The struggle to silence the Palestinian story in countries claiming to uphold free speech has produced endless contradictions, but none more glaring than the effort in Germany to withhold the 2023 Hannah Arendt prize from Masha Gessen. Arendt was a German-American intellectual and critic of Israel. Gessen is a Russian-American intellectual and critic of Israel….
Home > All News Items and Articles On 2 November 1917 the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour wrote to Lionel, 2nd baron Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation, promising to support the establishment of a Jewish “national home” – commonly understood to mean “state” – in Palestine,…
Home > All News Items and Articles British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) Palestine: Memory, Identity, Resistance BRICUP Seminar Series 2023-4 All seminars are on-line events, and take place at 18.00-19.30 London time. They consist of a presentation by the guest lecturer, an exchange with a discussant, and then questions and contributions. All…
Campus Voices for Palestine a UK-wide campaign to resist the suppression of Palestine advocacy and any interference with academic freedom in Middle Eastern research ‘Palestine – will not be silenced or erased!’ Dr. Husam Zomlot, Palestinian Ambassador to the UK, delivered a spirited defence of Palestine advocacy in British Higher Education at the launch meeting…
Home > All News Items and Articles Academic Freedom, Free Speech and Palestine Solidarity Campus Voices for Palestine a UK-wide campaign to resist the suppression of Palestine advocacy and any interference with academic freedom in Middle Eastern research ‘Palestine will not be silenced or erased!’ The campaign was launched at the end of January with…
Home > All News Items and Articles Israel and its Western mouthpieces have persuaded ill-informed audiences to believe that the trouble in Gaza began on 7 October 2023 when Hamas militants invaded Israeli territory, killing some Israeli settlers and capturing others. According to this narrative, Israel since then has merely been “retaliating” against the Palestinian…
Home > All News Items and Articles Hillel, the Jewish student organisation with branches on campuses across the United States and Canada, has long made anti-Zionist, non-Zionist and Zionist-sceptical Jewish students unwelcome inside its doors. It is all the more noteworthy therefore when a (retired) senior Hillel officer calls on Jewish alumni, donors, students and…
In a worrying development, the University of Birmingham Administration ordered a discussion of the crisis in Palestine wholly within the Law Department in November to be cancelled on preposterously inadequate grounds. The Dean of the Law School initially endorsed the cancellation on scarcely less spurious grounds, then apologised. But the Administration has since failed to…
Home > All News Items and Articles Predictably, Palestinian students in Israeli universities are being regularly censured and punished for expressing their views on social media. Equally predictably, Jewish students in Israeli universities are not. It has often been claimed that the universities in Israel are islands of liberalism in a sea of increasing illiberalism….
Home > All News Items and Articles According to a report from the Ministry of Education in Ramallah, 4,119 students have been killed in Gaza and 37 in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 7 October 2023. In addition, 221 teachers and administrators have been killed. 381 schools have been bombed and vandalised, and the few…