On January 15, 2024, educator and researcher Manolo De Los Santos spoke at The People’s Forum in NYC and said, “When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”
De Los Santos is a “popular educator” from the Caribbean, committed to “radical transformation of the world at the hands of the poor and oppressed. Versed in the histories of struggle and methodologies of education, Manolo seeks to engage a new generation of visionaries and fighters.” He is working toward “building international networks of people’s movements and organizations. In 2018, he became the founding director of the People’s Forum in New York City, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He is also a researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.”
The Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is headed by the prominent American-Indian Marxist Vijay Prashad. In a talk at the People’s Forum NYC in 2021, Prashad said, “I’m a Marxist. I’m a Communist. I believe in women’s emancipation. I believe in gay rights. I believe in everything good, decent, and sensitive in the world.” Between 1996 and 2017, he served as a professor of international relations at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. During this period, Prashad became a leading activist in the BDS movement. He is also a member of the advisory board of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
De Los Santos and Prashad follow the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who urged intellectuals and academics to become “organic” or “new” intellectuals, that are close to the experience of the working classes: “Gramsci notes, [the new intellectual] is the person who is devoted to working to alleviate the grievances of the people, elaborate popular consciousness, push the suffocating narrowness of thought outwards, and make more and more space for popular struggles to sustain themselves and win. Our intellectual production aspires to meet Gramsci’s standard.”
To pursue “Gramsci’s standards,” these activists are “archiving and analyzing the histories of national liberation and elaborating and promoting the advances made by the range of theories of national liberation Marxism.” It means that the “popular consciousness” now includes an aggressive focus on the victims of colonialism, as well as capitalism. In the eyes of the neo-Marxists, the Palestinians are the ultimate victim of colonialism, capitalism and other assorted Western transgressions against Third World populations. Their alleged victimhood gives them a place of prominence in planning “global transformative change.” For instance, De Los Santos pushed this theme as part of the “Mapping Visions for Transformative Change,” of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
It is well known that claiming that Israel is a product of a conspiracy of colonialists, capitalists, and imperialists is antisemitic because it denies Jewish rights to their ancestral land. The BDS, a global effort to destroy Israel through sanctions, is equally antisemitic. However, the story of Prashad and De Los Santos illustrates how difficult it is to fight the insidious academic antisemitism that masquerades as free speech. De Los Santos openly talks about destroying Israel and Parshad was hired by Trinity College despite his BDS activist background.
The irony is that the founders of the BDS movement originate from Muslim and Arab countries, where Marxist ideals such as rights for laborers, women, and LGBTQ are not respected.
Antisemitic and anti-Israel ideas are propagated on Western campuses, often dressed in fancy Marxist or neo-Marxist jargon. Those are disseminated into the community and media using the Gramsci protocols. Without a proper challenge, anti-Israeli sentiments that have been growing exponentially after October 7 would not be vanquished.
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“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”
“When we finally deal that final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”
-Manolo De Los Santos speaking at The People’s Forum in NYC.
The Social Justice Portal Project is a project of the Social Justice Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Participants
Manolo de los Santos, Founding Director, The People’s Forum: Manolo is a popular educator and organizer from the Caribbean. He is committed to the radical transformation of the world at the hands of the poor and oppressed. Versed in the histories of struggle and methodologies of education, Manolo seeks to engage a new generation of visionaries and fighters.For 10 years, he worked in the organization of solidarity and education programs to challenge the United States’ regime of illegal sanctions and blockades. Based out of Cuba for many years, Manolo has worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations. In 2018, he became the founding director of the People’s Forum in New York City, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
On 26 January, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it is ‘plausible’ that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The ICJ called upon Israel to ‘take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts’ that violate the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). Although the ICJ did not call explicitly for a ceasefire (as it did in 2022 when it ordered Russia to ‘suspend [its] military operation’ in Ukraine), even a casual reading of this order shows that to comply with the court’s ruling, Israel must end its assault on Gaza. As part of its ‘provisional measures’, the ICJ called upon Israel to respond to the court within a month and outline how it has implemented the order.
Though Israel has already rejected the ICJ’s findings, international pressure on Tel Aviv is mounting. Algeria has asked the UN Security Council to enforce the ICJ’s order while Indonesia and Slovenia have initiated separate proceedings at the ICJ that will begin on 19 February to seek an advisory opinion on Israel’s control of and policies on occupied Palestinian territories, pursuant to a UN General Assembly resolution adopted in December 2022. In addition, Chile and Mexico have called upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate crimes committed in Gaza.
Israel’s reaction to the ICJ’s order was characteristically dismissive. The country’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, called the ICJ an ‘antisemitic court’ and claimed that it ‘does not seek justice, but rather the persecution of Jewish people’. Strangely, Ben Gvir accused the ICJ of being ‘silent during the Holocaust’. The Holocaust conducted by the Nazi German regime and its allies against European Jews, the Romani, homosexuals, and communists took place between late 1941 and May 1945, when the Soviet Red Army liberated prisoners from Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, and Stutthof. However, the ICJ was established in June 1945, one month after the Holocaust ended, and began its work in April 1946. Israel’s attempt to delegitimise the ICJ by saying that it remained ‘silent during the Holocaust’ when it was, in fact, not yet in existence, and then to use that false statement to call the ICJ an ‘antisemitic court’ shows that Israel has no answer to the merits of the ICJ order.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), Gaza (detail), 2024.
Meanwhile, the bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza continues. My friend Na’eem Jeenah, director of the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, has been reviewing the data from various government ministries in Gaza as well as media reports to circulate a daily information card on the situation. The card from 26 January, the date of the ICJ order and the 112th day of the genocide, details that over 26,000 Palestinians, at least 11,000 of them children, have been killed since 7 October; 8,000 are missing; close to 69,000 have been injured; and almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced. The numbers are bewildering. During this period, Israel has damaged 394 schools and colleges, destroying 99 of them as well as 30 hospitals and killing at least 337 medical personnel. This is the reality that occasioned the genocide case at the ICJ and the court’s provisional measures, with one judge, Dalveer Bhandari of India, going further to say plainly that ‘all fighting and hostilities [must] come to an immediate halt’.
Amongst the dead are many of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors. One of the striking features of Palestinian life over the past 76 years since the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of 1948 has been the ongoing richness of Palestinian cultural production. A brisk walk down any of the streets of Jenin or Gaza City reveals the ubiquity of studios and galleries, places where Palestinians insist upon their right to dream. In late 1974, the South African militant and artist Barry Vincent Feinberg published an article in the Afro-Asian journal Lotus that opens with an interaction in London between Feinberg and a ‘young Palestinian poet’. Feinberg was curious why, in Lotus, ‘an unusually large number of poems stem from Palestinian poets’. The young poet, amused by Feinberg’s observation, replied: ‘The only thing my people have never been denied is the right to dream’.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), Gaza (detail), 2024.
Malak Mattar, born in December 1999, is a young Palestinian artist who refuses to stop dreaming. Malak was fourteen when Israel conducted its Operation Protective Edge (2014) in Gaza, killing over two thousand Palestinian civilians in just over one month – a ghastly toll that built upon the bombardment of the Occupied Palestinian Territory that has been ongoing for more than a generation. Malak’s mother urged her to paint as an antidote to the trauma of the occupation. Malak’s parents are both refugees: her father is from al-Jorah (now called Ashkelon) and her mother is from al-Batani al-Sharqi, one of the Palestinian villages along the edge of what is now called the Gaza Strip. On 25 November 1948, the newly formed Israeli government passed Order Number 40, which authorised Israeli troops to expel Palestinians from villages such as al-Batani al-Sharqi. ‘Your role is to expel the Arab refugees from these villages and prevent their return by destroying the villages… Burn the villages and demolish the stone houses’, wrote the Israeli commanders.
Malak’s parents carry these memories, but despite the ongoing occupation and war, they try to endow their children with dreams and hope. Malak picked up a paint brush and began to envision a luminous world of bright colours and Palestinian imagery, including the symbol of sumud (‘steadfastness’): the olive tree. Since she was a teenager, Malak has painted young girls and women, often with babies and doves, though, as she told the writer Indlieb Farazi Saber, the women’s heads are often titled to the side. That is because, she said, ‘If you stand straight, upright, it shows you are stable, but with a head tilted to one side, it evokes a feeling of being broken, a weakness. We are humans, living through wars, through brutal moments… the endurance sometimes slips’.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), Two Gazan Girls Dreaming of Peace, 2020.
Malak and I have corresponded throughout this violence, her fears manifest, her strength remarkable. In January, she wrote, ‘I’m working on a massive painting depicting many aspects of the genocide’. On a five-metre canvas, Malak created a work of art that began to resemble Pablo Picasso’s celebrated Guernica (1937), which he painted to commemorate a massacre by fascist Spain against a town in the Basque region. In 2022, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) published a profile on Malak, calling her ‘Palestine’s Picasso’. In the article, Malak said, ‘I was so inspired by Picasso that, in the beginning of my art journey, I tried to paint like him’. This new painting by Malak reflects the heartbreak and steadfastness of the Palestinian people. It is an indictment of Israel’s genocide and an affirmation of Palestinians’ right to dream. If you look at it closely, you will see the victims of the genocide: the medical workers, the journalists, and the poets; the mosques and the churches; the unburied bodies, the naked prisoners, and the corpses of small children; the bombed cars and the fleeing refugees. There is a kite flying in the sky, a symbol from Refaat Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’ (‘you must live to tell my story… so that a child, somewhere in Gaza while looking heaven in the eye… sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above and thinks there is an angel there bringing back love’).
Zulfa al-Sa’di (Palestine), King Faysal I of Iraq, 1931.
Malak’s work is rooted in Palestinian traditions of painting, inspired by a history that dates back to Arab Christian iconography (a tradition that was developed by Yusuf al-Halabi of Aleppo in the seventeenth century). That ‘Aleppo Style’, as the art critic Kamal Boullata wrote in Istihdar al-Makan, developed into the ‘Jerusalem Style’, which brightened the iconography by introducing flora and fauna from Islamic miniatures and embroidery. When I first saw Malak’s work, I thought of how fitting it was that she had redeemed the life of Zulfa al-Sa’di (1905–1988), one of the most important painters of her time, who painted Palestinian political and cultural heroes. Al-Sa’di stopped painting after she was forced to flee Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba; her only paintings that remain are those that she carried with her on horseback. Sa’di spent the rest of her life teaching art to Palestinian children at an UNRWA school in Damascus. It was in one such UNRWA school that Malak learned to paint. Malak seemed to pick up al-Sa’di’s brushes and paint for her.
It is no surprise that Israel has targeted UNRWA, successfully encouraging several key Global North governments to stop funding the agency, which was established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 in 1949 to ‘carry out direct relief and works programmes for Palestine refugees’. In any given year, half a million Palestinian children like Malak study at UNRWA schools. Raja Khalidi, director-general of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS), says of this funding suspension: ‘Given the long-standing precarious nature of UNRWA’s finances… and in light of its essential role in providing vital services to Palestine refugees and some 1.8 million displaced persons in Gaza, cutting its funding at such a moment heightens the threat to life against Palestinians already at risk of genocide’.
I encourage you to circulate Malak’s mural, to recreate it on walls and public spaces across the world. Let it penetrate into the souls of those who refuse to see the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international institute guided by popular movements and organisations. We seek to bridge academic production and political and social movements in order to promote critical thinking and stimulate debates and research with an emancipatory perspective that serves the people’s aspirations.
What We Do
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, our work is about building knowledge from the experience of social and cultural transformations wrought by popular struggles. The main epistemological basis for such an approach to knowledge is derived from Karl Marx’s ‘11th Thesis on Feuerbach’: ‘philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. Our understanding of this axiom is that those who are trying to change the world have a sharp assessment of its contradictions, vulnerabilities, and possibilities. The movements and struggles for social transformation teach immense lessons about the character of power, privilege, and property and about the possibility of building a different kind of world.
One of our key concepts, derived from Antonio Gramsci, is that of the ‘new intellectual’, which refers to organic intellectuals of working people who observe the conditions of their class, interpret them against the ruling ideas, and produce a radical understanding of the world. Their views emerge but might dissipate unless they are rooted in a social or political movement, preferably in a political party of some kind. Gramsci calls these intellectuals the new intellectuals: those who throw themselves into ‘active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent persuader”’. The ‘permanent persuader’, or new intellectual, Gramsci notes, is the person who is devoted to working to alleviate the grievances of the people, elaborate popular consciousness, push the suffocating narrowness of thought outwards, and make more and more space for popular struggles to sustain themselves and win. Our intellectual production aspires to meet Gramsci’s standard.
Two phrases capture the essence of our work: to bridge gaps and to amplify voices. We struggle to bridge the gaps between movements and intellectual institutions and to bridge the gaps between movements spread out across the planet. We amplify the voices of the new intellectuals who lead these movements and work to elaborate the movements’ theories. As part of the work of amplifying voices, we seek to reclaim our histories of socialism and national liberation.
Publications
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produces a weekly newsletter, monthly dossier, and various studies and other periodic publications.
Our work is rooted in the principle of hope: we believe that we do not have the right to be pessimistic. Our work is rooted in both a theory of exploitation and the reality of class struggle, in the experience of suffering but also in the insistence of struggle. To that end, our research is rooted in the dialectics of the human experience.
Our texts are collectively produced. We accompany social and political movements to conduct our research and analysis, and then we write, edit, translate, and design our materials as a team. We strive to produce accurate, credible, and accessible materials. In our texts, we do not distinguish between form and content; we build them with a firm belief in the importance of style and aesthetics, illuminating our pages with art and design that provides a sense of the hope inherent in human struggle. Our aesthetic practice is rooted in three concepts:
That the working class, peasantry, and impoverished millions enduring wage-less life (the labampofu, or ‘the poor’, as the South Africans put it) exist as historical actors.
That our readers must be able to breathe with joy as they read our texts.
That our readers leave our texts with hope from both the analysis in the texts but also in the range of human emotions conveyed by the art.
Our Research Agenda
Our work is focused on three main axes:
Contemporary Capitalism Much of our work closely studies developments in the contemporary capitalist economy, with a special focus on the unproductive growth of the financial sector, the rise of rentier forms of near monopoly firms, the expansion of a precarious working class, and the social effects of capitalism’s structural imbalances.
Monsters Our work develops a theory that the wretchedness of contemporary capitalism has been produced by proponents of both right-wing free market conservatives and liberals and of social democracy.
Futures The future will be shaped out of what we do now. That’s the slogan with which we operate, which means we must track the various forms of socialism that are being developed in our time.
As our work has developed, it has become clear that we must illuminate and defend our past heritage. This includes two aspects, also represented by our publishing agenda: archiving and analysing the historiesof national liberation and elaborating and promoting the advances made by the range of theories of national liberation Marxism.
Institutes
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is a network of research institutes in the Global South. We have institutes in Argentina, Brazil, India, and South Africa, as well as an inter-regional office with members in many parts of the world. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is part of an international process of creating a network of dozens of research institutes, whose first fruit is A Plan to Save the Planet. We are also part of the International Union of Left Publishers, made up of more forty publishers from over twenty countries to advance left ideas, produce collective books, and initiate the annual Red Books Day.
We are a partner organisation of the International Peoples’ Assembly, a growing network of more than 200 political and social organisations from around the world.
The Inspiration behind Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
The name of our institute draws upon two sources: the Tricontinental Conference held in Cuba in January 1966 and the Institute for Social Research set up in Frankfurt in 1923.
The Tricontinental Conference brought together a range of revolutionary movements from across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They brought with them the orientation of national liberation, non-alignment, and socialism. It is this tradition – national liberation Marxism – which anchors the work of our institute.
The Institute for Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School, developed during the Weimar Republic in Germany to understand the European working class’s failure to take advantage of the revolutionary situation on the continent at the time. The institute’s scholars studied the crisis of capitalism, the limitations of working-class struggle and ideology, and the rise of fascism.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
A group of scholars and practitioners of international law, genocide studies, international studies, and global justice published a petition in support of South Africa’s proceedings in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague against the State of Israel. South Africa is asking the court to recommend provisional measures to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian People. Israel “intends to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial, and ethnic group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.”
In support of South Africa, the petitioners state, “we wholeheartedly support South Africa’s application to the ICJ as a step towards a necessary ceasefire in Gaza and justice in Palestine.” The petitioners argue that the “support for South Africa’s application to the ICJ has increased, with Bolivia, Jordan, Malaysia, and Turkey backing the case. Over 1,000 political parties, unions, and other popular movements that support South Africa’s submission have also joined the four states.”
The petitioners also argue that “South Africa’s application to the ICJ cannot be disconnected from its own struggle against apartheid and the legacy of Israel’s close military support for the apartheid regime during some of the most oppressive years of white supremacist apartheid rule. The eradication of apartheid in South Africa was a significant achievement in the worldwide fight against racism, discrimination, and colonial subjugation. However, as Nelson Mandela stated, it is still ‘unfinished’ without the complete elimination of apartheid worldwide, and in Palestine.”
For the petitioners, “these connected struggles against apartheid and the racial calculus of genocide are crucial for upholding the internationalist vision of global justice, freedom, and decolonization.”
The petition ends by stating, “South Africa’s submission provides an opportunity to adjudicate the highly charged debates regarding Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza within a legal framework in front of the ICJ, upholding the aspiration for universal justice. In this spirit, we reiterate our support for South Africa’s submission to the ICJ as a clear demand to the international community to prioritize accountability, end genocide, reject impunity, and uphold human rights for all. We stand in support of South Africa’s application to the ICJ, and urge governments and people of conscience to do the same.”
The petition garnered almost 1100 signatures from scholars, including Jews and Israelis, among them, Raz Segal Stockton University, Jonathan Rosenhead London School of Economics, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner SOAS, London, Yosefa Loshitzky SOAS University of London, Neve Gordon Queen Mary University of London, Noam Peleg UNSW, Ophira Gamliel University of Glasgow, Yohai Hakak Brunel University London, Alana Lentin Western Sydney University, Rebecca Ruth Gould School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian Queen Mary University of London, Atalia Omer The University of Notre Dame, Ahuvia Kahane Trinity College Dublin.
This is not a surprise because, on October 15, 2023, over 800 scholars of international law and genocide studies published a statement declaring a potential genocide in Gaza. The signatories included Israelis and Jews, among them Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS, University of London, Yael Navaro, Professor of Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Ronit Lentin, Retired Associate Professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University., Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Department of History; Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, Brown University, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Global Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London, Hilla Dayan, Lecturer, Amsterdam University College, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London.
As a matter of fact, Israelis and Jews petitioned an international court well before the Gaza War. In 2021, over 180 Israeli human rights activists approached the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They wrote in support of the ICC, “We wish to assert at this early stage our deep suspicion, based on past experience, that the State of Israel, including its investigative and legal institutions, has no intention to seriously investigate complaints of war crimes. Our suspicion is backed by a very large number of documented cases ostensibly involving war crimes committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories in gross violation of international law.”
Then and now, these petitioners who are charging Israel with war crimes have turned a blind eye to the horrific record of Hamas during its two-decades-long control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, on orders from Iran, had turned Gaza into a large military complex boasting some 500 km of tunnels and workshops for producing missiles and rockets that were used to shell Israeli towns and villages. Hamas stole untold billions of dollars from the aid that well-meaning countries sent to the Palestinian civilians. The money also enabled the Hamas elites to live in luxury while impoverishing the population. More egregiously, by embedding among the population, including hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas turned civilians into human shields, a tactic that is illegal under international laws of war. If this is not enough, the total omission of Hamas’s murderous attack on October 7 in their petitions is egregious. By omitting any reference to the brutality of Hamas, the petitioners lost all moral and legal standing in the discourse.
Public Statement: Scholars support South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice against Israel for violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention
January 9, 2024
The Republic of South Africa initiated proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, against the State of Israel, asking the court to recommend provisional measures to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. The Israeli government declared on January 2, 2024, that it would appear before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The application, brought under Article IX of the 1948 Genocide Convention, states that Israel “intends to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial, and ethnic group, that being the part of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip.” The first hearing is scheduled for January 11 and 12, 2024.
As scholars and practitioners of international law, genocide studies, and international studies, and cognate fields relating to global justice, we wholeheartedly support South Africa’s application to the ICJ as a step towards a necessary ceasefire in Gaza and justice in Palestine. We recall the statement published on October 15, 2023, sounding the alarm of a potential genocide in Gaza, signed by over 800 scholars of international law and genocide studies.
South Africa’s submission to the ICJ re-emphasises the jus cogens character of the prohibition of genocide and strengthens the legal recourse available to Palestinians in Gaza to ensure their fullest protection against the continued grave and immediate risk of genocide. South Africa’s request for provisional measures from the ICJ presents a path forward for a necessary ceasefire that has so far been hard to reach due to the United State’s obstinate refusal to support a humanitarian ceasefire.
South Africa’s application to the ICJ cannot be disconnected from its own struggle against apartheid and the legacy of Israel’s close military support for the apartheid regime during some of the most oppressive years of white supremacist apartheid rule. The eradication of apartheid in South Africa was a significant achievement in the worldwide fight against racism, discrimination, and colonial subjugation. However, as Nelson Mandela stated, it is still “unfinished” without the complete elimination of apartheid worldwide, and in Palestine. We recognise that these connected struggles against apartheid and the racial calculus of genocide are crucial for upholding the internationalist vision of global justice, freedom, and decolonisation.
As we enter the 4th consecutive month of Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza’s people, about 4% of the total population of the Gaza Strip is either dead, seriously injured, or missing. According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, an estimated 23,084 Palestinians have been killed since October, 70% of whom are women and children. Additionally, Israel has so far targeted 326 health workers and 112 Palestinian journalists. An additional 58,926 individuals have been injured, hundreds of whom are currently in serious condition.
In addition to the still-rising death toll as people are excavated from beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings and homes, Israel’s attacks have destroyed about 70% of all civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including hospitals, universities, bakeries, mosques, and sites of cultural heritage. This widespread destruction has precipitated concerns regarding further deaths from famine, food insecurity, and disease. Furthermore, the desecration of graves, targeted killings of journalists, and enforced disappearances of people in North Gaza by Israel’s forces demonstrates Israel’s continued intention of genocide against the people of Gaza.
There has also been an escalation of violence, arrests, expulsions, and destruction of entire Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. Settler attacks against Palestinian communities have reached a record high, with nine new outposts erected and eighteen new roads paved or authorised by settlers, implicitly endorsed by the State of Israel.
Israel has predictably criticised South Africa’s application as “blood libel”, which misrepresents the grave violations catalogued in the application to the ICJ as antisemitic slander against Jews, and has put the wheels of its hasbara machinery in overdrive, with Israel’s foreign ministry calling on its embassies to press diplomats and politicians in their host countries to put out statements against South Africa’s case. Despite these efforts, support for South Africa’s application to the ICJ has increased, with Bolivia, Jordan, Malaysia, and Turkey backing the case. Over 1,000 political parties, unions, and other popular movements that support South Africa’s submission have also joined the four states.
South Africa’s submission provides an opportunity to adjudicate the highly charged debates regarding Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza within a legal framework in front of the ICJ, upholding the aspiration for universal justice. In this spirit, we reiterate our support for South Africa’s submission to the ICJ as a clear demand to the international community to prioritise accountability, end genocide, reject impunity, and uphold human rights for all.
We stand in support of South Africa’s application to the ICJ, and urge governments and people of conscience to do the same.
Signatories:
1. Jo BluenLSE/South African Jews for Free Palestine2. Anamika MisraUniversity of Kent3. John ReynoldsMaynooth University, Ireland4. Oumar BaCornell University5. Melusi SimelaneSouthern Africa Litigation Centre6. Bana Abu ZulufMaynooth University 7. Tshepo Madlingozi Wits University 8. Ardi ImseisQueen’s University 9. Dr Ntina TzouvalaANU College of Law10. Kelly GillespieUniversity of the Western Cape11. Shahd HammouriUniversity of Kent12. Shahnaaz Suffla University of South Africa 13. Yvette RussellUniversity of Bristol14. Kharnita Mohamed University of Cape Town 15. Emma DaitzUniversity of Cape Town16. Bonnie VenterUniversity of Bristol 17. Jill Bradbury University of the Witwatersrand18. Hylton WhiteUniversity of the Witwatersrand 19. Julia Africans Centre for Cities, UCT20. Dr. Lubna NadviSchool of Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu Natal21. Shereen AbramsChisholm Institute 22. Patrick BondUniversity of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change23. Anneke MeerkotterSouthern Africa Litigation Centre24. Birgit PoopuuTallinn University25. Jacob van GarderenSouthernDefenders26. Anna Selmeczi University of Cape Town27. Nicola PeruginiUniversity of Edinburgh28. Louise du PlessisLawyers for Human Rights – South Africa29. Salvador Herencia-CarrascoHRREC, University of Ottawa30. Penny GreenQueen Mary University of London 31. Andrew J. DouglasMorehouse College32. Polly Pallister-WilkinsUniversity of Amsterdam33. Jadé BothEUI34. Maree Pardy School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University 35. Dr Quraysha Ismail Sooliman University of Pretoria 36. Anupama Ranawana University of St Andrews 37. Dr Howie Rechavia-TaylorLSE38. Zoë JayUniversity of Helsinki39. Dr Lisa Tilley SOAS, University of London 40. Lachlan SummersMax Planck Institute for the History of Science41. Richard JoyceFaculty of Law, Monash University 42. Sadhvi DarQueen Mary University of London Melanie Richter-MontpetitUniversity of Sussex 45. Jeff HandmakerErasmus University Rotterdam 46. Dr Ida Roland BirkvadLondon School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)47. Anton David SchoonSouth African Revenue Serivce 48. Heidi MatthewsOsgoode Hall Law School, York University49. Onni AhvonenUniversity of Helsinki50. Shaheeda Sadeck University of South Africa 51. Gerhard KempUWE Bristol52. Tamsin Phillipa Paige Deakin Law School 53. Dr. Owiso OwisoInternational lawyer54. Dr Juan AuzTilburg University55. Nthabiseng RamosepeleLawyers for Human Rights – South Africa56. Su Ming KhooUniversity of Galway, Ireland57. Sophia SoaresUniversity of Bristol 58. Miha BrebenelUniversity of Southampton59. Jennifer Orlando-SallingUniversity of Copenhagen 60. Rasigan MaharajhInstitute for Economic Research on Innovation61. Mohan Dutta CARE, Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand 62. Nicola SoekoeUniversity of London63. Patricia Guernelli Palazzo TsaiUniversity of St Andrews (Scotland), Methodist University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Pramana Institute (Brazil)64. Alison PhippsUniversity of Glasgow 65. Eric LoeffladUniversity of Kent66. Felicity CallardUniversity of Glasgow 67. Mouki KambouroglouBirkbeck College, University of London68. Kezia LewinsUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 69. Maryam JamshidiUniversity of Colorado Law School70. Prof. Elena Fiddian-QasmiyehUCL71. Saydoon Nisa Sayed KwaZulu-Natal Palestine Solidarity Forum 72. Julia HopeAfrican Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town73. Cristian van EijkNewcastle University74. Esra Yılmaz ErenTurkish-German University75. Sarah DowlingUniversity of Toronto76. Mohammad FadelUniversity of Toronto Faculty of Law77. Zaid KimmieFoundation for Human Rights78. Nikolas KosmatopoulosAmerican University of Beirut 79. Michelle MoydMichigan State University80. Tahir AbassUniversity of Leeds81. Shehla KhanUniversity of Derby 82. Savo HeletaDurban University of Technology 83. Rehana ParveenUniversity of Birmingham Law School84. Scott LongIndependent human rights researcher85. Hamit Akan IBN KHALDUN UNİVERSİTY 86. Ahmed AbofoulInternational Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam/Al-Haq Organisation87. Lata Narayanaswamy University of Leeds 88. Amira Abdelhamid University of Portsmouth 89. Peter ReesGoldsmiths College, University of London90. Dr Fatima RajinaStephen Lawrence Research Centre, De Montfort University91. Graham Stewart University of Toronto92. Izabela DelabreBirkbeck, University of London93. Aritz ObregónUniversity of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)94. Ramokwapeng Jan MolebatsiLawyers for Human Rights95. Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 96. D. Ntokozo MjiyakoThe Cape Bar – Society of Advocates Cape Town97. Anjolie SinghIndependent practitioner 98. Dr Edward Wastnidge Open University99. Ahmed Memon Cardiff School of Law and Politics 100. Tasniem AnwarVU Amsterdam101. Dr Uzayr Parak South African Government 102. Marina VelickovicUniversity of Warwick103. Anna SaundersUniversity College London104. Mikki Stelder University of Amsterdam 105. Chris HoldridgeNorth-West University106. Dalia LotfyUniversity of London 107. Aoife O’DonoghueQueen’s University Belfast108. Fahad AhmadToronto Metropolitan University 109. Pietro StefaniniUniversity of Edinburgh 110. Dr Claire CerutiWits University111. Luisa Calvete Portela BarbosaSOAS, University of London112. Gloria NovovićLondon School of Economics and Political Science113. Remy Twahirwa London School of Economics114. Dr. Samantha Morgan-WilliamsCCJHR, School of Law, University College Cork.115. Alice Panepinto Queen’s University Belfast 116. Elizabeth FourieNelson Mandela University 117. Ardi ImseisQueen’s University 118. Jeanette JouiliSyracuse University119. Keri van Douwen VU Amsterdam120. Dr Elisa Wynne-HughesCardiff University121. Ayça Çubukçu London School of Economics and Political Science122. Jasmin Johurun NessaEdge Hill University 123. Paola CastañedaUniversidad de los Andes (Colombia)124. Brunilda PaliUniversity of Amsterdam125. Naveed Ahmad MirUniversity of Kent 126. Laurine PlatzkyUniversity of the Western Cape127. Jasmine GaniUniversity of St Andrews128. Yomna El-Serafy University of Cambridge 129. Margarida FawkeRetired UNHCR Officer130. Dr Aisha Ahmad LUMS, Pakistan131. Katharine MillarLondon School of Economics132. Ashok KumarBirkbeck University 133. Raghavi ViswanathEuropean University Institute134. Maneo MohaleCentre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (University of Johannesburg)135. Sumi MadhokLondon School of Economics 136. Sara MarzagoraKing’s College London 137. Dr Cemal Burak TanselNewcastle University138. Jillian RoginUniversity of Windsor139. Ruth FletcherQueen Mary University of London 140. Triestino Mariniello Liverpool John Moores University141. Levent PiskinUniversity of Dundee142. Myles HowardSOAS, University of London143. Mandy TurnerUniversity of Manchester, UK144. Rocio LorcaUniversity of Chile145. Chloé ChebUniversity of Manchester 146. Adam SabraUniversity of California, Santa Barbara147. Lena ObermaierUniversity of Exeter148. Rama SahtoutUniversity of Exeter149. Eman AlyAin Shams University150. Alessandra ArcuriErasmus University Rotterdam151. Jane PoynerUniversity of Exeter152. Krisna SaravanamuttuRudnicki and Company153. Rama Sahtout Exeter 154. Dr Rebecca Abby WhitingUniversity of Glasgow155. Sarah El-KazazSOAS156. The Rev’d Luke LarnerUniversity of Roehampton157. Tia TraffordUniversity for the Creative Arts158. Alessandra SpadaroUtrecht University159. Maysoon BadrideenNational Health Service160. Leon Pretorius University of the Western Cape (UWC) 161. Deborah LawsonSchool of Law and Justice, University of Liverpool162. Anna SuUniversity of Toronto Faculty of Law163. Julie CupplesUniversity of Edinburgh164. Alexander StoffelQueen Mary University165. Dr Lilly MarkakiRCA166. Catherine EschleUniversity of Strathclyde167. Rebecca SmythBirmingham City University168. Dr Lewis TurnerNewcastle University (UK)169. Shivangi Mariam RajIndependent Researcher and Writer170. Marie PetersmannLSE Law School171. Farwa SialSOAS172. Pinar BilginBilkent University173. Antje KunstPavocat Chambers174. Simbarashe VU Amsterdam175. Owain LawsonCardiff University176. Nick BernardsUniversity of Warwick177. Omer AijaziUniversity of Manchester 178. Sithembile MbeteUniversity of Pretoria179. Ezgi YildizCalifornia State University, Long Beach 180. Dr Surer Q MohamedPembroke College, University of Cambridge181. Tania SaeedLahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan 182. (Prof) Joel ModiriDepartment of Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria183. Matheus Gobbato Leichtweis Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul 184. Casey McNeillFordham University185. Raj MannSOAS University of London 186. Sean MaddenBirmingham Law School, University of Birmingham187. Vicki SquireUniversity of Warwick188. Maja DavidovicCardiff University189. Nivi Manchanda Queen Mary university of London 190. Santosh Anand University of Kent191. Iona SummersonDepartment of Politics and International Studies, SOAS192. Shraddha DubeyNational Law University Delhi193. Serena NatileWarwick Law School 194. Mattin BiglariUniversity of Bristol195. Shubranshu MUniversity of Exeter196. Elisa von Joeden-ForgeyThe Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention197. Harriet EvansUniversity of Westminster198. Daniel Brown LSE Sociology 199. Oliver KearnsUniversity of Leicester200. Louise MallinderQueen’s University Belfast201. James DickinsUniversity of Leeds202. Mathura UmachandranUniversity of Exeter203. Shikha DilawriLSE204. Angus McNellyUniversity of Greenwich 205. Anneri van Rooyen NWU206. Lebohang Dube Centre for Child Law – University of Pretoria 207. Paul Robert Gilbert University of Sussex 208. Brendan Ciarán BrowneTrinity College Dublin 209. Alicia PooleMcGill University, Department of Sociology 210. Sruti BalaUniversity of Amsterdam 211. Minam pertinRajiv gandhi university rono hills 212. Mohamed Elamin MohamedMuslim Council of Elders213. Camilla SteinMSLU214. Roberto MozzachiodiGoldsmiths College215. James EastwoodQueen Mary University of London216. Dr. Namita WahiCentre for Policy Research 217. Gabriel StephenUniversity of Johannesburg 218. Ana CardosoYork University219. Dr.Maryam Academic university uk220. Nicholas Johnson University of Massachusetts Boston221. Jairo I. Fúnez-FloresTexas Texh University 222. Michael FarquharKing’s College London223. Dr K Thornhill Oxford/LSHTM224. Laurence Butet-RochYork University225. Dr Hawraa Al HassanUniversity of Cambridge226. Katelin MikosUniversity of Michigan 227. Yolanda MtombeniUniversity of the Witwatersrand 228. Aashis JoshiTU Delft229. Timotheus Tap, LL.MInstituut Statera230. Kerry SinananUniversity of Winnipeg 231. Mohammad H ZakerhosseinUniversity of Tehran232. Alicia YaminHarvard University233. Mariam DurraniAmerican University234. Hans Lunshof (PhD)former Associate Professor Administrative and Constitutional Law (UD), University of Utrecht235. Nathan Derejko University of Manitoba 236. Alessandro PertiRoyal Institute of Art 237. Christopher Choong Weng WaiUniversity of Warwick 238. Yvan DeslauriersUniversity of Waterloo239. Vinicius Tavares de OliveiraPUC Minas240. Ulises Garcia FigueroaMemorial University of Newfoundland241. Rahima SiddiqueUniversity of Manchester242. Mouhanad SharabatiIn my personal capacity 243. Anastasiya KotovaLund University244. Noha Bayoumy Abdulazeem Ain Shams University, Egypt245. Ali AliUniversity of Helsinki246. Büşra ÜnerBayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies247. Pierre Cloutier de RepentignyCarleton University248. Robert BoyceLondon School of Economics249. Nadeema MusthanNelson Mandela University 250. Sabrina RewaldKalshoven-Gieskes Forum on International Humanitarian Law, Leiden University251. Mohammed Abu-NimerAmerican university 252. Ruth Castel-BrancoUniversity of the Witwatersrand253. Liam Midzain-Gobin, PhDBrock University254. Jessica MirandaAdvocate255. Hasan Basri BülbülBoğaziçi University, Istanbul256. Irina CericUniversity of Windsor Faculty of Law257. Julie Williams-ReyesUniversity of Oregon 258. Mónica A. Jiménez University of Texas at Austin259. Raz SegalStockton University 260. Sandra LiebenbergStellenbosch University 261. Claire MummeUniversity of Windsor 262. Silvina Sánchez MeraRobert Gordon University263. Dr Cristina Saenz PerezUniversity of Leeds264. Jared Sacks Columbia University 265. Summer Sabry Nile University 266. David Rossati Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 267. Alexander AviñaArizona State University268. Sam JowettOsgoode Law School269. David AlvarezGrand Valley State University270. Esther BritoAmerican University 271. Mehrzi Ilef Tokyo University of Foreign Studies 272. Oskar Keogh University of Cape Town (Michaelis School of Fine Art)273. Laura PipoloDeVerso: Percorso Decoloniale274. Brian KellyQueen’s University Belfast275. Susan Morrissey WyseYork University276. Vanessa FarrHelena Kennedy School of International Law, Sheffield Hallam University 277. FÁBIO VIEIRA HEERDTEscola Superior da Magistratura AJURIS278. Klenti TareFaculty of Natural Sciences – Tirana, Albania.279. Emily JonesNewcastle University280. Lane BenjaminDepartment of Health281. Siobhan WarringtonNewcastle University282. Rachael MalottCarleton University 283. Aine BennettRoyal Holloway, University of London284. Aizuddin Mohamed AnuarKeele University 285. Maria Aristodemou Birkbeck, University of London286. Jonathan RosenheadLondon School of Economics287. Angeles LopezCIESAS Peninsular (Mexico)288. Lucy GehringKing’s College London289. Amina AdananMaynooth University290. Jeroen Gunning King’s College London 291. Juan M. Amaya-CastroUniversidad de los Andes (Colombia)292. Francesca AnsteyAlum of international studies293. Marie KwonEcole normale supérieure, Paris294. Emilio DabedArab American university, Ramallah, Palestine 295. FionaHeriot watt University296. Yassin BrungerQueen’s University Belfast 297. Sarah BrackeUniversity of Amsterdam298. Zoé DuboisUniversité Libre de Bruxelles299. Zein El-AmineAmerican University 300. Garrett Graddy-LovelaceAmerican University School of International Service301. Seyma Boğaziçi University 302. Vasanthi Venkatesh University of Windsor Faculty of Law 303. Tara TaylorSt. Francis Xavier University304. Lynne SegalBirkbeck, University of London305. Tasneem VallyMedical Doctor306. Bozena WelborneSmith College307. Abdullah Nasir Dr Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow308. Elaine McIlwraithWestern University309. Phillipe CopelandBoston University310. Muhammad FaysalBogazici University 311. Ed Béchard TorresLincoln Alexander School of Law312. Christine Schwöbel-PatelUniversity of Warwick313. Graça LeãoEscola Artística de música do conservatório nacional314. V’cenza CireficeUniversity of Galway315. Tracy ValcourtConcordia University 316. Laura Betancur-RestrepoUniversidad de los Andes, Colombia317. Richard LinesSwansea University, UK318. Hasan Basri BülbülBoğaziçi University, Istanbul319. Prabhakar SinghBML Munjal University 320. Mahvish AhmadLondon School of Economics and Political Science321. Malini Ranganathan American University322. Dr Victoria Araj Eleanor Granville Institute, University of Lincoln 323. Sanne van der LugtLeiden Asia Centre324. Keelin BarryIrish Centre for Human Rights, University of Galway325. J. SulemanKing’s College London 326. Carla LeverUniversity of Cape Town327. Dr Devendren ReddyUniversity of Kwa Zulu Natal328. John B WatsonBard College 329. Aggie HirstKing’s College London330. Swati Singh Parmar Dharmashastra National Law University, India331. Andrew WoolfordUniversity of Manitoba332. Dr Rachel IbreckGoldsmiths, University of London333. Shannon FyfeGeorge Mason University334. Ruth MarshallUniversity of Toronto335. Irene CalisAmerican University, Traditional and occupied Piscataway and Nacotchtank territory336. Ronald Grigor SunyThe University Of Michigan, The University Of Chicago337. Paige HosleyOregon health and sciences University338. Pietro Sferrazza Centro de Derechos Humanos, Universidad de Chile339. Alex de WaalWorld Peace Foundation340. Aimen Taimur Tilburg University341. Karyn BallUniversity of Alberta342. Barbara Roggema University of Florence 343. Huseyin DisliThe University of Kent344. Lisa KellyQueen’s University, Faculty of Law345. Andrei Gomez SuarezWinchester’s Centre of Reconciliation and Peace346. Thomas Earl PorterNorth Carolina A&T State University347. John M. CoxUNC Charlotte, Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies348. Fabia Fernandes CarvalhoAdjunct professor349. Aisling WalshUniversity of Limerick350. EdelUniversity of Galway351. Melissa S. WilliamsUniversity of Toronto352. Rashmi LutherCarleton University 353. Saadat PirzadaUniversity of Kent354. Haim Bresheeth-ZabnerSOAS, London355. Dr Riccardo Vecellio Segate University of Groningen356. Caroline Jagoe Trinity College Dublin357. Yosefa LoshitzkySOAS University of London 358. Ida DanewidUniversity of Sussex359. Dimitris SoudiasUniversity of Groningen360. Rob HowseNYU Law School361. Dimitris SoudiasUniversity of Groningen362. Dr Martin Crook University of the West of England 363. Bernedette Muthien University of Free State 364. Dr Thomas MacManusQueen Mary University of London, School of Law365. Alina SajedMcMaster University366. Ahmed DrwishUniversity of Bristol 367. Neve GordonQueen Mary University of London368. William GalloisUniversity of Exeter369. Cathie Carmichael University of East Anglia370. Irene de CraenErrant Journal371. George YgarzaUniversity of Pennsylvania 372. Olivia MasonNorthumbria University, UK.373. Sarah MagniYork University374. Mo Jaeckelindependent artist researcher375. Eman ShehataLSE376. Omar GrechUniversity of Malta377. Michiel BotTilburg Law School378. AJ LinkHoward University School of Law379. Dónal HassettUniversity College Cork380. Colin SamsonUniversity of Essex381. Ethan Jacobs UCT382. Barry TrachtenbergWake Forest University383. Dina Al-KassimUniversity of British Columbia384. Mahesh MenonUniversity of Punjab 385. Eva PolonskaLondon School of Economics and Political Science386. Ana CardosoYork University387. Dimitris SoudiasUniversity of Groningen388. Victoria SanfordLehman College389. Guneet KaurAcademy of Fine Arts Vienna 390. Danielle Nembhard James Cook University 391. Sidra Niaz Integrative Research Institute Law & Society (LSI), Humboldt University, Berlin392. José Manuel Barreto, PhDCatholic University of Colombia393. Ali MalikDrake University 394. Irene Fernández-MolinaUniversity of Exeter395. Thomas R. BelfieldUniversity of Hawai’i – Manoa396. John BrownWadham College, Oxford397. Joel PearsonHistory Workshop, University of Wits398. Maha AbdallahFaculty of Law, University of Antwerp399. Antonette GouwsUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 400. Kathy WalkerUniversity of Saskatchewan 401. Ayhan AktarRetired Professor.402. Jordi MartinaliTilburg University403. Tom Pettinger University of Warwick 404. Dr. Wasiq AbassO.P. Jindal Global University405. Ali HammoudiUniversity of Windsor Faculty of Law406. Adham SaouliUniversity of St Andrews407. Bob BrecherUniversity of Brighton, UK408. Lillian RobbGraduate Institute of International and Development Studies409. Richard CallandUniversity of Cape Town410. Dr Andrew DelatollaUniversity of Leeds411. Vincent Wong University of Windsor Faculty of Law412. Joseph HillUniversity of Alberta, Department of Anthropology413. Ekhlas AssaediTaibah University 414. Harshad PathakUniversity of Geneva 415. Fajar Ajie SetiawanKobe University416. Jodi Koberinski University of Waterloo417. Daragh GrantUniversity of Chicago418. Aaron WinterLancaster University 419. Rachel SiederCIESAS, Mexico City420. Ibtisam IbrahimDiplomatic Language and Services421. Tara MannLondon Student Action for Palestine 422. Somia BibiIndependent 423. Dr. Jonida GashiAcademy of Albanian Studies424. Pearl SquiresUCT425. Sean PhelanMassey University 426. Caitlin BiddolphUniversity of Sydney427. Martin ShawUniversity of Sussex 428. Rashmi VarmaUniversity of Warwick 429. Doris BussCarleton University430. Hannah Wilkinson University of Nottingham 431. Dr Monish Bhatia University of York432. Emerson MurrayNorthwestern University433. May DarwichUniversity of Birmingham 434. Gerardo Montes de Oca Academy of fine arts Vienna 435. Frank DealeCUNY LAW SCHOOL436. Simone Varriale Loughborough University 437. Anthony BurkeUNSW438. Jacqui O’RiordanUniversity College Cork439. Chris RossdaleThe University of Bristol440. Samer AlatoutUniversity of Wisconsin. Madison441. Mohamed Adhikari University of Cape Town 442. Sergey VasilievUniversity of Amsterdam 443. Shivani Aberystwyth University 444. Dr. Ashish KumarFaculty of Law, University of Delhi445. Kaltun DualeUniversity of Bristol446. Dr Lisa Amanda PalmerDe Montfort University 447. Umut OzgucMacquarie University 448. Tanzeela KhalidUniversity of Bristol 449. Surinder KaurUniversity of Bristol (UNISON)450. Dr SonnetLaw For Egypt451. Tarik Cyril AmarKoç University452. Tomà BerlandaPolitecnico di Torino, Italy453. Rahul RaoUniversity of St Andrews454. Kiran Kaur GrewalGoldsmiths, University of London455. Viviane SaglierUniversity of St Andrews456. Harsha WaliaAuthor457. Prof. Ruth HallUniversity of the Western Cape458. Bal Sokhi-BulleyUniversity of Sussex 459. Wendy BurgersUniversity of Cape Town460. BeenaIndependent Global Justice Activist461. Carly KrakowLondon School of Economics462. Nadia Ahmad Barry University 463. Niyousha Bastani University of Toronto 464. Vineet ThakurLeiden University465. Haris JamilUniversity of Melbourne466. Filyra Vlastou DimopoulouNational Technical University of Athens467. Dylan AsafoUniversity of Auckland468. Jeff OstlerUniversity of Oregon469. Fatiema Haron-Masoet Imam Haron Foundation 470. Shahab AlbaharUniversity of Virginia 471. Nico Adam BothaEmeritus Prof University of South Africa472. Fatima MehmoodUniversal College Lahore, Pakistan473. Q ManivannanUniversity of St Andrews 474. Khurram Janjua, M.D.KYN Health, LLC475. Nick Caleb Lewis and Clark Law School476. Carlos Bichet Universidad de Panama 477. Liam DavisUniversity of Bristol478. Dr Tiina VaittinenTampere University479. Hannah WilkinsonUniversity of Nottingham480. Ishupal Singh KangJGLS481. Dina MatarSOAS482. Nicolas BoeglinLaw Faculty, University of Costa Rica483. Ayşe Betül KayahanIndependent Media484. Ajay ParasramDalhousie University485. Annina LieberherrUniversity of Oxford486. David CrockettUniversity of Illinois Chicago487. Dr Alice FindenDurham University488. Max LawUniversity of Cape Town489. Claire DebucquoisFonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Belgium490. Dr Tahaney Alghrani Hugh Baird University Centre/UCLAN 491. Michael ChristensenDepartment of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University492. Charlotte Villiers University of Bristol493. Dr. Felicity GrayAustralian National University494. Dr Fozia Bora University of Leeds495. Alex YatesUniversity of Bath496. Simon Behrman University of Warwick 497. Tanneke HerklotsErasmus MC498. Tom CromptobUniversity of Warwick499.
