We need to bring more attention to the university-specific #bds demands that the students of the #studentspring are making: companies invested, dollar amounts, research relationships, etc. So far, the divestment aspect seems to be lost, when it's actually the most important part.
#documentary / On The previous Israeli attempt to encourage "voluntary emigration" of Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip
The proposals being heard against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Gaza, to transfer the residents of the Strip to other countries, are not new. Dr. Amri Shefer Raviv, a historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, examined in his research a similar attempt made by the Israeli government immediately after the Six Day War.
In the months after the Six Day War, the Committee for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories drafted a document that was meant to outline the lines of action for controlling the conquered territories. The first and most important paragraph defined in the draft document: "A policy aimed at the departure of a maximum number of Arabs from the held territories".
From then on, Israel consistently dealt with the question of how to encourage the Palestinian residents of the territories to leave the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - without provoking international criticism against it. Unlike the West Bank, where about a quarter of the residents left immediately after the war, almost no resident left the Gaza Strip.
Initially, Israel hoped that a political agreement would solve the refugee problem and determine in an orderly manner the fate of the Gaza Strip and its residents. As time passed, when it was understood that a political agreement and a solution to the refugee problem were not on the horizon - Israel moved to a policy of encouraging emigration. It was a quiet policy aimed at pushing people to leave the Gaza Strip individually - whether by providing incentives to leave or pushing them to seek a better life by deliberately maintaining a low standard of living in the Strip. At the same time, Israeli representatives made efforts to reach agreements with foreign countries - including in Latin America - that would be willing to absorb Palestinian refugees for a fee.
[…] ISRAELISM uniquely explores how #Jewish attitudes towards #Israel are changing dramatically, with massive consequences for the region and for #Judaism itself.
[…] Zimmermann is part of a growing trend of young American Jews who are no longer satisfied with the one-sided narrative marketed to them in Jewish communities, Jewish schools, youth movements, and Birthright trips, but are starting to examine it critically, shaking off the automatic identification of #Judaism with loving Israel, and taking action against the occupation and for Palestinian rights.
[…] In debates with Palestinian students, Zimmermann recounts in the film, she felt again and again at a loss. "I remember there were Palestinian students who stood up and said: 'You cry over being silenced and marginalized, but my uncles and cousins couldn't sleep for weeks when bombs fell over their heads in #Gaza,'" she says. "I was thrown into these conversations where people used words I had never encountered: 'occupation,' 'settlements,' '#apartheid,' and 'ethnic cleansing.' I always thought I knew so much about Israel, but suddenly when they mentioned all these words, I didn't understand what they were talking about. I felt embarrassed that we couldn't respond to their claims. Do we not have any successful counterarguments besides 'double standards' and 'antisemitism'? This really troubled me."
Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking book revisits the formation of the State of Israel. Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint.
#nakba / studying or researching is not endorsing … but anyone who’s studying #history in the context of an apartheid/occupying state like Israel, would recognize the process by which any challenging narrative is perceived as a threat to national security or “social cohesion”
[…] Since communities that have been dehumanized are often not considered legitimate sources of information—including on their own suffering—allies have a crucial role in shifting narratives and pointing out collective cognitive dissonances. Take note of who might be telling you to leave history alone. Often, the quickest way to cut through misinformation is to ask what you are being asked not to look at. This usually involves “peeking behind the curtain” through direct interaction with the “other.” Allies are often well-positioned to do this work, as they can model the work of disentangling from an inherited narrative.
"..our universities in Australia must be places where we have the courage to take up our responsibilities as ethical researchers and teachers: our classrooms must be spaces of historical truth-telling that seek to explain why and how this is happening and support students to express their truths, including through student activism."
"As educators and researchers, we pay our deep respect to Palestinian scholars, writers, artists, and activists, including Palestinians based in Australia. We commit to continuing to learn from long histories of Palestinian description, critique, and analysis. Our colleagues in Palestine have called on us again and again to take action, and so we must. Telling the truth in history – as we know from our experiences in this settler-colony of Australia – is an important act of resistance, and we commit to undertaking this task."
