“Enough talk. Break ties with Israel now”
UvA employees support the student protest on Roeterseiland and want the Executive Board to take immediate action. “Any delay of meaningful action on our part is irresponsible.” In the submitted letter, the employees demand to sever ties with institutions “contributing to genocide” in Gaza immediately.
Yesterday, UvA students have set up an encampment at Roeterseilandcampus to renew the call for an end to our university’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and occupied Palestine. The encampment comes in the context of a changing tide in public opinion on Israel’s accelerated bombing, starvation and continuous displacement of Palestinian people.
Increasingly, many citizens, politicians, civil society organizations and public administrators are condemning Israel’s disproportionate violence and call for concrete action to stop the genocide. Colleagues across Europe are calling for an end to European funding for Israeli institutions via the EU-Israel association agreement. Last week, more than 1,500 Dutch scholars publicly called on the CvB’s to cut ties with Israeli institutions, and to end police violence on Dutch campuses.
As UvA staff members, we continue to fully support the demands of today’s encampment: disclose, cut ties and divest from all institutions and companies that are complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.We urge our CvB to take these calls seriously, and to repair the strained relationship between them and the UvA community. We ask the CvB to engage in a conversation with the protesting students and staff, instead of calling the police on their students and staff again, subjecting members of our community to brutal, unlawful police violence, and scaring them from coming to campus.
Put words into action
The shift in public opinion has not gone unnoticed in UvA’s leadership. Recently FMG Dean Christa Boer shared her support for the #TrekdeRodeLijn protest in The Hague, which was joined by more than 100,000 people calling on the Dutch government to take action to ensure Israel complies with international law. Last week rector Peter-Paul Verbeek acknowledged that Israel is engaging in genocidal violence and human rights violations.
We appreciate these public statements, and to see that leaders at this university are finally acknowledging the genocide. This awareness of grave human rights violations necessarily calls for action to end our institution’s complicity. This is not only an ethical and moral obligation, but also a legal one, affirmed by the ICJ’s January 2024 provisional measures and its July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which recognized the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from genocide and the duty of states and institutions not to aid Israel’s illegal occupation.
If the rector is serious about his recent statement, then it is clear that this must be followed up with concrete action. Israel is relentlessly killing and starving Palestinians while systematically and illegally ethnically cleansing them and occupying their land. The rector has the power to contribute to stopping this by ending our collaborations with academic institutions and companies that support such acts, not indirectly and unknowingly, but systematically and enthusiastically.
The illusion of science diplomacy
The deep entanglement of Israeli universities in Israel’s settler-colonial project and military-industrial complex cannot be resolved by dialogue. Efforts made by the board of Tilburg University with Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and Reichman University conclude that “It proved impossible to engage in a dialogue about the risks our collaboration may pose in relation to systematic and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms”. Science diplomacy is not possible under conditions of genocide, apartheid and occupation. Concrete action must be taken, involving boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) to cut ties with Israeli institutions.
Not just research
Despite repeated clarifications, the CvB maintains that we have nothing more to disclose and nothing to divest - this misconception must end. The University annually spends several million Euros in external procurement, involving companies such as HP and Microsoft which are known to be implicated in facilitating Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime systemically violating human rights in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and in other occupied Palestinian territories. The Board must commit to ending those contracts. It must also commit to a meaningful ethical procurement policy and review of other institutionally-endorsed activities, such as travel and hospitality. Disclosing should further concern serious engagement with the currently ongoing Horizon projects - for instance, what steps have the coordinators of the InHerit consortium undertaken to reduce their involvement in human rights violations connected to consortium partners? What risk re-assessment process has taken place in other sensitive projects?
Enough with the words. Any delay in meaningful action on our part is irresponsible. It is already too late for too many Palestinians, including many of our colleagues and their students in Gaza whose universities were entirely decimated by Israel more than one year ago. We stand by our students’ call to stop our institution’s complicity in genocide and call for appropriate actions to be taken by our CvB that are long overdue: cut all ties now!
Authors:
• Marina Tulin, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Jill Toh, PhD candidate, Faculty of Law
• Valentina Carraro, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Sruti Bala, Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities
• Candida Leone, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law
The list of co-signatories can be accessed via this link.