Ahmed ElbasyounyIndiana University 500. Maria Giannacopoulos University of New South Wales501. PJ HopeLHC Advisory502. Blair RutherfordCarleton University 503. Dr Caroline EdwardsBirkbeck, University of London 504. MadhurimaJawaharlal Nehru University 505. Areej Abuqudairi HTU506. Louise ArimatsuLSE507. Noam PelegUNSW508. Fatma Muge GocekUniversity of Michigan509. Selim BilginKabine Law Office510. Laila fathiHassan II511. Luiza Leite de QueirozVU Amsterdam512. Charlotte Vercraeye Leiden University & Fedasil 513. Jordana SilversteinUniversity of Melbourne514. Hidayat ullah KhanBUITEMS515. Lara KhattabMount Allison University516. Goldie OsuriUniversity of Warwick517. Alame BPCE518. Lena MooreUniversity of Cambridge Department of Sociology519. Pasan JayasingheUniversity College London520. Laura MillsUniversity of St Andrews521. Nella van den Brandt Coventry University, UK522. Sami SerdarIIUM ALUMNI TÜRKİYE CHAPTER523. Samah SelimRutgers University524. Johanna Ray VollhardtClark University525. Brock BahlerUniversity of Pittsburgh526. Dr Julia DehmLa Trobe University 527. Richard McNeil-WillsonLeiden University & Edinburgh University528. Miha MarčenkoEuropean University Institute 529. FatimaPsySSA530. Tathiana Flores-Acuna Expert, IHL/GBV531. Farhana SultanaSyracuse University 532. Zekayi DoğanSazchem533. Karina BarbosaUniversidade Federal Fluminense 534. Robert FlahiveWhitman college 535. J. Mijin ChaUC Santa Cruz536. Ophira GamlielUniversity of Glasgow537. Sneha KrishnanUniversity of Oxford 538. Dr Rizwaan SabirLiverpool John Moores University539. Tendayi AchiumeProfessor of Law, UCLA School of Law540. Christiane WilkeCarleton University, Canada541. Sonya OnwuLondon School of Economics 542. Julian MayUniversity of the Western Cape543. Mekia NedjarOran University544. Bob CantIndependent545. Francesca BerryUniversity of Birmingham 546. Jean d’AspremontSciences Po Law School547. Rebecca Mignot-MahdaviSciences Po Law School 548. Kevin HoffinBirmingham City University 549. Ayesha WijayalathUniversity of New South Wales, Australia 550. Anastasia StouraitiGoldsmiths, University of London551. Jo Drugan Languages and Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University552. Reem Abou-El-FadlSOAS University of London553. Jared AhmadUniversity of Sheffield 554. Yasmin Gunaratnam king’s college London 555. Kanad Bagchi University of Amsterdam 556. Frann MichelWillamette University557. Mubbashir RizviAmerican University 558. Saajidha SaderUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa559. Charlotte MertensUniversity of Melbourne560. Helga BaumgartenBirzeit University561. Sanghyuk ShinUniversity of California Irvine562. Lauren Bradford-ClarkeUniversity of Nottingham563. Helen ScanlonUniversity of Cape Town564. Taha Laroussi Tanit565. Tazreena SajjadAmerican University566. Rayaanah SavahlUCT567. Natasha IskanderNew York University568. Ann CurthoysAustralian National University 569. Yohai Hakak Brunel University London 570. Maud Anne Bracke University of Glasgow 571. Katarina PijetlovicCatolica Global School of Law 572. Zameer Begum Marie Curie 573. Richard HallDe Montfort University574. Brendon Bin Salleh573. Yung En CheeThe University of Melbourne574. Dr Martin MyersUniversity of Nottingham 575. Sarah RomanoLesley University576. Professor Amanda WiseMacquarie University577. Sohela KapdiThe University of Cape Town578. Maya MikdashiRutgers University579. Liz AblettNewcastle University580. Hela Yousfi Dauphine University 581. Estella CarpiUniversity College London 582. Nikos BozatzisNational and Kapodistrian University of Athens 583. Christie Haddad King’s College London 584. John Docker The University of Sydney 585. Lucas ScheelThe University of Adelaide586. Rebecca Laycock PedersenLund University587. Katy Brown Maynooth University588. Sharri PlonskiQueen Mary University of London589. Joshua CastellinoMinority Rights Group International & University of Derby, UK590. Assaf KfouryBoston University591. Coralie Pison Hindawi PRISME- Salam project /Université Catholique de Lyon, France592. Armand AzraLondon School of Economics and Political Science593. Tatiana Carpi594. Nesreen HusseinMiddlesex University595. V Spike PetersonUniversity of Arizona, USA596. Anaïs Duong-PedicaÅbo Akademi University597. Dania.ThomasUniversity of Glasgow598. Chiara MaritatoUniversity of Turin599. Dr Lambros FatsisCity, University of London600. Steve BreymanRetired 601. Anaheed Al-HardanHoward University602. Julia Willén Division of Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University603. Mariam Al-Hussona King’s College London 604. Nihan Albayrak-AydemirBoğaziçi University605. Malcolm JorgensenMax Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law606. Valentina BaúWestern Sydney University, Australia607. Jessie DanielsHunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY608. Richard JacksonThe University of Otago, New Zealand609. Jonathan JennerUniversity of Manitoba610. Terri FriedlineUniversity of Michigan, School of Social Work611. Sirma BilgeSociology, Universite de Montreal612. Heba GowayedCUNY613. Jessica MouliteHoward University614. Amy StreckerUCD Sutherland School of Law615. Baris Cayli MessinaUniversity of Lincoln 616. Fay FaradayOsgoode Hall Law School, York University 617. Samia BanoSOAS University of London 618. Alex HannaDistributed AI Research Institute619. Francesco Correale CNRS – UMR 7324 CITERES 620. Alana LentinWestern Sydney University 621. Syed Nadeem Farhat Research Fellow 622. Lana Tatour University of New South Wales 623. Christopher PeysPepperdine University624. DanielUniversity of Queensland625. Maddison WellsHoward University626. Dr Lara PalomboMacquarie University627. Laurie AdkinUniversity of Alberta628. Robert ClinesWestern Carolina University 629. Anders HardigAmerican University 630. RohanUniversity of Oxford631. Johnny E. Williams Trinity College 632. Tom Western UCL633. Chloe SeayUniversity of Texas at Arlington 634. Dr Dyuti ChakravartyUniversity College Cork, Ireland635. Dr Aidan HehirUniversity of Westminster 636. Julián Castro-ReaUniversity of Alberta, Canada637. Jânia Maria Lopes SaldanhaUniversidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos638. Carolyn D’CruzLa Trobe University639. Taner AkçamArmenian Genocide Research Program within PAI at UCLA640. Robina Iqbal Keele University 641. Rebecca Ruth GouldSchool of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London642. Zareena GrewalYale643. Mariam Zaqout University College London644. Teresa PiacentiniUniversity of Glasgow 645. Mohammad Shahabuddin University of Birmingham 646. Mairead Enright University of Birmingham 647. Ghazala MirUniversity of Leeds648. KymUniversity of Suffolk 649. Sharon Lambert University College Cork Ireland 650. Kerwin KayeWesleyan University651. Robert G. HermanPrinceton University652. Sanaa AlimiaAga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations653. Barbara J. WienAmerican University654. José Elías Turizo Vanegas Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)655. Paul GovindMacquarie University 656. Nancy ShihadehRutgers University 657. Luigi DanieleNottingham Law School (NTU)658. Zoha WaseemUniversity of Warwick659. Scott TimckeUniversity of Johannesburg660. Tom MuddUniversity of Edinburgh661. Dr Andrew ThomasDeakin University 662. James CavallaroYale Jackson School of Global Affairs 663. Raihan IsmailUniversity of Oxford664. Juliana Poveda ClavijoUlster University 665. Siobhán AireyErasmus University666. Jessica WhyteUniversity of New South Wales 667. Aurelien Mondon University of Bath 668. Ayanna DozierUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst669. Sara DehmUniversity of Technology Sydney 670. Geoffre R. Martin, Ph.D.Mount Allison University671. Chu Cong MinhUSTH672. Nada SalemKing Abdulaziz University 673. Ibtehal HussainUniversity of Westminster674. Sinead D’SilvaUniversity of Leeds675. Meghna MohandasUniversity of British Columbia676. Clare PattonUniversity of Leeds 677. Thomas MaroisMcMaster University678. Eka Nugraha PutraO.P. Jindal Global University679. Laura Piaggio Asociación Argentina de Salud Pública 680. Sujith XavierFaculty of Law, University of Windsor681. Saranga UgalmugleUniversity of Windsor, Faculty of Law682. Lisa Wedeen The University of Chicago 683. Souheir EdelbiWestern Sydney University684. Saba FatimaUniversity of Hull685. Marim Abdel KaderUniversity of Toronto 686. Courtney HallinkUniversity of Cambridge 687. Kathryn GreenmanUniversity of Technology Sydney688. Paul BraceRetired Ontario lawyer689. Ronald Eberhard TundangPeta Kebijakan690. Fathiyyah MaryufaniUniversitas Pendidikan Indonesia691. Ben SilversteinAustralian National University 692. Edel HughesUniversity of Galway693. Yoke Sum WongAUArts694. Derek SayerUniversity of Alberta695. Saida Hodzic Cornell University 696. Freya Higgins-DesbiollesFlinders University International Relations 697. Joy White University of Bedfordshire 698. KZA ParkerIndependent scholar699. Jeena ShahCUNY School of Law700. Fadiah Nadwa FikriNational University of Singapore701. Clodagh Dunne University College Dublin 702. Daniel R. Quiroga-VillamarínGeneva Graduate Institute703. Idham BadruzamanUniversitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta704. Isti Toq’ah PANDAI (Indonesia’s Peace Education) Community 705. Anthony J LangloisCurtin University706. Madison Ambrose Hall University of Montana707. Marina Calculli Leiden University and Columbia University 708. Roos CreyghtonLSE, University of Amsterdam709. Dr. Ahmad Farouk MusaIslamic Renaissance Front710. Sujatha FernandesUniversity of Sydney711. National Science and Technology Forum, South Africa712. Emily Kidd WhiteOsgoode Hall Law School713. Ehab Alalfey714. Subramani ManiMedical College, Trivandrum, India715. Danish Zaki IIT kharagpur716. Nadim RouhanaTufts University717. Makere Stewart-HarawiraUniversity of Alberta718. Nastassia RambarranUniversity of Glasgow719. Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-SiddiquiSheridan College720. Maha AliLeiden University 721. Fajri Matahati MuhammadinUniversitas Gadjah Mada722. Chaumtoli HuqCUNY School of Law 723. Qowiyy Olalekan Badmus Islamic University of Madinah 724. James GodfreyUniversity of Canberra725. Oishik SircarJindal Global Law School726. Saumya DadooColumbia University727. Mohamed IbrahimThe University of British Columbia 728. Ali MumbachHoward University729. Ronald Eberhard TundangChinese University of Hong Kong730. Vijay kachru University of Saskatchewan 731. Priyamvada GopalUniversity of Cambridge732. Rashmi SinghPUC Minas 733. Alberto GomesDEEP Network734. Khaled ElgindyGeorgetown University735. Cynthia FebrinaBinawan University736. Susan MorrisseyUniversity of California, Irvine737. Dr. Muhanad SeloomDoha Institute for Graduate Studies 738. Silvia Luz González Márquez International Christian University 739. Kristin BurnettLakehead University740. Joshua MakalintalUniversity of Innsbruck741. Md Tabish EqbalJamia Hamdard, New Delhi742. Victor ToscanoIndependent Researcher743. Aysha ShafiqPhD IHEID, Geneve744. Ambreen AghaO.P. Jindal Global University745. Laura Nkula-WenzAfrican Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town 746. Rabea KhanLiverpool John Moores University 747. Aqsa Agha SRM University AP748. Arshad Saeed KhanQuaid I Azam University Islamabad749. Simone RoweThe University of New South Wales, Australia750. Saiful KhanUniversity of Oxford 751. Sara GhebremusseUniversity of Western Ontario, Faculty of Law752. Adil Hasan Khan Melbourne Law School 753. Myriam Houssay-HolzschuchUniversity Grenoble Alpes754. Ayesha OmarSOAS/Wits University755. Salbiah AhmadUN756. Saatchi SInternational Lawyer757. Mary McAuliffe University College Dublin758. Shantanu SahsOP Jindal Global Universitu759. Ilze Fourie University of Cape Town 760. Jinan BastakiNew York University, Abu Dhabi761. CarinHva762. Nadera Shalhoub-KevorkianQueen Mary University of London763. Sanele SibandaUniversity of Pretoria 764. Basma Abdelgafar Maqasid Institute765. Sari ArrafKing’s College London 766. Nurina AllyCentre for Law and Society, University of Cape Town767. Mohamed Seedat University of South Africa768. Janette KotivirtaIIT Kharagpur769. Nora SalemGerman University in Cairo770. Catherine NolinUniversity of Northern British Columbia771. Alison PhippsNewcastle University, UK772. Fabio Andres Diaz PabonAfrican Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) – UCT773. Anton David schoonUniversity of Helsinki774. Ryan WardOxford University Law Society775. Sarojini NadarUniversity of the Western Cape776. Michelle PaceRoskilde University777. Adel FouadAin Shams University778. Margot TudorCity, University of London779. James SmithUniversity College London780. Meeri Tiensuu South African Revenue Service781. NcikoGeneva Graduate Institute 782. Tom CritcheyGoldsmiths University, London783. Mohan Dutta CARE, Massey University 784. Toh Swee-Hin (S.H.Toh)University of Alberta785. Andreas PapamichailQueen Mary University of London786. Toh Swee-Hin (S.H.Toh)University of Alberta787. Martin Schwab, Ph.D.3×3 Global Drills789. Sara Elizabeth DillAnethum Global790. Hyo Yoon KangUniversity of Warwick791. Dr. Paul MepschenUniversity College Utrecht792. Arrey Collins International Human Rights Commission-Cameroon793. Charles HarbDoha Institute for Graduate Studies794. Asim QureshiCAGE795. Işıl AralKoç University796. SonaliIndependent scholar 797. Ilaria TucciTampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland798. Michael AlbertUniversity of Edinburgh799. Ahmed HammadThe British University in Egypt800. Katie Cruz University of Bristol801. Fleur van Leeuwen Boğaziçi University 802. Hanna KienzlerKing’s College London803. Catherine OwenUniversity of Exeter804. Frida StranneUniversity of Halmstad805. TomasoFerrando806. Jansie Niehaus MurcottTampere University, Tampere Peace Research Institute 807. Johan LindalLinköping University808. Mansi Kashatria Linköping University, Sweden 809. Lenny AppadooIn personal capacity810. Heba TariqAASMT811. Lisa Karlsson Blom Linköping university, Sweden 812. Maryam Aldossari Royal Holloway University of London 813. David Birchall London South Bank University 814. Sara ChaudhryBirkbeck, University of London815. Alex AfouxenidisNational Centre for Social Research, Athens Greece816. Khuloud Al-JamalKing’s College London817. Agata LisiakBard College Berlin818. Joanna KidmanVictoria University of Wellington819. Jonathan KlaarenUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg820. Hanan ToukanBard College Berlin821. Meg LuxtonYork University822. Roberto FilippelloUniversity of Amsterdam823. Léa GudelEHESS824. Sabah BoufkhedUniversity of Manchester825. Tanvee NandanOPJGU/ UniMelb826. Kamel Barkaoui CNAM, France 827. Sarah WalkerUniversity of Bologna828. Jan SändigUniversity of Bayreuth829. Victoria Canning Lancaster University 830. Paola Rivetti Dublin City University 831. Francesca Romana AmmaturoLondon Metropolitan University832. Ju HuntUniversity of Cape Town833. Mohamed BadarNorthumbria University834. Flora YousefUniversity Paris VIII835. Jordanna MatlonAmerican University, School of International Service836. Héloïse PeaucelleAix-Marseille Université837. Christelle RabierEHESS 838. Julia CareyJules Carey Ltd839. Claerwen O’HaraLa Trobe Law School, La Trobe University840. Nick CaddickAnglia Ruskin University841. AmanJindal Global Law School842. Amit KumarIITK843. School of LawSchool of Law, University of Essex844. Talal AsadDistinguished Professor (Emeritus), City University of New York845. Francesca MeloniKing’s college London846. Anna LodesertoCa’ Foscari University Venice • Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia847. Otilla MaunganidzeInstitute for Security Studies848. Laleh KhaliliUniversity of Exeter849. Manuela CiottiUniversity of Vienna850. André NunesMaastricht University851. Nicola PrattUniversity of Warwick852. LouiseParis-Cité (LCSP/CEDREF) 853. Toni Haastrup University of Manchester 854. Annapurna MenonUniversity of Sheffield855. Vjosa MusliuVrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)856. Mridula Manglam University of Allahabad 857. Sladjana LazicUniversity of Innsbruck858. Elyse SemerdjianClark University859. Tom KempUniversity of Nottingham 860. Doerthe RosenowKing’s College London861. Jemima RepoNewcastle University862. Dr Amy Cortvriend Loughborough University 863. Tariq DanaDoha Institute for Graduate Studies 864. Brigitte Hamman865. Sara PapariniQueen Mary University of London866. John SebastianUniversity of Melbourne 867. Colin Murray Newcastle University 868. Ahmed EzzatSOAS, University of London869. Yusuf MotaraRhodes University870. NiravSabarmati University 871. Laurel Baldwin-RagavenUniversity of the Witwatersrand872. Devanshi SaxenaFaculty of Law, University of Antwerp873. Giuliana RaccoYork University874. Farah RasmiGraduate Institute of Geneva875. Dr Ornette D Clennon MaCTRI 876. Lioba A HirschUniversity of Edinburgh 877. Nancy TamimiKing’s College London 878. Kirsten AinleyAustralian National University 879. Miri DavidsonUniversity of Warwick880. Nafay ChoudhuryLondon School of Economics and Political Science881. Rabia Ermiş Yeşil Turkish goverment882. Dr Joanne N Smith FinleyNewcastle University883. Farhana RahmanUniversity of Cambridge884. Nicola PalmerKing’s College London885. Enrique Prieto-RiosUniversidad del Rosario886. Donald SassoonQueen Mary University of London887. Dipali A Fletcher School, Tufts888. Milli LakeLSE889. Asst. Prof. Dr. Anwar KomaPrince of Songkla University 890. Louiza OdysseosUniversity of Sussex891. Anna Ardin Marie Cederschiöld university892. Claudia SabaBlanquerna School of Communication and International Relations893. Inés Bolaños Somoano European University Institute 894. Sita VenkateswarMassey University895. Elliot C. MasonUppsala University896. Maria WallstamInstitute for Urban and Housing Research, Uppsala University 897. FIroz CachaliaMandela Institute, Wits University898. Prof Meena DhandaUniversity of Wolverhampton 899. Kamya Vishwanath Independent 900. Kurt MillsUniversity of St. Andrews901. Fanny ArnulfULB902. ClifLBVC903. Rana RefahiLawyer904. FaridaDibeen 905. Omar Jabary SalamancaREPI, Université libre de Bruxelles906. Zaharom NainUniversity of Nottingham in Malaysia907. Mayssoun SukariehKCL908. Hanno BrankampDurham University, UK909. Karthik KPoshane910. Alice BayinganaUniversity of Sydney911. Camelia DewanUppsala University 912. Judy ThorneUniversity of Manchester913. Rezarta BilaliNew York University 914. Dr Alex PrichardUniversity of Exeter915. Nyssa MirzaPlan International916. Leila FarsakhUniversity of Massachusetts Boston 917. Saima Noewwnde montfort university918. Sindy JoyceUniversity of Limerick919. Ivan ČavdarevićOxford Brookes University920. Rana KhazbakKing’s College London921. Natasa MavronicolaUniversity of Birmingham922. Atalia OmerThe University of Notre w923. Rachel SeoigheUniversity of Kent924. Kathryn Medien The Open University 925. Daniela NadjSt. Mary’s University926. Hadje Cresencio SadjeActivist and Freelancer 927. Itziar Ruiz_-Gimenez Arrieta Group of African an international Studies University Autonomous of Madrud 928. Rachel KilleanUniversity of Sydney929. Patrick BresnihanMaynooth University930. Sumaiyah KholwadiaUniversity of Birmingham931. Thomas FrancisSOAS University of London932. Muireann O’DwyerUniversity of St Andrews933. Beatrice CanossiIrish Centre for Human Rights – University of Galway 934. Kingsley OmonUniversity of Salford935. Reinhard Huss MD MPHUBI Lab Leeds936. Florence Waller – CarrLondon School of Economics and Political Science937. Hoda HosseinyLund University938. Sonia Jemmotte939. James BeirneMaynooth University940. Haris ZargarErasmus University Rotterdam941. Charles Christopher WeisbeckerStockton University942. Franco GaldiniThe University of Manchester943. Zoe TongueUniversity of Leeds944. Tomas DraytonUniversity of Bath945. Stacey MortimerUniversity of Guelph946. Ioannis KampourakisErasmus University Rotterdam947. Dr. Lena El MalakIndependent948. Imen El AmouriTilburg Law School, Tilburg University949. Sophie DohertyThe Open University 950. Salomé IetterUniversity of Warwick 951. Luis EslavaLa Trobe University952. Shahab SaqibUniversity of Leicester 953. Luca Miranda Terenzi PUC Minas954. Yassin al-Haj Salehaljumhuriya.net955. Eimear Ní MhaoldomhnaighUniversity College Cork956. Yusuf Ahmed Osman ShegowManchester School of Architecture957. Farnaz Dezfouli AslUniversity of Gießen 958. Zinaida MillerNortheastern University 959. Laura PiacentiniUniversity of Strathclyde960. Yasmin DualehUniversity of Cambridge 961. Dr. Sandra DuffyUniversity of Bristol962. Manne MartenssonMalmö university 963. Faiza RahmanUniversity of Melbourne964. Lauren WilcoxUniversity of Cambridge965. Camilla Marucco Al-MimarMigration Institute of Finland966. Sanela BašićUniversity of Sarajevo967. Madina ThiamNew York University 968. Fida AdelyGeorgetown University 969. Sahiba La Trobe University 970. Francesco VacchianoUniversity Ca’ Foscari, Venice971. Sana Ouechtati CARTHAGE UNIVERSITY972. Richard MoodyGlobal Life Industries973. FardanGovernment post graduate college 974. Tazreena SajjadAmerican University 975. Marie RuyffelaereULB976. Matt MahmoudiUniversity of Cambridge977. Ruveyda GozenLondon School of Economics978. Anna MeierUniversity of Nottingham979. Laurence DavisUniversity College Cork980. Professor Curtis F.J. DoebblerUniversity of Makeni (Sierra Leone)981. Amal OummihOLG982. Daniel SteinOP Jindal Global University983. Md Abdul Gaffar DM University 984. Natalie PorterKeele University985. Richard ClementsTilburg Law School986. DionysiaUniversity of Ioannina 987. George O’TooleUniversity of Cape Town988. Kevin McParlandDepartment of Humanities, Dundalk Institute of Technology989. Helena SheehanDublin City University990. Ahuvia KahaneTrinity College Dublin991. Arpeeta Shams Mizan University of Dhaka/ University of Bristol Law School 992. Kevin HeartyQUB993. Niall SheilMaynooth University994. Kathryn UCC995. Julia Teixeira Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais996. Rassela MalindaIndependent997. Khaled FahmyTufts University998. Atalia OmerThe University of Notre Dame 999. Hoda HosseinyLund University1000. Professor Eoin Devereux University of Limerick 1001. Patrizia ZanelliCa’ Foscari University of Venice1002. Dianne KirbyBlackfriars Hall, Oxford1003. Sherene RazackUniversity of California at Los Angeles 1004. Dr Omar ShawkatalyUniversiti Sains Malaysia1005. DR MAZLAN BIN CHE SOH UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA 1006. David ClinchRoyal College of Physicians of Ireland1007. Fauzilah SallehUniversiti Sultan Zainal Abidin1008. Féilim Ó hAdhmaillUniversity College Cork, UCC1009. Cole SwansonHumber College1010. Fouad MoughrabiUniversity of Tennessee at Chattanooga1011. Teodora TodorovaUniversity of Warwick1012. Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz Brock University, Canada1013. Nuarrual Hilal Md Dahlan Universiti Utara Malaysia 1014. Rory RowanTrinity College Dublin 1015. Nimi HoffmannUniversity of Sussex1016. Hasni HassanUniversiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA)1017. Mohammad Hassan El nabihPalestinane1018. Koni BensonDept of Historical Studies, University of Western Cape, South Africa1019. Heidi Grunebaum University of the Western Cape 1020. Ayesah Uy AbubakarAlbukhary International Univesity1021. Wasim S M QADI University kebanngsan Malaysia 1022. Fiammetta BonfigliUniversity of Vienna1023. Ahmad HamarshaPlease help us, im doing my PhD please don’t destroy my future 1024. Dr Sajida AllyUniversity of Sussex 1025. Osaid N A Abdaljawwad Albukhary International University 1026. Rami NassarUSIM/ Malaysia 1027. Diana Merlynn EdelsteinWits1028. Mel CousinsTCD1029. Nicky Falkof University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa1030. Clare CoultasKing’s College London1031. Samihah binti Khalil @ HalimUniversiti Utara Malaysia1032. Niamh RooneyMaynooth University, Ireland1033. Dr Lucy MichaelIndependent researcher1034. Melanie Ferreira University of London 1035. NancyLSE1036. Anam SoomroLawyer, Karachi, Pakistan 1037. Dr David WearingUniversity of Sussex1038. Margot FrancisBrock University1039. Clare BellTU Dublin1040. John DuncanSchool of Advanced Study1041. Mustaffa OmarAlbukhary International University 1042. Motlatsi Khosi Unisa 1043. Felícia CamposUniversity of Edinburgh 1044. Rachel SolnickAberystwyth university1045. Chiara BonfiglioliCa’ Foscari University of Venice1046. Maria GashiHøyskolen i Innlandet 1047. Chelsey CarterYale University 1048. Sinéad MurphyGriffith College 1049. Rezarta BilaliNew York University 1050. Rosa MaryonUWE Bristol1051. NGO Sheau ShiUniversiti Sains Malaysia1052. Christine BinzelFAU Erlangen-Nürnberg1053. Vasuki NesiahMagdalene College, Cambridge University1054. Lara Montesinos ColemanUniversity of Sussex1055. Lisa McLeanKing’s University College1056. Dina M. SiddiqiNew York University1057. Rania MuharebIrish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, University of Galway1058. Elsa TsioumaniUniversity of Trento1059. Marjana JohanssonUniversity of Glasgow 1060. Derek VerbakelYork University 1061. Emny NsaifPUC Minas1062. Usha NatarajanYale Law School1063. Khaoula BengeziYork University1064. José Henríquez LeivaUniversity of Galway, Ireland1065. Piergiuseppe ParisiUniversity of York1066. Yolande BoukaQueen’s University1067. Reuben Mekenye California State University, San Marcos (retired Associate Professor)1068. Jamila J. GhaddarDalhousie University1069. LoubnaÉNAP1070. Gyunghee ParkWestchester Community College1071. Lethuxolo NkosiUniversity of South Africa1072. Shifana NiyasTrinity College Dublin1073. Mariam GeorgisSimon Fraser University 1074. Catherine CoquioUniversity Paris Cité1075. Zora The Geneva Graduate Institute 1076. COLE de VILLIERSStellenbosch University1077. Saoussen Knani Faculté des sciences juridiques 1078. Rim Lahmandi Ayed Université de carthage Tunisia 1079. Rae JerezaAmerican University1080. Paul Szejner Natural resources institute Finland1081. Seli Kutameuniversity of cape town1082. Dr Aine Gormley GallagherUlster University1083. Perpetua AdarUniversity of Warwick 1084. Italo BrandimarteUniversity of Cambridge1085. Mahmoud PatelUniversity of Western Cape (UWC)1086. Faisal KuttyRutgers University Center for Race, Rights &Security1087. Ammar NasifPTUK1088. David Vine American University 1089. Priyanka NaidooThe Green Connection1090. Dimitri Van Den MeersscheQueen Mary University of London
Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza
On 15 October 2023, over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies signed a public statement warning of the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Signatories include prominent Holocaust and genocide studies scholars, as well as many international law and TWAIL scholars. The text of the statement and list of signatures (updated on 20 October 2023) is below, and a pdf version can be accessed here.
Public Statement: Scholars Warn of Potential Genocide in Gaza
15 October 2023
As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognising the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.
The pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had already prompted discussions of genocide prior to the current escalation – such as by the National Lawyers Guild in 2014, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2014, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in 2016. Scholars have warned over the years that the siege of Gaza may amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”. The prevalence of racist and dehumanising language and hate speech in social media was also noted in a warning issued in July 2014 by the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect, in response to Israel’s conduct against the protected Palestinian population. The Special Advisers noted that individual Israelis had disseminated messages that could be dehumanising to the Palestinians and that had called for the killing of members of this group, and reiterated that incitement to commit atrocity crimes is prohibited under international law.
Israel’s current military offensive on the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023, however, is unprecedented in scale and severity, and consequently in its ramifications for the population of Gaza. Following the incursion by Palestinian armed groups on 7 October 2023, including criminal attacks against Israeli civilians, the Gaza Strip has been subjected to incessant and indiscriminate bombardment by Israeli forces. Between 7 October and 9:00 a.m. on 15 October, there have been 2,329 Palestinians killed and 9,042 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, including over 724 children, huge swathes of neighbourhoods and entire families across Gaza have been obliterated. Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water and other essential necessities. This terminology itself indicates an intensification of an already illegal, potentially genocidal siege to an outright destructive assault.
Late on 12 October, the Israeli authorities issued an order for more than 1.1million Palestinians in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip to leave their homes and flee to the south of Gaza within 24 hours, knowing that this would be practically impossible for many. Palestinians who did start to evacuate south reported that civilians and ambulances were targeted and hit by Israeli airstrikes on the designated “safe route”, killing at least 70 Palestinians who were fleeing to seek refuge. The ICRC stated that “the evacuation orders, coupled with the complete siege” are incompatible with international humanitarian law. Almost half a million Palestinians have already been displaced, and Israeli forces have bombed the only possible exit route that Israel does not control, the Rafah crossing to Egypt multiple times. The World Health Organisation published a warning that “[f]orcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence”.
There has also been an escalation of violence, arrests, expulsions, and destruction of whole Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. Since 7 October, Israeli settlers, with the backing of the army and police, have attacked and shot Palestinian civilians at point blank range (as documented in the villages of a-Tuwani and Qusra), have invaded their homes and assaulted residents. A number of Palestinian communities have already been forced to abandon their homes, after which settlers arrived and destroyed their property. Between 7 – 15 October, Al-Haq documented the killing by Israeli military and settlers of 55 Palestinians in the West Bank, and more the injury of 1,200 Palestinians there.
Statements of Israeli officials since 7 October 2023 suggest that beyond the killings and restriction of basic conditions for life perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza, there are also indications that the ongoing and imminent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are being conducted with potentially genocidal intent. Language used by Israeli political and military figures appears to reproduce rhetoric and tropes associated with genocide and incitement to genocide. Dehumanising descriptions of Palestinians have been prevalent. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October that “we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”. He subsequently announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and that he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, as well as stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” On 10 October, the head of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”. The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Since 2007, Israel has defined the Gaza Strip as a whole as an “enemy entity”. On 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas fighters. He asserted that Israel will wage a prolonged offensive and will turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centres “into rubble”. Israel’s President emphasised that the Israeli authorities view the entire Palestinian population of Gaza as responsible for the actions of militant groups, and subject accordingly to collective punishment and unrestricted use of force: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true”. Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz added: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
Evidence of incitement to genocide has also been present in Israeli public discourse. This ranges from statements by elected officials – such as Knesset member Ariel Kallner’s call on 7 October for “one goal: Nakba! [catastrophe for Palestinians] A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948” – to public banners displayed in Israeli cities calling for a “victory” signified by “zero population in Gaza” and the “annihilation of Gaza”. On national television, security correspondent Alon Ben David relayed the Israeli military’s plan to destroy Gaza City, Jabaliyya, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanun. Such statements are not new and resonate with a wider Israeli discourse showcasing the intent for elimination and genocide against the Palestinian people. Earlier in the year, for example, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant”, “disgusting” and called for “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.
On 12 October 2023, a group of UN Special Rapporteurs’ condemned “Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for”. The UN experts warned against “the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines. Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity”. On 14 October 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory warnedagainst “a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale” as Israel carries out “mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”.
The Palestinian people constitute a national group for the purposes of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The Palestinians of the Gaza Strip constitute a substantial proportion of the Palestinian nation, and are being targeted by Israel because they are Palestinian. The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life – against a backdrop of Israeli statements which evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.
Article II of the Genocide Convention provides that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
All states are bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law. The International Court of Justice has affirmed that the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law from which no derogation is allowed. The Convention provides that individuals who attempt genocide or who incite to genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.
Article I of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides that: “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish”. The International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available to it means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harbouring specific intent (dolus specialis), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”.
The undersigned urgently appeal to states to take concrete and meaningful steps to individually and collectively prevent genocidal acts, in line with their legal duty to prevent the crime of genocide. They must protect the Palestinian population, and ensure that Israel refrains from any further incitement to genocide and from the perpetration of conduct prohibited by Article II of the Genocide Convention.
All states should immediately act under Article VIII, and should call upon the competent organs of the United Nations, particularly the UN General Assembly, to take urgent action under the Charter of the United Nations appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. We note specifically the role of the General Assembly here, given that the Security Council is compromised by the United States and the United Kingdom (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel.
We recall that in 1982, the General Assembly condemned the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as “an act of genocide”. We note also that the state of Palestine is entitled to initiate, in accordance with Article IX of the Genocide Convention, proceedings before the International Court of Justice in order to prevent the perpetration of genocidal acts.
Finally, we call on all relevant UN bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to immediately intervene, to carry out the necessary investigations and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.
