5 March 2025 While President Trump threatens to halt federal funding to universities that tolerate further demonstrations, meaning of course demonstrations in support of an end to genocide in Gaza and justice for all Palestinians in the region, Governor Hochul of New York has ordered the removal of an advertisement for a post in Palestine…
4 March 2025 Lee Mordechai, an historian at the Hebrew University, has published a vastly detailed account of Israel’s assault on Gaza. This is an enormously valuable resource for anyone seriously interested in what has actually happened there, As Mordechai affirms, it leaves no doubt that a genocide has taken place. The document – the…
4 March 2025 Students and faculty at the University of Granada persuaded the administration to break ties with Israeli institutions. A pro-Israel organisation challenged the legality of this decision in the local court. The court has rejected the challenge. While an appeal to a higher court remains possible, even likely, the strength of support for…
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…