Letter Concerning Israeli Raids on Palestinian University Campuses

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Jul 6, 2014 Israel
[Logo of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Image from http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/committees/academic-freedom/] [Logo of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Image from http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/committees/academic-freedom/]

Letter Concerning Israeli Raids on Palestinian University Campuses

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following open letter was issued by theCommittee on Academic Freedom of the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA)]

June 30, 2014

John Kerry
US Secretary of State
via fax 202-663-3636

Benjamin Netanyahu
Prime Minister of Israel
via fax 972-2-5303367

Dear Sirs,

On behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), I write to express our concern about the recent raids by Israeli forces against Palestinian university campuses.  In the course of these raids, Israeli forces destroyed university property, confiscated computers, student organization materials, documents and records, detained a number of university guards, and converted academic facilities into military barracks. Such attacks against educational institutions are direct infringements on academic freedom and serve only to bring more opprobrium upon the Government of Israel’s continued illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.  

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. It is the preeminent organization in the field. The Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3,000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

During the early morning hours of Thursday, June 19, 2014, the Israeli military stormed the grounds of Birzeit University, north of Ramallah, in an attempt to round up student members of the Islamic bloc; the students were holding a non-violent sit-in to protest the political detention of their peers.  In the course of the incursion, soldiers broke the eastern and western gates, raided campus buildings, and confiscated the property of student groups, including flags, notebooks, and flyers. For a second consecutive day, Israeli forces continued with their assaults and raided the Arab American University in al-Zababdah village, east of Jenin, and in the process destroyed the entrance gate padlocks and detained a university guard. There, too, the military raided student organization offices and confiscated flags and papers belonging to these groups.  Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Ahliya University in Bethlehem on the morning of Friday, June 20, and used its courtyard as a holding area for Palestinian detainees apprehended in the nearby Dheisheh refugee camp.  In the latest of this series of raids, Israeli soldiers stormed Al-Quds University in Abu Dis on the morning of Sunday, June 22.   During the raid, soldiers locked the security guards in one room, searched buildings, and confiscated Islamist flags and banners. Clashes broke out during many of these raids, and the Israeli military’s attacks and use of tear gas incapacitated a number of protesters and students.

We are concerned that these recent acts of aggression are not isolated incidents, but part of Israel’s broader systematic policies of undermining Palestinian academic institutions and infringing on Palestinian educational freedom.  Palestinian university campuses continue to suffer immeasurably from Israeli collective punishment policies, foremost among them imposed movement restrictions which impede, and in some cases, prevent students from attending university.  Disproportionately affected by these policies are students from the Gaza Strip, who are no longer allowed to study in West Bank universities. Since the latest reprisals, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon issued instructions to further restrict movement through Gaza’s crossings with Israel. In particular, at the Erez crossing, Israeli authorities now only allow medical patients and foreign citizens to exit Gaza. If there are Palestinian students from Gaza who wish to travel, Israeli authorities are preventing them from doing so. 

These policies are systematic and ongoing.  Israeli authorities limit the travel of Gaza students in a number of ways. Students who are awarded scholarships by foreign governments are technically eligible to receive Israeli travel permits to leave through the Erez crossing, however, Israel regularly prevents students from leaving the Gaza Strip.  Moreover, because Israeli authorities issue the Palestinian identification documents required to obtain a Palestinian passport, they indirectly have the authority to delay student travel through the Rafah, Allenby, or Jordan Valley crossings—which they often do. The harassment, arrest, and holding of university students in administrative detention, a system of incarceration in which prisoners are held indefinitely without charge for renewable six-month periods, remains commonplace.  These collective punishment measures extend to the physical infrastructure of Palestinian academic institutions in the Gaza Strip.  As of October 2013 (for the eighth time since Operation Pillar of Cloud in November 2012), the Israeli defense minister ordered that the transfer of building materials into Gaza be halted. According to the Gaza Industrialist Association, 269 projects, including schools and universities--civilian projects which are very much needed by Gaza residents--cannot be completed.

The Israeli government claims to be carrying out the latest attacks on Palestinian towns and universities in retaliation for the alleged kidnapping of three Israeli youths from a West Bank settlement. As a committee charged with monitoring infringements upon academic freedom, however, we believe that such provocative and aggressive measures of collective punishment against educational institutions and their students are never acceptable and cannot be justified.  These collective punishment measures are in clear violation of both human rights law and international humanitarian law, and more specifically Article 33 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War, which stipulates: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also guarantees the right to education, as well as Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

We call upon the Government of Israel to halt its illegal assault on Palestinian towns and universities and to respect the sanctity of Palestinian academic institutions. 

Sincerely,
Nathan Brown
President

cc:        
Minister of Defense Moshe Ya`alon
Minister of Education Shai Piron
Ambassador Ron Dermer

Ambassador Daniel B. Shapiro 
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412