Signatories:
Aanchal Saraf, Dartmouth CollegeAaron Seymour, Lecturer, University of Technology SydneyAasiya Lodhi, Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster.Abdelghany Sayed, Assistant Lecturer, PhD Candidate, Kent Law School. Abdullah Omran, PhD student, Indiana University Abigail Balbale, New York UniversityAdalmir Marquetti, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS).Adam Elliott-Cooper, Lecturer, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of LondonAdil Hasan Khan, Melbourne Law SchoolAdrian Carrillo Gomez, PhD student, Deusto University.Afshin Matin-Asgari, Professor of Middle East history, California State University, Los Angeles Ahmad Al-Dissi, Professor, University of SaskatchewanAhmad Fouad, Lecturer of Law, the British University in EgyptAhmad Khaled, PhD, Assistant Professor of Public Law, Birzeit University.Ahmad Mustafa, Ph.D. student at the University of Kansas Ahmed Abofoul, International Lawyer, Legal Researcher and Advocacy Officer at Al-Haq OrganisationAhmed Selim, PhD Student, University of ChicagoAhmet Ferhat Baran, PhD Student, University of Aberdeen. Ajantha Subramanian, Professor, City University of New York. Alba Valenciano-Mañé, post-doctoral researcher, Universidad Autonoma de MadridAlbert Caramés, Adjunct Professor, Blanquerna – Ramon Llull UniversityAlessandra Mezzadri SOAS Reader in Global Development and Political Economy Alessandro Donadio Miebach, Adjunct Professor, Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul. Alexander D. Barder, Professor of International Relations, Florida International University Alexandre Abreu, Assistant Professor, ISEG-Lisbon School of Economics and Management. Alfredo Alietti, Professor, University of Ferrara ItalyAli Cebeci, PhD, Georgetown UniversityAli Raza, Associate Professor, Lahore University of Management SciencesAlice Panepinto, Reader, School of Law, Queen’s University BelfastAlicia Campos Serrano, Profesora Titular, Universidad Autónoma de MadridAlison Phipps, UNESCO, Chair University of Glasgow Alma Khasawnih, The College of New JerseyAlyosxa Tudor, Reader in Gender Studies, SOAS University of London.Alyssa Kristeller, Graduate Student Georgetown University. Aman, Associate Professor of Legal Practice, Jindal Global University Amber De Clerck, PhD Student & Teaching Assistant, Ghent University, BelgiumAmber Lakhani, PhD Candidate & GTA, SOAS University of London. Amina Adanan, Lecturer in Law, Maynooth UniversityAmira Abdelhamid, Lecturer in International Relations, University of Portsmouth Amy Strecker, Associate Professor of Law, University College DublinAnamika Misra, Associate Lecturer, University of Bristol. Anand Sheombar, researcher & lecturer, HU University of Applied Sciences UtrechtAnand Vaidya, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Reed CollegeAnanya Chakravarti, Associate Professor of History, Georgetown UniversityAnas Karzai, Laurentian University, Canada Anastasiya Kotova, Doctoral candidate, Lund UniversityAnchita Dasgupta, Oxford Law FacultyAndrea Cornwall, Professor of Global Development and Anthropology, King’s College London.Andrea Gadberry, Associate Professor, NYUAndrea Maria Pelliconi, Teaching Associate, University of NottinghamAndrea Mura, Senior Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of LondonAndrea Teti, Associate Professor of Political Science, Univeristy of Salerno, ItalyAndrew Bush, Assistant Professor, Bard CollegeAndrew Woolford, PhD, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba Angana Chatterji, University of California, Berkeley. Angela Daly, Professor of Law & Technology, University of Dundee. Angela Smith, Sessional Academic, University of New South WalesAngela Zito, Anthropology/Religious Studies, NYUAnita H. Fábos, Professor, International Development, Community & Environment Department, Clark University Anita Rupprecht, University of BrightonAnjali Arondekar, Professor, Feminist Studies, UCSCAnna Bigelow, Stanford University. Anna Ferguson, Georgetown University Anna Rosellini, University of BolognaAnna-Claire Steffen, PhD Candidate, UMass AmherstAnnaclaudia Martini, Assistant Professor at University of Bologna, ItalyAnnapurna Menon, Teaching Associate, University of Sheffield Anne Berg, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania.Anne Hunnell Chen, Assistant Professor of Art History and visual culture, Bard College Anne Norton, Professor, University of PennsylvaniaAnne-Claire Defossez, Researcher, Institute for Advanced Study, PrincetonAnneke Newman, Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, University of GhentAnooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Barnard College, Columbia UniversityAnthony Alessandrini, Professor, City University of New YorkAnthony Gorman, Senior Lecturer, University of Edinburgh. Anton Shammas, Prof. Emeritus of Middle East Literatures, University of MichiganAntonio Scialà, Università Roma Tre, ItalyAntonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo, Associate Professor, Rutgers University-Newark. Aoife Daly, Professor of Law, School of Law, University College CorkArathi Sriprakash, University of Oxford Ardi Imseis, Professor of International Law, Queen’s University Arun Kundnani, independent scholar and writerArzu Somalı, PhD student, University of Istanbul. Aseil Abu-Baker, Legal Consultant. Ashok Kumar, Senior Lecturer of Political Economy, Birkbeck University. Aslı Bâli, Professor of Law, Yale UniversityAstrid Mrkich, refugee lawyer, Toronto, CanadaAta Hindi, Birzeit University. Atiya Habeeb Kidwai, retired Professor, Jawharlal Nehru University, IndiaAvital Ronell, University Professor of the Humanities, NYUAyça Çubukçu, Associate Professor in Human Rights, LSEAyesha Khalid Chaudhry, Doctoral candidate at Deakin University AustraliaAyesha Umaña Dajud, JSD student, Cornell UniversityAyushman Bhagat, Lecturer, Brunel University London Azam Khatam, Instructor, York UniversityAzeezah Kanji, legal academic and journalistBadreddine Rachidi, Graduate Student & Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.Baki Tezcan, Professor of History, University of California, DavisBanah Ghadbian, Assistant Professor Of Comparative Women’s Studies, Spelman CollegeBarbara Aiolfi, research fellow University of Milan – BICOCCABarbara De Poli, Associate Professor, Ca’ Foscari University VeniceBarry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University, North Carolina.Basheer Ahmad, Retired professor, JNU, New Delhi Bashir Saade, Lecturer in Politics and Religion, University of StirlingBayan Abusneineh, Assistant Professor, Ohio State University Ben Golder, Professor, UNSWBen Whitham, Lecturer in International Relations, SOAS University of LondonBen Wiedel-Kaufmann, Lecturer, The Open University. Benjamin Selwyn, Professor of International Relations and Development, University of Sussex. Benjamin Thorne, Lecturer in Law, University of KentBerklee Baum, DPhil, University of OxfordBesan Jaber, Georgetown UniversityBielasan Tareq Zaina, PhD Student, Georgetown UniversityBikrum Gill, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Virginia TechBilal Maanaki, University of VirginiaBilge Yesil, City University of New YorkBircan Ciytak, Research Fellow, University of BirminghamBirgul Kutan, University of Sussex Bishnupriya Ghosh, Professor, UC Santa BarbaraBlanca Camps-Febrer, Adjunct Lecturer, Autonomous University of BarcelonaBrannon Ingram, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, North-western UniversityBrendan Ciaran Browne, Assistant Professor, School of Religion, Theology and Peace Studies, Trinity College DublinBrenna Bhandar, Associate Professor, Allard Law FacultyBrian McMahon, Lecturer in Sociology and Mindfulness-Based Wellbeing, Munster Technological UniversityBridget Guarasci, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall CollegeBruce Robbins, Columbia UniversityBruna A. Gonçalves, PhD Researcher, European University InstituteCahal McLaughlin, Professor, School of Arts, English and Languages Queen’s University BelfastCamila Vergara, Senior Lecturer, University of EssexCamilo Pérez-Bustillo, Executive Director, National Lawyers’ Guild – San Francisco Bay Area chapterCarla Winston, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of MelbourneCarles Fernández-Torné, Adjunct Professor in transitional justice and conflict analysis, Ramon Llull UniversityCarlo Caprioglio, Legal Clinic on Migration and Asylum, Università Roma TreCarlo Leget, Professor of Care Ethics, University of Humanistic Studies. Carlos Bichet, Assistant Professor, Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Políticas , Universidad de PanamaCatherine Charrett, Senior Lecturer, International Relations, University of Westminster.Catherine Larocque, PhD candidate, University of OttawaCathy Powell, Associate Professor in Public Law, University of Cape TownCemil Aydin, Professor of International History, University of North Carolina Chapel HillCeyda Turan, Lawyer at Turan Law OfficeChaman Lal Retd Professor JNU Charles des Portes, Teaching Fellow in Political Theory, University of LeedsChenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor, NYU Journalism Chi-Chi Shi, PhD Researcher, Durham UniversityChiara De Cesari, Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, University of Amsterdam. Chiara Pagano, Post-doc, University of Graz Chris Barker, Assistant Professor, The American University in CairoChris Dole, Professor of Anthropology, Amherst CollegeChris Gilbert, Professor of Political Studies, Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela Christina Murray, Graduate Student, MAAS, Georgetown.Christine Hong, Professor, UC Santa CruzChristo El Morr, Professor, York University, CanadaChristopher Gevers, School of Law, University of KwaZulu-NatalChristopher Parker, Associate Professor, Ghent University Christopher Roberts, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Chinese University of Hong KongCigdem Cidam, Professor of Political Science, Union College Schenectady NYCira Pascual Marquina, Professor of Political Studies, Universidad Bolivariana de VenezuelaClaire Begbie, PhD student at Concordia University, Montreal.Claire Gallien, Professor, University Montpellier 3 Clara Han, Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins UniversityClaudia Dides, Universidad de Santiago. Claudia Saba, Adjunct Lecturer, Ramon Llull UniversityClement Sichimwa, Lecturer and Researcher at University of Zambia Clíodhna Murphy, Associate Professor of Law, Maynooth University Clod Marlan Krister Yambao, Asst. Professor University of the Philippines Dept. of Art Studies and Doctoral Research Fellow, Conflict Research Group, Ghent UnivesityColin Breen, Reader, Ulster UniversityColleen Bell, Associate Professor, University of SaskatchewanCristiana Fiamingo, assistant prof. University of MilanCristina Bacchilega, Professor Emerita, University of Hawaii-ManoaCurtis F.J. Doebbler, Research Professor of Law, Department of Law, University of MakeniCynthia Franklin, Professor, University of Hawai’iCyra Akila Choudhury, Professor of Law, FIU College of LawDalia Said Mostafa, Associate Professor, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, QatarDamien Short, Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice; Co-Director, Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of LondonDaniel Brown, PhD, LSE Sociology Department Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, PhD Candidate, Geneva Graduate InstituteDaniel Segal, Jean M Pitzer Professor Emeritus, Pitzer CollegeDaniel Stein, Assistant Professor, O.P. Jindal Global Law SchoolDaniela Meneghini ca’ Foscari università of Venice Daniela Pioppi University of Naples L’Orientale Daniele Conversi, Research Professor at the Ikerbasque Foundation for Science and the University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV), Bilbao, EuskadiDanielle Fernandes, Doctoral researcher, Vrije Universiteit BrusselDara Leyden, PhD candidate, Queen Mary University of LondonDaragh Murray, Senior Lecturer, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.Darryl Li, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member of the Law School, University of Chicago.David Keane, Assistant Professor of Law, Dublin City UniversityDavid Landy, Director of MPhil in Race Ethnicity and Conflict, Trinity College DublinDavid Leadbeater, Adjunct Professor, Laurentian University, CanadaDavid Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Stanford University. David Theo Goldberg, Professor, University of California, IrvineDavid van Leeuwen, professor, Radboud University Nijmegen David Whyte, Professor of Climate Justice, Queen Mary University of LondonDearbhla Minogue, Senior Lawyer at Global Legal Action NetworkDeborah B. Gould, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz Deborah Lawson, PhD Candidate, School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool. Deen Sharp, Visiting Fellow, LSEDiana Allan, McGill UniversityDiana Jeater, Professor of African History, University of LiverpoolDiane Lamoureux, professeure émérite, Université Laval. Didier Fassin, Professor, Collège de FranceDimitri Van Den Meerssche, Lecturer, Queen Mary University of London. Dina Al-Kassim, Professor, University of British Columbia Dina M. Siddiqi, Global Liberal Studies, New York UniversityDina Matar, Professor Political Communication, SOASDino Pancani C, Facultad de Comunicacion e Imagen, Universidad de ChileDipti Khera, Associate Professor, New York UniversityDolly Kikon, University of Melbourne Donia Khraishi, Georgetown University Douaa Sheet, Assistant Professor, American UniversityDouglas Carson, University College DublinEdemilson Paraná, Associate Professor of Social Sciences, LUT University, FinlandEduardo Villavicencio, PhD Student, Kent Law School.Edward Brennan, Lecturer, Technological University, DublinEdwin Bikundo, Senior Lecturer, Griffith Law SchoolEftychia Mylona, Lecturer, Leiden University Egidio de Bustamante, Senior Lecturer, Unit for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Innsbruck. Ekin Kurtic, Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern UniversityElena Vezzadini, Research affiliate, Institute for African WorldsElif Babül, Associate Professor, Mount Holyoke CollegeElif Durmuş, Postdoctoral Researcher in International Law and Human Rights, University of AntwerpElisa Giunchi, Professor, Università degli studi di MilanoElisabeth Weber, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa BarbaraElizabeth Shakman Hurd, Professor of Politics and Religious Studies, Northwestern University. Elora Halim Chowdhury, Professor, UMass BostonElora Shehabuddin, Professor, UC BerkeleyElyse Crystall, Teaching Professor, UNC Chapel HillEmilio Dabed, adjunct professor of law, York University, Toronto Emily J. Sumner, Ph.D. candidate, University of MinnesotaEmily Watkins, Graduate Teaching Assistant/Instructor, University of KansasEmma Palmer, Senior Lecturer, Griffith UniversityEnrica Rigo, Associate professor of law, University of Roma TreEren Duzgun, Assistant Professor of International Relations, University of CyprusEric Hooglund, Editor, Middle East CritiqueEskandar Sadeghi, Associate Professor, University of YorkEstella Carpi, Assistant Professor in Humanitarian Studies, University College London Ettore Asoni, University of BolognaEva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University of LondonFabia Fernandes Carvalho, Assistant Professor, Universidade Federal de São PauloFabio Lanza, Professor, University of ArizonaFabio Marcelli, Senior Researcher of the Institute for International legal studies. Fadi Ennab, Vanier Scholar/PhD Student, University of Manitoba Farah Mahmoud, Doctoral Candidate, Florida International UniversityFarida Khan, Professor, University of Colorado Fatemeh Shams, Associate Professor of Persian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.AFathimah Fildzah Izzati, PhD Candidate, SOAS University of LondonFatima Sajjad, Associate professor, Director Center for Critical Peace Studies, University of Management and Technology LahoreFauzia Ahmad, Senior Lecturer, GoldsmithsFéilim Ó hAdhmaill, Lecturer, University College CorkFelícia Campos, PhD researcher in Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Edinburgh. Felicite Fairer-Wessels, emeritus professor, University of Pretoria, South AfricaFernando Quintana, PhD Student and GTA, Queen Mary University of London, School of LawFerran Izquierdo Brichs / Profesor Agregat / Universitat Autònoma de BarcelonaFida Adely, Assistant Professor, Georgetown UniversityFien De Meyer, PhD, University of Antwerp. Flagg Miller, Professor, University of California, DavisFleur van Leeuwen, Assistant professor in international law, Boğaziçi University, IstanbulFrances Tanzer, Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Modern Jewish History and Culture, Assistant Professor of History, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University Francesca Biancani, Associate Professor, University of BolognaFrancesca Romana Ammaturo, Senior Lecturer, London Metropolitan University.Francis Cody, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of TorontoFrancisca James Hernandez, Instructional Faculty, Pima Community College Fulya Pinar, Postdoctoral scholar, Middle East Studies, Brown University.Gabriela Kuetting, Professor of Global Politics, Rutgers University-NewarkGabriele vom Bruck, SOAS. Gabriele Wadlig, Max Weber Fellow, Department of Law, European University Institute Gareth Dale, Politics, Brunel UniversityGargi Bhattacharyya, Professor, University of the ArtsGary Fields, University of California San DiegoGayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Professor, Columbia University Gearóid Ó Cuinn, Founding Director, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN)Gene Carolan, Lecturer in Law, Technological University DublinGennaro Gervasio, Associate Professor, Università Roma Tre German Correa profesor Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Germán Santana Pérez, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Ghada Ageel, University of Alberta. Ghadir Zannoun, Associate Professor, University of KentuckyGholam Khiabany, Goldsmiths, University of LondonGianfranco Ragona, professor at University of TurinGijs Verbossen, Senior lecturer in conflict studies, University of AmsterdamGillian Hart, Professor Emeritus, University of California BerkeleyGillian Maris Jones, Ph.D. candidate, University of PennsylvaniaGiorgia Baldi, Lecturer, University of Sussex. Giulia Contes, project manger and PhD student, UAntwerpenGiulia Pinzauti, Assistant Professor of Public International Law, Leiden Law SchoolGiuseppe Aragno, Storico, Fondazione Humaniter, NapoliGiuseppe Mastruzzo, Director, International University College of Turin Gloria Novovic, Gender, Development and Globalisation Fellow, London School of Economics.Goldie Osuri, University of Warwick, UKGolnar Nikpour, Assistant Professor or History, Dartmouth CollegeGordon Christie, Professor, Peter A Allard School of Law, University of British ColumbiaGoretti Horgan, Senior Lecturer, Ulster University Greg Albo, professor, Politics, York UniversityGreg Burris, Associate Professor, American University of Beirut.Guido Donini, former Assistant Professor 0ffof Classics at the University of ChicagoGuillem Farrés Fernández, Professor Lector, UOCGuillermo Gigliani, Professor, Universidad Nacional de Moreno, ArgentinaHadia Mubarak, Assistant Professor of Religion, Queens University of Charlotte.Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of LondonHakeem Yusuf, Professor of Global Law, University of DerbyHamed Al-Mogarry, Sana’a University.Hanan Elsayed, Occidental CollegeHanan Kashou, Associate Teaching Professor, Rutger University.Hanan Toukan, Associate Professor, Bard College BerlinHannah Birkenkoetter, Assistant Professor, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México Hannah Boast, Chancellor’s Fellow, University of Edinburgh Hannah NS Bahrin, PhD student, Queen Mary University Hannelore Van Bavel, postdoctoral researcher, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & University of BristolHarold Marcuse, Professor of History, University of California, Santa BarbaraHasan Basri Bülbül, Assistant Professor of International Law, Boğaziçi University, Turkey.Hasan Shuaib, PhD Graduate, Rutgers UniversityHassan Jabareen, General Director, Adalah Legal Center.Hatice Ozturk, PhD student, Georgetown UniversityHayley Gibson, University of Kent. Hazem Jamjoum, Curator, British Library.Helena Sheehan, Emeritus Professor, Dublin City UniversityHelga Tawil-Souri, Associate Professor, New York UniversityHelmi Mohammed Abdo, Sana’a Community College.Helyeh Doutaghi, Research Scholar, Yale University.Hesham Sallam, Stanford UniversityHilla Dayan, Lecturer, Amsterdam University College. Hossein Kamaly, Professor of Interfaith Studies, Hartford international University for Religion and PeaceHoward Pflanzer, Adj. Associate Professor, Hunter CollegeHoward Winant, University of California, Santa BarbaraHowie Rechavia-Taylor, Fellow, LSEHulya Dagdeviren, Professor of Economic Development, University of Hertfordshire. Humeira Iqtidar, King’s College LondonHumoud Y. Alfadhli, Assistant Professor of International Law, Kuwait University Huseyin Disli & Kent Law School/Worldwide Lawyers Association Research and Programmes Executive.Idil Abdillahi Assistant Professor, TMU.Ignasi Bernat, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, University of Barcelona Inessa Hadjivayanis, PhD candidate, SOAS. Inge van Nistelrooij, associate professor, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht.Intan Suwandi, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Illinois State University. Iqra Anugrah, Research Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University. Ira Bhaskar, Retd. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, IndiaIrene Van Staveren, professor of economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Irina Ceric, Assistant Professor, University of Windsor Faculty of Law Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Assistant Professor, Columbia UniversityIsabel Käser, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Bern Isabella Camera d’Afflitto – Honorary Professor, Sapienza università di RomaIsabelle Mildonian, Graduate, Roanoke College. Işıl Aral, Assistant professor of international law, Koç UniversityIsobel Roele, Reader in Law, Queen Mary University of London Issa Shivji, Professor Emeritus, University of Dar es SalaamItziar Ruiz Giménez, Profesora de RRII y Coordinadora del Grupo de Estudios Africanos e Internacionales, UAMJ. Travis Shutz, Assistant Professor, California State University Los AngelesJack Halberstam, Columbia University Jack McGinn, PhD candidate, LSEJairo I. Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech UniversityJalal Kawash, Academic, University of CalgaryJamal Ali, Assistant Teaching Professor, Rutgers UniversityJames Eastwood, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of LondonJan Selby, Professor of International Politics, University of LeedsJaskiran Dhillon, Associate Professor, The New SchoolJasmin Johurun Nessa, University of Liverpool.Jasmine Barzani, PhD candidate Melbourne UniversityJason Beckett, Associate Professor, American University in CairoJavier González-Arellano, Profesor asociado de filosofía del Derecho Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Jay Ramasubramanyam, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Science, York UniversityJean Beaman, Associate Professor, Sociology, University of California-Santa BarbaraJeannette Graulau, Associate Professor, CUNYJeff Handmaker, Associate Professor, Erasmus University Rotterdam.Jeffrey Sacks, Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, Senior Lecturer on Collective Violence, University of St AndrewsJehan Mohamed, Lecturer, Rutgers State University.Jenny Phillimore, Professor, University of BirminghamJeremy Dell, Lecturer, University of Edinburgh Jessie Daniels, PhD, Professor, CUNYJillian Rogin, Associate Professor (Law), University of Windsor. Jinan Bastaki, Associate Professor of Legal Studies, NYUAD. Jo Bluen, London School of Economics, PhD candidateJo-Marie Burt, Associate Professor, George Mason UniversityJoel Gordon, Professor of History, University of Arkansas Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor, Clark UniversityJohn Bellamy Foster, Profesor Emeritus, University of Oregon.John Cox, Director, Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.John L. Esposito, Distinguished University Professor, Georgetown UniversityJohn Reynolds, Associate Professor of International Law, Maynooth UniversityJolanda Guardi, Professor, University of TurinJonathan Wheeler, Assistant professor and researcher, National University of Tucumán-CONICET. Jordan Cortesi, PhD student, University of Kansas.Jordana Silverstein, Senior Research Fellow, University of MelbourneJose Itzigsohn, Professor of Sociology, Brown UniversityJoseph Elsayyid, Yale UniversityJuan M. Amaya-Castro, Universidad de los AndesJulia Dehm, Senior Lecturer in Law, La Trobe UniversityJulian Go, Professor, University of ChicagoJuliane Hammer, Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillJulie Carlson, Professor of English, UC Santa BarbaraJyotirmaya Sharma, Professor, University of Hyderabad Kaiya Aboagye, Senior Lecturer, University Western SydneyKalbir Shukra, former senior lecturer now independent researcher.Kanad Bagchi, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of AmsterdamKareem Rabie, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at ChicagoKaren Crawley, Senior Lecturer, Griffith Law School Karin Arts, Professor of International Law and Development, International Institute of Social StudiesKarin White, ECCE Programme Chair, Atlantic Technological UniversityKarma Nabulsi, Professor, University of Oxford Kasia Paprocki, Associate Professor, London School of Economics and Political ScienceKatherine Gallagher, Center for Constitutional RightsKatherine Natanel, Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies, University of ExeterKathleen Lynch, University College Dublin, UCD Professor of Equality Studies (Emerita)Kathy Engel, Associate Arts Professor, NYUKaty Kalemkerian, John Abbott College Kaveh Ehsani, Associate Professor, DePaul University- ChicagoKen Fero Assistant Professor Coventry UniversityKenzie El Bakry, Graduate Social Sciences, University of Düsseldorf Kevin A. Gould, Associate Professor of Geography, Concordia UniversityKevin Skerrett, Adjunct Research Professor, Institute of Political Economy, Carleton UniversityKhaled Abou El Fadl, Professor, UCLA law SchoolKiran Asher, Professor and Chair, Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, UMass AmherstKirsten Forkert, Professor of Cultural Studies, Birmingham City University. Koen Leurs, Associate Professor, Utrecht University. Kristina Richardson, Professor, University of Virginia. Kurt Schock, Professor, Rutgers University, NewarkLaila Farah, Depaul University, Associate ProfessorLaila Parsons, Professor, McGill University Laila Shereen Sakr, Associate Professor, University of California, Santa BarbaraLaith Aqel, Clinical Lecturer in Law, Yale Law School. Laleh Khalili, Professor, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of ExeterLana Sirri, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Amsterdam.Lana Tatour, University of New South WalesLara Deeb, Professor of Anthropology, Scripps CollegeLara Fricke, PhD candidate University of ExeterLara Khattab, Assistant Professor at Mount Allison University Laura Betancur Restrepo, Associate Professor of International Law, Universidad de Los AndesLaura De Vos, Assistant Professor American Studies, Radboud UniversityLaura Fair, Professor, Columbia UniversityLaura Feliu Martinez, Profesora titular, UABLaura Maghețiu, Doctoral Researcher, CLaSP, Queen Mary University of LondonLaura McAtackney, Professor of Radical Humanities Laboratory and Archaeology, University College Cork (Ireland) and Professor of Heritage Studies, Aarhus University (Denmark)Laura Rodriguez Castro, Southern Cross University Laurie King, Teaching Professor, Department of Anthropology, Georgetown University Layli Uddin, Lecturer, Queen Mary University of LondonLeena Grover, Associate Professor of International Law, Tilburg UniversityLeila Ullrich, Associate Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford.Lena Alhusseini, Phd Student, California Institute of Integral StudiesLeo Spitzer, Professor of History Emeritus, Dartmouth CollegeLeon Sealey-Huggins, Assistant Professor of Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick Leticia Rovira-Facultad de Humanidades y Artes- Universidad Nacional de Rosario – ArgentinaLeyla Neyzi, Research Fellow, University of GlasgowLila Pine, Associate Professor, New Media, Toronto Metropolitan UniversityLiliana Suárez, Universidad Autónoma de MadridLillian Robb, PhD Candidate Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies GenevaLisa Hajjar, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa BarbaraLivia Wick, Associate Professor, American University of Beirut.Liyana Kayali, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of SydneyLori Allen, Reader in Anthropology, SOAS University of London. Lucia Sorbera, Senior Lecturer and Chair Arabic Language and Cultures, The University of SydneyLucia Sorbera, Senior Lecturer and Chair Arabic Language and Cultures, University of SydneyLuigi Daniele, Senior Lecturer in Law, Nottingham Trent UniversityLuis Andueza, Lecturer in International Development, King’s College London Luis Eslava, Professor of International Law, La Trobe University & University of KentM. Bahati Kuumba, Professor of Comparative Women’s Studies, Spelman College M. Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology, Mount Royal University. Macarena Aguiló, Académica Universidad de Chile Madawi Al-Rasheed, Professor, LSEMadeline G. Levine, Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita, University of North Carolina, Chapel HillMadina Thiam, Assistant Professor of History, New York UniversityMaggie Ronayne, Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Galway, Galway, Ireland.Maghraoui Driss, Al Akhawayn University, Morocco. Maha Abdallah, Graduate Teaching Assistant & PhD researcher, Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp. Maha Nassar, Associate Professor, University of Arizona. Maha Shuayb, University of Cambridge and Centre for Lebanese Studies.Maher Hamoud, Associate Scholar, KU LeuvenMahsheed Ansari, Senior Lecturer, Charles Sturt UniversityMahvish Ahmad, Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics, LSE & Co-Director LSE Human Rights. Mairaj Syed, Professor, Religious Studies and Middle East South Asia Studies, University of California, DavisMaisha Prome, PhD Candidate, Yale UniversityMaja Janmyr, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of OsloMalek Abisaab, Associate Professor McGill University Mandy Turner, professor of conflict, peace and humanitarian affairs, University of Manchester, UK. Marcela Alvarez Pérez, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de PueblaMarcela Pizarro , Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of LondonMargaux L Kristjansson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Bard CollegeMaria Bhatti, lecturer, School of Law, Western Sydney University Maria Cristina Paciello, researcher, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Maria Federica Moscati, Reader in Law and Society, University of Sussex. Maria Haro Sly, Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins University. Maria LaHood, Deputy Legal Director, Center for Constitutional Rights. Maria Rashid Fellow, Gender Studies Department, London School of Economics.Maria Tzanakopoulou, Lecturer in Law, Birkbeck, University of LondonMariam Motamedi Fraser, Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of LondonMariana Gkiati, Assistant Professor, Tilburg UniversityMarianne Hirschberg, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany.Marieke Potma, PhD-candidate, University for Humanistic Studies.Marilù Mastrogiovanni, Adjunct professor in Journalism, University of Bari “Aldo Moro”Mario Novelli, University of Sussex Marion Kaplan, NYU, EmeritaMarios Costa, Senior Lecturer, City, University of London Marissa Jackson Sow, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Richmond School of LawMarjorie Cohn, Founding Dean, People’s Academy of International LawMark Goodman, Professor, Sociology, York University, TorontoMarnie Holborow, Associate Faculty, Dublin City UniversityMarsha Henry, London School of EconomicsMarsha Rosengarten, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of LondonMarta Giallombardo, PhD candidate, Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia.Marwa Daoudy, Associate Professor, Georgetown UniversityMarwa Neji, researcher, Ghent University, Belgium. Mary Ana McGlasson, Director, Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, Deakin University, MelbourneMary Ellen Davis, part-time faculty, Concordia University, MontréalMary Laheen, Assistant Professor, University College DublinMary Nolan, Professor of History Emerita, New York UniversityMarya Farah, Legal ResearcherMaryam Aldossari, Associate Professor, Royal Holloway University of London Matiangai Sirleaf, Professor of Law, University of Maryland Matt Howard, Lecturer, University of KentMatteo Capasso, University of Venice, Italy.Matthew Cole, Lecturer in Technology, Work and EmploymentMatthew Zagor, Associate Professor, ANU College of Law, Australian National University Maud Anne Bracke, Professor of modern European history, University of Glasgow UK Maura Finkelstein, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Muhlenberg College Mauricio Amar, Centro de Estudios Árabes Eugenio Chahuan, Universidad de ChileMaya Mikdashi, Associate Professor, Rutgers University. Mayur Suresh, Senior Lecturer, SOAS University of London. Mazen Masri, Senior Lecturer in Law, The City Law School, City University of London. Maziar Behrooz, San Francisco State UniversityMeera Sabaratnam, Associate Professor, University of OxfordMehmet Erken, İstanbul UniversityMehrdad F. Samadzadeh, University of TorontoMelania Brito Clavijo, PhD candidate; Universidad Autónoma de BarcelonaMelanie Richter-Montpetit, Senior Lecturer in International Security, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex.Melinda González, Assistant Professor, Georgetown UniversityMicah Khater, Assistant Professor, University of California-BerkeleyMichael Daniel Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburghersity of PittsburghMichael Fakhri, Professor of Law, University of Oregon. Michael Lynk, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Western UniversityMichael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Associate Professor, University of California, BerkeleyMichael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA.Michel Feher, Editor/Publisher, Zone books, NY. Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Senior Lecturer in Public International LawMichelle Farrell, Professor of Law, University of LiverpoolMichelle Hartman, Professor, McGill UniversityMichiel Bot, Associate Professor, Tilburg Law School. Miguel Valderrama, investigador adjunto Instituto de Filosofía, Universidad Diego Portales.Mikki Stelder, Assistant Professor Global Arts and Politics, University of Amsterdam. Minoo Moallem, Professor, UC BerkeleyMiriam Ticktin, Professor, CUNY Graduate Center. Miriyam Aouragh, Professor, University of Westminster. Mirjam Twigt, Leiden University Moara Assis Crivelente, Researcher in the Centre for Social Studies, University of CoimbraMohamad Arnaout, Associate Professor, Lebanese International University Mohamed Adhikari, Emeritus Associate Professor, History Department, University of Cape TownMohamed Ali, PhD Candidate, Georgetown UniversityMohamed Mathee, Senior Lecturer, University of Johannesburg.Mohamed Sayed, Associate instructor and PhD candidate at Indiana UniversityMohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed, Assistant Professor at UC BerkeleyMohammad Ataie, Lecturer, University of Massachusetts Amherst.Mohammad Fakhreddine, Assistant Teaching Professor, Georgetown UniversityMohammad Shahabuddin, Professor, University of Birmingham Mohammed Abukhdeir. Abukhdeir family President Mohammed Sawaie, Professor, University of VirginiaMohan Rao, former professor at JNU, New DelhiMohsen al Attar, Reader, Associate Dean, XJTLUMona Baker, University of OsloMonisha Das Gupta, University of Hawaiʻi Mridula Mukherjee JNU India Retired ProfessorMurad Idris, Associate Professor, University of MichiganMyria Georgiou, Professor, LSEMythri Jegathesan, Associate Professor, Santa Clara University.Nabil Al-Tikriti, Professor, University of Mary WashingtonNabil Salih, graduate student at Bard CollegeNada Elia, Visiting Professor, Western Washington UniversityNadeem Karkabi, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of HaifaNadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Lawrence D Biele Chair in Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Global Chair in Law, Queen Mary University of London.Nadia Abu El-Haj, Ann Whitney Olin Professor, Barnard College & Columbia University.Nadia Ahmad, Associate Professor of Law, Barry University; PhD Student, Yale School of the EnvironmentNadia Guessous, Colorado CollegeNadia Silhi Chahin, PhD researcher, Law School – University of EdinburghNadine El-Enany, Professor of Law, University of Kent. Nadje Al-Ali, Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies, Brown University Nahla Abdo, Professor, Carleton University. Naiefa Rashied, Lecturer: School of Economics, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Nalini Mohabir, Associate Professor, Concordia University. Namita Wahi, Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research. Nancy Gallagher, professor emerita, UCSBNandini Chandra, Associate Professor, University of Hawaii at ManoaNaomi Taub, Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLANaoual El Yattouti, PhD Researcher University of AntwerpNatalie Kouri-Towe, Associate Professor, Concordia UniversityNatasha Iskander, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, New York UniversityNatasha Remoundou, Lecturer, University College DublinNathalie Khankan, Continuing Lecturer, UC BerkeleyNathan Patz Professor of Law, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of LawNathaniel George, Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East, SOAS, University of LondonNaveed Ahmad Mir. PhD student and GTA, Kent Law School.Naveeda Khan, Associate Professor, Johns Hopkins UniversityNazia Kazi, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stockton University.Nesrine Badawi, Associate Professor, The American University in CairoNiall Meehan, Head, Journalism & Media Faculty, Griffith College, Dublin (retired)Niamh Rooney, Assistant Lecturer, Dept. of International Development, Maynooth UniversityNichola Khan. Professor, University of Edinburgh Nicola Perugini, Associate Professor, University of Edinburgh. Nicola Pratt, Professor of the International Politics of the Middle East, University of WarwickNicola Soekoe, Counsel, Pan African Bar Association of South Africa (PABASA). Nicole Beardsworth, Wits UniversityNicole Ranganath, Assistant Professor, UC DavisNicos Trimikliniotis, Professor, University of Nicosia. Nida Kirmani, Associate Professor, Lahore University of Management SciencesNikhita Mendis, Anthropology PhD Student, University of ChicagoNimer Sultany, Reader in Public Law, SOAS University of London.Nimet Cebeci, PhD Candidate, Harvard UniversityNina Eliasoph, University of Southern CaliforniaNina Farnia, Assistant Professor, Albany Law SchoolNisha Kapoor, Associate Professor, University of Warwick Nivi Manchanda, Reader in International Politics Queen Mary University of London Noah Salomon, Associate Professor, University of VirginiaNoam Peleg, Senior Lecturer, UNSW Law and JusticeNoga Wolff, Independent ScholarNoor Gieles, MD & PhD student, Amsterdam UMC. Nora E.H. Parr, Research Fellow, University of Birmingham Norma Rantisi, Concordia University. Nour El Kadri, Professor, University of OttawaNoura Erakat, Associate Professor, Rutgers University, New BrunswickNoura Nasser, PhD student, LSE. Noureddine Jebnoun, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown UniversityNtina Tzouvala, Associate Professor ANU College of Law. Nusrat S Chowdhury, Associate Professor, Amherst CollegeOishik Sircar, Professor, Jindal Global Law SchooOlga Grau, Universidad de ChileOlga Touloumi, Associate Professor, Bard CollegeOludamini Ogunnaike, University of VirginiaOlúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown UniversityOmar Al-Ghazzi, Associate Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science Omar Farahat, Associate Professor, McGill University Omar Jabary Salamanca, Postdoc Fellow, Université libre de Bruxelles. Omer Bartov, Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Department of History; Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, Brown University.Omid Safi, Professor, Duke UniversityOmnia El Shakry, Professor of History, Yale UniversityOmr Kassem, University of Chicago Orla Kelleher, Assistant Professor, School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University Osama Siddique. Inaugural Henry J. Steiner Professor of Human Rights. Harvard law School. Osman Bakar, Professor of Islamic Thought, International Islamic University MalaysiaOthman Belkebir, Ph.D researcher, Geneva Graduate Institute. Oudai Tozan, PhD candidate, researcher, and tutor at the University of CambridgeOzlem Biner Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, SOASPablo Oyarzun R., Universidad de Chile.Padraig McAuliffe, School of Law and Social Justice, University of LiverpoolPaola Rivetti, Associate Professor, Dublin City University Paola Zichi, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Warwick Law SchoolPatricia Sampedro, postgraduate student in International Development at the University of OxfordPatrick Shi Timmer, Postgraduate Student, King’s College London. Paul Michael Garrett, PhD, D. Lit, MRIA, University of GalwayPaula Chakravartty, James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor of Media Studies, NYUPauline Martini, Doctoral researcher, Queen Mary University of London.Pere Franch, Professor of Journalism and International Relations, Blanquerna School of Communication and International RelationsPete W. Moore, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve UniversityPeter Drury, Kent Law School, PhD Student.Peter Hallward, Professor of Philosophy, Kingston University UKPietro Masina, professor, University of Naples L’Orientale. Pınar Kemerli, Assistant Professor, Bard CollegePolly Withers, Leverhulme ECF, LSEPooja Rangan, Associate Professor of English in Film and Media Studies, Amherst College Popy Begum, Saint Louis University. Praggya Surana, PhD student at the Graduate Institute, GenevaR. Brian Ferguson, Rutgers University-NewarkRabea Eghbariah, SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School.Rachad Antonius, retired full professor, Université du Québec à Montréal Rachel Brown, author of Defusing Hate: A Strategic Communication Guide to Counteract Dangerous SpeechRafael Quintero Godinez Affiliation: Lecturer, Birmingham City Law SchoolRahima Siddique, Phd Student, University of Manchester.Rahul Rao, Reader, University of St AndrewsRami G Khouri, American University of Beirut. Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University.Rana Kazkaz, Associate Professor, Northwestern University QatarRana Khalaf, PhD, Centre for Conflict and Humanitarian Response – University of ManchesterRanda M. Wahbe; PhD student; Harvard UniversityRanda Tawil, Texas Christian UniversityRandle DeFalco, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of LawRania Muhareb, PhD researcher, Irish Centre for Human Rights, University of GalwayRaphael Salkie, Emeritus Professor of Language Studies, University of Brighton Rasha Bayoumi, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Birmingham Rashid Yahiaoui, Assistant Professor, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. Ratna Kapur, Professor, Queen Mary University of LondonRaz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University. Razan AlSalah, Concordia University. Rebecca Ruth Gould, Professor, SOAS University of London. Reem Abou-El-Fadl, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East, SOAS University of LondonReem Al-Botmeh, Lecturer, Institute of Law, Birzeit UniversityReem Awny Abuzaid, PhD candidate, University of WarwickRenate Bridenthal, The City University of New YorkRenisa Mawani, Professor, Sociology, University of British Columbia. Reuven Pinnata, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Washington.Rhys Machold, Senior Lecturer, University of GlasgowRicarda Hammer, Assistant Professor, UC BerkeleyRichard Clements, Assistant Professor, Tilburg Law SchoolRichard Falk, Professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.Richard Marcuse, Anthropology, formerly University of VictoriaRichard Wild, Principal Lecturer in Criminology, University of Greenwich Rita Sakr, Maynooth UniversityRobert Crews, Professor of History, Stanford UniversityRoberto Filippello, Assistant Professor at University of Amsterd.Rochelle Davis, Sultanate of Oman Associate Professor, Georgetown UniversityRodante van der Waal, PhD-candidate, University for Humanistic Studies.Rodrigo C. Bulamah, Professor, State University of Rio de JaneiroRoger Heacock, Professor of history emeritus , Birzeit University, Palestine Rohini Sen, School of Law, University of Warwick. Ronak Kapadia, Associate Professor, University of Illinois ChicagoRonit Lentin, Retired Associate Professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin Rose Parfitt, Senior Lecturer in International Law, University of Kent. Rosemarie Buikema , professor of art, culture and diversityRosie Bsheer, Associate Professor of History, Harvard UniversityRoxana Pessoa Cavalcanti, University of BrightonRoxana Pey, académica Universidad de Chile.Ruba Salih, Professor, Università di Bologna. Ruth Fletcher, Reader in Law, Queen Mary University of LondonS. Hasan Mahmud, retired professor Jamia Millia Islamia, New DelhiS. Sayyid, Professor of Decolonial Thought and Social Theory, University of Leeds.S. Yaser Mirdamadi Researcher and lecturere at the Institute of Ismaʼili Studies, London.Sa’ed Atshan, Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Anthropology, Swarthmore CollegeSaada Hammad, part time instructor, Holt Spirit University of Kaslik.Saadat Umar Pirzada, Assistant Lecturer, PhD Candidate, Kent Law School.Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui Sheridan College Sacide Ataş, Ph.D. Candidate, Istanbul Medeniyet UniversitySadiyya Haffejee, Associate Professor, University of Johannesburg. Sai Englert, Lecturer, Leiden University. 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Prof, Concordia University (Montreal)Sarah Ihmoud, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The College of the Holy Cross.Sarah Irving, Lecturer in History, Staffordshire UniversitySarah Keenan, Reader in Law, Birkbeck College, University of LondonSarah Lamble, Reader in Criminology, Birkbeck, University of LondonSarah Phillips, Professor of Global Conflict and Development, The University of SydneySarah Raymundo , Assistant Professor, Center for International Studies University of the Philippines Diliman Sasan Fayazmanesh, Professor Emeritus of Economics, California State University, FresnoScheherazade Bloul, PhD, Deakin University Scott Newton, Professor of Laws of Central Asia, SOAS University of LondonSean Lee, Assistant Professor of Political Science, American University in CairoSean T. 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Zahra Ali, Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Newark.Zahra Moloo, PhD candidate, Human Geography, University of TorontoZakia Salime, Associate Professor , RutgersZeina Jamal, PhD, Queen Margaret University Zoé Samudzi, Visiting Assistant Professor, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University Zoha Waseem, University of WarwickZoya Hasan, Professor Emerita, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
To: The Chief Prosecutor, The International Criminal Court, The Hague, Netherlands Your Excellency, We, individuals involved for many years in the field of human rights in the territories occupied by….
