1,200 Spanish University Professors and Researchers Demand to Break Academic Relationships with Israel

1,200 Spanish University Professors and Researchers Demand to Break Academic Relationships with Israel

1,200 Spanish University Professors and Researchers Demand to Break Academic Relationships with Israel

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This statement was first published here on 6 August 2014.]

More than one thousand professionals have signed a manifesto, released by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) academic campaign for Palestine, demanding to end all institutional relations with the Israeli academic world, until it stops supporting occupation and apartheid in Palestine.

The campaign, which started two years ago, asks for support from professionals from the academic and scientific field, and also from associations linked to this field, such as student’s and worker’s unions, research centers, professional associations, etc. From the 1,400 people who have signed the manifesto, 150 are professors, 850 are teachers and 200 are researchers. More than fifty-two associations linked to the academic field have also signed; among them there are research groups and University departments.

This initiative is part of an international campaign: Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) to Israel. This international calling is a non-violent strategy driven by the Palestinian Society in 2005. It is growing as an effective pressure strategy towards Israel, so that it respects Human Rights and International Law. Last year, the physician Stephen Hawking, the Nobel Peace Prize Desmond Tutu, and four American academic associations adhered to the boycott. It is important to emphasize that this demand is at an institutional level and not at an individual one. On the same line, the European Union has established a de facto boycott to all collaboration with Israeli research centers and Universities placed in the Occupied Territories.

The campaign will keep collecting signatures and foresees to support specific campaigns which will develop in different Spanish universities, such as the University of Vic and the University of Malaga, where the aim is to break ties with Haifa University and Tel Aviv University, respectively.

In Catalonia, activists from the above mentioned campaign occupied the Secretary of Universities and Research on 15 May, asking for transparency in all of the agreements signed last November when a delegation of businessmen, councilors, and directors of research centers led by Artur Mar travelled to Israel to tighten economic and academic ties with Israeli institutions.

As a result, a meeting was achieved with the Secretary of Universities, Antoni Castellà, where the campaign’s demands were exposed. He delivered the agreements signed
during that trip. Even though he assured that no Catalan Universities collaborate with universities that are involved in the Occupation of Palestine, these Israeli universities do actively participate in military research projects and in the Palestinian occupation. This is documented in Alejandro Pozo’s report: Defensa, Seguretat i Ocupació com a Negoci. Relacions Militars, Armamentístiques i de Seguretat entre Espanya i Israel.

The Spanish campaign has achieved a special echo in Catalonia, where forty percent of the total signatures are from: more than 550. The Universities that have participated the most are the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universitat de Barcelona. This is especially significant since the Generalitat is clearly trying to transform Israel into a priority partner, with a specific emphasis when it comes to University ties.

For more information and to contact members of the campaign, send an e-mail to bdspbai@gmail.com.

Red de Solidaridad contra la Ocupación de Palestina (RESCOP)

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • A Way of Walking: Conversations with Michael Gilsenan

       A Way of Walking: Conversations with Michael Gilsenan

      Michael Gilsenan's "festpod": Intimate interviews about politics, religion, books, life, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Singapore with Talal Asad,  Khaled Fahmy, Darryl Li, Maya Mikdashi, Sherene Seikaly and many more colleagues, students, and friends."

    • Emergency Teach-In — How to Get Your Event on Palestine Canceled? Top 10 Strategies

      Emergency Teach-In — How to Get Your Event on Palestine Canceled? Top 10 Strategies

      Holding an event on Palestine in the era of Genocide and Teslocracy has become slightly complicated, even as Nazi salutes are bravely defended by the ADL. The stench of fear-induced eAU (eMOTIVE ADMIN-URINE) is palpable as some ponder whether to support their University mission or to succumb to supporters of Israel’s Apartheid--as an example for generations to come. Sadly, they’re slacking; some events have fallen through the cracks, and were actually held on their campuses. Join usas we help you put an end to this by devising strategies to cancel the remaining events. Liberation struggles on campus will not be tolerated so long as we’re afraid to speak truth!

    • Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      Long Form Podcast: Our Next Three Episodes

      There can be little doubt we are living in a time of monsters. But is the global order that emerged after the horrors of the Second World War dying in a paroxysm of conflict and violence that are tearing its foundations apart? Or are we experiencing yet another period of upheaval that will be absorbed and leave the world as we know it fundamentally intact?

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