“Keeping the conversation going” with supporters of genocide
Dutch universities hide behind ‘academic freedom’ to retain ties with Israeli universities
Dutch universities say they will not boycott Israeli universities, yet a closer look at these institutions reveals that they are far from innocent bystanders to what is happening in Palestine.
On 8 June, the major Dutch universities published an open letter, stating that they are not going to sever ties with Israeli universities because of what is happening in Gaza. In the letter, the rectors of these universities state that it is vital to “keep the conversation going” and keep “scientific diplomacy” possible, in other words that the best way to influence Israeli society is by keeping their ties intact. As long as their academic values do not hinder cooperation with Israeli (and Palestinian) universities, they say, they see no reason to reconsider or sever their ties.
The Dutch Minister of Education, defending the universities’ refusal to end ties with Israeli universities, praised the universities and their stance for protecting academic values and freedoms, “free from intimidation, pressure, or threats of violence,” without naming specific examples of how exactly universities are being intimidated and threatened. The minister also stated that “international academic cooperation ties provide an opportunity to keep an open line of communication and let critical voices be heard.”
In other words, what is being argued here is that the best way to have a positive influence on the situation in Gaza, is not to sever ties with the Israeli institutions that make apartheid and genocide possible, but to sway them by working together and helping them understand how important it is to respect human rights. This stance seems eerily similar to how our leaders say that “keeping the conversation going” with Israeli politicians is the best way to put pressure on them and help the people in Gaza, as opposed to ineffective measures like, say, not sending any more weapons or supporting judicial procedures at the International Criminal Court.
The Student Response
Just as Israel is showing no intention of halting its genocide, even now that the U.S. is trying to pretend that Israel is accepting a ceasefire proposal, students are showing no intention of halting their protests. Crackdowns on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to protest or have a viable future without a permanent mark on your record, should leave no doubt as to what side many universities are choosing. These university representatives like to talk about how they respect the right to expression and protest, just ‘not like this’, by which they mean you can protest as long as you do it in a nice, respectful way that will have little to no effect. They talk about safeguarding academic values, but do not extend the same logic to safeguarding Palestinians’ academic values.
In a direct response to the open letter, a collection of 14 student Palestine movements shared a statement, in which they "strongly condemn the shameful and hypocritical statement", as well as the police violence they have been subjected to. They see the refusal to cut ties as evidence that the measures that the universities have been proposing, like setting up ethics commissions to evaluate ties, are not sincere. The students also denounce the universities' conflation of individual and institutional boycotts, saying that their movements have only been calling for the latter.
In my opinion, boycotting those complicit in apartheid and genocide, whether it is an Israeli university or Hewlett Packard (HP), is a legitimate way to stand up for human rights. Not just to influence government policy or make it illegitimate, but to influence everybody’s notions of what is and what is not acceptable and thereby create financial consequences for those that do not adhere to these notions. Historically, real change has only happened when many people together put themselves on the line day after day, disrupting business as usual and forcing those in power to make concessions, as happened with the student protests against apartheid in South Africa.
This is much more than a mere difference of opinions or 'cause' pursued because of personal convictions, because we are talking about fundamental issues here, at least for a supposedly democratic society. We are talking about human rights violations like instituting apartheid, committing genocide, or suppressing freedom of inquiry and speech, that go against the very principles of free and open discourse and emancipation that an institution like a university is supposedly based on. That means that it definitely has a responsibility to do whatever it can to ensure that it is not contributing to such crimes.
The fact that these universities do not want to do that demonstrates that they do not really stand for these values, at least not when it counts. Because what they have demonstrated through their actions, whether by having the police violently break up student protests or by showing no hesitation or signs of protest when it came to breaking ties with Russian universities, is that their academic values do not conflict with supporting institutions that play an active role in facilitating violence, environmental destruction, or genocide, as long as it is our side that is doing it. It is yet another verse in the long and murderous ballad of Western exceptionalism, where values of academic freedom, freedom of speech, free trade, and universal human rights are paraded around only when they serve our side, but immediately thrown out whenever they become inconvenient to accepted narratives, political alliances, or imperial objectives. We should not be surprised, but we have every right to be outraged when we are being so blatantly lied to, like when politicians keep repeating the long discredited and evidenceless claims of Hamas committing acts of rape on October 7.
Israeli universities are not impartial bystanders
If Israeli universities were indeed nothing but bystanders that cannot be held responsible for the deeds of their government, then it might indeed be perfectly reasonable to have a discussion about whether and to what degree it is desirable to maintain ties with them. However, this is simply not the case.
Defenders of academic cooperation with Israeli universities like to pretend as if these institutions are merely engaged in mundane academic research, only related to the Israeli government’s apartheid policies and unrestrained violence by their nationality. While more mundane ties certainly exist, like student exchange programmes or the participation of Israeli researchers in certain international research projects, Israeli universities are far from the impartial bystanders that they are portrayed to be. In fact, they have been actively facilitating apartheid and occupation for decades, in some cases even before there was such a thing as Israel. Let’s go over a few examples.
➪After the 7 October Hamas attack, Israeli universities halted classes for nearly three months so that their students could participate in the violence in Gaza, and when they restarted classes the university granted benefits to students who were serving in the Israeli military. This kind of active support for military objectives is similar to how in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, that saw many Palestinians displaced from their homes and resulted in the creation of the Israeli state, Israeli universities facilitated the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands as “faculty and students developed and manufactured weapons”.