To:
The Chief Prosecutor, The International Criminal Court,
The Hague, Netherlands
Your Excellency,
We, individuals involved for many years in the field of human rights in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, are writing to the ICC following your request to the Israeli government to clarify whether it intends to investigate complaints of war crimes allegedly committed in the Occupied Territories, including Gaza and east Jerusalem, in general and since 2015 in particular.
We understand that such a request is required in accordance with your procedures in such instances, and we do respect your method of operation.
We wish to assert at this early stage our deep suspicion, based on past experience, that the State of Israel, including its investigative and legal institutions, has no intention to seriously investigate complaints of war crimes. Our suspicion is backed by a very large number of documented cases ostensibly involving war crimes committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories in gross violation of international law. Most of these cases have not been investigated at all, and a few have been concluded with acquittal following a superficial and inadequate investigation.
In our assessment, the many acts of discrimination, severe restrictions upon freedom of movement, appropriation of Palestinian lands for the purpose of Israeli settlement, arbitrary collective punishments (such as curfews and blockades), unwarranted arrests (including long-term administrative detention and illegal incarceration in prisons outside the occupied territories), repeated invasion of private homes and villages, large-scale demolition of houses and other vital structures, prevention of access to basic needs such as water and electricity, denial of residency permits, denial of access to privately-owned Palestinian fields and grazing grounds, and the abject failure of the military courts to provide even a semblance of justice – all these and more are eminently worthy of investigation by your Court. Such acts are the routine, daily reality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, as we can attest from our own extensive experience there over many years. It is difficult not to see in this list an underlying systemic goal of dispossessing and expelling large numbers of innocent Palestinians from their homes and of barring access to their legally owned lands. As is well known, there are two separate legal systems in place in Israel and the Palestinian territories— the former based on the laws of the state and enshrining basic human rights, the latter, in the occupied territories under military rule, often entailing the denial of such rights.
We must emphasize that addressing the ICC is not an easy choice for us. We are law-abiding citizens who love this land. Precisely from this standpoint, we believe that the actions of the State of Israel and its authorities in the Occupied Territories cause not only unjust and outrageous harm to the local Palestinian population but also irreparable damage to the State of Israel itself. The occupation corrupts every corner of Israel and is driving it into a moral abyss.
Sadly, despite Israel’s image as a state that maintains a proper and professional legal system, the reality paints a different picture – harsh, discriminatory, and outrageous. The law imposed on the Occupied Territories and the manner in which it is applied by the Israeli enforcement and security agencies effectively allow ongoing acts of moral injustice and prima facie war crimes.
Many of us are in contact with the human-rights organizations and activists working in Israel and Palestine, whose ample documentation can contribute to the work of the ICC.
Signed:
1. Prof. Michal Aviad 2. Dr. Hanna Aviram 3. Yael Agmon 4. Prof. Joseph Agassi 5. Dr. Dana Olmert 6. Jonathan Ofir 7. Claire Oren 8. Dror Etkes 9. Prof. Benjamin Isaac 10. Prof. Eva Illouz 11. Amos Ityel 12. Amira Ityel 13. Prof. Zohar Eitan 14. Udi Aloni 15. Rami Elhanan 16. Dafna Alexandrovitch 17. Prof. David Enoch 18. Ora Ardon 19. Meira Asher 20. Prof. Jerome Bourdon 21. Prof. Tali Bitan 22. Prof. Yoram Bilu 23. Rachel Beitarie 24. Idan Bchor 25. Amitai Ben-Abba 26. Sadi Ben-Shitrit 27. Michal Ben-Gera 28. Daphne Banai 29. Ronit Back 30. Hagit Back 31. Hanna Barag 32. Dr. Tamar Berger 33. Prof. Yigal Bronner 34. B. Michael 35. Daphna Baram 36. Ruth Barkai 37. Prof. Amiram Goldblum 38. Tamar Goldschmidt 39. Neta Golan 40. Ada Gorni 41. Natalie Ginzburg 42. Natanya Ginsburg 43. Dr. Snait Gissis 44. Maya Gal Eshet 45. Bat-El Galor 46. Liora Glatt Traube 47. Prof. Charles W. Greenbaum 48. Prof. Raphael Greenberg 49. Marcia Greenman Lebeau 50. Niva Grunzwieg 51. Prof. Ran Greenstein 52. Dr. Zeev Degani 53. Ronit Dahan-Ramati 54. Dani Danieli 55. Orit Dekel 56. Aliza Dror 57. Barak Heymann 58. Guy Hirschfeld 59. Prof. Ruth Hacohen 60. Lahav Halevy 61. Mattan Helman 62. Dr. Jeff Halper 63. Shoshana Halper 64. Hanna Heller 65. Roni Hammermann 66. Dr. Ilana Hammerman 67. Prof. Don Handelman 68. Yoav Haas 69. Prof. Alon Harel 70. Yehudith Harel 71. Tal Haran 72. Rivka Vitenberg 73. Dr. Uri Weiss 74. Einat Weizman 75. Hanna Zohar 76. Dr. Nava Sonnenschein 77. Prof. Galit Hasan-Rokem 78. Rachel Chayut 79. Anat Tueg 80. Avital Toch Bar-Haim 81. Eran Torbiner 82. Hadas Tal 83. Dori Tal 84. Sivan Tal 85. Yaron Yehoshafat 86. Smadar Yaaron 87. Menahem Yaari 88. Raia Yaron 89. Dr. Yanai Israeli 90. Dugi Israeli 91. Ram Cohen 92. Hanna Kahana 93. Tzruya Lahav 94. Prof. Ram Loevy 95. Karin Lindner 96. Prof. Idan Landau 97. Dr. Mili Mass 98. Avichai Magal 99. Jonathan Mizrachy 100. Dr. Anat Matar 101. Elia Michaeli 102. Dr. Ishai Menuchin 103. Ivonne Mansbach-Kleinfeld 104. Prof. Jacob (Kobi) Metzer 105. Prof. Avishai Margalit 106. Racheli Merhav 107. Prof. Jad Neeman 108. Shirli Nadav 109. Ohad Naharin 110. Kobi Niv 111. Ofer Neiman 112. Nina Sebba 113. MD Ronit Sevilia Zangvil 114. Maya Savir 115. Dr. Aliza Savir 116. Anouk Savir-Kadmon 117. Irit Segoli 118. Prof. Guy Stroumsa 119. Prof. Sarah Stroumsa 120. Dr. Yoav Silbert 121. Tamar Selby 122. Revital Sella 123. Amitai Sandy 124. Dr. Kobi Snitz 125. Dr. David Senesh 126. Dr. Michal Sapir 127. Iftach Spector 128. Hannah Safran 129. Prof. Amotz Agnon 130. Prof. Avraham Oz 131. Dr. Meir Amor 132. Uriela Inbar 133. Shoshi Anbar 134. Orna Akad 135. Fathiya Akfa 136. Zohar Atai 137.Nurit Popper 138. Sylvia Piterman 139. Micky Fisher 140. Prof. Nurit Peled Elhanan 141. Tamar Fleishman 142. Prof. Emmanuel Farjoun 143. Sigal Primor 144. Ronny Perlman 145. Rachel Perets 146. Nola Chilton 147. Shaul Tcherikover 148. Goni Tsur 149. Avner Tsur 150. Varda zur 151. Ronit Chitayat Kashi 152. Shimri Zameret 153. Noam Kadmon 154. Michal Kaiser-Livne 155. Annelien Kisch 156. Tali Klagesbrun 157. Prof. Menachem Klein 158. Adam Keller 159. Aya Kaniuk 160. Luciana Kaploun 161. Professor Yosef Kaplan 162. Nurit Karshon 163. Prof. Ishai Rosen-Zvi 164. Prof. Freddie Rokem 165. Micha Rachman 166. Haran Rivlin 167. Dr. Nura Resh 168. Jonathan Sugarman 169. Dr. Ygal Shochat 170. Dr. Daphna Shochat Bagon 171. Prof. David Dean Shulman 172. Prof. Dmitry Shumsky 173. Yael Shomroni 174. Shelly Steinberg 175. Shlomit Steinitz 176. Tamar Shita 177. Miriam Shlesinger 178. Dr. Moshe Shalit 179. Tami Shellef 180. Vardit Shalfy 181. Mati Shmuelof 182. Ziyona Snir 183. Yonatan Shapira 184. Dr. Tzvia Shapira 185. Riki Shaked-Trainin 186. Dr. Dan Tamir
The UK Government is promoting an anti-boycott legislation in the House of Commons. First introduced in July last year, it is titled “Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill.” The Bill would allow the government to fine public bodies that boycott Israel. The Bill was debated and passed for the third time on January 10, 2024.
However, in Northern Ireland, the Derry City and Strabane Council tries to find a way to continue backing the BDS movement. The Council has had a formal policy backing the BDS movement for nearly ten years. It has recently voted in favor of a new “ethical procurement policy,” which was suggested by BDS campaigner Omar Barghouti.
Barghouti is a Qatari-born Palestinian who studied electrical engineering in the U.S. where he met his Arab-Israeli wife. They moved to Israel and settled in Acre. He then pursued a postgraduate degree at Tel Aviv University’s Philosophy Department. He studied Ethics under the supervision of the peace activist Prof. Marcelo Dascal, in 2000 for nearly a decade. While at Tel Aviv University, he co-founded in 2005 the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).
Earlier this month, on January 9th, Barghouti addressed the Governance and Strategic Planning Committee of Derry City and Strabane District Council by video. His presentation was titled “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS): Effective Solidarity, Ethical Responsibility and Ending Complicity in Israeli Apartheid in the Time of Genocide.” Barghouti stated, “The US, supported by the UK and other Western powers, imposed its will, again, on the UN Security Council in its latest vote, preventing a permanent ceasefire and an end to Israel’s deadly siege of 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. This has given the apartheid state a green light to continue its rolling massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children, women and civilian men.”
Barghouti continued, “Appreciating that your city council’s tender bids must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis… And that no bidding company must be excluded from tenders or contracts because of its geographical scope of activity, sourcing location, national identity or origin, I therefore propose on behalf of the BDS movement, to your esteemed council to consider the following – an ethical procurement policy that takes into account the involvement of bidders and members of its economic entity in grave professional misconduct, including violations of human rights and/or international law, and allows the council to exclude problematic bidders.”
Likewise, the Northern Ireland city of Derry is to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday. On Sunday, January 30, 1972, British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march. The Bloody Sunday incident fueled the Catholic Irish hostility towards the British Army and worsened their conflict. Pro-Palestinian activists found an opening to insert their cause in the commemoration. The Bloody Sunday events this month would center on the conflict in Palestine. During the last week of January, several events will take place. Family members and campaigners are hoping to “shine a spotlight” on the “injustices in Palestine.” Tony Doherty, Bloody Sunday Trust chair and the son of Bloody Sunday victim Patrick Doherty, said it would be an “honor and a privilege” to welcome co-founder of the BDS campaigner Omar Barghouti to deliver the annual Bloody Sunday lecture… The people of this city are well known for standing up against injustice, against inequality, and for using their voices for people oppressed in other places.” Doherty continued: “Derry, and the annual Bloody Sunday commemorations, have always stood in opposition to oppression and injustice wherever they occur. As we mark the 52nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday a number of events will focus attention on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and what we in Derry can do to help the Palestinian people… Omar, who this week addressed Derry City and Strabane District Council to secure support for the BDS campaign, has been to the forefront in providing people across the world with a means to support the Palestinian people in a peaceful, non-violent manner that stands in stark contrast to the genocidal actions of the Israeli government and their allies at this time. The BDS movement is under attack in many parts of the world but I am proud that Derry stands with Palestine. He will take part in a number of events during his visit to Derry providing an opportunity for people to hear directly about his advocacy work and the reality of life for Palestinians under the occupation.”
The Derry Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (DIPSC) has also recently organized a support rally for Gaza, calling for an “immediate end to the Israeli war on Gaza.” The march took place on Saturday, January 13, and took the historic civil rights route of 1968. Catherine Hutton, Chairperson of DIPSC said, “We stand with people all over the world in demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. We call for legal proceedings to begin at once against the Netanyahu government for their genocidal actions. The IPSC fully supports the South African led initiative to hold Israel account at the International Criminal Court.”
According to the program, on Thursday, the 25th of January, Barghouti will attend the Candlelight Procession for the Children of Palestine that will culminate in lighting the Bloody Sunday Monument in the colors of Palestine. On Friday, the 26th of January, he will deliver the 2024 Annual Bloody Sunday Lecture in Derry’s Cultúrlann Ui Chanáin, the Irish Cultural Center. On Saturday, January 27, Barghouti will join a panel outlining effective support measures, including adopting ethical procurement procedures by local councils titled “Palestine: What Can Derry Do?”
Even St Patrick’s Day was not left out of the protest. Celebrated on March 17, many leading Irish politicians travel to Washington for St. Patrick’s Day. This year, however,
campaigners are opposed to the United States’ arming of Israel’s Defense Forces and it’s ongoing “genocide in Gaza.” They have called “to Boycott St Patrick’s Day Celebrations at the White House 2024.” Hutton, the DIPSC chair, established an online boycott petition and said, “no Céad Míle Fáilte or drowning the Shamrock with Joe Biden until he stops arming and funding Genocide in Gaza… This would be a powerful sign of solidarity with Palestine that would reflect the feelings of Irish people & have a massive impact around the world. You are either against genocide in Gaza or you are not. I will not vote for any politician who travels to Washington and shakes the blood-soaked hands of Joe Biden.” Hutton continued, “The people of Derry have shown incredible solidarity with Palestine… In our thousands, in our millions – We are all Palestinians.”
Standing with the Palestinians means standing with Hamas, a radical Islamist terror group aligned with Iran, a brutal military theocracy. Not only did Hamas butcher, rape, behead, burn, and kidnap innocent Israeli civilians, but it used its own civilians as human shields. The Jihadist terror group stole untold millions of aid money to build an extensive tunnel system under hospitals, mosques, schools, and other public places. To add insult to injury, some of the money was used to support a luxury lifestyle for the leadership, while ordinary Palestinians went hungry. Those who dared to complain were severely punished.
The people of Derry should bear in mind that Omar Barghouti has exploited Tel Aviv University while promoting his campaign of BDS against Israel.
They should also note that supporting the Islamist Jihadists in Gaza and their patron, Iran, tarnishes the proud Irish tradition of fighting for justice.
Bloody Sunday families and campaigners are hoping to use anniversary events this month to “shine a spotlight” on injustice in Palestine.
Tony Doherty, Bloody Sunday Trust chair and the son of Bloody Sunday victim Patrick Doherty, said it will be an “honour and a privilege” to welcome co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign Omar Bargouti to deliver the annual Bloody Sunday lecture.
The Palestinian rights activist will speak in Derry as part of a lengthy programme of Bloody Sunday events this month that centre on the conflict in Palestine.
“The struggle in Ireland, the process around conflict transformation in Ireland is one that resonates internationally,” she said.
“The people of this city are well known for standing up against injustice, against inequality and for using their voices for people opressed in other places.
“There has always been a link, an alliance and an understanding between Ireland and Palestine generally. There is an historic rationale for that in terms of occupation, lack of self determination. There are similarities and differences but I suppose one of the things Derry prides itself on and indeed the Bloody Sunday families and Bloody Sunday Trust is that we’re able to use the lessons from our own conflict and our own processes here to shine a spotlight on injustice internationally.”
The former Foyle MLA continued: “It’s well known that Free Derry Corner has been used as a platform for many, many struggles and campaigns over generations.
“One of the things in the Bloody Sunday Trust is that, for the 50th anniversary, we reflected on what we had achieved – bearing in mind prosecutions are ongoing. There have been really genuine outcomes from Bloody Sunday – a public apology from a British Prime Minister and what that meant for the families.”
She added: “For the 50th anniversary we had a lecture delivered at that stage by Mustafa Barghouti [Palestinian National Initiative leader]. We have been trying to assist, to help with projects, to donate where we can, and all of that. “It’s right and proper that, given our story and given our history and all that followed from that, that we shine a spotlight on injustice in Palestine.”
On Omar Barghouti’s forthcoming lecture, Tony Doherty said: “As we prepare to mark the 52nd Anniversary of Bloody Sunday it will be both an honour and a privilege to welcome to Derry leading Palestinian Rights activist Omar Barghouti, as he joins the long and distinguished list of national and international figures that have delivered the annual Bloody Sunday Lecture.
“Derry, and the annual Bloody Sunday commemorations, have always stood in opposition to oppression and injustice wherever they occur. As we mark the 52nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday a number of events will focus attention on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and what we in Derry can do to help the Palestinian people.”
He continued: “Omar, who this week addressed Derry City and Strabane District Council to secure support for the BDS campaign, has been to the forefront in providing people across the world with a means to support the Palestinian people in a peaceful, non-violent manner that stands in stark contrast to the genocidal actions of the Israeli government and their allies at this time. The BDS movement is under attack in many parts of the world but I am proud that Derry stands with Palestine.
“He will take part in a number of events during his visit to Derry providing an opportunity for people to hear directly about his advocacy work and the reality of life for Palestinians under the occupation.”
Mr Doherty added: “On Thursday 25th January he will attend the Candleight Procession for the Children of Palestine that will culminate in lighting the Bloody Sunday Monument in the colours of Palestine at 7.00pm.
“On Friday 26th January at 8.00pm in Cultúrlann Ui Chanáin he will deliver the 2024 Annual Bloody Sunday Lecture.
Derry’s Bloody Sunday Trust said it was and “honour and privilege” to be hosting Palestinian Human Rights Activist Omar Barghouti.
Mr Barghouti was the winner of the 2017 Ghandi Peace Award and co-founder of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign.
Chairperson of the Trust Tony Doherty said Mr Barghouti would be in the city as part of the series of events marking the 52nd Anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
He added: “As we prepare to mark the 52nd Anniversary of Bloody Sunday, it will be both an honour and a privilege to welcome to Derry leading Palestinian Rights activist Omar Barghouti. He joins the long and distinguished list of national and international figures who have delivered the annual Bloody Sunday Lecture.
“Derry, and the annual Bloody Sunday commemorations, have always stood in opposition to oppression and injustice wherever they occur. As we mark the 52nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday a number of events will focus attention on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and what we in Derry can do to help the Palestinian people.
“Omar, who this week addressed Derry City and Strabane District Council to secure support for the BDS campaign, has been to the forefront in providing people across the world with a means to support the Palestinian people in a peaceful, non-violent manner that stands in stark contrast to the genocidal actions of the Israeli government and their allies at this time. The BDS movement is under attack in many parts of the world but I am proud that Derry stands with Palestine.
“He will take part in a number of events during his visit to Derry providing an opportunity for people to hear directly about his advocacy work and the reality of life for Palestinians under the occupation,” said Tony Doherty.
On Thursday, January 25, Mr Barghouti will attend the Candleight Procession for the Children of Palestine that will culminate in lighting the Bloody Sunday Monument in the colours of Palestine at 7.00pm.
On Friday January 26, he will deliver the 2024 Annual Bloody Sunday Lecture, at 8.00pm in Cultúrlann Ui Chanáin.
Tony Doherty added: “In these terrifying and traumatic times for the people of Gaza, international solidarity is more important than ever.
“On Saturday, January 27, Omar will join a panel outlining measures of effective support, including the adoption of ethical procurement procedures by local councils at ‘Palestine: What Can Derry Do?’ from 1.00pm to 4,00pm in Cultúrlann Ui Chanáin.
“As well as participating in the Bloody Sunday Commemorations, he will also be meeting with a range of political and civic organisations in the city during his visit and will attend a civic reception in his honour hosted by the Mayor.”
The Derry Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (DIPSC) has organised a rally calling for the “immediate end to the Israeli war on Gaza”.
Speaking to Derry News, Catherine Hutton, Chairperson of DIPSC said: “The march will take place on Saturday, January 13. It will take the historic civil rights route of 1968, leaving the train station in the Waterside at 12pm and finishing at the Guildhall.
“This will be part of an international day of action for Palestine. Similar events will be happening all over the world.
“We stand with people all over the world in demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. We call for legal proceedings to begin at once against the Netanyahu government for their genocidal actions.
Sponsors of Saturday’s demonstration.
“The IPSC fully supports the South African led initiative to hold Israel account at the International Criminal Court. We urge the Irish government to back South Africa and take a stand for humanity.
“The complicity of the US administration, led by President Joe Biden, in the Gaza genocide should never be ignored or forgotten. We are actively campaigning for all our politicians to boycott the White House this St. Patrick’s Day,” said Ms Hutton.
She added: “The people of Derry have shown incredible solidarity with Palestine.
“We call on them to come out in their thousands to support the march. We are asking for people to bring a doll or a white pillow and pillowcase to showcase and represent the 1000’s of children who have lost their lives. We welcome attendance from all individuals and groups across the city and beyond.
“We would also like to thank the organisations and groups who have sponsored and endorsed the march. Together, we can send a powerful message of solidarity to the Palestinian people and a clear message of resistance to the Israeli oppressors.
“In our thousands, in our millions – We are all Palestinians.”
Palestinian human rights campaigner, Omar Barghouti has addressed the Governance and Strategic Planning committee of Derry City and Strabane District Council.
Mr Barghouti is the Founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes boycotts, divestments and economic sanctions against Israel.
The title of his Council presentation was: ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS): Effective Solidarity, Ethical Responsibility and Ending Complicity in Israeli Apartheid in the Time of Genocide’.
Mr Barghouti is the Founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which promotes boycotts, divestments and economic sanctions against Israel.
The objective of the BDS campaign is to pressure Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, remove the separation barrier in the West Bank, and full equality for Arab-Palestine citizens of Israel. It also calls for the “respecting, protecting and promoting of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties”.
Addressing councillors and members of the public who attended the meeting, Omar Barghouti said: “The US, supported by the UK and other Western powers, imposed its will, again, on the UN Security Council in its latest vote, preventing a permanent ceasefire and an end to Israel’s deadly siege of 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
“This has given the apartheid state a green light to continue its rolling massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children, women and civilian men.
“An expert has told CNN that the intensity of Israel’s bombing had ‘not been seen since Vietnam’. As Israeli military and intelligence officers have admitted to Israeli media, ‘everything is intentional’ in Israel’s ‘factory’ of mass murder in Gaza.
“Nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza have been forcibly displaced, many facing famine and the spread of infectious diseases in overcrowded, unsafe shelters.
“In November, UN experts warned of an Israeli ‘genocide in the making’, having already concluded earlier that Gaza had been ‘running out of time’. Given the scope of Israel’s carnage, the modern day ghetto of Gaza is running out of life.”
According to Mr Barghouti, senior UN official Craig Mokhiber wrote days before leaving his post: “This is a text-book case of genocide.
“The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.
“What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. … they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.”
Mr Barghouti added: “In genocide jurisprudence, one needs to prove the intent, which must be pondered against reality and capacity. I shall just cite a few examples of what scholars have considered as irrefutable genocidal intent.
“An Israeli government minister from the Jewish Power party has suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Israel’s war minister, Yoav Gallant, infamously called Palestinians in Gaza ‘human animals’ prompting the US-based Jewish Voice for Peace, the world’s largest Jewish anti-Zionist organisation, to say: ‘As Jews, we know what happens when people are called animals. We can and we must stop this. Never again means never again – for anyone’.
“An unprecedented dehumanisation of the entire Palestinian people prevails today in mainstream Western media outlets, like the BBC, and in Israeli society, enabling its unfolding genocide.
“Calls to flatten Gaza, exterminate its residents, or ethnically cleanse them entirely have become mainstream in Israel, feeding the Israeli military’s actual carpet-bombing of entire neighbourhoods, with a clear intent to destroy life-sustaining conditions.
“The UN is warning that many Palestinians, especially children, may ‘dehydrate to death’ as clean water runs out, while Oxfam and Palestinian human rights organisations have condemned Israel’s use of ‘starvation as a weapon of war’”.
He added: “Every civilian life matters, but where you start the timeline in any situation of oppression is a strong indicator of your moral compass.
“After 16 years of a near-total Israeli siege, designed ‘to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,’ as its architect once admitted, Gaza was turned into an ‘unlivable’ zone’, according to the UN.”
According to Mr Barghouti, the BDS movement, launched in 2005, has “won global support from trade unions, farmers’ coalitions, as well as racial, social, gender and climate justice movements, together representing tens of millions worldwide”.
He said: “If you hate oppression, end complicity. If you love freedom, justice, dignity, and equality for all, irrespective of identity, as we do, mobilise pressure to help us dismantle Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, as well as all forms of oppression.”
Thanking Omar Barghouti, Cllr Shaun Harkin (People Before Profit) said Council had attempted to implement BDS but had been “frustrated because of the legalities here”.
He said: “It has been frustrating for us as councillors who support BDS, especially now in the context of the British Government’s attempt to prohibit our ability to advance BDS through Council. We want to take meaningful action that will put pressure on the Israeli state and put pressure on corporations that are complicit in assisting to carry out genocide right now and who are profiting from apartheid and who are profiting from the occupation.”
Cllr Christopher Jackson (Sinn Féin) said he looked forward to welcoming Omar Barghouti to Derry at the end of January to deliver the annual Bloody Sunday Lecture.
He said: “That was probably one of the most powerful presentations that has ever been presented to this Council, given the televised genocide that is currently underway.
“You have outlined better than any of us could have, the current situation in Gaza, where it has stemmed from, what action we can take as a public authority to take a stand, to ensure international law is protected.
“One thing that has remained firm is our Council’s commitment and solidarity to the Palestinian people and for their right to return. That is something our Council is very, very proud of.”
Cllr Brian Tierney (SDLP) said the “most powerful” part of Omar Barghouti’s presentation was when he said, ‘If you hate violence, end oppression’.
“That sums it up for me,” said Cllr Tierney. “We as a society should be doing all we can to show our support to the people of Gaza and doing all we can to support the BDS movement, which this council has a very strong track record on.
“I am proud to say, at least one of the MPs representing this Council area will tomorrow night [Wednesday] vote against the proposal by the British Government [to outlaw BDS] – Colum Eastwood MP for Foyle.
Cllr Gary Donnelly (Independent) observed people in Derry and Ireland “know what it is like to be under the imperialist jackboot”.
He added: “We know what it is like for a world media to blame the oppressed and fail to deal with the oppressor.
“We have two artificial states in this country. We have a counter-democratic process and it all stems from the same organisation, the same British Imperialism that has destroyed the Palestinian state.
“There are those who will try to imply that what is currently ongoing in Palestine is as a result of what happened on October 7. The people of Ireland and the people of the world know that is false.”
The Council committee subsequently passed the suggested motion supporting Ethical Public Procurement.
The full text of title of his Mr Barghouti Council presentation: ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS): Effective Solidarity, Ethical Responsibility and Ending Complicity in Israeli Apartheid in the Time of Genocide’ can be read HERE.
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DCSDC – Governance & Strategic Planning 09/01/2023 Derry City & Strabane District Council
Transcript
thank you 3:59 very much for this invitation I uh deeply appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and to engage with you on 4:06 issues related to Human Rights the United States supported by the UK and 4:12 other Western Powers imposed its will yet again on the UN Security Council in 4:18 its latest vote last month preventing a permanent ceasefire and an end to 4:24 Israel’s deadly Siege of 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied govern as a 4:30 strip this has given the apartheid state a green light to continue its rolling 4:35 massacres of tens of thousands of Palestinians predominantly children women and civilian men an expert has 4:44 told CNN that the intensity of Israel’s bombing had quote not been seen since 4:50 Vietnam end of quote an Israeli military and intelligence uh as Israeli military 4:56 and Intelligence Officers have admitted to Israeli media quote everything is intentional end of 5:03 quote in Israel’s Factory of mass murder in Gaza nearly 2 million Palestinians in 5:10 Gaza have been forcibly displaced according to the United Nations many facing famine and the spread of 5:16 infectious diseases in overcrowded unsafe shelters recalling Israel’s long 5:22 history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians the UN expert on the UN on 5:29 the human rights of internally displaced persons has said that Israel’s war on 5:34 Gaza quote aims to deport the majority of the civilian population on M end of 5:42 quote in November un experts warned of an Israeli genocide in the making having 5:49 already concluded earlier that Gaza had been running out of time given the scope 5:56 of Israel’s Carnage the modern day GTO of Gaza is running out of life as early 6:04 as October 13th prominent Israeli scholar of the Holocaust and genocide 6:09 Raz seal described Israel’s aggression in Gaza as quote a textbook case of 6:16 genocide over 880 International Scholars as well as leading us and Palestinian 6:22 human rights organizations and many US un experts have also warned of an 6:29 unfolding genocide in Gaza agreeing with seal senior un official Craig mber wrote 6:36 days before leaving his post at the UN quote this is a textbook case of 6:42 genocide the European ethn nationalist settler Colonial project in Palestine 6:48 has entered its Final Phase toward the expedited destruction of the last 6:54 remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine what’s more the governments 6:59 of the United States the United Kingdom and much of Europe are wholly complicit in the horrific assault they are in fact 7:08 actively arming the assault providing economic and intelligence support and 7:13 giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities end of 7:19 quote in genocide jurist Prudence one needs to prove the intent which must be 7:26 pondered against reality and capacity I shall just cite a few examples of what 7:32 Scholars have considered as irrefutable genocidal intent Israeli Prime Minister 7:38 Benjamin Netanyahu said quote you must remember what amalik has done to you 7:45 says our Holy Bible end of quote he was referring to Samuel 153 which says quote 7:52 now go and smite amalec and utterly destroy all that they have and spare 7:58 them not but slay lay both man and woman infant and suckling ox and sheep camel 8:04 and ass end of quote an Israeli government Minister from the Jewish power party has suggested dropping a 8:12 nuclear bomb on Gaza Israel’s war minister yav Galant infamously called 8:18 Palestinians in Gaza quote Human animals prompting the us-based Jewish voice for 8:25 peace the world’s largest Jewish anti Zionist organization to say quote as 8:31 Jews we know what happens when people are called Animals we can and we must 8:39 stop this never again means never again for anyone end of 8:45 quote an unprecedented dehumanization of the entire Palestinian people prevails 8:51 today in mainstream Western media Outlets like the BBC and in Israeli 8:57 Society enabling its unfolding genocide calls to flatten Gaza exterminate its 9:04 residents or ethnically cleanse them entirely have become mainstream in Israel feeding the Israeli military’s 9:11 actual carpet bombing of entire neighborhoods with a clear intent to 9:16 destroy life sustaining conditions Israel’s numerous war crimes 9:22 and crimes against humanity have included the intentional bombing of residential buildings refugee camps 9:29 hospitals ambulances bakeries solar panels water reservoirs infrastructure 9:36 and the use of white phosphorus on crowded civilian neighborhoods the UN is 9:42 warning that many Palestinians especially children may dehydrate to death as clean water runs out while 9:50 Oxfam and Palestinian human rights organizations have condemned Israel’s use of quote starvation as a weapon of 9:58 war and of quote the extent of this us Israeli 10:03 induced hunger in Gaza according to expert reports has eclipsed even the 10:09 near famines in Afghanistan and Yemen of recent years Israel has killed more civilians 10:16 in Gaza in 30 days than Russia has in its entire war in Ukraine which began 10:24 almost two years ago but the Gory timeline of life and death death did not 10:30 begin with the Palestinian paramilitary groups attack on Israeli military basis 10:35 and settlements around Gaza on October 7th during which hundreds of Israeli 10:41 civilians and soldiers were killed every civilian life matters but where you 10:49 start the timeline in any situation of Oppression is a strong indicator of your 10:56 moral compass after 16 years of a near total Israeli Siege designed to quote 11:04 put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger end of quote as its architect once admitted Gaza was 11:13 turned into an unlivable Zone according to the UN the Health Care system was 11:19 near collapse 96% of the water was undrinkable 60% of 11:25 children were anemic and many suffered from stunted growth due to severe 11:32 malnutrition a generation of young Palestinians were psychologically scarred from the bombings and The Siege 11:39 and this was before now Gaza is a site of unfolding 11:46 genocide even someone like me a Palestinian human rights Defender who 11:51 has for four decades experienced documented and peacefully resisted 11:58 Israel 7 2-year-old regime of settler colonialism and apartheid cannot quite 12:04 know how to deal with the world’s first televised 12:09 genocide the UN Secretary General has sounded the alarm that Israel’s war on Gaza poses a serious threat to world 12:17 peace and security indeed if Israel evades accountability this would usher in a new 12:24 era of Might makes right that threatens weaker Nations and communities worldwide 12:32 if they dare to defy systems of domination and subjugation and pursue 12:38 Justice Israel’s impunity is reducing the already frail foundations of 12:45 international law to tatters as Irish President Michael D Higgins puts 12:52 it much of the western establishment has duly parroted Israel’s claim that 12:58 Palestinian arm armed groups attack on October 7th was quote unprovoked and 13:03 Israel’s assertion about its right to self-defense quote allow me to share 13:09 Five Points on this based on my ethical perspective first as the Brazilian 13:16 philosopher Paula FR writes quote with the establishment of a relationship of 13:22 Oppression violence has already begun never in history has violence been in 13:28 initiated by the oppressed violence is initiated by those who oppress who 13:35 exploit who fail to recognize others as persons not by those who are oppressed 13:41 exploited and unrecognized end of quote the reaction of the oppressed whether 13:47 one considers any aspect of it morally or legally justifiable or not is always 13:53 just that a reaction to the initial violence of the 14:00 oppressor second well before October 7th Israel’s far-right government its most 14:05 racist fundamentalist sexist and homophobic ever had been ruthlessly 14:11 escalating its ethnic cleansing Siege prgrams incarceration and daily 14:17 humiliation of millions of Palestinians hoping we would surrender and accept 14:22 oppression as fate third as affirmed by the 14:27 international Court of Justice in 2004 and as prominent international law 14:33 experts and the South African government remind us Israel as the occupying power 14:39 does not have the right to selfdefense using military means against the 14:45 Palestinians under its occupation moreover the genocide 14:50 convention does not allow for any justification to perpetrate genocidal 14:56 acts genocide cannot be under undertaken as retaliation to unlawful acts no 15:02 matter how serious and of course now South Africa is suing Israel at the international court of justice for 15:10 genocide international law actually recognizes the right of all people’s resisting foreign occupation and 15:17 colonization to resort to Armed struggle however the use of force 15:23 against civilians is strictly prohibited and the BDS movement endorses this 15:29 principle fourth condemning any illegal or immoral acts of violence that the 15:36 oppressed May commit in resisting oppression is acceptable only if the 15:42 condemning party has earned the moral standing to do so by being already on 15:49 record condemning the prevailing system of Oppression the initial 15:54 violence fifth since oppression is the RO root cause of violence those who 16:02 sincerely care about ending all violence like we do must act to end 16:09 oppression as the struggle that ended in South Africa has shown ending State 16:15 corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s system of Oppression especially through the nonviolent 16:20 tactics of BDS is the most effective form of solidarity the BDS movement was launched 16:27 in 2005 by the absolute majority in Palestinian Society it calls for ending 16:32 Israel’s military occupation dismantling its system of apartheid and respecting 16:37 the right of Palestinian refugees to return home anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the BDS 16:44 movement categorically opposes all forms of racism including islamophobia and 16:51 anti-Semitism Bas targets complicity not identity over the last 18 years BDS has 16:59 won Global support from trade unions Farmers coalitions as well as racial 17:04 social gender and climate Justice movements together representing tens of 17:10 millions worldwide it has compelled large multinationals like Puma G4S 17:16 violia orange to end their involvement in Israel’s human rights violations and 17:21 it has played a key role in the decisions by large Sovereign funds and 17:27 major US churches especially Protestant churches in the US to divest from complicit companies and 17:34 Israeli Banks recognizing that ending complicity is not only a prerequisite to meaningful 17:41 solidarity but also the most profound moral ethical obligation everyone and 17:49 every entity has City councils worldwide have adopted diverse effective measures 17:57 Barcelona has cut all relations with aparte Israel’s government in response 18:02 to its ongoing genocide as have the Belgian city councils of Le and verier 18:09 long before the current genocide the city councils of Oslo in Norway and BM 18:15 in Brazil have also adopted meaningful policies to end complicity the Barcelona 18:20 city council is also actively pressuring the Spanish Spanish government to impose 18:26 a full military embargo on Israel highlighting the intersectional and 18:32 organic Nexus between the struggle for Palestinian freedom justice and equality 18:37 and struggles for racial social economic gender and climate Justice based on the 18:43 tenets of international law and the UN guiding principles on business and human rights rejecting all forms of racism and 18:52 appreciating that your city council’s tender bids must be reviewed on a case-by casee basis and that no bidding 18:59 company must be excluded from tenders or contracts because of its geographical scope of activity sourcing location 19:07 national identity or origin I therefore propose on behalf of the BDS movement to 19:13 your ested Council to consider adopting the following an ethical procurement 19:20 policy that takes into account the involvement of biders and members of its 19:26 economic entity in grave professional misconduct including grave violations of 19:33 human rights and or international law and allows the council to exclude 19:38 problematic biders from its tender procedures this ethical procurement 19:44 policy will incorporate widely accepted and precisely formulated International 19:50 norms and standards of business and human rights to explain clearly when exclusion from tenders is Justified 19:59 to end if you hate violence end 20:04 oppression if you hate oppression end complicity if you love freedom justice 20:13 dignity and equality for all irrespective of identity as we do 20:18 mobilize pressure to help us dismantle Israel’s 75y old regime of settler 20:23 colonialism and apartheid as well as all forms of Oppression but for now we need 20:29 your full support to help stop the Gaza genocide thank 20:46 you
‘Legislation designed to silence legitimate dissent and protest against the actions of foreign governments that undermine human rights’ – Colum Eastwood
‘Legislation designed to silence legitimate dissent and protest against the actions of foreign governments that undermine human rights’ – Colum Eastwood.
SDLP MPs have again voted against Tory legislation designed to “restrict the ability of councils to take positions of conscience on the behaviour of foreign governments and to adapt their own procurement policies to take part in solidarity campaigns such as the BDS movement”.
Speaking following the vote in the British House of Commons this week, SDLP Leader Colum Eastwood MP said: “The extreme Tory anti-boycott legislation is designed to silence legitimate dissent and protest against the actions of foreign governments that undermine human rights. There is no other way to describe it.
“It yet again breaches international law, restricts free expression and undermines the long standing cross-party support for a two state solution between Israel and Palestine. It is astounding to me that any government would push through such an extreme law at any time but while Palestinians in Gaza are being killed in their tens of thousands, it is a grotesque statement from the British Government.
“The SDLP is the only party in the North that has opposed this Bill and backed efforts to scrap it at every stage in the House of Commons. We will continue to use every option available to us to oppose the legislation and defend the rights of councils to take positions of conscience on these issues.”
