Letters

Israel and Gaza – academic protests and cultural boycotts

Academic and cultural freedom

Letters to the Editor. Illustration: Paul Scott

The Irish Times - Letters to the Editor.

Thu May 2 2024 - 00:08

Sir, – As members of staff in Irish higher education, we write with concern at recent institutional responses to student activism against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. We stand in solidarity with student activists on our campuses. We admire their courage and join them in demanding that their universities take similarly principled stands against the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocide. To date, these demands have been ignored. Instead, our institutions have escalated attempts to suppress student protest. Writing from University College Dublin, we have seen such attempts range from the claim that UCD Students’ Union protests have breached “Dignity and Respect” policy, to the direct use of force against student activists.

Across the island of Ireland, our university administrations continue to legitimate their more than six months of silence on Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinian people by asserting a neutral position in defence of academic freedom. To remain silent in the face of genocide is not neutrality, but complicity. UCD’s recent honorary conferring of US Representative Nancy Pelosi, a long-time powerful supporter of Israel, directly contradicts its purported neutrality. At the ceremony, UCDSU president Martha Ní Riada interrupted to voice her opposition and was removed by plain-clothes gardaí and security men. Later that evening, the Garda Public Order Unit policed the 100-plus students gathered to protest the Sutherland Award and dinner in celebration of Ms Pelosi. Apart from demonstrating a lack of institutional courage in the face of an ongoing genocide, this approach from UCD is unlikely to quell conscientious student protest. As the pro-Palestine student solidarity encampments spread across university campuses in the United States and beyond, even the violent repression, expulsion and incarceration of student protesters and staff are not suppressing their solidarity with Palestine or silencing demands to boycott and divest from Israeli institutions.

The International Court of Justice has determined that the actions of the Israeli state toward the captive civilian population of Gaza may plausibly constitute genocide, a view shared by the Irish Government. International aid and human rights organisations warn that the population faces a famine caused by the denial of access to sufficient food, water, and health services. The Israeli military has killed over 34,800 Palestinians, equivalent to the student population of UCD. How many Palestinian people have to die, how many more mass graves need to be uncovered in the al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals, for university leaders to wake up?

A key component of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza is what Karma Nabulsi calls scholasticide, the systematic obliteration of Palestinian teachers, scholars, students, and educational infrastructure which has most recently caused the destruction of all 12 universities in Gaza by the Israeli military. This fact places a particular obligation on university leaders to demonstrate solidarity with our colleagues and peers in Gaza. It is estimated that 356 of our educator peers have been murdered, including three university presidents and 98 professors. As university staff we have the privilege to work with and for our students. It is unacceptable to remain “neutral” as more than 6,000 students just like ours have had their lives extinguished in Gaza.

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We demand that Irish universities take concrete steps. These include divesting from any and all financial complicity in Israeli occupation; implementing adequate support for displaced Palestinian students and academics; and making principled calls for ceasefire.

After over 200 days of Israel’s aggression, the Department of Higher Education, the Higher Education Authority and the Irish Universities Association have yet to enact a sectoral response to support Palestinian students and scholars with swift enrolment, scholarship opportunities, and psychological support, such as we saw implemented for displaced Ukrainian students. We call on these agencies to enact such a response with urgency, in coordination with Irish universities. We renew our call for a boycott of academic institutions and divestment from companies on the ethnically cleansed land of historic Palestine.

Academic freedom is an insufficient defence of such relations in plain view of scholasticide in Gaza.

We write, with increasing frustration but also hope inspired by students rising around the world, to reclaim Irish universities as spaces of justice, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism. Irish third-level institutions are completely out of step with the broader public in Ireland in their refusal to deplore the Israeli state’s genocidal atrocities in Palestine.

Our students have not been silent. Students have always been at the forefront of peace and liberation struggles, and that is a proud tradition that bears recognition and support by all members of society. – Yours, etc,

Dr ANNE MULHALL,

Dr PATRICK BRODIE,

Dr PATRICK ANTHONY,

University College Dublin;

Dr PAOLA RIVETTI,

Dublin City University;

ZOË LAWLOR,

University of Limerick;

Dr ANGELA FLYNN,

University College Cork;

JIM ROCHE,

Technological University Dublin;

Dr JOHN REYNOLDS,

Maynooth University;

Dr CATHERINE PALMER,

Munster Technological University;

Dr DAVID LANDY,

Trinity College Dublin; on behalf of more than 300 others at academicsforpalestine.org

Sir, – Calls for Ireland to boycott the Eurovision and demands for Israel to be expelled from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) are nothing new (Zoë Lawlor, Opinion & Analysis, April 30th).

These same calls and demands were particularly loud in the lead-up to Israel hosting the 2019 Eurovision in Tel Aviv, when the boycott, divestment and sanction movement (BDS) ran a co-ordinated effort across multiple countries to intimidate national broadcasters and competing performers into boycotting the competition. Their efforts came to nothing.

The BDS movement claims it works to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”. In practice, BDS seeks to penetrate the public and political discourse and blur the lines between legitimate criticism of Israel and the complete delegitimisation of Israel in the international arena, and by undermining the Western world order.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), a Palestinian coalition that leads the global BDS movement, salutes the general chaos and attempted exclusion of Jewish students on university campuses across the world, hailing it as successful in unsettling what it calls “the Western-dominated world order”. Ireland is not exempt. Only last week, the chair of Trinity College Dublin’s Jewish Society, Agne Kniuraite, felt compelled to address Trinity College’s student union in an article published by the Jewish Chronicle, asking “To my anti-Israel students’ union: Don’t you have a duty to represent Jewish members too?”, reminding the union of its duty to represent all its students and not just those whose opinions it agrees with.

Meanwhile, there are no “bombs raining down on Gaza” as Ms Lawlor states, even though Hamas commits war crimes by continuing to fire rockets from Gaza into Israeli civilian territory. Neither is the population of Gaza “starved”. Over the last few weeks the amount of aid, including food, water, medical supplies and shelter equipment, going into Gaza has increased significantly via the Nitzana and Kerem Shalom Crossings. A humanitarian aid delivery channel via Jordan is also in operation. Construction of the US floating humanitarian pier, designed to support USAID and to receive and deliver humanitarian aid, has just been completed. What happens to the aid once it has passed into Gaza, where much of it is seized by Hamas, is not the responsibility of Israel.

Since the beginning of the war inflicted on Israel by Hamas, 16,278 trucks of food, 1,581 trucks of water, 3,824 trucks of shelter equipment, 1,911 trucks of medical supplies, 256 tanks of diesel and 501 tanks of cooking oil have been delivered to the people of Gaza. Additionally, 26 bakeries are currently operational in Gaza, providing close to five million breads, rolls and pitta breads daily.

Those who choose to continuously demonise Israel for exercising its primary duty to protect and defend its citizens against the savagery, barbarism and chaos it endured on October 7th, and which Hamas has vowed to repeat again and again, are not seeking a peaceful solution. They are seeking the dissolution of the state of Israel, a democracy based on human dignity and liberty, and inhabited by a rich mosaic of some nine million souls from across the world, including its 20 per cent Arab population. – Yours, etc,

JACKIE GOODALL,

Ireland Israel Alliance,

Dublin 2.

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