2 March 2025 Australian universities came under pressure from pro-Israel groups who secured the backing of Parliament to demand that the universities adopt a definition of antisemitism that protect Israel from criticism. They succeeded. Despite expressions of regret from pro-Israel groups that the IHRA definition itself was not adopted, the new definition is at least…
2 March 2025 Noura Erakat (pictured), in this thoughtful article in the Boston Review, describes the boomerang effect of America’s decades long support for Israel’s brutal repression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Historians have described the dangerous blowback from America’s practically unending wars of repression in Latin America and the Caribean. Its support for…
2 March 2025 As Anat Matar, recently of Tel Aviv University, explains in this article in The Nation, large numbers of fellow Israeli academics participate in protests against the anti-democratic actions of their government but seem unable to recognise that fighting for Palestinian rights is equally essential for Israel’s democracy. The Nation February 27, 2025…
2 March 2025 Concordia University, like the other major English-language university in Montreal, McGill, has accepted large amounts of money from wealthy pro-Israel benefactors, and as Yves Engler (pictured) explains in the following post, just like McGill its administrators are prepared to yield to the benefactors’ demands rather than respect the views of their students…
2 March 2025 As Peter Beinart (pictured) observes in Jewish Currents, the major universities have experts who could provide a suitable definition of antisemitism. Instead they rely upon partisan organisations who produce one-sided definitions, and in doing so they create a rod for their own backs. The Perils of Universities’ Unscholarly Antisemitism Reports By relying…
2 March 2025 Jo Grady, General Secretary of UCU, has written the following letter to Prof. Deborah Prentice, V-C of Cambridge University, protesting the wildly excessive request for a semi-permanent injunction against protests calling for an end to the ongoing genicide in Palestine. UCU General Secretary to University of Cambridge VC: drop your injunction suppressing…
2 March 2025 This already slightly outdated report from +972 vividly describes the apalling destruction that Israel has meted out on Gaza higher education, its faculty and students. The decimation of Gaza’s academia is ‘impossible to quantify’ With thousands of faculty and students likely killed and campuses destroyed, Palestinian universities in the Strip are barely…
27 February 2025 Faculty and students at the Freie Universitat Berlin have voted for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. This poses a huge challenge for the German authorities who have hitherto forcibly suppressed all support for Palestinians. Now is the time, therefore, for faculty and students elsewhere to demonstrate their support for this…
26 February 2025 Across Britain, universities are appointing Jewish chaplains who have expressed support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and in many cases have lived Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Now, Palestine is still the issue has exposed the fact that this is done with the help of British government…
Gaza’s doctors are systematically tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli detention. Healthcare workers are protected under international law – yet hundreds were detained during the war. Now, some of Gaza’s most senior doctors have spoken about the the violence and abuse they have faced from the Israeli state. ‘No rules’: Gaza’s doctors say they were…