The breakdown of votes following the third reading of the Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill can be found HERE.
Derry and Strabane to be first in novel bid to continue BDS campaign despite UK anti-boycott bill
MPs will tonight debate a government Bill to ban councils and other public bodies from boycotting Israeli companies
By Niall Deeney
16:02, 10 JAN 2024
A Northern Ireland council is set to be the first to attempt a novel way to continue backing the BDS movement despite UK government plans to ban boycotts against Israel.
MPs will tonight debate a Bill to ban councils and other public bodies from boycotting Israeli companies.
But the Derry City and Strabane council, which has had a formal policy backing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement for nearly 10 years, has now voted in favour of a new “ethical procurement policy” suggested by BDS campaign founder Omar Barghouti.
The UK government first introduced its ‘Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill in July last year, and it was given initial backing by 268 MPs (with 70 votes against) after several hours of debate in Westminster.
It would allow the government to fine public bodies that boycott Israel.
Another round of debate is due to take place on Wednesday night in the House of Commons.
Human rights groups such as Amnesty International are calling for a rethink of what it describes as a “draconian anti-boycott bill”.
Amnesty said on Tuesday the bill “effectively grants Israel impunity at a time of flagrant breaches of international law in Gaza and the West Bank” and called on MPs to reject it.
The Derry and Strabane council, meanwhile, is already seeking ways to continue supporting the BDS movement and on Tuesday heard from BDS co-founder Mr Barghouti.
Addressing councillors on the governance and planning committee, Mr Barghouti spoke at length about the plight of the people living in Palestine and the actions of the Israeli government.
He suggested a novel “ethical procurement policy” in light of the rules around boycotts faced by councils in the UK.
“Appreciating that your city council’s tender bids must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “And that no bidding company must be excluded from tenders or contracts because of its geographical scope of activity, sourcing location, national identity or origin, I therefore propose on behalf of the BDS movement, to your esteemed council to consider the following – an ethical procurement policy that takes into account the involvement of bidders and members of its economic entity in grave professional misconduct, including violations of human rights and/or international law, and allows the council to exclude problematic bidders.”
BDS movement co-founder Omar Barghouti speaking to Derry City and Strabane council this week
The suggested policy was proposed by People Before Profit councillor Shaun Harkin, alongside Sinn Fein councillor Christopher Jackson, and backed by 10 votes to one.
Mr Harkin said the “legalities” around the council’s boycott policy had been “frustrating”.
He added: “The proposal for an EPP [ethical procurement policy] seems right and just, and applies to Israel and any entity involved in crimes against humanity.”
The ethical procurement policy will now be referred to a council working group and must be approved by the wider council.
Ireland’s politicians are being urged to boycott the traditional White House St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
St Patrick’s Day normally sees an exodus of Ireland’s leading politicians to the US capital.
This year, however, campaigners opposed to the United States’ arming of Israel’s Defence Forces and it’s ongoing “genocide in Gaza” have called on “MLAs, MPs and TDs to Boycott St Patrick’s Day Celebrations at the White House 2024”.
Catherine Hutton, chairperson of the Derry Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign who has established the online boycott petition said there should be “no Céad Míle Fáilte or drowning the Shamrock with Joe Biden until he stops arming and funding Genocide in Gaza”.
Ms Hutton said the signatories to the petition are saying: “I am calling on you [MLAs, MPs and TDs] to boycott St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations at The White House this year.
“This would be a powerful sign of solidarity with Palestine that would reflect the feelings of Irish people & have a massive impact around the world.
“You are either against genocide in Gaza or you are not.
“I will not vote for any politician who travels to Washington and shakes the blood-soaked hands of Joe Biden,” said Ms Hutton.
Eran Shayshon, a researcher and founder of Atchalta, a non-partisan Zionist leadership group focusing on national resilience in Israel, detailed in a new report how the threat that Hamas poses “extends beyond its military capabilities.” The threat encompasses a global “ideological warfare that challenges the core values and foundations of Western democracies.” Atchalta states that “recognizing this global dimension is crucial for developing a comprehensive strategy to counteract Hamas.” Atchalta recommends that in order “To effectively counter Hamas, Israel requires a multifaceted strategy that not only combats Hamas militarily in Gaza but also undertakes a global campaign to dismantle Islamist influence in the West. This challenge is intensified by the strategic alliance between Western Islamists and leftist organizations – including progressive groups in the US and socialist groups in Europe. This phenomenon, known as the red-green alliance, significantly bolsters Hamas’ soft power on a global scale.”
A recent example of the Islamist influence in the West, in particular in Israel, was demonstrated recently when, three days ago, a South African news outlet, Eyewitness News,reported that hundreds of Israeli citizens, including academics, have signed an online petition submitted to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. The petitioners believe South Africa’s case is credible and that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is a violation of its obligations under the UN’s genocide convention. South Africa approaches the International Court of Justice on Thursday, pledging for an immediate order for Israel to stop its military operation in Gaza.
The petition’s initiator, Tel Aviv University Philosopher Dr. Anat Matar, spoke on South African TV, the SABC News.
Matar said, “We are almost with 700 signatures by now, and we’re going to send it out in a couple of minutes, I mean just right after our talk, so I suppose this will be the number 700, although people keep signing. Our motivation was to make clear to the court in the Hague that not all Israelis are the same, think the same, and not all support what happens now on behalf of them, in their name, in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Army. I’m not a legal expert; I’m a philosopher, I’m an activist, so I don’t know whether, you know, the formal definition of genocide is applicable to this particular case; what I see are horrible pictures, what we read are horrible data about children dying about limbs being cut, about operations being done without anesthesia, about women giving birth just on the street without water, so this is something that is totally unbearable. We’re talking now about 23 thousand people dying, and I’m sure the number is much higher because there are many who are still buried under the rubble. People cannot even bury their dead, and I speak with people I know from Rafah and from other places in Gaza; I have friends whose relatives are in Beit Hanun or in Gaza City, and I’m getting the impression both by the media, the reliable media, which is not the Israeli media, and by their own testimonies, so I just felt, you know, we cannot be silent, it is done in our name and so we wanted to sound another voice.”
She continued: “What happened on October 7th made us, you know, numb. I was just sitting, I think, for 3 or 4 days without even moving; it was such a shock. It was so terrible. I knew someone who was murdered there on 7th October; he was actually a member of my organization, Academia for Equality. I’ve indirectly known several others who were murdered or kidnapped, and of course, it was shocking, and what we heard, the stories we heard about what happened that day, what was done by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and other organizations, was horrible. But it doesn’t justify in any way what happens now and what the Israeli Army is doing now. I mean, there’s no logic, and these are so many eyes for few eyes, and I mean the horrors should not be compared and should not be committed, so that’s and I’d like to add, that I think pragmatically, politically, this is the wrong direction to take. I mean, it’s not only that I’m sitting here on a very, you know, moral high ground and just preaching because I think this is going to just take us down and down and down and down to the abyss. And if you want a political resolution ever, it cannot start by committing such atrocities. I mean, how do we even imagine that people in Gaza would be ready to speak with us to believe what we suggest and what we offer if this is what we do? So, even pragmatically, politically, not morally. I think this is totally wrong. It’s totally wrong. And another thing, just a second, we are talking about the atrocities by Hamas of 7th October, but this came, given a context, I mean, there is a context of 57 years of occupation, you know, it’s not coming out of nothing, you have the memory of the nakba of this is all the burden that Palestinians carry.”
Matar said, “I’m not happy with the government, first of all. I’m very, very unhappy with the government and actually with most of the opposition as well. I mean, of the 120 members of parliament, members of Knesset, maybe 100, but maybe more are not acceptable to me. I mean, they’re holding the same thing. They’re supporting the horrors that are now committed by the army, so I don’t care if they’re unhappy. I’m happy that they are unhappy because I want this to stop, and there’s another thing, we haven’t mentioned there are the people who were abducted, you know, and these are Israelis, most of them Israeli citizens. It doesn’t seem that our government cares for them, and you know, the families of those who are kidnapped are holding demonstrations. They’re calling the government to stop it, so they can, you know, strike a deal and free our prisoners, our hostages, and the government doesn’t do anything because for doing this it should stop the war, and this is what I want, to decide that the war should stop.”
She said, “I think most Israelis don’t know because the Israeli media doesn’t show it. I mean, it’s hardly spoken about in Israeli radio and Israeli television, the journals, the daily newspapers, apart from online magazines that are radical and leftist, and they give a very faithful representation of what happens; most people don’t see them, so I think many of them don’t really understand why it’s called, you know, something that amounts to genocide, they have no idea what’s happening there and they simply believe that the world is against us and maybe it’s anti-semitic, maybe it’s just being anti-Israel. I don’t know, but they don’t understand that severe things are happening.”
The petitioners say they are prepared to face “oppressive consequences from authorities” for supporting the South Africa case. According to them, the Hamas attacks on Israel in October do not warrant the complete destruction of Gaza or the killing of 22,000 Palestinians, including academics, writers, doctors, medical staff, and journalists. The petitioners believe “Israel is taking systematic steps to wipe out the population of Gaza, to starve, abuse and displace them.” They add that they are concerned “Israel is violating its obligations to prevent genocide and that senior Israeli officials are not being held accountable.” The petitioners say they support South Africa’s application to the International Criminal Court for Israel to “immediately suspend its military operations in Gaza.”
Matar also toldThe New Arab, an anti-Israel propaganda outlet based in London, that she is filing the petition to the ICJ in The Hague on Tuesday 9th of January. She said, “I initiated this petition first of all because I wanted to show that there is part of Israeli citizens who agree with South Africa’s move… What I know for sure is that this war must be stopped immediately. Every moment that passes is a crime.” The New Arab added that Dr Matar “holds a senior lecturer position at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches political philosophy. In addition, she advocates for ‘draft refusers’, a small segment of Israelis who refuse to serve in the Israeli army because they oppose the occupation.”
Matar acknowledges she is not a legal expert but a philosopher and that she doesn’t know whether the formal definition of genocide is applicable to this particular case. Yet, she petitions the ICJ to harm Israel. Matar has been abusing the lax academic freedoms at Tel Aviv University by focusing on her political career instead of her academics.
Matar said that because she sees horrible pictures of children and adults dying in Gaza, the situation is unbearable. Indeed, the situation is unbearable, but the culprit here is Hamas, not the IDF, which has always tried to minimize casualties. Hamas practices the strategy of embedding among the civilian population to shield itself from the IDF. One does not need to be an expert in the laws of war to know that the Geneva Conventions make it illegal to use civilians as human shields. Indeed, the IDF has discovered that Hamas located its military assets under hospitals, schools, mosques, and even private homes, often in children’s rooms. The abuse of the civilian population extended beyond embedding. Hamas stole untold billions of dollars donated to the Gaza Strip to build the enormous underground complex and acquire missiles and rockets to shell Israel. The massive embezzlement of aid and the heavy taxation impoverished the population, which had no recourse but to abide by the rule of Hamas. Those who complained were severely punished, and extrajudicial killings were common.
The war in Gaza would not only prevent Hamas from launching deadly attacks on Israelis but liberate the Palestinians from a brutal and criminal regime. Matar and her 700 co-signers should be aware of this.
OVER 400 ISRAELI CITIZENS SIGN PETITION BACKING SA’S GENOCIDE CASE VS ISRAEL
The petition’s initiators include Tel Aviv University professor, Anat Matar, social worker, Lior Kay, and Israeli peace activist, Jonathan Pollak.
CAPE TOWN – Over 400 Israeli citizens have signed an online petition to be submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.
They believe South Africa’s case is credible and that Israel’s conduct in Gaza is in violation of its obligations under the UN’s genocide convention.
South Africa will approach the court on Thursday, asking for it to immediately order Israel to stop its military operations in Gaza.
By Sunday night, over 300 Israeli citizens had signed the petition.
That number has now grown to almost 500.
The petition’s initiators include Tel Aviv University professor, Anat Matar, social worker, Lior Kay, and Israeli peace activist, Jonathan Pollak.
They say they are prepared to face oppressive consequences from authorities for supporting South Africa’s case.
But they believe Hamas’ attacks on Israel last October do not warrant the complete destruction of the Gaza Strip and the killing of 22,000 Palestinians including leading academics, writers, doctors, medical staff and journalists.
The petitioners believe Israel is taking systematic steps to wipe out the population of Gaza, to starve, abuse and displace them.
They add that they are concerned Israel is violating its obligations to prevent genocide and that senior Israeli officials are not being held accountable.
The petitioners say they support South Africa’s application to the world court for Israel to immediately suspend its military operations in Gaza.
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Jan 9, 2024 #SABCNewsHundreds of Israeli citizens have reportedly signed an online petition to be submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in support of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. South Africa will approach the court later this week petitioning it to immediately order Israel to stop its military operations in Gaza. South Africa and Israel are signatories to the 1948 Genocide Convention, which allows the ICJ to rule on disputes related to the treaty. Let’s discuss this further. Tel Aviv University Department of Philosophy Senior Lecturer, Anat Matar.
Transcript
0:00 at the same time hundreds of Israeli 0:02 citizens have reportedly signed an 0:04 online petition to be submitted to the 0:06 international court of justice in the ha 0:08 in support of South Africa’s genocide 0:10 case against Israel South Africa will 0:12 approach the court later this week 0:14 petitioning it to immediately order 0:16 Israel to stop its military operations 0:17 in Gaza South Africa and Israel are 0:20 signatories to the 1948 genocide 0:22 convention which allows the icj to rule 0:25 on disputes related to the treaty let’s 0:27 discuss this petition further now and 0:29 some details with Tel Aviv University 0:31 Department of philosophy senior lecturer 0:34 anat matar let me thank you so much for 0:36 your time good afternoon to you the last 0:38 count According to some thank you so 0:40 much for joining us the last count 0:42 According to some reports was over 400 0:44 signatures how many have you collected 0:46 so far and also while you answer that 0:48 tell us why it was important for you and 0:51 other Israeli citizens to do 0:53 this okay we are almost with 700 0:57 signatures by now and we’re going to 0:59 send it out in in a couple of minutes I 1:02 mean just right after uh our talk so I 1:05 suppose this will be the number 700 1:07 although people keep keep signing uh our 1:11 motivation was to to make make clear to 1:16 the court in hag uh that not all 1:20 Israelis are the same think the same not 1:24 all of them support what happens now on 1:27 behalf of them uh in the name in in the 1:31 Gaza street by the Israeli Army uh I’m 1:34 not a legal expert I’m a 1:37 philosopher I’m an activist so I don’t 1:39 know whether you know the the former 1:42 definition of genocide is is applicable 1:46 to this particular case what I see are 1:50 horrible pictures what we read are 1:52 horrible data about children 1:56 dying about about limbs being cut about 2:01 operations being done without anesthesia 2:05 about women giving birth just on the 2:07 street without water so this is 2:10 something that is totally unbearable 2:12 we’re talking now about 2:15 2300 thousand people dying and I’m sure 2:18 the number is much higher because there 2:20 are many who are still buried under 2:22 under the rubble uh people cannot even 2:25 bury their dead and I speak with people 2:29 I know 2:30 from from ra and from other places in in 2:33 Gaza I have friends whose relatives are 2:36 in kanun or in Gaza City and and I I I’m 2:41 getting the impression both by the by 2:43 the media the reliable media which is 2:46 not the Israeli media uh and and by 2:50 their own testimonies so I just felt you 2:53 know we cannot we cannot be silent it is 2:55 done in our name and so we wanted to 2:59 sound another another voice and anat I’m 3:02 going to get to some repercussions in 3:04 just a moment but let me stay with what 3:05 you’ve just said the Israeli government 3:07 you know in different interviews 3:09 justifying its actions saying that Hamas 3:11 attacked first and they are trying to 3:13 eliminate Hamas but they’ve also been 3:15 criticism leveled against the government 3:17 that it is targeting civilians under the 3:19 guise of trying to eliminate Hamas and 3:22 and I wonder as Israeli citizens who are 3:26 backing this call who’ve signed this 3:27 petition how does all of this make you 3:30 feel okay I’m very happy about this 3:34 question actually because what happened 3:36 on October 3:38 7th made us you know numb I I I was just 3:42 sitting I think for three 4 days without 3:45 even moving it was such a shock it was 3:48 so terrible I knew someone who was mured 3:51 there on 7th October he’s actually was 3:55 actually a member of my organization 3:57 Academia for equality uh I’ve indirectly 4:00 known several others who who were 4:03 murdered or kidnapped uh and and of 4:07 course it was shocking and the the what 4:09 we heard the stories we heard about what 4:11 happened that day what was done by Hamas 4:13 and Jihad and other other organizations 4:16 was horrible but it doesn’t justify in 4:19 any way in any way what happens now and 4:23 what the Army the Israeli Army is doing 4:25 now I mean there’s 4:27 no and I find is not a logic I I cherish 4:32 and these are so many eyes for for few 4:35 eyes and I mean the hor should not be 4:39 compared and should not be committed so 4:43 so that’s and I’d like to add to that I 4:46 think pragmatically politically this is 4:49 the wrong direction to take I mean it’s 4:51 not only that I’m I’m sitting here on a 4:54 very you know moral High ground and just 4:57 preaching uh because I think this this 5:01 this is going to to just take us down 5:04 and down and down and down to the abys 5:07 and and if you want a political 5:09 resolution ever it cannot start by 5:12 committing committing such atrocities I 5:15 mean how how do we imagine even that 5:18 people in Gaza would be ready to to to 5:20 speak with us to to to believe what we 5:23 suggest what we offer if this is what we 5:26 do so even pragmatically politically not 5:29 morally I think this is totally wrong 5:32 it’s it’s the totally wrong 5:36 uh Ru to take and another thing just 5:39 just a second more uh we talking about 5:42 the atrocities by Hamas of 7th October 5:45 but this came given a context I mean and 5:49 there is a context of 57 years of 5:54 occupation of you know you it’s not it’s 5:57 not coming out of nothing 6:00 uh you have the memory of the nakba of 6:03 48 this is all the burden that 6:06 Palestinians bury and pardon me um there 6:11 could be consequence I’m sure you are 6:13 aware of that um for for this decision 6:16 to back South Africa cuz your government 6:19 is not happy with this particular matter 6:22 um even going to the icj are you 6:24 prepared to face them oh sure well I’m 6:27 not happy with the government first of 6:29 all 6:30 I’m very very unhappy with with the 6:32 government and actually with most of the 6:34 opposition as well I 6:36 mean of the 120 members of parliament 6:40 member of knesset 6:43 maybe a 100 but maybe more are not are 6:48 not acceptable by me I mean they’re 6:50 holding the same thing they’re 6:52 supporting the the the horrors that are 6:54 now are now committed by by the army so 6:58 I don’t care if they if they’re unhappy 7:00 I’m happy that they are unhappy because 7:02 I want this to stop and there’s another 7:06 thing we haven’t mentioned there are the 7:08 people who were abducted you know the 7:10 the and these are Israelis most of them 7:14 the Israeli citizens it doesn’t seem 7:17 that our government cares for them and 7:19 you know the families of the those who 7:21 are kidnapped they they’re holding 7:22 demonstrations and they’re calling to 7:24 the government stop it stop it so they 7:27 can you know strike a deal and and free 7:31 are prisoners are are hostages and the 7:35 government doesn’t doesn’t do anything 7:38 because for doing this it should it 7:40 should stop the war and and this is what 7:42 I want the to decide that the war should 7:45 stop and and at right on that point how 7:49 do Israelis feel on the ground about 7:53 what is going on in 7:56 Gaza I think most Israelis don’t know 7:59 because because the Israeli media 8:00 doesn’t show it I mean it it’s hardly 8:03 spoken about in Israeli radio and 8:06 Israeli 8:07 television uh the journals the papers 8:11 newspapers daily newspapers apart from 8:14 and apart from online magazines that are 8:16 radical and they leftist and they they 8:19 give very faithful representation of 8:21 what happens most of the people don’t 8:23 see them so I think many of them they 8:26 don’t really understand why it’s called 8:30 you know something that is that amounts 8:32 to genocide they have no idea what’s 8:35 happening there and they simply they 8:37 simply believe that the world is against 8:39 us you know against us and maybe it’s 8:42 anti-semitic maybe it’s just being 8:44 anti-israel I don’t know but they don’t 8:47 understand that severe things are 8:50 happening sure um quite a difficult um 8:54 you know a difficult one and as we say 8:55 that you know your petition garnering 8:57 over 700 signatures now now and you’re 9:00 about to click Send let’s see then what 9:02 happens um because those arguments are 9:04 set down for Thursday and Friday but 9:06 we’ll see what becomes of that 9:08 particular mety thank you so much for 9:09 your time and I do appreciate it that is 9:12 you very much let’s just hope thank you 9:15 thank you that is Tel Aviv University 9:16 Department of philosophy senior lecturer 9:19 anat 9:28 Matar
Hundreds of Israelis support South Africa’s ICJ case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza
Ibrahim Husseini
Jerusalem
09 January, 2024 Hearings are expected in The Hague this week. South Africa is also seeking an emergency suspension of Israel’s military campaign on Gaza.
More than 600 Israelis have signed a petition calling on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to rule in favour of South Africa’s lawsuit against the state of Israel, calling for a decision that will bring an immediate end to the war.
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians thus far, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian health officials, and rendered much of the Gaza enclave uninhabitable for the 2.2 million Palestinians living there.
South Africa accused Israel last month of breaching its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the treaty drafted in the wake of the Holocaust in Europe, which makes it a crime to attempt to destroy a people in whole or in part.
Hearings are expected in The Hague this week, on the 11th and 12th of January. South Africa is also seeking an emergency suspension of Israel’s military campaign on Gaza.
Bolivia, Turkey and Malaysia have voiced their support for the case, while Jordan’s foreign minister also said Amman will back South Africa.
Dr Anat Matar, one of the petition initiators, told The New Arab that she is filing the petition to the ICJ in The Hague on Tuesday.
“I initiated this petition first of all because I wanted to show that there is part of Israeli citizens who agree with South Africa’s move”.
Dr Anat Matar holds a senior lecturer position at Tel Aviv University, where she teaches political philosophy. In addition, she advocates for ‘draft refusers’, a small segment of Israelis who refuse to serve in the Israeli army because they oppose the occupation.
“What I know for sure is that this war must be stopped immediately. Every moment that passes is a crime”.
Israeli member of Knesset Ofer Cassif from the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality-Jabha announced that he’s also supporting the initiative.
“My constitutional duty is to Israeli society and all of its residents, not to a government whose members and its coalition are calling for ethnic cleansing and even actual genocide”, Cassif wrote on the social media platform X.
Israelis adding their voice to millions of voices around the world who accuse the government of PM Netanyahu of committing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza may give credence to South Africa’s lawsuit.
“Do we believe that general public trends could impact what judges rule? Overall, the answer is yes. I do believe this petition by Israeli citizens can help educate the public opinion”, Ofer Neiman, one of the signatories to the petition and an anti-occupation activist, told TNA.
South Africa has backed the Palestinian cause for statehood in Israeli-occupied territories for decades, likening the plight of Palestinians to those of the Black majority in South Africa during the repressive apartheid era, a comparison that Israel denies. Israel was a major ally to Apartheid South Africa, providing political and military support, as well as jointly shared nuclear technology for the development of a bomb.
A different court in The Hague, the International Criminal Court (ICC), is separately investigating alleged atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank but has not named any suspects. Israel is not a member of the ICC and rejects its jurisdiction.
Israel has named its former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak as its addition to an International Court of Justice panel due this week to hear a genocide allegation filed against it.
Under the ICJ’s rules, a state that does not already have a judge of its nationality on the bench can choose an ad hoc judge to sit in their case.
South Africa, which accuses Israel of genocide in the Gaza war, has also appointed an ad hoc judge, former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke, South African media said.
Scotland’s first minister, Hamza Yusuf, in the wake of remarks of senior members of the Israeli cabinet, calling to move Palestinians out of the enclave and Jewish recolonisation of Gaza, accused Israel of ethnic cleansing.
“If that’s not tantamount to ethnic cleansing, then I don’t know what is”, he told Sky News.
Israel and the United States have rebuked South Africa’s case at the ICJ. Israel, which is under increasing international calls to end its offensive in Gaza, claims self-defence.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Tuesday, 9 January, that “there is nothing more atrocious and preposterous” than a lawsuit filed in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in its war on Gaza.
The threat posed by Hamas extends beyond its military capabilities. It encompassing a global ideological warfare that challenges the core values and foundations of Western democracies. Recognizing this global dimension is crucial for developing a comprehensive strategy to counteract Hamas.To effectively counter Hamas, Israel requires a multifaceted strategy that not only combats Hamas militarily in Gaza but also undertakes a global campaign to dismantle Islamist influence in the West. This challenge is intensified by the strategic alliance between Western Islamists and leftist organizations – including progressive groups in the US and socialist groups in Europe. This phenomenon, known as the red-green alliance, significantly bolsters Hamas’ soft power on a global scale.Our findings underscore Hamas’ influence on perceptions and policy in the U.S., particularly during wartime. This influence often translates into increased pressure on the U.S. administration to curtail military aid to Israel and accelerate a ceasefire, potentially undermining Israel’s military goals. Significantly, pro-Hamas sentiment has also resonated with some members of the Democratic Party, influencing U.S. policies. This includes exerting pressure on Israel to permit fuel deliveries to Gaza, which inadvertently assists Hamas’ military capabilities.
Some Islamist and leftist groups significantly contribute to the rising antisemitism in the West. This manifests both through direct, explicit expressions of antisemitism and indirectly by portraying Jews as ‘white and privileged,’ which diminishes the perceived urgency to address antisemitism. The red-green alliance is increasingly effective in framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a binary of oppressed vs. oppressor, utilizing the domestic terminology of identity politics.Cuntering Hamas’ strategic influence in the U.S. is crucial, complementing Israel’s military strategies. This aspect often remains a critical blind spot for Israeli policymakers. While they recognize the link between the Gaza conflict and the rise of antisemitism, Israeli leaders frequently overlook the importance of actively countering key sources of antisemitism in America. Addressing these sources is not only vital in its own right but also aligns with the broader objective of undermining Hamas.This oversight results in a failure to fully grasp the impact of rising antisemitism on Israel’s current military objectives. Atchalta’s main goal is to enlighten Israeli decision-makers about this crucial link. Acknowledging this connection could foster a more unified approach among government agencies, which currently operate in isolation, aiming to globally neutralize Hamas. It may also prompt Israeli diplomatic efforts and intelligence sharing with pro-Israel groups. This collaboration would not only further Israel’s goals but also support Jewish organizations in America in their fight against antisemitism, fueled by Islamist and progressive factions.Combating the sources of the recent surge in antisemitism is not only a moral obligation but also a crucial component in the strategic defeat of Hamas.
Like in other Western countries, the reaction to the Hamas attack and the Gaza war is going through a wave of unrest led by the Palestinians and pro-Palestinian advocates. An important goal of the protest is to sever the special relations between Germany and Israel initiated after WWII and the Holocaust. German academia, like its American and British counterparts, is serving as the torchbearer of the mission. Not surprisingly, to push the Palestinian narrative, Arab groups have recruited in Germany Israelis and Jews to deflect accusations of antisemitism.
Adam Broomberg is a case in point.
A South African Jewish artist, activist, and educator, Broomberg resides in Berlin. He is a visiting professor for Media Arts at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a practice supervisor on the MA in photography & society at The Royal Academy of Art in the Hague. His activist work includes founding the NGO Artists + Allies x Hebron, which he co-directs with the Palestinian activist Issa Amro.
Amro, according to a letter by the Israeli Ministry of Justice from 2021, was indicted with “assault of a public servant, hindering a soldier, incitement, breach of a restricted zone order, malicious cause of damage to property, and participation in an unauthorized procession,” for his involvement in five events during the years 2010-2016.
Recently, Artists + Allies x Hebron launched a new online magazine described as “a tool for resistance,” featuring Palestinian artists. For the group, Hebron is “the only place in which Israeli settlers are living in the heart of a Palestinian city.” One artist speaks about coping with Islamophobia and “draws on the trauma experienced after one of his university friends was attacked by a group of men in the street in Bourges, France.” Another artist deals with Queer Palestinians. As Broomberg explains, “It’s super important to also show queer Palestinian culture because I really believe that the only way forward is intersectional solidarity… We need different struggles—Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ and environmental issues and indigenous rights—to intersect.”
Broomberg’s lack of integrity is staggering. First, in referring to “Israeli settlers” living in Hebron, the South African academic conveniently forgot to mention that Jews lived in Hebron for centuries and it is one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. In 1929, a Palestinian mob initiated a pogrom, killing many Jews. Second, his desire to show queer Palestinian culture” is born out of the desire to fit with the ethos of “intersectionality,” Under its banner, all the “oppressed minorities” such as Blacks, Palestinians or Lesbians, Gays, Transgender, and Queers should stand together. The reality in all Palestinian territories is radically different. Homosexuality is a grave sin in the Islamic tradition, and homosexuals are often persecuted. Israel has provided a refuge for Palestinian LGBTQ.
As if trashing Israel was not enough, Broomberg toldthe New Arab, an Arab media outlet based in London and known for spreading anti-Israel propaganda: “I think there is German desire, as opposed to guilt, that’s still in operation here, and the desire is to have a white, Christian, nationalist country, that’s what it’s about. It’s literally like the McCarthyist moment where, you know, a number of my friends in the art community are, like, their works are being removed from galleries. It feels very, it’s very scary and it’s very tribal, and it’s very polarized. I truly believe that the de-Nazification process did not happen and I think that we know that the Nazis and the Zionists collaborated in the 1930s because they had the same agenda which was to get the Jews out of Germany out of Europe, and I think that that agenda is still the same and I think that CDU (Christian Democratic Union) they want immigrants and ultimately Jews too, ideally, to get out our Arian homeland, ultimately that’s what it’s about it’s not like, I think that stopping at German guilt is letting Germans get off a bit lightly.”
Broomberg states that “the Nazis and the Zionists collaborated in the 1930s.“ This is an egregious conspiracy theory found on antiemetic websites. To recall, according to the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, asserting that the Zionists and the Nazis collaborated is considered antisemitism.
While sharing an Al-Jazeerafilm portraying Palestinian culture titled “Banned in Berlin,” Broomberg wrote on his Instagram account that he is going through “multi-faceted attacks on me from pretty much every angle of the German State.” From accusations of “hateful antisemitism… and of advocating for terrorism against Jews” by Hamburg’s commissioner of antisemitism, Stefan Hensel, to “cancellations of exhibitions and now an imminent end to my professorship. I have three or four criminal charges against me for which I have had to find legal representation.” He believes the current climate in Germany is “particularly oppressive” and has caused him to have his “teaching contract terminated.”
Broomberg needs to be reminded that Hamas, via its connection to Muslim Brotherhood, has been exposed to Nazi propaganda. Copies of the Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf were found recently in the terror complex in Gaza. The brutal murder and rape on October 7 reminded many of the fate of Jews in the Holocaust.
Israel pointed out that Hamas, like Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, use the strategy of embedding themselves in densely populated areas to protect its terrorists.
It seems that Broomberg’s skills for demonizing Israel are a good match for the politics of the terrorists and their defenders. German higher education institutions should be aware.
70 backers pledged €18,689 to help bring this project to life.Last updated April 22, 2023
Story
My name is Adam Broomberg. I am an artist, educator and activist, and one of the founders of Artists+Allies x Hebron, an NGO established to confront the ongoing oppression of Palestinian residents in Hebron.
Artists+Allies x Hebron is working on a series of projects established to raise awareness of Palestinian life under the current occupation. We are not eligible for any state funding or institutional support, so all projects to date have relied on self-funding or pro-bono work, which is not sustainable.
One of the projects, Anchor in the Landscape (explained in detail in the video), is a series of 8”x10” film portraits of olive trees. Since 1967, over one million Palestinian olive trees – many of which are over 2000 years old – have been destroyed by Israeli authorities and Jewish settlers. I have always felt that no one with any sense of belonging or love for their land would willingly destroy its oldest living indigenous citizens. At the same time, the Jewish National Fund (an organisation established by the Zionist Congress) has planted more than 240 million pine trees in Israel.
Along the mountainous strip that runs from the Hebron Mountains in the south to the Galilee in the north, two contrasting landscapes now exist: deciduous olive groves and conifer pine forests. Each botanical group has its own totemic symbolism: the olive trees signifying Palestinian culture, resistance, agrarian sovereignty and intergenerational tradition; the pines drawing upon historical narratives of the holy cornucopia, and characteristics of European civilised society.
Each portrait acts as a witness to the resilience of the Palestinian people and their tender and fiercely loving relationship with their land. They are evidence of both the juridical and political existence of Palestine, and the need for the freedom of Palestine and its people.
Thanks to overwhelming support, we reached our intended target within 3 days of opening this Kickstarter. This target was to make prints from the 8”x10” film to process for a book, and print for exhibitions intended to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause. The book will include accompanying text by Dr. Irus Braveman, who has made this subject part of her life’s work, and will be published by the prestigious MACK, which has global distribution and is a hugely significant platform for photography in print.
We are very grateful for your help running a collective that is not eligible for any public or institutional grants. This is an unsustainable without independent support.
As of March 25th all the proceeds we collected will be used only for the book and exhibition.We have many other projects on the go and any contributions we gratefully receive now until the Kickstarter ends we willuse for the other projects we have on the go that are listed below.
Hebron has a surveillance camera mounted every 300 feet. Palestinians are monitored constantly by the Israeli security forces by integrating facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and smartphones. We developed a strategy of counter-surveillance: A series of livestream cameras were placed around H2: Each showing a view of a local olive grove. Visible on a website an international public can help protect the trees which are targeted by the Israeli authorities and settlers. We co-opted the same weaponised technology but use it as a community building strategy, to show solidarity and make sure the courageous residents and their daily acts of heroism are not only surveilled but very much seen. We would like to continue and extend this project.
We are seeking to take small groups of people to Palestine to meet, amongst others with Issa Amro, the celebrated activist founder of Youth Against Settlements and co-founder of Artists+Allies x Hebron, who is the most eloquent and passionate narrator of contemporary Palestinian life. We know that allowing people to see it with their own eyes is the best chance we have to enact real and urgently needed change.
Finally, we want to build a website to share the stories of the people involved in the projects and the communities they aim to support. We know that the occupation of Palestinian land is a global concern, and we know the best way to build support is online. The creation of a secure site and the regular updates that it will require will also be funded by these donations
Thank you once again for your interest and support, and please keep sharing our projects
– Adam
Risks and challenges
I am confident with the images we have managed to capture, the essential writing of Dr. Irus Braveman, and the commitment to excellence of MACK we will produce a beautiful and politically important book and exhibition. With a team in Berlin and Hebron as dedicated as we all are we will also continue to make our other projects a reality on the ground. None of the proceeds of this fundraiser will be used by MACK in the production of the book.
Artists and Allies of Hebron, a Berlin- and West Bank-based organisation and NGO, which is due to exhibit at the Venice Biennale next year, has today launched a new online magazine featuring Palestinian artists. Described as “a tool for resistance”, Union Magazineaims to use art to “celebrate and salute the Palestinian people”, says the Berlin-based Jewish artist Adam Broomberg, who founded Artists Allies of Hebron in 2020 with the Palestinian activist Issa Amro.
“It’s a way of not being silent within the art world while not screaming some political agenda,” Broomberg says, noting that the title of the publication represents the “idea of being self-organised at a time when our simple rights as humans and fellow art workers are so undermined”.
The first four artists to be interviewed include Hazem Harb, whose work incorporates historical artefacts such as archival images, map fragments, coins and pressed plants. In this way, his art is a “bridge between the past and present”, the artist says in the magazine. Harb collages these elements together, often into diptychs, which he says serve as a metaphor for his life in the UAE. As he puts it: “As someone living in exile, my journey through adulthood is constantly unfolding between worlds, with my mind anchored in a homeland that I cannot physically inhabit.”
Earlier this year, the Belgian journalist and photographer Barbara Debeuckelaere travelled to Hebron in the West Bank, the only place in which Israeli settlers are living in the heart of a Palestinian city. There, she photographed the women of Tel Rumeida, a particularly traditional neighbourhood built on top of and around an archaeological mound referred to as “Tel Hebron” by Israelis. For her project, OMM, which means mother in Arabic, Debeuckelaere photographed the women’s surroundings and then handed the camera to them to capture themselves and their homes as they wished.
Areej Kaoud spent part of her childhood in Gaza before her family emigrated to Canada. Her 2017 piece, Anxiety Is a Present of the Present, is “derived from my interest in emergencies and disaster scenarios”, she says in the magazine. Meanwhile, Mahdi Baraghithi deals with Islamophobia in his work, and draws on the trauma experienced after one of his university friends was attacked by a group of men in the street in Bourges, France. More artists will be added to the magazine weekly.
Broomberg believes celebrating art is vital at this moment. “It provides a moment of respite—it brings hope to see people being resilient and producing things,” he says. “And it kind of breaks through all the politics. It’s a way of people connecting that cuts through what’s happening, which is so polarised; it’s so tribal.” In Germany, the artist says the current climate is particularly oppressive and has caused him to have his teaching contract terminated.
Last month, Artists and Allies of Hebron was named as one of 30 officially sanctioned collateral events for the 60th Venice Biennale. Palestine has never had a national pavilion because Italy is among the countries that does not recognise it as a sovereign state. Broomberg says the Biennale has been “very supportive” of the presentation, which is “very driven by Palestinian artists and collectives”. More details are due to be announced next month.
As for Union Magazine, the next interview is with the Palestinian queer pop artist Bashar Murad. “It’s super important to also show queer Palestinian culture because I really believe that the only way forward is intersectional solidarity,” Broomberg says. “We need different struggles—Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ+ and environmental issues and indigenous rights—to intersect. Art is a language that is able to do that. The importance of poetry and literature and visual art at this moment is so hugely important.”
Analysis Beyond guilt: How pro-Palestine Jews are resisting Germany’s ‘McCarthyist’ crackdown
Alexander Durie
04 December, 2023
In-depth: Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestine solidarity since 7 October has had a wide impact on civil society. In Berlin, anti-Zionist Jews have been arrested and fired for criticising Israel and its war on Gaza, but they refuse to yield.
On 14 October, Iris Hefets, a 56-year-old psychoanalyst, stood alone in a public square in Berlin and held up a sign. On it, she had written: “As an Israeli and Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza” – on one side in English, and on the other in German.
Very quickly, police officers stationed nearby arrived. They told Hefets that she was not allowed to do this and that she must take the sign down. A crowd formed and started filming. Hefets, who’s lived in Germany for the past 20 years, politely argued with authorities, saying that she just wants to stand alone with her sign, that she’s not causing any trouble.
This was happening on Hermannplatz, in Neukölln, a neighbourhood in the south of Berlin with a big Middle Eastern and Arab community, Palestinians in particular. It was one week after the 7 October attack by Hamas that subsequently launched Israel’s war on Gaza. In Germany, like in the past two years, authorities reacted by banning all public gatherings that might be considered pro-Palestinian.
The reason that Hefets had insisted on standing alone on Hermannplatz was because law professionals told her that the German constitution states that being alone does not constitute a gathering – it only becomes potentially illegal if several people gather.
“Over 850 arrests were made by Berlin police in the first three weeks following 7 October, mostly of people with presumed pro-Palestinian sympathies”
The Berlin police’s justification for banning pro-Palestinian demonstrations was that such gatherings would bring “an imminent danger” of “seditious, anti-Semitic exclamations” and “violent activities”.
Over 850 arrests were made by Berlin police in the first three weeks following 7 October, mostly of people with presumed pro-Palestinian sympathies. This does not include people who were detained at protests, which is estimated to be in the hundreds, according to legal experts.
In response, Jewish artists, writers, and scholars warned that Germany’s “disturbing crackdown on civic life”, including the ban on public gatherings, has been used to scapegoat its large Arab and Muslim community and restrict freedom of speech, including legitimately criticising Israel or expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
“Muslim people and others feel this oppression and Islamophobia and pure racism the [German] state is doing, so I decided I’m going to stand in Neukölln, in this place, where the people, the press, and everyone’s saying that it’s dangerous for Jews and Israelis,” Hefets told The New Arab about her solo protest.
In Germany, Jewish groups like Jüdische Stimme, which Hefets is a chairwoman of, are becoming increasingly important in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and justice for Palestinians.
In countries like Germany, the US, the UK, and France – Israel’s key allies – Jewish alliances like Jüdische Stimme, the Jewish Voice for Peace, Na’amod, and Tsedek! are uniting to combat state racism both at home and in Israel-Palestine. They are challenging the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that is being used to silence Palestinian solidarity and saying loud and clear: “Not in our name”.
Israel’s security as Germany’s raison d’être
Due to the genocide of European Jews and other groups during Nazi rule, the German state has been determined to shape the country’s post-war identity around a culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur in German).
