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10 October 2024

The US organisation Faculty for Justice in Palestine explain in their statement attached why they intend to shut down the Israel-sponsored Study Abroad programmes, which have been instituted at many American universities. For the same reasons, action should also be taken to identify similar programmes in the UK and to demand their suspension.

NATIONAL FJP BACK TO SCHOOL STATEMENT

FALL 2024

On the eve of the new academic year we are looking forward to a renewal of pro-Palestinian expression on our campuses. With the arrival of a fresh class of students who are invested in freedom in Palestine and beyond, the work to educate and organize will continue and grow in new ways.  As the mechanisms for suppressing speech, criminalizing protest, and weaponizing fragility also grow and intensify, faculty, academic workers, and staff must rise again to the challenge of supporting and standing with students, while defending their own freedoms in this new era of unprecedented McCarthyism. Lawsuits and legislation aimed at shutting down any criticism of Israel and its genocidal war are ubiquitous. At the same time, Israel, its enablers, allies, and apologists have never been so exposed, as the genocidal assault on Gaza and the brazen land grabs on the West Bank demonstrate, day after day, the depth of settler colonial depravity.

FJP chapters have played an important role during the last ten months. There are now almost 120 campuses in the national network, and several groups are in a state of formation. Of the three major campaigns promoted by NFJP this year, one of the largest achievements was retraction of the national AAUP’s ban on boycotts. University administrators can no longer portray pro-Palestinian advocacy as out of alignment with AAUP principles. Moreover, in a recent statement, strenuously titled, “Professors Are Not the Enemy. Fascists Are,” the new AAUP leadership has come out fighting against right-wing attacks on university professors.

Our second campaign, for Divestment, has seen mixed results. Along with some solid gains, there has been some predictable backsliding from administrators who were willing to make hollow promises to students to get them to leave the encampments in late Spring. Our students won’t be fooled again.

The third campaign, to dismantle Study Abroad in Israel programs, has enormous potential. Israeli universities have been fully complicit in the Gazan scholasticide; not a single one is on record as opposing the genocide, let alone calling for a ceasefire. Our administrations cannot justify their continued relationship with Israel institutions. Their study abroad programs have never been more vulnerable, while restrictions on entry into Israel are in clear violation of the same campus antidiscrimination codes that have been weaponized this past year against pro-Palestinian speech and action. We call on chapters to respond to the decision of the BDS leadership in Palestine to prioritize the study abroad campaigns; almost every campus has a program, and their operation is an infringement of institutional rules. Now is the time to shut them down. 

Study Abroad in Israel Violates Your Campus Policies

One of the ways to advance the academic boycott of Israel is to dismantle your university’s Study Abroad program in Israel. Many of these programs were set up after college presidents were directly solicited by Israeli state agencies. In most cases, their operation is in clear violation of campus codes regarding non-discrimination and equal opportunity because they are not accessible to all students and faculty.

It is well-known that Israel routinely denies entry to persons of Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim origin and subjects them to detention and harassment at borders, engaging unashamedly in racial profiling, which effectively declares such travelers to be suspect in advance. Those of Palestinian descent experience particular difficulties in entering.

This practice has been confirmed by the U.S. State Department, which openly observes that “U.S. citizens whom Israeli authorities suspect of being of Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim origin… may face additional, often time-consuming, and probing questioning by immigration and border authorities, or may even be denied entry into Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza.”

Just as egregiously, a 2017 Israeli law prohibits entry for anyone who has publicly supported the BDS movement, on the basis of their political opinion alone.

Israel’s racial profiling has a real and discriminatory impact on students and faculty participating in educational programs, while its anti-BDS law means that US students and faculty could be prohibited entry into the country for an act of political expression that is fully protected under the US Constitution.

No college should operate a program that contravenes its own campus policies by denying access to members of its community.

Aside from these violations, there are many other reasons for non-cooperation with Study Abroad programs. Almost all of the U.S. college programs are embedded within Israeli universities that are heavily complicit with the Occupation and ongoing Nakba. These universities have constructed and expanded their campuses on stolen Palestinian land. They maintain degree programs that systematically discriminate against Palestinian and advantage Jewish students; conduct demographic and resource research that guides land and resource expropriation; and contribute to the design of weaponry and information technology that maintain not only the Occupation but also the apartheid system of discrimination against the Palestinian population. No Israeli university has ever publicly opposed the Israeli state’s illegal military occupation of the West Bank or its racial discrimination against Palestinians within Israel or the Occupied Territories nor the systematic and premeditated destruction of Palestinian universities, libraries, and schools in Gaza. Indeed, commemoration of the Nakba is prohibited in Israeli universities as part of their erasure of Palestinian history and denial of Israel’s settler colonial character. See Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.

Israel nevertheless makes considerable public relations capital out of touting higher education opportunities and research collaborations as part of its Brand Israel campaign. Publicity for its Study Abroad programs presents Israel as a modern democracy with exciting intellectual opportunities for all. Yet beneath that facade is a racist and colonial state that segregates both its citizens and its subject populations on the basis of national, ethnic, and religious origin. While some claim these programs are an opportunity for “dialogue,” or even for “fact finding” about the conditions in Israel-Palestine, true dialogue and education cannot take place in a reality from which Palestinians are denied their rightful presence and in conditions under which they are racially subjugated and violently displaced.

The academic boycott of Israel has been called for by Palestinian scholars and students living under military occupation, siege, and in an apartheid state, and whose rights to education are violated on a daily basis. To enroll, or participate in any way, in a Study Abroad program at an Israeli institution means ignoring if not perpetuating the ongoing violation of the academic–and, indeed, human–freedoms of Palestinians.

We call on FJP chapters to push for the suspension of these programs on their campuses and to ask all students, faculty, and staff of conscience to pledge non-cooperation with any campus process—advising, registration, credit approval, departmental participation–that supports such programs.