{"id":169201,"date":"2024-06-07T15:20:14","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T13:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/?p=169201"},"modified":"2025-12-19T11:27:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T10:27:23","slug":"open-letter-from-staff-at-erasmus-cut-all-ties-with-israeli-academic-institutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erasmusmagazine.nl\/en\/2024\/06\/07\/open-letter-from-staff-at-erasmus-cut-all-ties-with-israeli-academic-institutions\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Letter from Staff at Erasmus: Cut all ties with Israeli academic institutions"},"content":{"rendered":"

We, staff members of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Erasmus Medical Center, express our solidarity with the Palestinian people. We also support our students who have joined the global student movement last week on 30 May 2024 with an encampment on Campus Woudestein.<\/p>\n

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By the day, the campus protest encampment gets more and more decorated. The protesters make signs mostly on campus.<\/span><\/p>

\n\t\n\n<\/svg>\n<\/span>\n\tImage by:<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFeba Sukmana<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>

With this letter, we reiterate the longstanding call on our university to cut all institutional ties with Israeli academic institutions and companies that are complicit in apartheid, the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, and decades of atrocity crimes committed against Palestinians. These well-documented crimes have now escalated to unprecedented levels since October<\/strong> 2023, leading to formal charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice and a request by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for arrest warrants against the Prime Minister and Minister of Defense of Israel, as well as three members of Hamas. The State of Israel, with the unconditional support of our own Dutch government and other allies, has been committing these egregious violations of international law and inflicting unfathomable suffering on Palestinians in Gaza, as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The deliberate nature of the violence perpetrated on civilians is underscored by three separate rulings of the International Court of Justice in the first half of 2024 that establish a plausible risk of genocide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While our Board has publicly committed to review its institutional ties with Israeli universities and announced on 4 March 2024 that a committee will be established to conduct the review, it has now been three months and no information has been made public about the committee\u2019s mandate, its members, or of its progress. We call on our board to follow through on its commitment and conduct the institutional review on the basis of Human Rights Due Diligence as a matter of urgency<\/em>. In the meantime, we call on our university to immediately suspend <\/em>all institutional ties during the review process.<\/p>\n

We stress that the call to suspend and cut ties with Israeli academic partners and companies is not because they are Israeli, rather it is because they are directly complicit <\/em>in atrocity crimes against the Palestinian people, in apartheid and in the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, all in violation of international law. Following the well-established guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel<\/a>, we stress that this boycott is not directed at individuals based on their identity, rather it is directed at institutions based on their complicity. The aim is to pressure and incentivize institutions to end their complicity.<\/p>\n

The complicity of Israeli universities is well-documented, including of the universities identified as EUR partners in the list released on 8 May 2024, and involves several modalities of oppression which are also comprehensively documented by Dr. Maya Wind in her recent book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom<\/em><\/a>. These modalities include extensive education collaborations with the Israeli Defense Forces and Israeli military industry by all<\/em> <\/strong>Israeli universities. Specifically, Israeli universities:<\/p>\n