The memory of the Holocaust, and the atrocities committed on Jewish people, is ever-present in Germany, to try and ensure racist state crimes never happen again. However, many critical Jewish voices have witnessed a dangerous conflation: fighting antisemitism has been misinterpreted by the German establishment as defending Israel and Zionism by all means.
In 2008, Angela Merkel declared before the Knesset that Israel’s security was, for Germany, its “Staatsräson”, its raison d’être. Fifteen years later, her successor as Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, repeated the phrase on 12 October in the Bundestag. “At the moment there is only one place for Germany: on Israel’s side. This is what we mean when we say, ‘Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson.’”
Since 7 October, this has been backed up by action. The German government has increased its arms sales to Israel by almost tenfold compared to 2022, from about €32 million to nearly €303 million ($323 million), according to government sources. This makes Germany the second biggest arms supplier to Israel after the US. On 17 October, Olaf Scholz became the first foreign head of state to visit Israel following the Hamas attack.
“Many critical Jewish voices have witnessed a dangerous conflation: fighting antisemitism has been misinterpreted by the German establishment as defending Israel and Zionism by all means”
Domestically, Germany’s strong pro-Israel policies have resulted in what many activists consider anti-Palestinian racism. Apart from banning pro-Palestinian gatherings, in 2019 the German parliament deemed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel “anti-Semitic” and said that it recalled Nazi-era propaganda.
Things have escalated since 7 October. On the 13th, Berlin police made the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” forbidden and indictable, and Berlin’s education senator, Katharina Günther-Wünsch, sent a letter to Berlin school principals, giving them the option to ban students from displaying pro-Palestinian symbols, such as the keffiyeh, the Palestinian flag, or stickers that say “Free Palestine”. This ever more repressive atmosphere has left many in Berlin too fearful to criticise Germany’s pro-Israel stance.
“Detentions, police violence, surveillance, suspensions in schools, and workplace intimidations or sackings that we have been witnessing are unequivocally comparable to practices of authoritarian regimes,” according to Alice Garcia from the European Legal Support Centre, which provides legal support for pro-Palestinian voices across Europe. “This is extremely fear-inducing and fearsome, akin to the days of fascism.”
Fired for mentioning ‘apartheid’
As a result of this crackdown, several Jewish people, including Israelis, have been detained, fired, or slandered by major German media outlets for calling out Israel’s well-documented human rights violations. Udi Raz, a Jewish Israeli academic who grew up in Haifa and moved to Berlin over 10 years ago, said she was “surprised that Germans would often call me an anti-Semite” when she criticised Israel.
An expert in Jewish history in the Middle East, Raz started working as a freelance tour guide at Berlin’s famous Jewish Museum in March this year, doing up to ten tours a week. Raz was never shy about politics, when discussing Israel with museum visitors she cited the position of many major human rights organisations.
“According to Amnesty International, not only the West Bank should be understood as an apartheid state, but really the entire area between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea should be understood as characteristics of an apartheid state, according to international law,” Raz told The New Arab.
After 7 October, Raz said the museum “delivered the message [to staff] that we are more free to express our feelings and thoughts”. She thus continued calling Israel an “apartheid” state on her tours to contextualise current events. But then, the unthinkable happened. On 25 October Raz was told by the Jewish Museum that her contract would be terminated. According to her, it was the mention of the term “apartheid” that was the issue.
“The only person who actually addressed this injustice within the Jewish Museum was me… Everybody is afraid. Why? Because they know what can happen to them after they saw what happened to me.”
A spokesperson for the Jewish Museum told The New Arab that Raz was let go because she “overwhelmed groups with a personal political stance”, which went against the museum’s “educational standards”.
But Raz, who was financially dependent on this job and still hopes to work there again someday, said that it was “questionable” of the museum to suggest that stating “certain facts” backed by international law would be considered a “stance”.
“Educational institutions really have not only the possibility, but also the responsibility to educate the people who live now in Germany, about how Germany also supports the systemic injustice against Palestinians in the name of protecting Jewish people. This is something that people deserve to know.”
“As a result of this crackdown, several Jewish people, including Israelis, have been detained, fired, or slandered by major German media outlets for calling out Israel’s well-documented human rights violations”
Beyond ‘German guilt’
In recent weeks, Raz has been very active with Jüdische Stimme in organising pro-Palestine protests, especially since Berlin courts started allowing such gatherings in late October. For organisers from the Jewish group, the rise of racist hate crimes in Germany – both antisemitism and Islamophobia – are very real and both equally felt, but their frustration is that German politicians do not listen to their concerns and are instead fixated with a “responsibility” to protect Israel – which has resulted in Germans lecturing Jews about what antisemitism looks like.
Many have suggested that Germany’s strong pro-Israel stance is due to “historical guilt” arising from the horrors of World War II. But for Israeli Jewish psychoanalyst Iris Hefets, this guilt is “a cover story”.
“Germany is acting according to the primitive art of having guilt… They will tell us what antisemitism is. They will build new synagogues, but there are no Jews in there,” she told The New Arab, suggesting that Germany separates Jews into “good ones” and “bad ones” depending on their opinions of Israel.
“In German, we call it ‘ungeschehen machen’ – to undo. This is the primitive way of dealing with guilt – to undo something, and to say ‘okay, these are the Muslims, these are the Palestinians, they are the bad guys. We already know that we are clean… We worked through it and now we can also teach the others.’ I don’t buy this guilt issue as something mature.”
These are sentiments echoed by Adam Broomberg, a Berlin-based Jewish South African artist who said that 90% of his family was killed during the Holocaust. Broomberg has now built a large following online for his pro-Palestine views, and repeated what several critical Jewish voices have said: that conservative European politicians may blame immigrants, Muslims, or Arabs for rising antisemitism, but that it is antisemitic in itself of them to weaponise Jewishness for political means and to put all Jews in one basket – especially as many Jews oppose Zionism.
“I truly believe that the de-Nazification process did not happen,” Broomberg told The New Arab. “And we know that the Nazis and the Zionists collaborated in the 1930s because they had the same agenda, which was to get the Jews out of Germany, out of Europe.”
“I think there’s a German desire as opposed to guilt, that’s in operation here. And the desire is to have a white, Christian, nationalist country.”
“It’s McCarthyism times here, it really is. A number of my friends in the art community, their works are being removed from galleries, they’re losing representation. It feels very very scary, and it’s very tribal and polarised”
‘McCarthyism’ in Berlin
On the same day Broomberg spoke, he had received a letter from German authorities charging him for resisting arrest and attacking police officers – accusations he claims are “false”.
Last May, he had been arrested by Berlin police for taking part in a peaceful protest organised by Jüdische Stimme that commemorated the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, referring to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland. It was the only pro-Palestinian rally allowed by authorities, but riot police still arbitrarily and violently arrested attendees like Broomberg.
The artist said that he receives many death threats for his pro-Palestine posts, but that Berlin police have yet to react when he has reported them.
“It’s McCarthyism times here, it really is,” he said. “A number of my friends in the art community, their works are being removed from galleries, they’re losing representation. It feels very very scary, and it’s very tribal and polarised.”
For Broomberg, and many other anti-Zionist Jews in Berlin, the climate often feels hopeless and distressing, but solidarity with oppressed people both in Germany and Palestine has never been more important.
“The police are saying I’ve been charged with resisting arrest. My ancestors were killed for not resisting German police,” Broomberg said. “So I will resist German authorities until I go to my grave.”
Alexander Durie is a Multimedia Journalist for The New Arab, working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw.
To: Kate Sherringer, Trecnwc, Glandwr, Pembs. UK SA340YD
North Pembs Amnesty Group
Date: February 23, 2021
Adar 11, 5781
Dear Ms. Sherringer,
Re: Your letter concerning Mr. Issa Amro
We have received your enquiry regarding Mr. Issa Amro, and would like to address your concerns according to information forwarded to us by the relevant authorities.
1. On June 7, 2016, Mr. Amro was indicted with, among others, assault of a public servant, hindering a soldier, incitement, breach of a restricted zone order, malicious cause of damage to property, and participation in an unauthorized procession, for his involvement in five (5) events during the years 2010-2016.
2. Mr. Amro pleaded “not guilty”, and subsequently, evidence and witness hearings were held, during which the evidence for the charges was brought before the Military Court. During the hearing, the prosecution withdrew two (2) charges regarding assault and malicious damage to property, after finding acquitting evidence.
3. On January 6, 2021, the verdict was given. The Military Court convicted Mr. Amro of six (6) of the charges, and acquitted him of twelve (12). The six (6) convictions were with regard to four (4) out of the five (5) events mentioned above.
4. On January 8, 2021, a sentencing hearing was held, and a date for handing down the sentence has not yet been set. The prosecution did not request imprisonment, but probation and a monetary penalty.
5. Mr. Amro was not detained twenty (20) times during 2012, as was argued in your letter. There were four (4) investigations in which Mr. Amro was the suspect. He was indicted for one (1) event during 2012, and was convicted of two (2) offences, while the other three (3) cases were dropped. Additionally, according to Mr. Amro’s lawyer, he was held for a total of ten (10) days for all the indictments brought against him.
Last month, Professor Gurminder K Bhambra from the University of Sussex Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies published a letter on behalf of the British Sociological Association (BSA), where she is the President. Two hundred ninety members of the BSA signed the letter. The letter condemned Israel alone for the current war between Israel and Gaza and twisted the Israeli-Palestinian history favoring the Palestinians.
The letter says,
“Israel’s devastation of Gaza is a disproportionate response to the terror attack undertaken by Hamas on October 7th which killed over a thousand Israelis, migrant workers, and foreign citizens and took over 200 people hostage. The Israeli response has killed over 15,000 Palestinian men, women, and children, with an unknown number still buried under the rubble and uncounted, and the displacement of over a million people from their homes in the north of Gaza to the south. We understand these events as part of the ongoing Nakba, beginning in 1948, but with a longer history. The Balfour Declaration in 1917, for example, saw the British pledge to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine and there was an exponential increase in the movement of Jewish people to those lands in the aftermath of the Shoah. The Nazi regime’s systematic slaughter of Jewish populations across Europe in the 1940s followed centuries of pogroms by Europe’s Christians against Jewish minority communities. Prohibitions on the free movement of Jewish people to the UK in the aftermath of the Second World War left few options for Jewish people who no longer felt able to live in Europe. The creation of a catastrophe from ongoing European catastrophes must be acknowledged. As sociologists, we deplore the systematic destruction of human communities. The current ceasefire provides a vital respite from the death and destruction unleashed by Israel and must become permanent with a negotiated political solution that is just to all parties. We do not believe that there is any military solution. International support will be needed to rebuild Gaza including the reconstruction of its hospitals, schools, and universities which have been destroyed. We commit to work with colleagues from the region to rebuild educational infrastructures in Gaza.”
The letter only cares for the Gazans and not for Israelis. It also ignores the numerous rejections of the Palestinians to accept the Jewish state. It doesn’t acknowledge Hamas’s charter’s aim to destroy Israel. The letter is so biased that it only calls for rebuilding Gaza but not the Israeli communities that were damaged in the Hamas attack on October 7, not to mention the missile attacks that Hamas has been launching from Gaza to Israel since the outbreak of the war on October 7 to this day.
British sociologists have been leading the anti-Israel sentiments in British academia.
Recently, the British Arabic media Middle East Eye (MEE), a media outlet based in London spreading anti-Israel information, published an article discussing how a group of 24 academics from the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK, have called on their University to end the programs with Israeli universities and to divest from companies involved in Israel’s defense industry. MEE did not provide any link to the letter, neither a copy of the letter, nor who is behind it.
According to MEE, the academics wrote, “We are all witness to Israel’s ongoing mass killing of Palestinians, assisted and armed by the UK government… The bombardment of Gaza is the latest, horrific phase of 75 years of Israel’s expulsion, occupation, dispossession, brutalization, humiliation, incarceration without trial including of children, torture, maiming, and killing of Palestinians.”
MEE reported that the academics called on the University of Manchester to end the joint research fund with Tel Aviv University because of its research and development in weapons, surveillance technologies, military strategy, and operational theory. They also called for the end of the exchange agreement with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem because it hosts Israel’s army intelligence training program, Havatzalot, which conducts surveillance of Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem. In addition, the academics called for the University of Manchester to dissolve its partnerships with the Graphene Engineering and Innovation Centre, GKN Aerospace and Haydale, which all have ties to Israel’s defense sector. The University of Manchester’s relationship with donors also came under scrutiny. The authors called for the University of Manchester to divest from HSBC, Siemens, and “all other companies who invest in Israeli weapons, military technologies, and the means of Israeli apartheid.”
This is not the first time MEE has published anti-Israel propaganda. In 2021, IAM reported that the MEEpublished a petition signed by 236 staff and postgraduate students, many sociologists, of the University of Manchester. This petition asked the University of Manchester to end its research partnership with Tel Aviv University.
When it comes to Israel, the anti-Israel cohorts raise their voices while they do not criticize Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians. Britain designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, acknowledging It also harms its own population. Britain should invest in educating its pro-terrorist sociologists in its midst.
Israel’s devastation of Gaza is a disproportionate response to the terror attack undertaken by Hamas on October 7th which killed over a thousand Israelis, migrant workers, and foreign citizens and took over 200 people hostage. The Israeli response has killed over 15,000 Palestinian men, women, and children, with an unknown number still buried under the rubble and uncounted, and the displacement of over a million people from their homes in the north of Gaza to the south.
We understand these events as part of the ongoing Nakba, beginning in 1948, but with a longer history. The Balfour Declaration in 1917, for example, saw the British pledge to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine and there was an exponential increase in the movement of Jewish people to those lands in the aftermath of the Shoah. The Nazi regime’s systematic slaughter of Jewish populations across Europe in the 1940s followed centuries of pogroms by Europe’s Christians against Jewish minority communities. Prohibitions on the free movement of Jewish people to the UK in the aftermath of the Second World War left few options for Jewish people who no longer felt able to live in Europe. The creation of a catastrophe from ongoing European catastrophes must be acknowledged.
As sociologists, we deplore the systematic destruction of human communities. The current ceasefire provides a vital respite from the death and destruction unleashed by Israel and must become permanent with a negotiated political solution that is just to all parties. We do not believe that there is any military solution. International support will be needed to rebuild Gaza including the reconstruction of its hospitals, schools, and universities which have been destroyed. We commit to work with colleagues from the region to rebuild educational infrastructures in Gaza.
The signatories hold various positions in UK universities and in professional societies and associations but sign this letter in an individual capacity.
Gurminder K Bhambra, President of the British Sociological Association (2022-2024) and Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex
Martin Albrow, Past President of the British Sociological Association (1985-1987) and Emeritus Professor, University of Wales
Sara Arber, Past President of the British Sociological Association (1999-2001) and Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Surrey
John Brewer, Past President of the British Sociological Association (2009-2012) and Professor Emeritus, Queen’s University Belfast
Rachel Brooks, Incoming President of the British Sociological Association (2024-) and Professor of Sociology, University of Surrey
Susan Halford, Past President of the British Sociological Association (2018-2022) and Professor of Sociology, University of Bristol
John Holmwood, Past President of the British Sociological Association (2012-2014) and Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham
Lynn Jamieson, Past President of the British Sociological Association (2014-2018) and Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh
Sue Scott, Past President of the British Sociological Association (2007-2009) and Visiting Professor, Newcastle University and University of Helsinki
John Scott, Past President of the British Sociological Association (2001-2003) and Emeritus Professor, University of Plymouth
Additional signatories
Dr Finn MacKay, University of West of England
Briony Hannell, University Teacher in Sociology at the University of Sheffield
Ece Kocabıçak, Lecturer in Sociology, The Open University
Eda Yazici, Research Associate, University of Bristol
Eliran Bar-El, Lecturer in Sociology, University of York
Alejandro Miranda Nieto and I work as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Dr Alan Roe, Lecturer, University of Leeds
Marcus Morgan, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Bristol
Balihar Sanghera, University of Kent
Dr Mike Sheaff, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Plymouth
Professor Hannah Jones, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick
Bridget Byrne, Professor of Sociology, University of Manchester
Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Reader, University of Manchester
Professor Nick Couldry, London School of Economics
Dr Tara Mahfoud, University of Essex
Dr Rima Saini, Trustee of the British Sociological Association (2021-present) and Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Middlesex University London
Dr Saleema F Burney, Research Fellow, University of Birmingham
Rachel Cohen, Professor of Sociology, Work and Employment, City, University of London
Stefania Vicari, The University of Sheffield
Anna Strhan, University of York
Jennifer Remnant, Chancellor’s Fellow in Work, Employment and Organisation, University of Strathclyde
Lorenzo Cini, University College Cork
Professor Brendan Burchell, Professor of the social sciences, University of Cambridge
Patricia Irizar, University of Manchester
Konrad Rekas, HPL, Nottingham Trent University
Miriam Tenquist, University of Manchester
Maryam Alhajri, Sociology PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, and a Researcher and Teaching Assistant at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
Simon Bailey, University of Kent
Po-Han Lee, Assistant Professor of Global Health Studies, National Taiwan University
Dawn Lyon, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent
Giorgos Bithymitris, National Centre for Social Research
Rampaul Chamba, Member of the British Sociological Association
Dr. Lisa Howard, postdoctoral researcher, University of Edinburgh
Dr Sadia Habib, Lecturer in Education, University of Manchester
Bridget Anderson, Director Migration Mobilities Bristol, University of Bristol
Caroline Casey, Assistant Professor of Work, Management and Organisation, University of York
Chris Phillipson, Emeritus Professor, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester
Sugandha Agarwal, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester
Ann Phoenix, UCL
Dr Dyuti Chakravarty, Postdoctoral Researcher, University College Cork
Aina Tarabini, principal convenor of the BSA Bourdieu Study Group (2022-) and associate professor of sociology of education at Autonomous University of Barcelona
Francesca Romana Ammaturo, London Metropolitan University
Alex Law, Professor of Sociology, Abertay University
Aerin Lai, PhD researcher, Sociology, University of Edinburgh
Isabel Fletcher, Researcher in Social Science and Food Systems, University of Edinburgh
Ayesha Siddiqa, Member of the British Sociological Association (2023-24) and Lecturer of Sociology, University of Sargodha Pakistan
Syra Shakir, Associate Professor Learning and Teaching, Leeds Trinity University
dipak (dipbuk) Panchal, PhD Candidate at University of Warwick
Priscilla Alderson, Professor Emerita, University College London
Mano Candappa, University College London
Rachel Thomson, Professor of Childhood & Youth Studies, University of Sussex
Michael Harloe FACSS, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Salford
Professor Gladys Ganiel, Queen’s University Belfast
Dr. Carolina Matos, FHEA,Senior Lecturer in Media and Sociology, City University of London
Tariq Modood, Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy, University of Bristol
Professor Nicola Ingram, University College Cork
Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics
Jingyu Mao, the University of Edinburgh
Esca van Blarikom, Queen Mary University London
Barbara Crossouard, Professor of Theory in Education, University of Sussex
Karl Spracklen, Professor of Sociology of Leisure and Culture, Leeds Beckett University
Professor Barry Gibson, Professor in Medical Sociology, University of Sheffield
Taz Goddard-Fuller, Professor of Medical Education, University of Liverpool, School of Medicine
Cailean Gallagher, Associate Lecturer, St Andrews University
Noortje Marres, Professor of Science, Technology and Society, University of Warwick
Piyush Pushkar, Clinical Lecturer, University of Manchester
Dr Karina Pavlisa, University of Bristol
Juliet Hall, Post Graduate Researcher University of Plymouth
Alif Rafid Alfaridzi, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield
Patricia Gilbert, University of Portsmouth
Rev Mr Philip J Fernandez, Ontario, Canada
Tracy Shildrick, Professor of Inequalities, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University
Val Gillies, Professor of Social Policy, Centre for Socai Justice Research, University of Westminster
Graham Crow, University of Edinburgh
Salman Yaqoob, Postgrad student in Aberystwyth Business School, Wales
Richard Twine, Reader in Sociology, Edge Hill University
Bridget Fowler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Glasgow
Dr Tom Mills, Aston University
Professor Pamela Abbott F AcSS, Director of the Centre for Global Development , University of Aberdeen
Yingzi Shen, University of Sheffield
Zoe Walshe, Goldsmiths, University of London
Anna Gillions, Post-graduate researcher, Centre for Trust Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University
Kobe De Keere, Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam
Raquel Boso Perez, University of Glasgow
Shannon Martin, PhD Student, The Open University
Emily Jays, PhD Student in Education, University of Strathclyde
Howard Davis, Emeritus Professor, Bangor University
Asiya Islam, Lecturer, University of Leeds
Olatunji Adigun Adebola, staff coordinator at ALAD, Liberia and a member of British Sociological Association
Huw Beynon, Emeritus professor social science, Cardiff University
Dr Paul-Francois Tremlett, The Open University
Dr Caroline Oliver (SFHEA), University College London
William Outhwaite, FAcSS, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University
Asma Khan, Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK
Chrissie Rogers, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent
Florence Villesèche, Editorial board member of Work, Employment and Society (2023-), and Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School
Jeffrey Hyman, Prof Emeritus, University of Aberdeen
Dr Chloe Maclean, University of the West of Scotland
Rin Ushiyama, Lecturer in Sociology, Queen’s University Belfast
Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK
Hoshang Noraiee, Retired, taught in the University of Westminster and London Metropolitan
Ian Watt UWS – retired
Kirsten Forkert, Birmingham City University
Aimee Middlemiss, University of Plymouth
Marlo De Lara, University of Edinburgh
Amanda Latimer, Department of Criminology, Politics & Sociology, Kingston University
Simina Dragos, PhD Candidate – University of Cambridge
Professor Emeritus Stephen Mennell, University College Dublin
Raphaël Nowak, University of York
Dr Bethany Simmonds, Aberystwyth University
Nicholas Abercrombie, Emeritus Professor, University of Lancaster
Tony Elger, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick
Gerard Delanty, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Sussex University
Andrew Stevens, Associate Professor, University of Regina (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada)
Yvette Taylor, University of Strathclyde
Dr Chinwe Egbunike-Umegbolu, University of Brighton
Sara Chaudhry, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Lila Skountridaki, University of Edinburgh
Professor Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey
Kath Maguire, Member of the British Sociological Association, Public Involvement and Engagement Lead, European Centre for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter
Stevi Jackson, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology/Centre for Women’s Studies
Doğuş Şimşek, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology, Kingston University London
Prof Daniela Sime, Professor of Youth, Migration and Social Justice, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow
Dr Sweta Rajan-Rankin, Reader, University or Kent
Angela Loum, PhD candidate, Goldsmiths University Sociology department
Annalisa Murgia, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Milan
Alison Wilde – Senior Lecturer, Leeds Trinity University
Suki Ali, LSE
Julia Brannen, emerita professor UCL Institute of Education
Professor David Weir, Professor of Intercultural Management, York St John University
Dr Elizabeth Cotton, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Dr Siân Russell, Newcastle University
Andrew Baron – UCLAN
Sharon Gewirtz, King’s College London
Jonathan Gabe, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Royal Holloway, University of London
Pam Law, past trustee of the BSA
Jennie Popay, Distinguished Professor Sociology and Public Health, Lancaster University
John Holford, Robert Peers Professor of Adult Education Emeritus, University of Nottingham
Harriet Bradley, Professor Emerita, University of Bristol and the University of the West of England
Syd Jeffers, University of East London
Nasar Meer, Former BSA Trustee, Professor of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow
Janice McLaughlin, Newcastle University
Dr Fouzia Azzouz, Honorary Research Associate, University of Bristol
Prof. Dr. IRENA NIKAJ, University Fan S. Noli, Albania
Professor Mark Featherstone, Head of School of Social, Political, and Global Studies, Keele University
Les Back, University of Glasgow
Richard Sennett, Chair, The London Centre for the Humanities
Paraskevi-Viviane Galata, Member of the British Sociological Association and Lecturer in Sociology of work and adult education, Hellenic Open University
Derek Williams, Retired, Former senior lecturer in Sociology, Solent University, Southampton
Fatma Müge Göçek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Kaori Muto, Professor, The Institute of Medical Sciences, The University of Tokyo
Dr Sazana Jayadeva, Surrey Future Fellow, University of Surrey
Kath Woodward, FAcSS, FLSW, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Open University
Nigel de Noronha, University of Manchester
Dr Niamh Moore, University of Edinburgh
Yao-Tai Li, UNSW, Sydney, Australia
Matthew Waites, University of Glasgow
Wendy Olsen, Professor of Socioeconomics, University of Manchester
Sari Hanafi, former President of the International Sociological Association (2018-2023)
Graham Scambler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, UCL
Professor David James, Cardiff University
Moslem Boushehrian, Post Graduate Researcher, University of Surrey
Diana Khor, Hosei University
Ikuko Tomomatsu, Visiting researcher of Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan
Suvi Salmenniemi, University of Turku, Finland
Petra Nordqvist, University of Manchester
John Horne, Past Chair of the British Sociological Association Board of Trustees (2017-2018)
Erin Shannon, Associate Researcher in Sociology at Newcastle University
Richenda Power, The Open University
Sarah Irwin, Professor of Sociology, University of Leeds
Sonya Sharma, Lecturer in Sociology, University College London
Professor Andrew Smith. Sociology, University of Glasgow
Dr Evelyn Mahon, Trinity College, Dublin, Fellow Emerita
Corinne Squire, Chair in Global inequalities, Bristol University
Edwin van Teijlingen, Professor, Bournemouth University, UK and Book Review Editor Sociological Research Online
Stephanie King, Nottingham Trent University
Anne Arber, University of Surrey
Leah de Quattro – University of Manchester (PhD Student)
Zhuofei Lu, The University of Manchester
Fiona McQueen, Edinburgh Napier University
Dr María Villares-Varela FHEA, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Southampton
Dr Luisa Gandolfo, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Aberdeen
Robert Meadows, Editor in Chief Sociology and Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey
Dr Helene Snee, Manchester Metropolitan University
Christina Weis, Senior Lecturer in Global Health, De Montfort University
Louise Ryan, past chair of the BSA board of Trustees, Senior Professor of Sociology, London Metropolitan University
Professor Paul Stewart, Senior Professor of Sociology of Work and Employment at Grenoble Ecole de Management, former editor of Work, Employment and Society and member of the BSA
Professor Ali Rattansi, Honorary Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology, City, University of London
Professor Emmanuelle Tulle, Professor of Sociology, Glasgow Caledonian University
Sadiya Akram, Manchester Metropolitan University
Dr Maureen McBride, University of Glasgow
Hannah Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Sheffield
Dr Victoria Redclift, Associate Professor of Political Sociology, Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Social Research Institute
Prof Sam Whimster, Global Policy Institute London
James Cummings, Lecturer in Sociology, University of York
Caitlin Nunn, Manchester Metropolitan University
Alexandrina Vanke, Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Dr Nadia Haq, Research Fellow, Cardiff University
Professor Umut Erel, The Open University
Ellen Annandale, Professor of Sociology, University of York
Dr James Pattison, Research Fellow, University of Lincoln
R.Sánchez-Rivera, Research Fellow, Gonville & Caius College-University of Cambridge
Katie Higgins, University of Oxford
Gethin Rees, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University
David Scott, Abertay University
Dr Meghan Tinsley, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester
Leah Gilman, University of Sheffield
Barbora Cernusakova, Hallsworth Fellow, Sociology, University of Manchester
Dr Eleanor Kirk, University of Glasgow
Professor Ann Oakley, Social Research Institute, University College London
Geraldine Healy, Professor Emeritus of Employment Relations, Queen Mary University of London
Dr Martin Crook, University of West of England
Dr Joyce Mamode, Birkbeck, University of London
Lena Theodoropoulou, University of Liverpool
Sayo Mitsui, Hosei University, Japan
Professor Kay Peggs, Kingston University London
Carole Murphy, Director, Bakhita Centre for Research on Slavery and Abuse, and Asssociate Professor, Criminology and Sociology, St Mary’s University, London
Steven Roberts, Professor of Education and Social Justice, Monash University
Massilia Ourabah, UGent (Belgium)
Fiona Christie, Senior lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University
Carrie Friese, LSE
Jenny van Hooff, Manchester Metropolitan University
Baptiste Brossard, University of York
Professor Eileen Green, Emeritus Professor Teesside University
Isirabahenda Gonzague, PhD candidate at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Founder and Vice-President of the International Citizens Council from Cluj-Napoca/Romania (2023-up to date) and Vice President of the Center for Peace and Violence Prevention (CPVP).
Andrew Sayer, Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy, Lancaster University
Professor Stephen Vertigans, Dean of School of Applied Social Studies, Robert Gordon University, Scotland
Stefanie Doebler, Lancaster University
Stephen Ackroyd, Professor Emeritus, Lancaster University
Franca Roeschert, PhD candidate, University of Greenwich
Bill Harley, The University of Melbourne
Maryam Aldossari, Senior Lecturer in HRM & Organisation Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London
Louiza Odysseos, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex
Dr. Laura Harris, University of Southampton
Professor Janette Webb MBE FRSE FEI, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
Sophie Buijsen, PhD student in Science Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh
Jeff Hearn, Professor of Sociology, University of Huddersfield, and Professor Emeritus, Hanken School of Economics, Finland, and Senior Professor, Örebro University, Sweden
Diane Richardson, Emerita Professor, Newcastle University
Angela Dale, Retired, University of Manchester
Narzanin Massoumi, University of Exeter
Professor Brian Heaphy, The University of Manchester
Edmund Coleman-Fountain, University of York
Malcolm MacLean, Academic Director (Interim), Doctoral College, University of Wales Trinity St David; Associate Professor (Extraordinary), Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Prof Scott Fleming Bishop Grosseteste University
Madoka Nagado, The University of the Ryukyus
Dr Benjamin Bowman, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University
Martin Greenwood, University of Manchester
Noirin Mac Namara, Postdoctoral Researcher, Maynooth University
Dr. Maria Berghs, Associate Professor Global Health, De Montfort University
Paul Watt, Visiting Professor, London School of Economics
Dr Milena Kremakova, member of the British Sociological Association and Editor at the Sociological Review Magazine
Sarah Neal, University of Sheffield
Lucy Mablin, Senior Lecturer Sociology, Sheffield University
Dr Isabel Crowhurst, University of Essex
Wendy Stacey-Alidina, University of Wales
Tim Butcher, Editor-in-Chief of Sociological Research Online (2023-2025) and Associate Professor of Organisation Studies, University of Tasmania, Australia
Ashley Collar, PhD Student, Sociology at University of Manchester
JulieWalsh, Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield
Carys Hughes, University of East London
Eileen Barker, Professor Em. Sociology, London School of Economics
Dr Jane McCarthy, The Open University
Dr Sarah Kunz, University of Essex
Prof Gayle Letherby, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Plymouth, Greenwich and Bath
Alan Petersen, Professor of Sociology, Monash University
John MacArtney, Associate Professor, University of Warwick
Dr Nayia Kamenou, University of Cyprus
John MacArtney, Associate Professor, University of Warwick
Jana Kriechbaum, PhD Researcher, City, University of London
Sarah Hoare, University of Cambridge
Alan Warde, University of Manchester
Anna Smolentseva, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
Hugo Gorringe, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Edinburgh
Kuba Jablonowski, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Bristol
Rosa Targett, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Bristol
Rebecca Coleman, Professor, University of Bristol
Junko Yamashita, Senior lecturer, University of Bristol
Kate Weiner, University of Sheffield
Julia O’Connell Davidson, Professor of Social Research, University of Bristol
Alessia Dalceggio, PhD student, School of Social Sciences and Professions, London Metropolitan University
Gurminder K Bhambra FBA FAcSS is President of the British Sociological Association and Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex.
Academics call on UK university to divest from Israel
13 December 2023 18:20 GMT
A group of 24 academic staff in the department of sociology at the University of Manchester have called on the University to end its joint programmes with Israeli universities and divest from companies involved in Israel’s defence sector.
“We are all witness to Israel’s ongoing mass killing of Palestinians, assisted and armed by the UK government,” the staff wrote.
“The bombardment of Gaza is the latest, horrific phase of 75 years of Israel’s expulsion, occupation, dispossession, brutalisation, humiliation, incarceration without trial including of children, torture, maiming, and killing of Palestinians.”
The authors called on the University of Manchester to end its joint research fund with Tel Aviv University, citing the work it does on research and development in weapons and surveillance technologies, and in military strategy and operational theory.
They also called for the end of an exchange agreement with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem because it hosts Israel’s army intelligence training programme, Havatzalo, and conducts surveillance of Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem.
In addition, the staff called for the school to dissolve its partnerships with the Graphene Engineering and Innovation Centre, GKN Aerospace and Haydale, which have ties to Israel’s defence sector.
The University of Manchester’s relationship with donors also came under scrutiny. The authors called for the school to divest from HSBC, Siemens and “all other companies who invest in Israeli weapons, military technologies, and the means of Israeli apartheid”.
University of Manchester academics urge end to Israel ties
7:01 PM
The New Arab Staff
Twenty-four faculty members from the University of Manchester’s sociology department have urged the university to cut its ties with Israeli academic institutions and divest from firms linked to Israel’s defense industry.
In their statement, the staff highlighted, “We are all witness to Israel’s ongoing mass killing of Palestinians, assisted and armed by the UK government. The bombardment of Gaza is the latest, horrific phase of 75 years of Israel’s expulsion, occupation, dispossession, brutalisation, humiliation, incarceration without trial including of children, torture, maiming, and killing of Palestinians.”
They specifically requested the termination of the University of Manchester’s joint research fund with Tel Aviv University, pointing to its involvement in weapons, surveillance technology, military strategy, and operational theory research.
The group also advocated ending an exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, citing its hosting of Israel’s army intelligence training program, Havatzalo, and its surveillance activities in occupied East Jerusalem.
The academics also called for the university to cut ties with the Graphene Engineering and Innovation Centre, GKN Aerospace, and Haydale, all of which are connected to Israel’s defense sector.
They also scrutinised the University of Manchester’s relationships with various donors, urging the institution to divest from HSBC, Siemens, and “all other companies who invest in Israeli weapons, military technologies, and the means of Israeli apartheid”.
Alarm over Israel’s detention of 70 medics at hospital
AUTHOR администратор (administrator)
PUBLISHED BY 14.12.2023
Twenty-four faculty members from the University of Manchester’s sociology department have urged the university to cut its ties with Israeli academic institutions and divest from firms linked to Israel’s defense industry.
In their statement, the staff highlighted, “We are all witness to Israel’s ongoing mass killing of Palestinians, assisted and armed by the UK government. The bombardment of Gaza is the latest, horrific phase of 75 years of Israel’s expulsion, occupation, dispossession, brutalisation, humiliation, incarceration without trial including of children, torture, maiming, and killing of Palestinians.”
They specifically requested the termination of the University of Manchester’s joint research fund with Tel Aviv University, pointing to its involvement in weapons, surveillance technology, military strategy, and operational theory research.
The group also advocated ending an exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, citing its hosting of Israel’s army intelligence training program, Havatzalo, and its surveillance activities in occupied East Jerusalem.
The academics also called for the university to cut ties with the Graphene Engineering and Innovation Centre, GKN Aerospace, and Haydale, all of which are connected to Israel’s defense sector.
They also scrutinised the University of Manchester’s relationships with various donors, urging the institution to divest from HSBC, Siemens, and “all other companies who invest in Israeli weapons, military technologies, and the means of Israeli apartheid”.
Following the Congressional testimony of three college professors, a huge debate about antisemitism on campus erupted. Dr. Roza El-Eini, a Fellow at the British Royal Historical Society, published an interesting article called “American Universities and the Seeds of Evil.” She lays the blame for the shocking displays of antisemitism on the campus-based crusade against Israel. Academics have taught that Israel is an “apartheid state,” that it was “racist” and “committing genocide” against the Palestinians, and compared Gaza to a “concentration camp.” Israeli Apartheid Week, held on many campuses, was replete with visuals pushing these themes. BDS, another campus invention, has migrated to other sectors of society, including trade unions and the cultural world.
El-Eini noted that many of the professors who teach Middle Eastern Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are from the Middle East and “woefully unqualified.” In the guise of scholarly work, they invent or recycle antisemitic tropes. One of the most egregious is Jasbir K. Puar, from Rutgers University. Her book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, spread a blood libel that the IDF harvests Palestinian organs. A course offered by the Near East Studies department at Princeton University assigned the book to its reading list.
El-Eini praised IAM for “holding up a mirror to academia’s unscrupulous BDS advocacy and anti-Israel activism” since 2004. As readers of the IAM reports know, a sizable group of Israeli academics have contributed to the delegitimization of Israel most viciously.
Here are some names that have recurred in the IAM postings:
Oren Yiftachel was a pioneer of the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa. He started in the early 2000s, as detailed in the Guardian newspaper in 2002.
Neve Gordon, one of the most vociferous anti-Israeli advocates, pushed the Gaza ghetto analogy in an early article. He went on to criticize Israel for a long line of alleged offenses against the Palestinians and called for the boycott of Israel on the pages of the Los Angeles Times in 2009.
Gadi Algazi pushed the analogy of the “Gaza ghetto” while complaining about Israel’s policy of assassinating Hamas leaders.
Ilan Pappe, a former professor at the University of Haifa, was one of the first to demand boycotting of several Israeli universities.
Rachel Giora and Anat Matar contributed to the BDS movement by starting the Boycott from Within group in 2009.
Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay adopted the Nakba terminology, blaming Israel for the mistakes the Palestinians made when attacking Israel in the war of 1948.
Yehouda Shenhav promoted the “Arab Jews” theory that the Palestinians and the Mizrahim are victims of the Ashkenazim.
Ariella Azoulay used a fake image of Palestinians behind a fence chased by Israeli soldiers as if they were in Auschwitz.
Amos Goldberg and Raz Segal pushed for the Nakba-Holocaust equivalence.
Shlomo Sand argues that the Jewish People were invented by the Zionist movement and had no connection to the Biblical Land of Israel. In his view, they were Khazars, a Turkic tribe who converted to Judaism in the 8th century. Sand’s theory became a staple of Iranian antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Moshe Zimmermann and Moshe Zuckermann wrote in their book that the establishment of the state of Israel “took place at the same time as the collective disaster of the Palestinian people… the Palestinians are indeed, to a considerable extent, victims of Zionism.” Both professors have implied that the Holocaust and Nakba are equal in some ways, supporting the increasingly popular theory that Israel has perpetuated genocide against the Palestinians.
Dalit Baum founded the group “Who Profits from the Occupation,” calling on people to boycott Israeli settlements.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan denied that there were calls for violence against Jews in the Palestinian education system. Numerous studies about the violent content of Palestinian textbooks, especially in the Gaza Strip, contradict this argument.
Yael Barda argued that Israel’s permit system, which allows Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to work in Israel, has nothing to do with security. In her opinion, it is a tool of control and segregation. Arguably, Barda’s theory fits well with the depiction of Israel as a colonial-apartheid state.
Daniel Bar-Tal studied Israelis’ siege mentality. In Israeli school books, according to Bar-Tal, Arabs are often stereotyped negatively and portrayed as “uneducated people and enemies.”
Oren Ben-Dor wrote “The Boycott Should Continue,” The Independent, 2005.
Baruch Kimmerling wrote in 2005 “I will be the first to admit that Israeli academic institutions are part and parcel of the oppressive Israeli state that has, among its other acts of foolishness and villainy, committed grave crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Tanya Reinhart published an article in 2002 seeking to convince Israeli academics “opposing Israel’s oppressive and brutal policies toward the Palestinian people” to join Professors Hilary and Steven Rose in their effort to promote a boycott against the Israeli academic community and its institutions.
It is beyond the scope of this post to provide a full record of these Israeli scholars. Still, even this abbreviated list speaks to their significance in delegitimizing Israel on campus and beyond. Conceptualizing Israel as an apartheid state spurred the popular Israel Apartheid Week on campuses; the not-so-veiled comparisons between the treatment of Palestinians and Jews in the Holocaust nourished the argument that Israel is committing “genocide.” The initial demand to impose a boycott on Israel all came from the academy in Israel.
It is hard to exaggerate the critical role of this cadre of activists. In a world of identity politics, antisemitic and anti-Zionist Israelis are considered the gold standard among Israel delegitimizers. So much so that many were offered positions in reputable universities in the West, and their articles and books appeared in numerous outlets that pushed the anti-Israel campaign.
As El-Eini rightly pointed out, rehabilitating Israel’s blackened image has to start on campus. The ideologically driven pseudo-science peddled by the activist cohorts needs to be recognized for what it is: anti-Israel propaganda supported by taxpayers.
When three university presidents cannot condemn antisemitic calls for genocide, the depravity of academia is proved
ROZA I.M. EL-EINI
Dr. Roza I.M. El-Eini, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, specializes in the study of British Mandatory Palestine.
(December 13, 2023 / JNS)
The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between Israel and the PLO set a dangerous precedent because it established terror-diplomacy as the PLO’s modus operandi. Seeing their bombings, stabbings and violence against Israelis rewarded, the PLO readily continued on this path, which culminated in the second intifada of 2000–2005. In tandem with this terrorist campaign, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel began. Based on the anti-apartheid movement, it spread its antisemitic mantras to universities around the world.
