinian culture, memory and presence in Gaza.
We should ask our universities to break the silence and terminate all forms of complicity with what is going on in Gaza by rescinding their institutional collaborations with Israeli universities and their investments in companies complicit with Israel’s regime of dispossession.
We should organise and ask our academic associations, societies and unions to vote for a boycott and join the many national and international associations and societies which have decided to suspend their relationship with Israel’s universities. The boycott is institutional and is not directed towards individuals, and signifies a concrete commitment to anti-racism, anticolonialism and the human rights of our Palestinian colleagues.
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Nicola Perugini is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (2015) and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire (2020).
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Posted On: 29 August 2023 07:17 pm
Updated On: 30 August 2023 01:50 pm
Sponsorship agreement signed between The University of Edinburgh MENA Society & The Embassy of the State of Qatar
The University of Edinburgh Middle East and North Africa Society (MENA), a leading student organization has officially announced a sponsorship agreement with the Embassy of the State of Qatar in London.
This historic partnership, officiated on 21 August 2023, is a testament to the efforts of H.E Ambassador Fahad bin Mohammed Al-Attiyah, and the MENA Society’s President, Hamad Essa Al-Tamimi. The Embassy of the State of Qatar will now be recognized as a platinum sponsor from 1 September 2023 to 1 June 2024.
Sponsorship Highlights:
Joint Endeavour: This alliance stands as an emblem of mutual commitment to enhance understanding and respect for the multifaceted cultures, histories, and dynamics of the MENA region.
Expanding Horizons: With the generous platinum sponsorship from the Embassy, MENA is poised to upscale its initiatives, ranging from larger events, and diverse community engagements, to deeper academic outreach.
The Road Ahead: As MENA Society progresses, its primary focus will be on intensifying efforts to spotlight Arab Heritage. Beyond the parameters of this sponsorship, the society is committed to undertaking pragmatic steps: hosting educational programs, partnering with local community leaders, and curating events.
“Collaborating with the Embassy of the State of Qatar, especially under the guidance of H.E Ambassador Fahad bin Mohammed Al-Attiyah, has been an illuminating experience. This partnership amplifies our society’s commitment to, it gifts MENA communities a prominent spotlight—a much-deserved platform that allows them to truly showcase who we are. The importance of sharing culture and heritage cannot be understated; it’s the bridge that connects generations and binds communities. In this grand tapestry of traditions and narratives, the MENA Society proudly positions itself as the ‘House of Culture’—an epicentre where the essence of the MENA region thrives and resonates.”
israel-academia-monitor.com 