According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 63,000 people have been killed in the territory – the majority of them civilians – with the true toll likely far higher. UN-backed experts have confirmed parts of Gaza, much of which has been reduced to rubble, are now in a “man-made” famine.
In response, a growing number of academic bodies are now distancing themselves from Israeli institutions. Last year the Federal University of Ceará in Brazil cancelled an innovation summit with an Israeli university, while a host of universities across Norway, Belgium and Spain have cut ties with Israeli institutions. Others, including Trinity College Dublin, followed suit this summer.
The University of Amsterdam has ended a student exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the European Association of Social Anthropologists has declared it will not collaborate with Israeli academic institutions and has encouraged its members to follow suit.
Stephanie Adam of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel said Israeli academic institutions are complicit in “Israel’s decades-long regime of military occupation, settler colonial apartheid and now genocide”, adding there is “a moral and legal obligation for universities to end ties with complicit Israeli universities”.
However, few institutions in the UK, France and Germany have announced they are cutting links Israeli academia, with Universities UK (UUK) saying it does not support an academic boycott.
Ghassan Soleiman Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon and rector of the University of Glasgow, said that students and academics across the UK have pushed for academic boycotts of Israel, but are being blocked by the governing bodies of universities.