Even before this, academics had been declaring that “Zionism is racism” and Israel was an “apartheid state” that was “ethnically cleansing the Palestinians” and “committing genocide.” Holocaust imagery was evoked through the libelous accusation that the Gaza Strip was a “concentration camp.” Well-organized and funded student unions joined in, advocating for an especially aggressive form of BDS. As a result, Jewish faculty and students were left increasingly isolated and distressed. Universities complacently and in many cases benevolently permitted “Israeli Apartheid Week” to become a fixture on campus, so that Jewish students and faculty were annually confronted with raw antisemitism.
University faculties became clogged up with academics—many from the Middle East and woefully underqualified—who peddled and published toxic antisemitic tropes. This has been well-documented by Israel Academia Monitor, which since 2004 has been holding up a mirror to academia’s unscrupulous BDS advocacy and anti-Israel activism. Some of the world’s leading institutions of higher education and academic publishers have become complicit in the dissemination of anti-Israel propaganda, indoctrinating students and legitimizing antisemitism.
Princeton University, once the home of Bernard Lewis, one of the greatest scholars of the Middle East, exemplified this when it authorized a Near Eastern Studies course for autumn 2023 with the turgid title of “The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South.” The syllabus included Rutgers University women’s and gender studies professor Jasbir K. Puar’s book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, an anti-Israel screed published in 2017 by no less than Duke University Press. In the book, Puar parroted blood libels against Israel, claiming that the IDF is “harvesting Palestinian organs.” Where to begin? Perhaps by restricting the use of the notably abused terms “university,” “professor,” “academic,” “university publisher” and “academic publication.”
Almost immediately after the horrific news broke of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, thousands upon thousands of faculty and students were unleashed onto university campuses and the streets of major cities in suspiciously well-organized antisemitic mob events, chanting pedantically rhyming hate slogans. The heaving throngs of the geographically ignorant hollered, “From the river to the sea!” a genocidal call for the elimination of Israel.
It soon transpired that many did not know of the whereabouts of all of this water. Perhaps they conflated it with the issue of global warming, thus pulling in another ignoramus, juvenile climate hysteric Greta Thunberg, complete with her febrile link to academia via her honorary doctorate of theology from Helsinki University.
Much more sinister, however, is Hamas’s infiltration of America and Europe both on and off campus. Lorenzo Vidino, of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, has mapped out and quantified this phenomenon in his study “The Hamas Network in America,” revealing that the genocidal antisemitic organization has been operating in America for over 30 years.
Making their well-funded way from training camps in Latin America—which also harbors Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, among others—Hamas terrorists cross the perfidiously open U.S. border and burrow into the hearts and minds of Americans while being zealously embraced by academia.
As a result, virulently antisemitic jihadists have concluded an alliance with progressives to further their joint assault on the Jews and Western civilization. Universities are at the forefront of this in their role as the Trojan Horse of terrorism, using the freedoms they enjoy even as they are systemically destroying them root and branch.
And who are “they”? “They” are, for example, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who glibly sneered and smirked their way through a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. The moment is now indelible: The presidents of three of the world’s most prestigious universities testified before a House committee that to call for the genocide of the Jewish people is only a violation of their universities’ “code of conduct” in certain “contexts.” Their redolent hypocrisy and dereliction of duty was palpable.
The seeds of evil were long ago sown on university grounds and the writer Douglas Murray is correct when he says that “universities have let evil grow on campus.” The depravity of the three university presidents in question has proved it.
Dr. Jason Thomas, the director of Frontier Assessments, a group that analyzes risks and develops solutions, published an article in the Australian press. In “Islamist Terrorists Have Won War for Hearts and Minds,” Thomas argues that Hamas’s October 7 attack shows that the West did not win the global war on terror and that Hamas presented “successful psychological operations” aimed at Western audiences.
The author explained that the attack and the Gaza war play well to “the Islamist global insurgency,“ a plan to harness the power of hundreds of thousands of Western-hating, males who entered Europe during the war in Syria. “All the Islamist insurgency had to do was wait patiently for the right moment, using the sanctuaries secured in generous Western countries to drive its campaign into the heart of all facets of our Judaeo-Christian society.” The Islamist insurgency’s strategy also involves “deploying our own principles against us.”
Thomas wrote that the global Islamist insurgency aims to “break the US-led Western resolve by targeting our centers of gravity, belief in ourselves, driving splinters of hot dissent among Western populations who are now less sure of themselves and more divided… The Iranian-funded and coordinated attack on Israel and its multifaceted, hybrid nature is fourth-generational guerrilla warfare deployed against the West. This is the world we must now be prepared to face… Right now, the West’s enemies are coordinating a network of state and non-state actors, criminals, terrorists and international cartels while inspiring sympathizers at home to launch a perpetual multipolar conflict.”
All these, while spreading the message that the Islamist Jihadists, including Hamas in Gaza, are interested in peaceful coexistence.
As IAM reported since 2004, more than a handful of Israeli academics adopted the theme that Israel alone is to blame for the failure of peace with the Palestinians.
Rather than going through a heart-searching revision of their views, the October 7 massacre saw them doubling down on their defunct theory. Ironically, they have been busier than ever, giving interviews and writing articles to explain why they are right.
IAM gathered samples of some of their writings, focusing on a small group of activist academics.
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan recently discussed in Haaretz her Facebook post for which she was attacked. She wrote that in Gaza, “referring to the context from which the murderers emerged – a brutal siege of almost three decades. To paraphrase words written by Jean-Paul Sartre: After so many years in which their necks were suffocated under your boot, and they were given a chance to raise their heads, what kind of a look did you think you would find? We saw this look on October 7. The vengeful and hateful gaze of the Nakba refugees, their children and grandchildren, young people whose lives range between oppression and humiliation, scarcity and repeated bombings that wiped out entire families, institutions and infrastructure… The occupation corrupts both the conqueror and the conquered. The occupier grows rotten fruits in the image of the terrorists of the hills whose representatives sit in the Israeli government today and encourage their ‘boys’ to perpetrate pogroms in the West Bank and even in Jerusalem without interference, and the occupied grows rotten fruit in the image of Hamas boys. Both see their neighbors as enemies in heart and soul and do not distinguish between a soldier and a civilian, between a man and a woman, between an old man and a young man or a baby.” Peled Elhanan added, “Anyone who dares to acknowledge the suffering of the residents of Gaza or the West Bank is denounced as a supporter of terrorism and could be harmed.”
Another fellow academic activist, Shlomo Sand, published an article discussing “The Global Left.” He touched upon the “radical right wing that was growing more extreme” while “the long historical bond between Jews and the liberal or social left loosened… Then came the horrors of 7 October. Hamas’ murderous attack shook Jews around the world. It was especially hard for Jews from the global left. On the one hand, you could no longer support the traditional argument, dating from Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, that defends the violence of the oppressed, and on the other hand it was hard to ignore the siege that Gaza’s residents have been living under, while at least half of them are descendants of refugees from the 1948 war.” Sand argues that the IDF’s “response against all Gaza residents has made it even harder to defend Israel, and to continue to only see in Israel a victim of immediate circumstance.” For Sand, “the rise of Judeophobia among Islamists, seen against the rise of Islamophobia among right-wingers and centrists in Europe, has embarrassed left-wing Jews. They have been torn between their universal values and this intensifying mutual hatred.”
Another activist, Prof. Ariella Aisha Azoulay, published an article in the Boston Review, titled “Seeing Genocide,” where she declares, “Israel’s weaponization of images since October 7 obfuscates its genocidal campaign against Palestinians.” She argues that to convince the world that the violence waged upon Gaza is not genocidal, governments and institutions in the West have enacted an ideological campaign of terror, weaponizing accusations of anti-Semitism against those who reject these claims and the conflation of Jews and Israelis.” She postulates, “My point of departure is that genocide can be recognized when a certain group is turned into a ‘problem’ to which violent ‘solutions’ are offered in the form of expulsion, concentration, forced vulnerability, incarceration, murder, destruction, and extermination. A genocidal regime is one that produces, cultivates, trades, uses, and legitimizes these forms of violence while at the same time socializing its citizens to see them as necessary for their protection and well-being. Over the last few weeks, we have been watching Palestinians in Gaza undergo a genocide. Meanwhile, the Israeli propaganda machine has launched its latest campaign to silence those who refuse to accept its narratives.” She terms it a “genocide targeting Palestinians.”
Likewise, Prof. Ilan Pappe wrote an article for Palestine Chronicle, for Pappe, “genocide taking place.” Pappe can “draw some hope, in these dark times, from the huge and growing solidarity movement all over the world. This movement doesn’t cave in to scare tactics employed by governments and politicians, and is advocating for an immediate ceasefire…. The political elites of the Global North and some of the Global South will continue to provide international immunity for Israel’s criminal policies on the ground. Yet their civil societies will continue by and large to stand behind the Palestinian liberation movement. On the ground, the military imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – despite the surprise attack – will remain the same, and quite a few Arab states will eventually continue the normalization process. For Pappe, “the framing of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial project is a consensual issue among all the leading scholars on the Middle East, and it is rejected as an accurate paradigm only among mainstream Israeli academia.” The Global North, according to Pappe, has to take a stand: “Are they with the liberation movement or against it? There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider. The attempt to frame the stance I am calling for as racist or antisemitic will not hold water.” Pappe concludes, “This is indeed the time for people with moral courage, as the struggle for freedom and liberation will be a long one and needs such allies to support it.”
Another activist academic, Prof. Neve Gordon, recently published an article discussing Human Shields. Gordon postulates that Israel’s “claim that Hamas uses human shields should be understood as a pre-emptive legal defense against accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of human shields: ‘The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favor or impede military operations.’ In other words, it’s legal to bomb a site protected by human shields.” For Gordon, Israel accuses Hamas while Israel kills civilians or destroys hospitals because Hamas has used them as shields. “Thirty thousand tons of bombs have so far been dropped on Gaza, and more than two hundred mosques, two hundred schools and over forty hospitals and other medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed. More than five thousand children and around ten thousand adults have been killed. Most of them were civilians.” For Gordon, these are attempts by the Israelis to “justify their carpet bombing and blame Palestinians for bringing disaster on themselves.”
As the above quotes make clear, the anti-Israel Israeli academics bought into what Dr. Thomas described as the propaganda action for the Islamist global insurgency.
Al-Qa’ida leader Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US, would have been proud because Islamist terrorism now is mainstreamed into Western society, including right here in Australia.
This phenomenon has been successful because it is coinciding with the denigration of everything that made the West strong since the Enlightenment. The fact is the October 7 attack on Israel was one of the most successful psychological operations against the West at the height of its weakness.
I witnessed Islamic State in Syria and northern Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the New People’s Army in The Philippines and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, as well as other rebel movements such as the Mai-Mai in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One thing they all have in common is that their mission reaches beyond a physical dimension.
They have a cognitive network that is borderless. And when combined with a well-supplied sanctuary supported by a big brother, then they are hard to defeat. This is made even harder when they are allowed to swim in what Mao Zedong called the warm waters of the population.
In Australia and across the West, we have large pools of disgruntled, impressionable, narcissistic communities nurtured on identity politics, envy and hate, a generation reared on fear except the fear of losing the soul of the West. This is being legitimatised by leading global organisations such as the UN.
I recall when in northern Iraq describing to a UN security meeting in Erbil that ISIS was coming across from the east into Sinjar and they needed to be prepared. The response was “we don’t call them ISIS”. I then was proudly informed that UN secretary-general Ban Kimoon had sent a strongly worded letter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi. The Kurds couldn’t believe it.
The fact is, the war on Islamist terrorism never ended with the demise of ISIS.
Instead, the Islamist global insurgency manoeuvred into the next phase of its plan. A climate was created for hundreds of thousands of young, fit, Western-hating, fighting-aged males to cross freely into Europe and other Western countries during the civil war in Syria. All the insurgency had to do was wait patiently for the right moment, using the sanctuaries secured in generous Western countries to drive its campaign into the heart of all facets of our Judaeo- Christian society.
The plan has been evolutionary, with moments of revolution- ary fever, as we are now witnessing.
In the history of guerrilla warfare, insurgents are rarely defeated when they have sanctuary. Now that sanctuary is here.
Saudi-born Shaykh Youssef al- Ayyiri, who was killed in mid-2003, was one of al-Qa’ida’s key strategists and best communicators.
He said: “The entire world has become a battlefield and not in theory.” It is a fight beyond time and geography. Don’t be foolish to believe this is only about the Palestinian territories and Israel.
Terrorism is the tactic used by the insurgent to push forth their strategy. Its initial impact is physical, yet its lasting influence is psychological. The strategy is coopting as many centres of power and influence as possible within civil society. This is how I organised the Dozo groups on the border of Ivory Coast and Mali against al-Qa’ida affiliates.
The Islamist insurgency’s strategy also involves deploying our own principles against us. The success of this strategy is now evident.
The sight of many Western women celebrating or offering excuses for a movement that rapes, mutilates and kills women is an example.
Before our mind’s eye, the people and institutions we looked to for guidance and leadership turned the terrorists into the victims and the victims into the terrorists.
The strategy has been so successful that not even many of our politicians can make a distinction between the evil acts of the terrorists and the desperate plight of the people in the Palestinian territories.
Right now the West’s enemies are co-ordinating a network of state and non-state actors, criminals, terrorists and international cartels while inspiring sympathisers at home to launch a perpetual multipolar conflict in which Australia is also a target.
Their cunning will be in not triggering a world war. The aim is to break the US-led Western resolve by targeting our centres of gravity, belief in ourselves, driving splinters of hot dissent among Western populations who are now less sure of themselves and more divided – populations losing faith in everything that has made us strong since the Enlightenment.
The Iranian-funded and co-ordinated attack on Israel and its multifaceted, hybrid nature is fourth-generational guerrilla warfare deployed against the West.
This is the world we must now be prepared to face.
Jason Thomas is the director of Frontier Assessments.
Ideas 29 November 2023Left-wing Jews are torn between their values and the intensifying conflictThe IDF’s response against all Gazans has made it harder to only see in Israel a victim of immediate circumstance.
By Shlomo Sand
As is well known, in the long history of the left there have always been many Jews. Although in both of the great revolutions, the English and the French, that opened the modern age there were no significant figures of Jewish background. The moment that the left started to form in 19th-century Germany, people such as Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle, and later on in eastern Europe Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and many other Jewish revolutionaries, became an inseparable part of the formation and spread of socialism in the West.
Many of those figures did not ask questions about their Jewish heritage, but others were preoccupied with the issue of Jewish identity, and tried to mediate in different ways between being part of the political left and having a unique background. They ranged from Moses Hess who, in his early career, was close to Marx through Bernard Lazare (the French anarchist who sparked the Dreyfus affair), to Harold Laski, the economist and political theorist who chaired the British Labour Party, or even the historian Isaac Deutscher, author of Message of the Non-Jewish Jew.
That modern anti-Semitism had already blossomed in the 19th century, including among different left-wing currents, did not deter Jews from identifying with the universal values of socialism. In the 20th century the alliance between Jews and the myth of social and political equality was strengthened and turned into an almost unquestionable fact.
Within the international Zionist movement, too, the left grew and spread until, with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the left became the hegemon. In fact, it was the left that built and established Zionist society, at least until the 1970s. It is noteworthy that both the socialist and communist movement, led by Josef Stalin, supported the founding of the Jewish state.
Since the end of the 19th century, the relationship between Jews and the traditional right (Catholic, Protestant, or orthodox), or extreme secular right was always unstable and tense. The immigration of Jews from the Russian empire to the West had raised the level of hate towards Jewish immigrants even higher, and extreme nationalism turned the Jew into the chosen enemy of the nation. The peak of that hate was the Nazi genocide, but even after that, radical right-wing parties remained suspicious of any Jewish population in Europe.
Two developments slowly changed attitudes towards Jews, real or imaginary. First, Israel’s decisive victory over Arab states in the 1967 Six Day War turned the country into a symbol of aggressive national force, which stood out as unique against the background of Western defeats through decolonisation. Second, the significant immigration of Muslim workers to Europe again increased the xenophobia there under the surface, and Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians living under occupation increasingly became a political model worthy of replication. The image of the strong, fighting Jew became popular in the eyes of conservatives and, at a later stage, in the eyes of a radical right wing that was growing more extreme.
At the same time, the long historical bond between Jews and the liberal or social left loosened. In the 1960s dreams of the revolution sparkled among the Jewish youth, but with the defeat of the radical left in the 1970s, some joined growing waves of conservatism. In fact, the movement of many Jewish intellectuals to the right was an accompanying factor in the retreat of the global left.
Then came the horrors of 7 October. Hamas’ murderous attack shook Jews around the world. It was especially hard for Jews from the global left. On the one hand, you could no longer support the traditional argument, dating from Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon, that defends the violence of the oppressed, and on the other hand it was hard to ignore the siege that Gaza’s residents have been living under, while at least half of them are descendants of refugees from the 1948 war.
The Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) response against all Gaza residents has made it even harder to defend Israel, and to continue to only see in Israel a victim of immediate circumstance. In addition, the rise of Judeophobia among Islamists, seen against the rise of Islamophobia among right-wingers and centrists in Europe, has embarrassed left-wing Jews. They have been torn between their universal values and this intensifying mutual hatred.
What is left for us is to turn to a wise Jew who expressed his view about the ongoing conflict when it had only begun. On 25 November 1929, after the terrible massacre of Hebron – when Arabs murdered 69 Jews following rumours that Jews were planning to seize the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – Albert Einstein wrote to Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader: “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs, then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering and deserve all that will come to us.”
This article is part of the series What It Means to Be Jewish Now.
Shlomo Sand Shlomo Sand is an Israeli emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University
מדיניות הריגול, ההלשנה והשיסוי שמבקש להנהיג שר החינוך קיש במוסדות להשכלה גבוהה מצאה חייל נאמן בדמותו של נשיא מכללת דוד ילין יוסף פרוסט
המכללה האקדמית לחינוך ע”ש דוד ילין.
“הפתעה! גם להם נמאס לפעמים” כתבתי בפייסבוק, בעודי משוחחת עם בת דודי מבארי, שהיתה כלואה עם בעלה בממ”ד 28 שעות רצופות. כתבתי זאת לנוכח ה”הפתעה” שהפגינה ממשלת ישראל, עם היוודע דבר התקיפה של יישובי הדרום על ידי החמאס וגרורותיו. הפוסט הביע תדהמה על ההפתעה. הוא לא הביע הצדקה למעשי הרצח, הביזה וההתעללות שעליהם נודע לנו מאוחר יותר, אולם אי-הבנת הנקרא, שמן הסתם הייתה מכוונת, שימשה את שופרות השלטון להטיף לי מוסר, ולצאת במתקפה אישית. ה”עיתונאי” עמית סגל שהתחנך על ברכיו של מחבל מורשע, פרסם כתבת נאצה בנושא כחודשיים לאחר פרסום הפוסט. זאת כמובן מבלי לבקש כל תגובה או התייחסות מצדי.
בהנחה שלא מדובר בהסתה מכוונת נגדי אלא באי הבנת הנקרא יש לקרוא את הפוסט כמתייחס להקשר שממנו צמחו הרוצחים – מצור אכזרי של כמעט שלושה עשורים.
בפראפרזה על דברים שכתב ז’אן פול סארטר: אחרי שנים כה רבות שבהן צווארם היה חנוק תחת עקב מגפכם, וניתנה להם הזדמנות להרים את הראש, איזה מבט חשבתם שתמצאו שם?
את המבט הזה ראינו ב-7 באוקטובר. מבטם הנוקם ומלא השנאה של פליטי הנכבה, ילדיהם ונכדיהם, צעירים שחייהם נעים בין דיכוי והשפלה, מחסור והפצצות חוזרות ונשנות המחסלות משפחות שלמות, מוסדות ותשתיות. בחורים שהם עיוות של מה שהוא אנושי כיוון שחייהם הם עיוות של כל מה שהוא חיים אנושיים.
הכיבוש משחית גם את הכובש וגם את הנכבש. הכובש מגדל פירות באושים בדמותם של מחבלי הגבעות שנציגיהם יושבים היום בממשלת ישראל, ומעודדים את “נעריהם” לחולל פוגרומים בגדה המערבית ואף בירושלים באין מפריע, והנכבש מגדל פירות באושים בדמות נערי החמאס. אלה ואלה רואים בשכניהם אויבים בלב ובנפש ואינם מבחינים בין חייל לאזרח, בין גבר לאישה, בין זקן לצעיר או לתינוק.
אולם לומר שיש הקשר למתקפה ולטבח, ושלא היה זה פוגרום אנטישמי שנולד יש מאין, הוא פשע נורא יותר מרצח בארץ הזאת שכבר מזמן התהפכו בה הערכים שהכרנו. המלים הפכו למסוכנות וכדורי המוות ללגיטימיים. אנשי המלים נרדפים שעה שרוצחים נהנים מחיסיון. אדם ששרף למוות משפחה שלמה נחשב לצדיק ואילו מי שמעז להכיר בסבלם של תושבי עזה או הגדה, מוקע כתומך טרור ודמו מותר.
מדיניות הריגול, ההלשנה והשיסוי שמבקש להנהיג שר החינוך קיש במוסדות להשכלה גבוהה מצאה חייל נאמן בדמותו של נשיא מכללת דוד ילין יוסף פרוסט, שמיהר ליישמה. מדיניות זו הולידה את הנזיפה שזכיתי בה על היותי “תומכת טרור” ונזיפה זו הזינה את כתבת הנאצה של סגל. לפיכך, לפני יומיים הודעתי למכללת דוד ילין על החלטתי להתפטר. במכתבי נאמר, “בכל שנותיי כמרצה לחינוך לשוני לימדתי שהדיאלוג הפתוח, הביקורתי, הוא לב לבה של ההוראה ולב לבו של הלימוד. על כן, באווירת ציד המכשפות ברוחו של ארגון הרדיפה ‘אם תרצו’ לא אוכל להמשיך ללמד במכללה”.
מכונת הרעל שנועדה לשכנע אותנו ש”אלה החיים” ולהסיט את תשומת הלב הציבורית ממחדלי הממשלה, מחלוקת הנשק הלא-אחראית שאת תוצאותיה חווינו לפני מספר ימים, ומן המשבר שפוקד את ישראל בכל תחום, מפנה את חיציה אל מורים ומחנכים כמוני וכמו מאיר ברוכין המתעקשים לראות בשכנינו בני אדם. כדאי להזכיר למלעיזים שלא אני ולא אף אחד מן המרצים והסטודנטים הנרדפים, לא פיטם את החמאס במאות מיליוני דולרים, לא הפקיר את יישובי הדרום, לא הסיג את הצבא מן הגבול, לא פירק את יחידות הכוננות מנשקן ולא מנע את כניסתם של 500 חיילים לקיבוץ בארי. כדאי גם לזכור שנקמת ממשלת ישראל על שנתפסה בקלונה אינה מסתכמת ברדיפת המוקיעים בשער, אלא מתבטאת בעיקר בהרג הבלתי פוסק של חפים מפשע שהיא מבצעת מאז ועד היום בעזה.
ובמיוחד כדאי לזכור שגם אם נהרוג עשרות אלפים, אם נחריב את עזה ונחזירה לתקופת האבן, לא נחדל לחיות בין רצח מצד זה לרצח מצד זה, עד עולם. לא זה הגורל שמגיע לנו.
הכותבת היא פרופסור לחינוך וכלת פרס סחרוב לזכויות האדם ולחופש המחשבה מטעם הפרלמנט האירופי.
I. The pair of images above, Gaza “before and after,” has circulated in Israel as an image of victory over Hamas. If it were perceived by its perpetrators as evidence of a crime, it would have been censored so that it could not be used as proof of the spaciocide waged upon Gaza. Rather, it has been disseminated with pride, announcing that Palestinians can no longer walk along Al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, and more broadly cannot return to the Northern part of Gaza, which became a territory free of Palestinians.
“Ceasefire now,” “lift the siege,” and “stop the killing” are emergency calls to put an immediate end to Israel’s bombardment and destruction in Gaza. They are voiced by millions of people all over the world, in the streets and on social media. And yet, they are being rejected by liberal governments of the West as well as by institutional leaders from academia to the medical organizations. These groups turn these bare minimum demands—stop the killing—into controversial statements. Indeed, in an effort to convince the world that the violence waged upon Gaza is not genocidal, governments and institutions in the West have enacted an ideological campaign of terror, weaponizing accusations of anti-Semitism against those who reject these claims and the conflation of Jews and Israelis.
Images do not have an innate truth; they live in community with or against those who are involved in them.
There is no such a thing as an image of genocide; but images in plural, made over time, can be used to refute the terms of the conversation that deny the racialization of a group and its transformation into the object of genocidal violence. My point of departure is that genocide can be recognized when a certain group is turned into a “problem” to which violent “solutions” are offered in the form of expulsion, concentration, forced vulnerability, incarceration, murder, destruction, and extermination. A genocidal regime is one that produces, cultivates, trades, uses, and legitimizes these forms of violence while at the same time socializing its citizens to see them as necessary for their protection and well-being. Over the last few weeks, we have been watching Palestinians in Gaza undergo a genocide.
Meanwhile, the Israeli propaganda machine has launched its latest campaign to silence those who refuse to accept its narratives, which run counter to what they see, hear, remember, and think when they follow non-Western media. The Israeli government has used photographs and videos taken on October 7 to manufacture consent for genocidal violence against Gaza and Palestinians more broadly. A forty-seven-minute compilation of images and videos has been privately screened to sympathetic journalists, statesmen, and lobbyists in forty countries both to garner global support for genocidal violence against Palestinians and to reinforce the global intimidation and punishment campaign against whoever opposes or “misunderstands” this putative war against terror, which is mostly a war directed against Arabs and Muslims.
But images do not have an innate truth; they live in community with or against those who are involved in them. Painful as images from October 7 are, the violence inscribed in them can no longer be prevented, but it can be attended to. The eruption of violence against those who live on the other side of the wall is inseparable from the genocidal condition that must be reconstructed in connection to what is left outside the frame of every image taken between the sea and the river. The fact that images of violence targeting Israelis are being weaponized as decisive proof for the legitimacy of Israel’s response is itself a testament to this genocide targeting Palestinians.
This staging of a battle of images, through which Israel seeks to deny, obfuscate, and extend its violence, is not new. It has been a tool of this regime from its start in 1948, when the use of genocidal violence to destroy Palestine was justified through images in which the “triumphant solution” of creating a state for the Jews “won” in the eyes of Euro-American imperial powers. The destruction of Palestine and the attempt to bury it under the state of Israel—thereby undermining recovery, redress, and return for Palestinians—imposed a genocidal condition in the space between the river and the sea. This condition is innate to settler colonial regimes. It is sustained by the colonizers, who seek to perpetuate it at any price to ensure that what they did to Palestinians and what was expropriated from them goes unquestioned. The colonizers and the colonized are positions people occupy, regardless of their individual approaches to this condition of violence. The difference in their positions, as well as in their exposure to violence and the duration of this exposure, is not foreign to the realm of images.
II. The “after” image above differs from many images taken during the last few weeks in Gaza. Other images, most captured on phones by Palestinians as a means of bearing witness and alerting the world to the violence being waged, center persecuted Palestinians, their homes, and institutions. In this image, by contrast, the genocidal condition itself is foregrounded, and yet it is worth underscoring. This is an image of a place from which inhabitants have been removed—either killed, maimed, wounded, and deported—for no reason other than that they are Palestinians.
As of this writing, the soil in Gaza has been violated with more than 25,000 tons of explosives—equivalent to two nuclear bombs—that were dropped from the air and shells that were fired by thousands of soldiers who didn’t refuse orders to destroy entire worlds in Gaza. The soldiers who drove tanks in an imperial procession decimated worlds whose inhabitants were forced to leave if they were not already killed. They are fighting a demonized Hamas, which they compare to the Nazis to justify their actions, while denying that they themselves are enacting genocide against Palestinians. But of course, this before-and-after should not mislead us, since Israeli genocidal violence is also inscribed in the “before” image.
Prior to 1948, Gaza was not an isolated, narrow strip, and its inhabitants enjoyed free movement in the entire region of greater Palestine. With the isolation of Gaza from other part of Palestine in 1948, however, even the open sea was transformed into a border surveilled by the Israeli navy, which restricts the ways inhabitants can access it. Before the current genocidal campaign, more than half of the refugee population of Gaza lived in eight overcrowded refugee camps in Gaza, and the strip’s density allows only two main roads to connect North and South. Destroying Gaza now, Israel’s military forces have erased seventy-five years of memories inscribed in the region—wounds and scars of multiple genocidal “solutions” imposed on its inhabitants. The destruction of this geophysical archive of the Nakba, and the second mass expulsion of those who effectively became its archivists—Palestinians who are familiar with every bit and piece of it—are consistent with genocidal violence, seeking to erase the evidence of its crimes.
There is no such a thing as an image of genocide. But images in plural, made over time, can be used to refute the terms of Israel’s battle of images.
The Israelis who destroyed this world made themselves masters of this crying land with the exclusive right to photograph it. The aim was to ensure no Palestinians would be left to take their own photographs or photographs of their perpetrators. Yet despite Israel’s imperial aim to monopolize the meaning of its actions and eliminate human plurality from the photographic field, we still recognize the crimes these photos evince; we know that, until a few days ago, a world used to be here, before its inhabitants were deemed superfluous for being Palestinian. Though we see the way the tanks trampled the face of the earth, we also see the soil refusing to surrender and forget. We hear the tears, the groans, and the moans.
Despite the erection of different separation walls in the land between the sea and the river—including eighteen years of military rule, borders preventing return, an archipelago of enclaves surrounded by checkpoints, fences, and cement walls—the systematic racist violence and differential rule imposed there by the Israeli regime impacts and organizes the life of all its inhabitants. Only inculcated lies and a militarized state can create the illusion that the group responsible for creating and maintaining this racial regime can be protected from the consequences of its oppressive actions. The level of exposure to violence is obviously different for the racialized groups therein; nonetheless, whatever is done to impact the life of Palestinians also impacts and endangers Israelis. Hamas’s painful attack on October 7 did not transform this condition but rather revealed it.
What followed was an intensified campaign to essentialize the violence of its perpetrators as proof of who Hamas is and, by identification, who all Palestinians are. Thereby, Israelis’ grief was weaponized to continue to deny their positions and actions as colonizers and operators of genocidal technologies. Acknowledging this call is not a justification of the attack or a minimization of the harm, nor is it proof of a lack of empathy for the attack’s victims, as Israelis tend to interpret it. It is rather a refusal to forget that this attack, and the genocide that followed, could have been prevented if this genocidal and suicidal regime ceased to exist. Acknowledging the crimes against Palestinians prior to October 7 and opposing the genocide against them is the required minimum if one aims to imagine a shared future free of genocide in this place. And reconstructing the longer imperial history of this place is necessary for imagining the abolition of its regime and for restoring Palestine to a place rich in human diversity. One must remember that history didn’t start on October 7.
III.
Haifa, November 1948. Image: AP Photo/Jim Pringle
In the wake of World War II, as part of Euro-American imperial powers’ efforts to secure their influence in the Middle East, the imperial technology of partition was employed, and Euro-Zionists were entrusted with Palestine.
The promise of Zionist statehood in Palestine was at the same time another “solution” to Europe’s century-old “Jewish question,” which, at the end of the war when Europe’s racializing apparatuses were not dismantled, had to be “solved” again. Unsure of how to manage the many Jews left uprooted in camps in Europe after the Holocaust—who were still undesired in Europe and unwelcome in the United States—Euro-American imperial powers empowered Zionist leaders aiming for a sovereign state in Palestine and recognized them as the sole representatives of Jews. Their interests coalesced as the West didn’t want to lose this precious colony, situated in the heart of the Jewish Muslim world. As part of their campaign to withhold the right to indigenous sovereignty, Euro-American powers thus turned their own enemies—Palestinians—into the Jews’ enemies. Before then, no historical enmity existed between Jews and Palestinians, and more generally between Jews and Arabs and Muslims; for centuries, being Palestinian and Jew and being Jew and Arab were not mutually exclusive. Jews had lived together with Muslims in the wider region since before the emergence of Islam and were part of the Arab world.
Toward the end of World War II, the United Nations was created as a major instrument to facilitate the imposition of a “new world order.” It sought to legitimate partition and population transfer, giving these the imprimatur of international law and recognition. Barely two years after its creation, the UN announced the partition plan for Palestine in November 1947. With the help of colonial committees such as the Anglo-American Committee, the partitioning of Palestine was crafted and proposed as a “solution” against the will of the majority of the inhabitants of Palestine and the broader region (already divided and under French and British colonial rule), where many non-Zionists Jews lived. This UN resolution gave the greenlight to some Zionists armed groups to use an array of genocidal technologies for its implementation.
The outcome was the destruction of Palestine and Palestinians as a people, and along with them, their ancestral lands, practices, and heritage. The majority of Muslim and Arabs inhabitants of Palestine were expelled from the new nation state built in its place and have not been allowed to return, even to this day and those who live between the sea and the river are constantly forcibly displaced. Undesired in this racializing state, they were transferred to different disconnected sites. This first genocidal campaign against Palestinians was silenced through the UN’s recognition of the formation of the state of Israel as narrative of Western-Zionist triumph and as a national “solution” for the Jewish people. Through this logic, Muslims and Arabs were transformed into potential threats to this touted Jewish sovereignty. Since then, millions of children—myself included—were born Israelis, born as pawns for the orchestrated denial of Palestine’s destruction and as aids to the global campaign to recognize Israeli-Jews as the legitimate inhabitants of Palestine.
Though we see the way the tanks trampled the face of the earth, we also see the soil refusing to surrender and forget.
The outcome of this convergence of interests between the Zionist and Euro-American imperial powers was the destruction of Palestine and its replacement with the state of Israel. Both transpired alongside a narrative of historical enmity which figured the events as part of a conflict of “two sides,” a conflict between two identity groups: “Palestinians,” who were denied recognition as the survivors of a genocidal campaign, and “Israelis,” who were yet to be invented in 1948, out of Zionists, Palestinian Jews, survivors of genocide. If there were at that moment “two sides,” they were the colonizers and the colonized. At the center of the invented colonial identity donned by Israelis is the denial of the genocidal violence that enabled them to replace Palestinians and take over their lands and property. Thus, lying at the heart of Israeli identity is the interiorized notion that the Palestinians are the Jews’ enemies and not those whom Zionists dispossessed. Since the creation of Israel, those imperial states that support Zionist interests in Israel have invested in keeping Israelis the enemies of Palestinians and in blurring the differences between Israelis and Jews writ large.
From the end of November 1947, one place after another was destroyed and turned to rubble to prevent Palestinians who were expelled from returning to their homes. So too, this systemic destruction was sought out to facilitate the fabrication of an Israeli memory from which Palestine could fade away and emerge as the name of a threatening enemy. Alongside the expulsion of the 60,000 Palestinians from Haifa alone, Zionists started to destroy the heart of the city, approximately 220 buildings. What is captured in the photograph above are not signs of war but of a colonial policy—turning Haifa into a Jewish city so that the barely 30,00 Palestinians who were not expelled would no longer recognize themselves in their city, nor would they feel at home in it.
Beyond what we could read from it about Haifa, the photograph is also a generic image of the genocidal condition that, since installed in 1948, has turned towns, cities, and villages where Palestinians live into rubble, concomitantly destroying Palestinians’ livelihood, heritage, rights, histories, dreams and memories. Inscribed by the racial regime erected in this place, this condition provides constant proof that Palestinian life can be taken away at any moment; it also proves that attempts to rebuild Palestinian spaces are always shortcut by genocidal precarity. This condition inscribed here reveals itself in endless images taken throughout the years, in which it is always Palestinians who are being targeted. Under UN leadership, the world clock was set on May 15, 1948, to mark the birth of Israel, while Palestinians’ accounts of the genocide they endured were silenced, distorted, and replaced with other narratives. Institutions of culture and education flourished to promote this newly invented colonizing subject, the Israeli, whose identity is premised on the obliteration of the memory of its own birth.
IV. In several public interviews and in an op-ed in the New York Times, historian Omer Bartov warns that Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza has the potential to become a genocide. He calls to condemn the onslaught “before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after.” Bartov quotes a few published statements of several Israeli military officials and members of the government in which, as he writes, the intent of genocide is explicit. And yet, what is happening on the ground in Gaza, Bartov assesses, is not a genocide: “there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”
When Bartov discusses the actual violence, he somehow puts aside these genocidal intents and rather chooses to believe the rhetoric that the Israeli military employs—in coordination with their lawyers and other specialists in international law—to describe their actions. He repeats their narrative as proof that their actions do not reflect their voiced and written intents:
Israeli military commanders insist that they are trying to limit civilian casualties, and they attribute the large numbers of dead and wounded Palestinians to Hamas tactics of using civilians as human shields and placing their command centers under humanitarian structures like hospitals. . . . And so, while we cannot say that the military is explicitly targeting Palestinian civilians, functionally and rhetorically we may be watching an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide.
What leads Bartov to assert that what he sees doesn’t fit the UN’s 1948 definition of genocide—“the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—is his trust in the way the perpetrators of this genocidal violence justify their actions and shamelessly attribute their consequences to Hamas.
If Bartov were writing an article about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which is what he recognizes is presently happening, I would not argue with him, since ethnic cleansing is a proper term to use here, among and alongside others. However, given the history of the instrumentalization and exceptionalization of the genocide perpetrated against Jews, using one’s authority as historian of genocide and the limited language of the 1948 UN document to judge that this is not a genocide—and doing so based on evidence provided by the perpetrators—participates in the fetishization of the term “genocide” and its reservation for exceptional cases in which the West is not the direct perpetrator—as in, the Rwandan or Bosnian genocides.
Instead of repeating the language of Israeli expressions of genocidal intent, I want to point to these expressions’ endurance and prevalence throughout Israeli history and society. As someone who was born and raised in the Zionist colony in Palestine, I heard such expressions repeated regularly, in oral and written modes, in public and private venues, by statespersons and lay persons. People older than me heard them expressed since 1948; they were socialized to see Palestinians enduring extreme violence again and again, always alongside justifications that obfuscate its genocidal nature—its aim to eliminate them as a group with its own history, desires, grievances, and dreams. The endurance and permanence of these open expressions require us to reconfigure the temporal premises of the term genocide. The temporal dimensions ascribed to the legal definition of genocide enable genocides perpetrated by Western colonial regimes to be dismissed, denied, and legitimized. Such genocides do not constitute a discrete event but unfold over time and share their duration with the lifespan of the regime that commits them.
Destroying Gaza now, Israel’s military forces have erased seventy-five years of memories inscribed in the region—wounds and scars of multiple genocidal “solutions” imposed on its inhabitants.
Instead of assuming that “we still have time” to warn of genocide, we have to reverse and say that we are running out of time; the genocide has already brought to extinction so many aspects of Palestinian life, so we must keep screaming that it’s genocide and act to stop it!
Settler colonial genocides have a blurred nature since they are often committed by liberal so-called “democratic” regimes that are sustained by a body of citizens—a single group among other groups governed—who believe that despite the fact that their government wields violent racial technologies against its colonized subjects, the regime’s foundations are democratic and fair. This is what happened in North and South America, in Algeria, and in Palestine, as colonial actors installed and maintained their regimes using different genocidal technologies. These technologies operate also through epistemological mechanisms which keep elements, which together could testify to a genocide, apart. It is the decades-long consistent use of genocidal violence against Palestine and Palestinians as a group that we have to assess, not each disparate event of which the genocide consists. The genocidal condition is the cumulative outcome of a genocidal regime built against Palestinians with the aim of their elimination.
The current totalitarian regime of speech orchestrated by Israel, which turns truth into “terrorist content” and looks for or reproduces it into a criminal form of “consumption,” didn’t emerge yesterday. Global imperial mechanisms were already in place to silence, distort, censure, intimidate, and punish those who countered the true meaning of the regime that was imposed in Palestine. It was under this regime that Palestinians were made disposable and deported to concentration camps called refugee camps, where life was impacted by humanitarian crisis and slow death, and simultaneously Israeli citizenship was shaped to prevent their return and redress, thus beckoning the militarization of all aspects of Israeli life. The way historians and other intellectuals globally betrayed Palestinians by complying with the triumphal narrative of this regime’s emergence in 1948 is still to be studied.
V. Genocide is not at the forefront of images, though it can be traced within them. If we wish to see beyond the bodies of the victims captured in discrete photos, we notice a template and the imprint that the systematic use of genocidal technologies left upon the colonized. All these images reveal a single aim: Israel’s aim to eliminate Palestinians from the land between the sea and the river and to eliminate Palestinians’ ways of life, their imprint upon the land’s soil, their autonomy, dignity, livelihood, and worldliness.
