Both-siding Israel-Palestine: the provisional advice of the Committee on Sensitive Collaborations

As experts at this University who have been closely following the genocidal onslaught and the intensifying raids and land grabs on the West Bank, we are encouraged that our university is the first in the Netherlands to take the mounting critique on the complicity of Israeli universities seriously. As we know, Israeli universities have close ties with the Israeli state and particularly, its military. They are also sites of limited academic freedom, particularly for those critiquing Israeli state ideology and discriminatory apartheid practices. The knowledge produced in a diversity of disciplines and fields, from law, archeology to urban studies, and of course AI and bio-tech have been instrumentalised to advance the displacement and erasure of Palestinians from their indigenous land.

We welcome the close and careful scrutinisation of these universities as promised by the committee, although in cases of the utmost urgency – like the current genocide – an immediate suspension of all existing ties is urgent and necessary.

We also read the provisional advice with considerable surprise. Simply put, we are confused by its inclusion of Palestinian universities into the committee’s mandate. The inclusion of Palestinian universities was never called for, nor do Palestinian universities represent similar threats to the EUR’s own values, or to human rights, in contrast with the complicity of Israeli institutions that have been complicit for decades of settler-colonial occupation and apartheid.

In fact, engaging colleagues in embattled academic communities in Palestine, for instance our colleagues at Birzeit University in the West Bank (only last week raided, for the 23rd time since 2002, by the Israeli army), has been one of the ways our university has been able to live up to its promise of positive impact.

The inclusion of Palestinian universities into the committee’s mandate is doubly surprising given the fact that the committee also states that its decisions are not to hinder any EUR efforts to contribute to the rebuilding of the higher education infrastructure in Gaza. The Palestinian education and research infrastructure in Gaza has been bombed and academics and students have been assaulted by the Israeli military, leading to a complete cessation of all its activities. UN experts speak of a scholasticide, characterized by ‘the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.’

The committee still seems to think that the best way to have difficult conversations about our university’s ethical and moral obligations is to adopt a highly problematic and simply unempirical both-sideism to conceptualise the relation between Israel and Palestinians. In this mainstream view, two equal sides are implicated in a ‘conflict’ or perhaps even a ‘war’. However, this view contradicts established historical fact and legal consensus.

Indeed, only this past summer, the International Court of Justice underlined what historians, Middle Eastern studies experts, human rights organizations and international legal experts have been saying for decades; that this is not a relation between two equal parties, but of a state that violently and illegally subjugates Palestinians, occupies Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and pursues policies of systemic, institutional discrimination.

In this context, it is worrisome that the committee lacks international law expertise, following an unexpected change in its composition. This raises questions as to whether the committee has sufficient access to international law expertise. As members of this academic community, we urge the Advisory Committee Sensitive Collaborations to align its operations, decisions, and messaging to reflect basic empirical reality and legal consensus.