➪The support for the military does not stop there. Several Israeli universities offer soldiers’ programmes, which include combat and intelligence training, with students wearing uniforms to classes. These universities also provide the military with personal information about university staff, as well as information about the students’ grades and attendance, and staff is to “refrain from offensive statements toward the IDF soldiers studying at the institution.”
Similar to many Western universities, close ties are maintained with weapons manufacturers to research and develop technology that is used by the military. These weapons include armed drones and bombs designed for ‘densely populated urban warfare’, as are currently being used in Gaza. AI-systems developed at Israeli universities like Bar-Ilan University are used for bombing non-military targets, whereby civilians casualties are seen as nothing more than collateral damage. The Dutch universities in Leiden, Delft, and Eindhoven are partnered with this university.
➪Academic programmes also facilitate the continued occupation and erasure of Palestinian culture. Archaeological projects pursued by the Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities systemically ignore or destroy non-Jewish artifacts and help Israeli settlers lay claim to more territories, for instance by labelling them as ‘empty’, which is eerily reminiscent of the way Europeans viewed the lands that they colonised. Agricultural programmes do the same thing, helping Israeli agritech corporations exploit illegally occupied lands and even employ the very Palestinians workers whose lands were stolen.
➪Universities like Hebrew University and Ariel University are built on occupied lands. Hebrew University was even founded as a “New Jerusalem upon the hill,” from which, according to one of its architects, “any Western eye can see that the Arabs are dirty, untidy, in many ways degenerate.”
➪Political action or demonstrations supporting Palestinians are not allowed, and those students that do protest are violently removed by police, as we have now also seen happening all across Western universities.
➪Palestinian universities in Gaza no longer exist after Israel has bombed all them to rubble, and those that remain standing in areas like the occupied West Bank, have for years been subject to military raids, detention and torture of faculty and students. In other words, Palestinians have no academic freedom.
Join the Completely Mental Gymnastics: Contribute to Apartheid and Genocide to Safeguard Academic Principles
A couple of years back, I might have accepted some of these universities’ arguments as a good-faith defense of universal principles of objectivity and freedom of thought. But I have seen this pattern of feigned objectivity or neutrality, whether in media or in scientific institutions, too many times to uncritically believe that these principles, which I wholeheartedly stand behind, are being argued for in good faith. How can we take calls for maintaining “open dialogue” seriously, when your partners are actively taking part in a deliberate campaign to blow up universities and schools?
These university boards expect us to believe that in order to safeguard academic principles we should keep engaging with institutions that actively facilitate apartheid, displace Palestinians from their lands and actively prevent them from getting an education, erase and revise Arab history and culture, and train soldiers of an army that celebrates committing war crimes on TikTok, acts that go against the very essence of what academic freedoms are about. At the same time, they also expect us to believe that the Russian attack on Ukraine was “a direct attack on freedom and democracy, the fundamental values on which academic freedom and cooperation are based,” which was their justification for halting cooperation with Russian (and Belarussian) universities, as well as with specific researchers, teachers, students, and organisations unless they were critical of the invasion. The rectors do not take responsibility for that decision, saying that was different because the government told them to do it, which shows how committed they really are to academic freedoms.
This warped logic is part of a larger pattern, in which we are, for instance, also expected to believe that Israel, after slaughtering men, women, children, and babies in broad daylight for months, should be able to partake in the Eurovision Songfestival, because it is important to be “united by music”, but that Russia was banned within 36 hours of launching its attack on Ukraine because Russia is clearly “not interested in neither uniting nations nor celebrating diversity”. Anyone able to pull off those kinds of mental gymnastics should be part of their country’s Olympic delegation next year.
Just like universities have no qualms with supporting Western weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, and other destroyers of life and limb, they see no reason why anything that is happening in Gaza should move them to take action. Which is why, just as happened with students demanding their universities stopped investing in apartheid South Africa, and has also been happening over the past few decades with divestment movements against fossil fuel companies, they will only stop supporting these crimes if we make them.
Thank you for reading this post. As a direct response to the blatant lies being told around this topic, and the disingenuous stonewalling by universities and the mainstream media, I felt it was necessary to make my points more forcefully than I usually do, precisely because this issue strikes so deeply into the heart of what it means to have a free and open society. If there ever was a moment to stand up for those values, then it is now.
Feel free to leave a comment and share your thoughts about all this, or share your own experiences from your country or local community. Also be so kind as to share my post so that more people can find my work.
I appreciate your response. It's so important to have reasoned discussions rather than name calling
"How can we take calls for maintaining “open dialogue” seriously, when your partners are actively taking part in a deliberate campaign to blow up universities and schools?"
Exactly! You say it so well, Robert. These Western universities and institutions aren't trying to keep an "open dialogue" with Israeli universities. If that were so, they'd want to keep an open dialogue with ALL universities, and I suspect that isn't the case when it comes to Russian or Palestinian universities. Western higher institutes of learning are obviously benefiting from their Israeli connections, probably through donations and favorable loans. You see it here in the US by their refusal to divest from corporations making money by creating and selling armaments to fuel the Israeli genocide of Gaza. Until we can expose and out all these hypocrites running universities worldwide, we'll be seeing more lies and manipulations to hide their ugly sense of "academic freedom."