The excessive abundance of photographs of Palestinians testifies to this aim. Photographing Palestinians in such abundance didn’t start immediately in 1948. Few are the photos from the expulsion of Palestinians to Gaza and the from creation of the “Gaza strip” as a “solution” to separate and contain the 200,000 Palestinians expelled by Zionists from other parts of Palestine. As I visually reconstructed in From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of State Formation(2011), the expellees were forced into this narrow strip of land where, up until then, only approximately 75,000 Palestinians lived. Soon after the area was closed behind barbed wires, the first humanitarian crisis erupted.
This was the expected outcome of the combined use of the genocidal technologies of expulsion, concentration, and killing. Very few photos interrupted the first two decades of the state’s existence. Most were taken in refugee camps in surrounding countries; in them Palestinians figure as worldless refugees, bereft of the world in which they lived in fullness in Palestine. During this period, the Zionist interest in state-building converged with Europe’s needs to absolve itself from the genocide it committed during World War II and to present itself rather as the liberator of the Jews. Under these conditions, Zionists, in concert with European imperialists, shaped the existence of Israel into a fait accompli. In 1967, despite the conquest of Gaza and West Bank and parts of Syria by Israel, the inhabitants of the refugee camps constructed therein resisted for several years. In response, Israel used genocidal technologies to destroy and internally displace Palestinians, implementing different “solutions” to eliminate them as a group and indenture their labor.
Gradually, Gaza, like the West Bank, became the biggest militarized open photography studio in the world; there, Palestinians could be turned at any moment into subjects of what are commonly known as “human rights photographs.” Waging consistent military assaults (with names like “Pillar of Defense,” “Returning Echo,” and “Cast Lead”) every few months, or sometimes more frequently, Israeli forces targeted Gazans with genocidal violence. During the First Intifada, Gaza became a true photographic mine and a spectacular laboratory for testing both new arms on Palestinians as well as the West’s tolerance for the exercise of these technologies in plain sight. Out of this mine, hundreds of thousands of photos of Palestinians were extracted, published, discussed, circulated, purchased, sold, auctioned, and held in press archives, museum collections, NGOs archives, and so on. Despite many noticeable differences between the myriad photographs, in almost all of them Palestinians are captured as disposable life, so that their killing is not a disruption but rather a validation of their disposability. When Israelis are also captured in the frame, they mostly appear as soldiers “on duty,” agents of the state, its law and order.
Such photos are commonly captioned through the lens of human rights, which focuses on the predicament of the victims rather than on the regime and technologies used to produce these conditions. Such captioning, which visually signals a call for humanitarian aid as opposed to denunciation of a regime that violates humanitarian law, normalizes the disposability of Palestinian life. In 2005, following Israel’s declaration that it would withdraw from Gaza, another “solution” was imposed upon it: its transformation into the biggest concentration camp on earth.
This was achieved through the use of a carceral technology that isolates Gaza from other parts of Palestine and from the world, creating a general condition of slow death for Gazans, which, as we have witnessed in the wake of October 7, can be accelerated at any moment. Contrary to the statements of the agents of this carceral regime that they no longer rule Gaza, the Israeli state continues to dispense attacks from the sea, the air, and the land while keeping Palestinians isolated from the world. Marketed for so long as precarious subjects in images of human rights violations, Palestinians are now exterminated in front of the worlds’ eyes without being recognized as victims of colonial genocidal violence.
Plans to further destroy Gaza were not drafted on October 7. They had been in preparation for years, and they were implemented on small and large scales from 1948 onward. The violence waged in last few weeks is different in scale and concentration of horror than ever before. So too is the resistance of millions of people around the world who are refusing to accept the imperial narrative that Israel and the United States use to justify this violence. But the violence waged over the past few weeks cannot be understood separately from the systematic use of genocidal technologies against Palestinians over the last seventy-five years. Those who prepared those plans waited for the occasion to implement them. As many generals and politicians in settler colonial regime have said along the years, the Israeli military just needed the occasion or event that would justify their intervention; once they received it, they would then bring it to fruition.
VI.
Palestinians fleeing North Gaza, November 10, 2023. Image: Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote that “genocide is an actual possibility of the future,” and, hence, “no people on earth . . . can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence.” Imperial governments do not represent humanity but the logic of their racializing regimes. This endows them with imperial rights to support each other when they use genocidal violence. The millions in the streets all over the world, blocking roads, protesting in front of the offices and factories of arms manufacturers, blocking shipments of arms, and marching in unprecedented numbers in support of Palestinians know that the order of humanity is being attacked yet again. They affirm that we should not fail to recognize the genocide that is happening right now. If this wave of genocidal violence will also pass unrecognized, and if the genocidal regime which is perpetrating it goes unquestioned, then not only Palestinians but more people will be unsafe.
These are not discrete images of what happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognize the decades-long genocide and to stop it now.
Arendt’s discussion of crimes against humanity is instructive. Those crimes, Arendt writes, are written in the bodies of their victims, but they are also committed against the community in the name of which they are perpetrated—against the community’s law, and more broadly against an order of humanity defined by its diversity. Palestine was destroyed because Zionists didn’t want Palestinians living among them; the regime the Zionists erected was meant to be the materialization of this genocidal intent. The enforcement of a racial law, an affront to human diversity, has been the raison d’être of this regime since 1948. It lies at its basis, and it is this law that should be abolished between the river and the sea for all inhabitants therein to be free. It must be abolished for the sake of Palestinians, so that they can regain their rights to return to live in Palestine and rebuild their world; and, so too, it must be abolished for the sake of Israeli Jews, so that they can liberate themselves from Zionism, free themselves from the position of perpetrators—the only one they can inhabit under this genocidal regime—and reclaim the diverse Jewish histories of which they were deprived when they were forced to embody a fabricated Israeli identity defined by its enmity to Palestinians. Israelis can choose to act as citizens of their genocidal regime and endorse the transformation of the tragic day of October 7 into its justification, or as some have done, they can reclaim their place as members of a shared humanity and reject the genocidal foundation of their regime.
The images of genocide over the last few weeks could have even inspired different outcomes—forcing Israelis to recognize that they are settlers and to overcome the false belief that wielding genocidal violence could keep them completely safe from the resistance of the colonized, or sparking a popular movement calling for a general strike against the colonial regime, one that refuses to support and execute its genocidal violence and serve in its army whose genocidal intents are clear. The flow of images in which nonstop genocidal violence is exercised against Palestinians—mainly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank—could have been prevented at any moment, had the use of such technologies not been normalized, justified, and legalized as a means for targeting Palestinians.
What makes this current genocidal violence revelatory is that it echoes and reiterates the inaugural moment when this genocidal regime was established. In 1948, it was 750,000 Palestinians—the majority of Palestine’s inhabitants—who were expelled in a period of over a year. Now, in barely a few weeks’ time, at the speed of a death factory, more than 1.5 million Palestinians—who were already living in a concentration camp, ghetto, or prison—have been displaced, and between 1 and 2 percent of the population of Gaza has been wounded or exterminated.
In an uncanny and painful way, the black-and-white still images taken in Palestine during the Nakba of 1948 are coming alive, in the form of moving images and in color. The images coming out of Gaza—at least when Israel hasn’t shut down the electricity and Internet—can only falsely be called images, since they capture the people who are calling to stop the genocide in rectangular immaterial forms. These are not discrete images of what had happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognize the decades long genocide and to stop it now. Recognizing the genocide also means rejecting any further genocidal solutions for Gaza and Palestine once this killing stops.
****************** Ariella Aïsha Azoulay Ariella Azoulay is a curator, filmmaker, and Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her latest book is Potential History—Unlearning Imperialism.
The Righteous Fury of the Israeli Left – Ilan Pappé
November 16, 2023 ‘One can only draw some hope, in these dark times, from the huge and growing solidarity movement all over the world.’ Ilan Pappé
By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle
There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider.
It is hard to write on anything that is not aimed at informing people of the genocide taking place and adding our voice to those who are doing all they can to stop it.
This notion is reinforced by such tragic estimations as, for example, a recent statement by the World Health Organization, that every ten minutes, a child is killed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
However, one can only draw some hope, in these dark times, from the huge and growing solidarity movement all over the world. This movement doesn’t cave in to scare tactics employed by governments and politicians, and is advocating for an immediate ceasefire.
As horrific as this chapter in the history of modern Palestine is, it is unfortunately not a game changer.
The basic constellation of powers – locally, regionally and globally – will remain the same.
This might be more transformative if the fight spreads to include an uprising in the West Bank and inside Israel, and the opening of fronts in the east and north of Israel. As this piece is being written, this has not yet unfolded.
The political elites of the Global North and some of the Global South will continue to provide international immunity for Israel’s criminal policies on the ground. Yet their civil societies will continue by and large to stand behind the Palestinian liberation movement.
On the ground, the military imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – despite the surprise attack – will remain the same, and quite a few Arab states will eventually continue the normalization process.
Also, the struggle in Israel between the messianic settlers and the secular Jews fighting over their own versions of apartheid will continue.
And it is in this context, that I would like to focus on the way that liberal Zionists, mainly through the newspaper Haaretz – but also with the support of liberal Zionists around the world – loyally stand behind Israel’s actions. This incomprehensible logic is also reflected in the way western powers justify their immunity to any accountability regarding the genocide in Gaza.
One after the other, main spokespersons for the Zionist Left publish daily op-eds in Haaretz, where they give vent to their righteous fury against what they call the Global Left.
Their anger is worth analyzing, if only just for the purpose of reminding us once more why there is very little hope for change from within Israel.
Zionist Left in a Limbo
The Zionist Left in Israel is in a limbo.
On the one hand, it is ostracized by Jewish society as, at best, being naïve and, at worst, as being accused of betrayal. This is in reaction to their support for the two-state solution and the call to end the occupation. This alienation, of course, is now more acute after the events of October 7.
On the other hand, they are not considered, and rightly so, genuine allies of the Palestinian liberation struggle.
The Israeli Left’s biggest hope was that the Global Left, as they call it, would share the same language and attitude regarding the October 7 operation by Hamas; namely to be unconditionally behind Israel.
The Israeli Left was outraged that, in the eyes of the Global Left, the Hamas operation did not absolve Israel from its past criminal policies nor did it provide Israel with a green light for its genocidal policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
To their great surprise, the Global Left in its entirety was galvanized behind the call to “Stop the War” and “Free Palestine”, rather than echoing their government’s repeated response of “We support Israel’s right to defend itself”.
Israel and Colonialism
What is most illuminating – in the dialogue the liberal Zionists have with themselves on the pages of Haaretz – is their vicious attack on any one associating colonialism with Israel.
For some reason, they chose Judith Butler as the main culprit, which would leave many of us disappointed, as we devoted our careers to frame Zionism as settler colonialism, probably going back to the 1960s.
In fact, today, the framing of Zionism and Israel as a settler-colonial project is a consensual issue among all the leading scholars on the Middle East, and it is rejected as an accurate paradigm only among mainstream Israeli academia.
The Global Left is guilty of two ‘sins’, in the eyes of the liberal Zionists: one, it refers to Israel as a settler-colonial state and two, it provides a context for the Hamas attack on October 7.
No Middle Ground
This self-righteousness and fury is not just typical to the Zionist Left. You will hear it from actors in Hollywood, journalists and mainstream academics in the Global North, who suddenly have to take a stand: Are they with the liberation movement or against it?
There is no middle ground anymore. There is no way of supporting the liberal occupier, the progressive ethnic cleanser and the leftist genocider.
The attempt to frame the stance I am calling for as racist or antisemitic will not hold water. It is a matter of where you would see yourself at this critical juncture in history, and how you value your own sense of self respect.
At least, a small ray of hope appeared on my horizon last week. A high school history teacher in Israel was arrested on November 10 for mentioning the context of the Hamas attacks on social media.
Unlike the lost souls on the liberal Israeli Left, this brave teacher reminded his students of the atrocities Israel perpetrated over the years, the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves, and the need for Israel to respect international law.
Such a view is a crime in Israel and, now, the British Home Office wishes to make it a crime in Britain as well.
This is indeed the time for people with moral courage, as the struggle for freedom and liberation will be a long one and needs such allies to support it.
– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
In the early 1990s I worked at Physicians for Human Rights – Israel. Not long after the Oslo Accords were signed we moved from offices on Gordon Street in Tel Aviv to larger premises on Allenby Street, not far from the Great Synagogue. Walking home from work one day, I noticed a small plaque near the synagogue’s entrance. Written in Hebrew and English, it says: ‘The Lehi used the basement and attic of this synagogue as a secret arms cache. It was discovered by the British during the “great curfew” imposed in July 1946, and the weapons were confiscated.’
Lehi was a Zionist paramilitary organisation that operated primarily against the British forces in Mandatory Palestine, but it was also among the groups that carried out the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Palestinians. Four years earlier, the group had assassinated Walter Guinness, also known as Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East. Later terrorist attacks included the assassination in 1948 of the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations mediator between Israel and Arab countries.
The first provisional government of Israel declared Lehi a terrorist organisation and arrested more than two hundred members, but offered them a general amnesty before the first elections in January 1949. Thirty years later, Israel introduced the Lehi ribbon, honoring the militant group’s ‘activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel’ and in 1983 a former leader of the organisation, Yitzhak Shamir, became prime minister. It was around this time that the plaque was placed in front of the Great Synagogue commemorating its role in the Zionist struggle for liberation – namely, hiding arms deployed in Lehi’s terrorist attacks.
A few kilometres from the Great Synagogue, in Ramat Gan, the first elementary school in the city was used for similar purposes. Its plaque says that the place was used by the Etzel during the 1930s and 1940s for weapons training and as a secret arms cache.
Etzel, a Hebrew acronym for Irgun Zvai Leumi (the National Military Organisation), is the group that bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 people and injuring scores of others. Led at one stage by Menachem Begin, the paramilitary group also participated in the Deir Yassin massacre and several other terrorist attacks before morphing into the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Herut). A letter to the New York Times in December 1948, signed by Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and others, described the party as ‘closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties’. In 1977, it became the major partner of the newly formed Likud, which has been ruling Israel on and off ever since.
Synagogues and schools were not the only places Zionist paramilitary groups used to hide fighters and equipment. The Magen David Adom (Red Star of David) station in Netanya has a plaque which says that ‘the medical centre was used to cover and camouflage the operations of Haganah’s command centre in Netanya – the military arm of the state to come.’ This plaque also suggests that the pre-state use of civilian sites as a cover for military purposes is something that Israelis today should be proud of.
The use of civilian sites by paramilitary groups was in no way unique to Mandatory Palestine. When the Prussians occupied France in 1870, the French francs-tireurs or free shooters were ‘farmers by day and fighters by night’. From the American Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento to anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam as well as Algeria, Angola and Palestine, militants have hidden among civilians in what we now call people’s wars. Given the asymmetry of power between non-state paramilitary groups and national armies, the ability to blend into the civilian population was necessary for military survival. Today, hi-tech state militaries deploy new surveillance technologies and enhanced weapon systems to find and kill militants much more easily, driving paramilitary groups across the globe to move into densely populated urban settings where they can conceal themselves more easily. Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier.
It has consequently been accused by Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesperson, of using human shields. ‘Our war,’ Hagari said, ‘is against Hamas, not against the people in Gaza. Especially not the sick, the women, or the children. Our war is against Hamas who uses them as human shields.’
Hagari was referring not to the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in secret locations across the Gaza Strip, but to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who were unwilling or unable to flee when Israel instructed them to. Many of them have been taking refuge in hospitals, schools and mosques. They are cast as shields because Hamas has built what are believed to be hundreds of kilometres of underground tunnels beneath Gaza and the people above are in the way of Israel’s ability to destroy the tunnels. An IDF spokesperson said last week that ‘Hamas has been systematically using hospitals in Gaza to run its terror machine. Hamas built tunnels underneath hospitals … using the protected status of hospitals as a shield.’
Hagari’s claim that Hamas uses human shields should be understood as a pre-emptive legal defence against accusations that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of human shields: ‘The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.’ In other words, it’s legal to bomb a site protected by human shields (provided legal principles, such as proportionality, are followed). The subtext of Hagari’s accusation, then, is that Hamas is to blame when Israel kills civilians or destroys hospitals because Hamas has used them to ‘shield’ its tunnels.
In recent years the ‘human shield’ accusation has been adopted by several state militaries trying to justify the killing of civilians in Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria and elsewhere. This justification, however, functions only in one direction. When state actors kill civilians, it’s become standard to describe them as human shields. But when non-state actors attack military targets in urban settings, the civilians they kill are still recognised as civilians.
When Islamic State captured Mosul in 2014, for example, there were no human shields in the city, but two years later, when the American-led coalition was preparing to retake it, headlines across the world warned readers that the jihadist militants were using 100,000 civilians as human shields. Israeli citizens living next to the military command headquarters in central Tel Aviv have never been cast as human shields, even though Hamas has targeted it. This is not to condone the brutality of IS or Hamas, who have frequently targeted civilians, but to show how state militaries exculpate themselves from the killing of civilians.
Besides the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv, the primary school in Ramat Gan and the medical facility in Netanya, there are more than fifty other buildings in Israeli cities that have plaques commemorating how they were used to hide combatants and weapons before 1948. The British armed forces sent infantry troops to raid civilian sites that they suspected of being put to military use. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli armed forces have sent in ground troops only after bombing.
Thirty thousand tons of bombs have so far been dropped on Gaza, and more than two hundred mosques, two hundred schools and over forty hospitals and other medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed. More than five thousand children and around ten thousand adults have been killed. Most of them were civilians. The attempt by the Israeli authorities to justify their carpet bombing and blame Palestinians for bringing disaster on themselves through the use of ‘human shields’ is not only political sophistry, but forgetful of Israel’s own history.
The Knesset Committee of Education, Culture, and Sports, chaired by MK Yosef Taib, met on November 15, 2023, to debate “The Struggle of Higher Education During the ‘Iron Swords’ War.” The committee discussed several issues concerning higher education, including postponing the opening of the school year to December 24, 2023, because many of the students are reservists serving in the Gaza Strip and the North.
The committee then discussed cases of students and lecturers in various institutions of higher education who supported terrorism and incitement. The universities established a forum to deal with this, and the Committee noted that there have already been cases where the instigators were expelled from the institutions.
The Knesset committee resolved that,
– The war Iron Swords is not a war between Jews and Arabs. However, there will be zero tolerance for incitement. The Committee notes that the CHE established a forum to deal with cases of incitement on campuses. Cases that are claimed to have been taken care of will be re-examined.
– Institutions should define clear rules of conduct expected of faculty and students. These rules must be published clearly, in all languages, to make sure that everyone is aware of them. Orderly, transparent and equitable mechanisms must be established regarding sanctions on incitement. It is recommended that the institutions be called to maintain restraint and respectful discourse.
– A sense of belonging to the institutions may serve as a basis for bringing together, and a common denominator between the different groups. It is recommended to encourage this feeling as a collective feeling, and it should be echoed prominently throughout the campuses.
– Security forces on campuses are the main bodies entrusted with maintaining order. Training should be conducted and procedures refined to ensure equal and respectful treatment for all students. The security personnel must be well aware of the limits of their powers and the rights of the students.
The Israeli media reported that since the beginning of the war, more than 270 publications encouraging violence, incitement, support, and identification with terrorist organizations have been dealt with by the police, of which about 130 investigation files have been opened for offenses of the type of incitement.
Israeli Arabs often claim that during hostilities Israel crackdowns on dissent. Mariam Farah, a Political Science Master’s student at Tel Aviv University, wrote in the online journal +972, a pro-Palestinian media outlet, that “Palestinian students and faculty have long encountered racism, discrimination, and harassment at Israeli universities and colleges.” She reported on a Technion student Bayan Khatib, who, the day after Hamas launched the massacre attack on southern Israel, posted a video on Instagram showing a skillet of shakshuka, a traditional dish of eggs, vegetables, and tomatoes, with the caption, “Soon we’ll eat victory shakshuka,” alongside an emoji of a Palestinian flag. The flag and the word “victory” signaled her support for Hamas. The Technion took this post seriously. On October 25, Khatib was arrested on suspicion of incitement. She spent one night in jail for sedition and was put on house arrest the following day. A complaint was also filed against Khatib at the Technion, and her hearing was held on Nov. 9. She was suspended from her studies while disciplinary proceedings against her are still ongoing. She said, “The allegations against me are absurd — merely over a video of shakshuka,” Farah reported.
According to Farah’s article, the following weeks since October 7 have seen a “significant spike” in the “crackdown on freedom of expression by Israeli authorities,” also impacting left-wing Israeli Jews, “creating an atmosphere of fear to silence any dissent” against the “Israeli army’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip.”
Farah quoted an estimate by the Union of Arab Students that approximately 160 Palestinian students at Israeli universities and colleges have faced disciplinary proceedings since October 7. The legal center Adalah reported that 113 Arab students from 33 different Israeli academic institutions requested support. In half the cases, the students were temporarily suspended before disciplinary proceedings started. In 8 cases, students were expelled without a hearing. The Union reported also that “Arab students are being arrested simply for writing or ‘liking’ seemingly innocuous posts on social media.”
Farah reported that “the National Union of Israeli Students called for the immediate suspension of anyone who expresses solidarity with Hamas’ attacks and encouraged students to anonymously report those suspected of supporting terror.” Farah added, “This call came frighteningly close to physical violence.”
Describing “Toxicity and persecution,” Farah’s article also details the case at the University of Haifa, which IAM reported, “University of Haifa Students Suspended for Supporting Hamas.”
Farah’s article touched upon the case of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Professor of Criminology at the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law that IAM reported on, who signed two anti-Israel petitions after the Black Sabbath of 7 October, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Among others, Farah also discusses the case of Warda Sada, an educator and peace activist, who has faced “similar persecution.” Sada was “dismissed from her position at the Kaye Academic College of Education in Be’er Sheva after a student published a few of her social media posts before and after October 7. All these posts, according to Sada, “condemned violence from both sides and against the war and the killing of civilians.”
Farah’s article which claims “collective blame placed on all Arabs,” is a gross exaggeration and an example of propagandist writing to inflame passions. In reality, the number of cases of students and staff accused of incitement or supporting Hamas is very low. Opinion polls taken after the October attack indicate that more than half of Israeli Arabs support the war and reject the murder and horrific abuses inflicted on innocent civilians in the Israeli communities bordering Gaza. As stated by the Knesset Education Committee, the Iron Swords War is not a war between Jews and Arabs. The Committee even urged a respectful discourse and a sense of belonging to the institutions to help bring together the different Israeli groups on campus. The Committee thus stated that the security forces on campus are the bodies entrusted with maintaining order and should ensure equal and respectful treatment for all students.
Stopping incitement is not a war between Jews and Arabs but rather an action against the support of a Jihadist terror group that used the ISIS-style protocol to commit horrific crimes.
On Oct. 8, the day after Hamas launched a large-scale surprise attack on southern Israel, Bayan Khatib posted a video on Instagram showing a skillet of shakshuka that she had prepared. The 23-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel, a student at Haifa’s Technion Institute and a self-confessed bad cook, proudly captioned the post, “Soon we’ll eat victory shakshuka,” alongside an emoji of a Palestinian flag.
Construing her use of the flag and the word “victory” as signaling support for Hamas, Khatib’s fellow students widely circulated the post and demanded that she be punished — both by the university and by state authorities.
The complaints were taken seriously. On Oct. 25, Khatib was arrested on suspicion of incitement. She spent one night in jail, sharing a cell meant for four people with eight other Palestinian women, all of them arrested after Jewish-Israeli colleagues reported them to the police for sedition. Khatib was released to house arrest the following day.
A complaint was also filed against Khatib at the Technion, and her hearing was held on Nov. 9. Despite seeking assistance from professors at the university by email and phone calls, Khatib said she received no response. She remains suspended from her studies while disciplinary proceedings against her are ongoing.
Khatib told +972 that she has never felt so at risk for her identity as she does now. “Simply being Palestinian and displaying symbols of my heritage has become a cause for suspicion, making me feel inherently guilty,” she said. “The allegations against me are absurd — merely over a video of shakshuka.”
According to the Union of Arab Students, approximately 160 Palestinians studying at Israeli universities and colleges have faced disciplinary proceedings since October 7, accused of supporting terror, supporting terrorist organizations, or incitement to terrorism.
The Haifa-based Palestinian legal center Adalah, meanwhile, reported that it has been approached by 113 Arab students at 33 different Israeli academic institutions in that time, all of them seeking legal support. Adalah further notes that in nearly half of the cases it is aware of, students were temporarily suspended before disciplinary proceedings had even started; in 8 cases, students were expelled without a hearing.
The Union reports that Arab students are being arrested simply for writing or “liking” seemingly innocuous posts on social media. For example, the arrests of four students at the Western Galilee College on Nov. 19, the Union said, were conducted in a particularly “barbaric” manner, intended to humiliate them and perpetuate a policy of intimidation.
Perhaps more frightening still has been the harassment of Palestinian students by their Jewish peers. Shortly after the war began, the National Union of Israeli Students called for the immediate suspension of anyone who expresses solidarity with Hamas’ attacks and encouraged students to anonymously report those suspected of supporting terror.
This call came frighteningly close to physical violence. On Oct. 28, a mob of extremist Jewish Israelis gathered outside the dormitories of Arab students at Netanya Academic College, chanting “Death to Arabs.” Police had to block the crowd from breaking into the building, and the threatened students were eventually evacuated to safety.
Together with Adalah, the Union of Arab Students has pressed for an investigation into the attack at Netanya College. It is also calling on the heads of Israeli universities to provide enhanced protection for Palestinian students and reinstate those who have been suspended, while encouraging progressive Arab and Jewish lecturers to intervene against unjustified punitive action.
The Union has also made the unusual step of seeking outside intervention, reaching out to foreign universities and donors affiliated with Israeli institutions and urging them to support Palestinian students, as well as asking the EU to reevaluate its academic collaboration with Israel’s Education Ministry.
Toxicity and persecution
The persecution of Palestinians on Israeli campuses extends beyond students, with faculty members also facing similar charges. On Oct. 9, 25 faculty members at the University of Haifa — including the vice rector — sent a private letter to the university’s rector, Professor Gur Alroey, raising concerns about the suspension of five students the previous day; the university had failed, they argued, to follow its own administrative regulations or explain its decisions.
In a letter that was later leaked to the public, Alroey wrote back to the professors, admonishing them for their alleged support of students he accused of supporting Hamas or terrorism. The rector even called for the resignation of the vice rector, but later retracted this demand.
Ameed Saabneh, a Palestinian senior lecturer at the University of Haifa and one of the professors who authored the letter to the rector, told +972 that the university lacks the authority to suspend students from their studies. “Hearing committees are the sole bodies empowered to make decisions regarding student suspensions,” he clarified.
Saabneh explained that after the incident became public, the atmosphere at the university became tense. “The relationship between students turned toxic, eroding the previously healthy manner of discussions,” he said. “I’ve been informed by my students that they feel persecuted by their peers, the student union, and the university administration.”
The situation has created a “crisis of trust” between professors and their students, Saabneh continued. “The most concerning aspect is that students began sending letters to the department head, threatening to boycott professors who signed the letter to the rector,” he said.
According to a recent report by Academia for Equality, at least six professors and junior faculty at Israeli academic institutions have faced disciplinary action since October 7 because of alleged incitement to terrorism or support for terrorist organizations. Some of them have been fired as a result.
One of the academics who has been targeted is Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor of criminology at the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law and at Queen Mary University of London. Alongside 3,000 other academics and students around the world who specialize in the study of childhood, she signed a petition last month criticizing Israel’s attack on Palestinian children, and calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the “genocide” in Gaza.
A few days later, she received a letter from Asher Cohen, the Hebrew University’s president, in which he accused her of “incitement against the State of Israel,” threatened her with legal action, and urged her to resign. Cohen shared the letter with other staff at the university, and it gained traction on social media. Shalhoub-Kevorkian soon started receiving online threats.
Her lawyer, Alaa Mahajna, accused Cohen of distorting the contents of the petition and said the university was potentially liable for having violated labor laws and inciting threats against a faculty member. He believes the university sought Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s resignation on the sole basis of her political views, which he sees as a dangerous and unprecedented overreach.
In response to a request for comment, the university’s director of international communications stated: “The [president’s] letter pretty much speaks for itself.” Shalhoub-Kevorkian has so far refused to tender her resignation.
Warda Sada, an educator and peace activist, has faced similar persecution. She was dismissed from her position at the Kaye Academic College of Education in Be’er Sheva after a student published a few of her social media posts before and after the war. All these posts, according to Sada, condemn violence from both sides and against the war and the killing of civilians. Kaye College is generally known for fostering a multicultural and multilingual learning environment, and prides itself on the diversity of its students and faculty, which mirrors the ethnic diversity of the Naqab/Negev region.
“As an educator with three decades of experience in the field and 28 years in academia, I never thought academic persecution would reach such extremes,” Sada told +972. “Our responsibility as academics is to foster critical thinking, encourage inquiry, and apply the theories we impart. We, as educators, aim to convey a message to the world, to empower fellow teachers to freely express their ideas.”
The purge has affected Jewish academics as well. Uri Horesh, a professor of Arabic linguistics at Achva Academic College near Ashdod, told +972 that on Oct. 15, while he was in New York, he received an email from the college with a complaint regarding a Facebook post of his that included the phrase “Free the Gaza ghetto.” Horesh initially shared the post a month earlier but reposted it after the start of the war.
“The college twisted the meaning of my post, claiming that I openly supported an act of terrorism,” Horesh said. “They accused me of tarnishing the college’s reputation.”
On Oct. 23, Horesh discovered that he no longer had access to the university’s online system and that his name had been removed from the college’s website; he had received no formal indication that he had been suspended. A week later, he was asked to attend a disciplinary hearing; he refused, stating that the process was illegitimate and that his personal political views were irrelevant to his employment. A few days later, he received a letter from the college confirming his termination and threatening to withhold compensation (though ultimately he was paid).
Horesh noted that many of his students were Palestinian citizens of Israel and that his dismissal wasn’t just a blow to him but also to them — a chilling message that discourages them from sharing their own views. Though he was scheduled to return to Israel on the day he received the first complaint, Horesh feared being arrested upon his arrival and so postponed his return indefinitely.
‘Collective blame placed on all Arabs’
The academic year in Israel was due to begin on Oct. 8, but the outbreak of war the day before meant that studies were postponed and repeatedly delayed. According to a recent statement by the Association of University Heads, the next target is to begin on Dec. 24, but doing so first requires a demobilization of army reservists.
As that date approaches, there are fears about what the atmosphere will be like, especially for Palestinian students and faculty. A recent survey found that 17 percent of Arab students polled expressed uncertainty or lack of intention to commence the year, primarily due to economic and security concerns.
Amid these heightened tensions, the Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education has voiced apprehensions about the upcoming academic year. On Nov. 27, the body penned a letter to Varda Ben Shaul, the director-general of the Council for Higher Education in Israel, highlighting the pressing mental, social, and economic challenges arising in this new reality, and calling for an immediate specialized program to support Arab students and foster their engagement in higher education. The letter also emphasized the need for collaboration with educational institutions and relevant government ministries to address issues of harassment and racism, and formally requested a meeting with Shaul to proactively address current and future challenges.
On Nov. 25, the Union of Arab Students convened to strategize for the commencement of the academic year. Their agenda includes arranging meetings with university administrations, conducting face-to-face sessions with incoming first-year students to offer support amid forthcoming challenges, and revitalizing Arab students’ committees within universities and colleges.
A university’s role, even amid a crisis, is to be a space of reason and open dialogue. Yet in a stark departure from normal procedure, Israeli institutions have cracked down on critical expression since October 7, with Palestinians and left-wing Israeli Jews facing persecution.
“There’s a sense of collective blame placed on all Arabs within the university, including students who haven’t engaged in any posting [on social media,” Saabneh, from the University of Haifa, said. “This situation has escalated into a significant conflict on campus, creating an unhealthy environment for studying and discussions, which should ideally foster diverse viewpoints.”
Mariam Farah is a Palestinian journalist from Haifa
שר החינוך שר במשרד החינוך שר הביטחון יו”ר ור”ה יו”ר ול”מ יו”ר רמ”א
ויו”ר המל”ג
פרופ’ יפעת ביטון
יו”ר ור”מ
מכובדיי,
הנדון: התמודדות ההשכלה הגבוהה בתקופת מלחמת “חרבות ברזל”
אנשי מילואים מגוייסים כבר 6 שבועות ואין לדעת את מועד השחרור. ביניהם, סטודנטים רבים.
פתיחת שנה”ל במוסדות האקדמיים היא בסמכות כל מוסד אקדמי. כל מוסד ניהל את פתיחת השנה , בנפרד. יש שיקולים שונים ושונות בין המוסדות. כל מוסד חייב לוודא שכל סטודנט שנמצא במילואים, יוכל לסיים את שנת הלימודים, יחד עם חבריו. דחו את פתיחת שנה”ל , ככל הניתן, מבלי לפגוע בסמסטר קיץ. הלימודים יהיו במתכונת שונה.
המוסדות להשכלה גבוהה המתוקצבים, נתנו פתרונות בהתאם לתקציבם. דחיית פתיחת שנת לימודים לתאריך 24.12.23, וחבילת הטבות למשרתים במילואים. למשל –הנחה בתשלום, תרגול בקבוצת קטנות, תוספת נ”ז עבור השירות במילואים, קורס מקוצר כשיחזרו, ועוד.
מוסדות לא מתוקצבים, נתנו פתרונות אחרים. מי שלא משרתים במילואים, שזה 80% מהסטודנטים, התחילו את לימודיהם . מי שמשרתים במילואים, יקבלו קורס שלם, כשיחזרו.
היו מקרים של סטודנטים ומרצים, במוסדות שונים של השכלה גבוהה, שתמכו בטרור ובהסתה. המוסדות הקימו פורום לטיפול בכך, וכבר היו מקרים שהמסיתים הוצאו מהמוסדות.
מסקנות הוועדה :
1. הוועדה מודה ליואב קיש – שר החינוך ויו”ר מל”ג, ולכל המשתתפים בדיון.
2. 30% מהסטודנטים משרתים במילואים. הוועדה מברכת אותם ומייחלת לשיבתם המהירה לשלום לביתם.
3. הוועדה מברכת את כל הסטודנטים שנרתמו לעזור ולהתנדב בכל הנדרש, כתוצאה מהמלחמה.
4. הוועדה מבקשת להרגיע את הסטודנטים, משרתי המילואים, שלא ידאגו לנושא הלימודים. עליהם להתרכז במשימתם. כולנו מאחוריהם, כולל מוסדות הלימוד שלהם. הוועדה קוראת למוסדות לא להוציא הודעות מבלבלות.
5. הוועדה מבקשת לוודא שלא ייפגעו לימודיו של אף סטודנט המשרת במילואים. אסור שמילואים יהוו מכשול לסטודנטים המשרתים במילואים. מעמד של כל משרת במילואים צריך להיות זהה לחברו שלא שירת. הוועדה דורשת מכל המוסדות להשכלה גבוהה, כולל הפרטיות, לדאוג לכך.
6. הוועדה מבקשת לדאוג לסטודנטים המשרתים במילואים, לכל צרכיהם האקדמיים, כמו: גמישות בתאריכי מבחנים, מועדי מבחן נוספים, טיפול פסיכולוגי, אם נדרש, החזר תשלום למעונות, וכדומה.
7. הוועדה דורשת להטיל סנקציות למוסד להשכלה גבוהה שלא יעניק את המעמד הזהה לסטודנטים משרתי מילואים.
8. הוועדה קוראת למצוא פתרון לסטודנטים לרפואה, שמועד הבחינה שלהם חלף. יש למצוא מועד חדש לבחינה ולתקנן את היחסיות של הציון ליתר הסטודנטים שנבחנו במועד.
9. הוועדה מבקשת למצוא פתרון, לימודי וכלכלי, לסטודנטים במכללת ספיר שפונו מהמכללה בגלל המצב הביטחוני. הוועדה דורשת למצוא חבילת סיוע ייחודית למכללה, הכוללת: פטור משכ”ל לשנה הקרובה, וזאת כדי לעודד את הסטודנטים לחזור ללמוד במכללה.
10. הוועדה רשמה לפניה ששר החינוך יתמוך בהצ”ח פרטית להחזיר את שכ”ל לשנה זו, לכל סטודנט משרת מילואים.
11. מלחמת חרבות ברזל אינה מלחמה בין יהודים וערבים. עם זאת, תהיה אפס סובלנות להסתה. הוועדה רשמה לפניה שמל”ג הקים פורום לטיפול במקרי הסתה בקמפוסים. מקרים שנטען שלא טופלו, ייבדקו שוב.
12. על המוסדות להגדיר כללי התנהגות ברורים המצופים מאנשי הסגל והסטודנטים. יש לפרסם כללים אלה, באופן ברור, ובכל השפות, כדי לוודא שכולם מודעים להם. יש לקבוע מנגנונים מסודרים, שקופים ושוויוניים, לגבי סנקציות בנושא הסתה. מומלץ שהמוסדות יקראו לשמירה על איפוק ולשיח מכבד.
13. תחושת שייכות למוסדות עשויה לשמש בסיס מקרב ומכנה משותף בין הקבוצות השונות. מומלץ לעודד תחושה זו כתחושה קולקטיבית, ויש להדהד אותה, באופן בולט ברחבי הקמפוסים.
14. סגלי הביטחון בקמפוסים הם הגורמים העיקריים האמונים על שמירת סדר. יש לערוך הכשרות ולחדד נהלים כדי להבטיח יחס שיווני ומכבד לכלל הסטודנטים. על אנשי הביטחון להיות מודעים היטב לגבולות סמכויותיהם וזכויות הסטודנטים.
November 17, 2023 | Written By: Dr. Adam AsadConciliation between Jews and Arabs in Israel is not just a moral imperative, but also a necessary condition for maintaining peace and stability in the country.
Arab society in Israel shares the suffering of the Jewish public following the October 7 attack—it, too, has felt this terrible pain. Arab citizens of Israel were also among those who were murdered and abducted by Hamas. Meanwhile, conflict and tension have spread from the Gaza border region to other arenas, including the Lebanese border and the West Bank. The threats from both the north and the south do not differentiate between Jewish towns such as Metula, Nahariya, or Sderot and Arab towns such as Arab al-Aramshe, Kafr Qasim, or Rahat.
Indeed, the Arab public has also been hurt and bloodied over the last month by the Swords of Iron War. The sense of personal safety among Arabs has taken a further blow, after several years of sharp deterioration due to failed government policy, including institutional neglect and disfunction, in response to rising violence and crime. Despite this, a recent survey published by the Viterbi Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute found that the sense of belonging and identification with Israeli society among Arabs has actually increased: 70% of Arab citizens of Israel now say they feel part of Israel and its problems, compared with 48% in June 2023. This is the highest such score in the Arab population since the Center began measuring it some 20 years ago.
Declarations of this nature have also been evident among the Arab leadership in Israel following the events of October 7. A large proportion of Arab Knesset members and mayors condemned the massacre, in which the attackers did not discriminate between Jews and Arabs. The head of the Ra’am party, Mansour Abbas, publicly stated that the attack was fundamentally opposed to the values of Islam, which he said were based on peace and dialogue rather than violent acts of terror. MK Abbas also noted that Arab society in Israel has a significant role to play, particularly at the current time, in promoting acceptance, conciliation, and peace.
With Israel in a state of war, the Arab public has been staying quiet and exercising restraint, despite various attempts at provocation which have included warnings of a repeat of the clashes of 2021. The delicate relations between Arabs and Jews in the country have become especially sensitive. Suspicion toward Arab citizens is on the rise, and Arabs fear the consequences of overtly showing their Arab identity or even speaking Arabic in public spaces. There are also fears about posting in Arabic on social media, regardless of the content, and about expressing any form of sympathy for the civilian population in Gaza.
According to the Israel Police, more than 190 Arab citizens have been detained for questioning since the beginning of the war, mainly for expressing views on social media or for attempts to demonstrate that were classed as attempted incitement, even if in many cases these were just expressions of dismay over the suffering of civilians in Gaza or criticisms against the harming of innocents. Some of those detained have been people who make key contributions to Israeli society, such as doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and teachers. These events raise a serious question of whether the voice of Israeli democracy is being silenced during the war.
In practice, then, Arab society in Israel is dealing with challenges on three different levels: the external threat of rocket fire from the north and the south, just like their Jewish peers, alongside the unique challenges of violence and crime within Arab society and this policy of “silencing” that is being radically applied to Arab citizens in Israel. This combination of challenges may ultimately serve to deepen the divide between Jews and Arabs when the war is over, and impinge on the ability of these two peoples to find a balanced way of living together.
Particularly during these difficult times, conciliation between Jews and Arabs in Israel is not just a moral imperative, but also a necessary condition for maintaining peace and stability in the country. There is no doubt that without conciliation and mutual understanding, the trends we are seeing today will continue to tear our society apart and pour salt on wounds that need time to heal. Israel’s citizens, both Jews and Arabs, have a responsibility to take an active role in the struggle toward conciliation and a peaceful, just coexistence in our shared society.
israel-academia-monitor.com 