13 December 2024
You couldn’t make it up! Sussex University decided to hold a conference on “Displacement, Forced Migration and Reparation” and invited the Hebrew University to collaborate with it. How could the organisers not know of the Hebrew University’s decades long complicity in ethnic cleansing: its special treatment for IDF soldiers, its links with Israeli arms manufacturers, its contributions to the defence of state crimes, the fact that part of the University is built on stolen Palestinian land, that the faculty building still bears the name of its Palestinian owner? Or perhaps they did know and don’t care. In any case, BRICUP has issued the following protest to the vice-chancellor of Sussex University [pictured] at this insult to the academic community. We hope others will join in protesting the University’s plans.
Professor Sasha Roseneil
Vice-Chancellor, University of Sussex
10 December 2024
Dear Professor Roseneil
Conference on DISPLACEMENT, FORCED MIGRATION AND REPARATION
It is with some incredulity that my colleagues at BRICUP have learned of your university’s decision to host on your campus a Conference jointly organised by the Hebrew University.
This conference on displacement and forced migration will be taking place under the logo of possibly the major academic institution of a country which is currently engaged precisely in the displacement and forced migration that is the subject matter of the Conference, as well as war crimes (classed as ‘plausible’ by the international Court of Justice), against a defenceless civilian population. The insensitivity of this cooperation with the Hebrew University is off the scale.
Since the foundation of the state of Israel, the Hebrew University has been an integral part of the mechanism for the planning and enforcement of Israel’s regime of inexorably intensifying domination over the Palestinians that live in Israel and in its illegally occupied Palestinian territories. It has a decades long policy of discriminating against its Palestinian students, and of privileging veterans of the IDF. It is a major centre of counter-terrorism research, with commercial links on to Israel’s military-industrial industries. Israel’s devastating and indiscriminate attack which has literally decimated* Gaza’s civilian population would not have been possible without the essential contribution of the Hebrew University and other Israeli academic institutions.
It is for these reasons that scholars across the world, and a growing number of institutions, are responding positively to the appeal from their Palestinian colleagues to boycott Israeli academic institutions, and to sanction those other institutions internationally that collude with them.
It is striking that none of Israel’s universities have protested the deliberate obliteration of every one of Gaza’s universities, and the targeted assassination of leading academics including two university Presidents. But neither have you, or any UK Vice-Chancellor, seen fit even to comment on what has now been termed scholasticide.
You should cancel this conference. We urge you so to do. We also call on you to denounce publicly the scholasticide and other crimes that Israel has been and is still committing against Palestine and the Palestinians.
Yours sincerely
(Professor) Jonathan Rosenhead
Chair, British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
As long ago as July 2024, The Lancet published a study estimating the number of Palestinian deaths, including the uncounted still lying under the rubble, at 186,000 out of a population of circa two million.