#haaretz#editorial West Bank settlers are exploiting the “propitious moment” created by the war that #Hamas started to expel thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands. They are terrorizing them through various means in order to drive them from their villages. Far from everyone’s eyes, the West Bank is changing almost irreversibly.
It's not always easy to take Professor Ilan Pappé for his word when it comes to vigorous historical research, but his commentary is always interesting, and in this case also self-reflective.
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The holy rage: the plight of the Israeli left
My heart goes out to Jewish-Israeli leftists these days. They vent their distress on the pages of #Haaretz daily newspaper, while directing their anger at the global left, or at least the Western left. They are in a reality I found myself in some 15 years ago: ostracized and alienated from Jewish society for my “betrayal” of it on the one hand, yet on the other hand, not accepted as a credible partner by Palestinian society, whose national movement I supported as a researcher and political activist. Luckily that stage of my life is behind me.
When you don't belong to any group of reference, you are in a societal and intellectual limbo. This is exactly the distress of the Israeli left. The massacre carried out by #Hamas on October 7 exposed the difference between it and the global left. The global left is an organic part of the solidarity movement with the Palestinian liberation movement.
This liberation movement is no longer as institutionalized as it was, and is much more fragmented and weakened compared to its heyday in the 1970s. But it remains robust and its solidarity movement remains as well. The concepts and language of the solidarity movement have always been different from those of the Israeli left. This movement has not supported the two-state solution idea for years, and has long defined #Zionism as a settler colonial movement and Israel as an #apartheid state.
The sins of this movement, as they appear in the righteous indignation articles of writers like Eva Illouz,, Ofri Ilany, Haim Levinson and many others, are mainly twofold: comparing #Israel to colonialism, and mentioning the historical context of the massacre carried out by Hamas.
But the global left does not talk about Israel as part of global colonialism, but as part of settler colonialism. It is worth recalling, even for a moment, what characterizes settler colonial movements. These are movements of European refugees, who sought refuge and shelter from a Europe that did not want them and even persecuted them. They arrived in countries inhabited by native populations, who the new settlers saw as a fundamental obstacle to their dream of building a new Europe of their own.
Destruction of the local population or its expulsion were a precondition for the success of this new settlement. This is the story of the founding of the United States, Canada and Australia. The Zionist movement was also such a movement, and like the other movements relied on an empire to gain a foothold in a foreign land, found religious justification for settlement, and engaged in the search for ways to get rid of both the empire that assisted it and the native majority population.
Indeed, this is the perception of the global left. It includes defining Israel as an apartheid state, and was not born on October 7. It does not prevent condemnation of Hamas' actions, but it certainly provides a much more convincing explanation for this terrible event than defining Hamas as a bloodthirsty #Nazi organization that seeks to kill #Jews for the sake of killing.
Israel reacted with rage to the mass killing in the Gaza Strip, yet the Israeli left still expected the global left to be outraged along with it and relate to the horrors of that Shabbat outside any context. This is the global left's second sin, and this is the sin of the #UN secretary general: mentioning the context.
The Israeli left demands focus on the event as pure evil without context. Mentioning the context does not justify it but explains it, and above all offers a different explanation than that adhered to by Israeli politicians, pundits and journalists. In vain, the Israeli left will ask people of conscience worldwide to focus on the horrors of October 7, and therefore forget about the horrors of the occupation and siege prior to October 7 and those of the days after October 7.
The global left has always focused in the past - both in its historical perception and moral viewpoint - on contexts that gave birth to difficult actions of those who rebelled against Western oppression. Therefore, those who supported the abolitionist movement did not see the terrible massacre of whites led by Nat Turner in 1831, an event that harmed the struggle to abolish slavery, as an uncontextualized evil. Those who supported the Algerian liberation movement did not demand constant condemnation of the terrible massacre carried out by the rebels in July 1962 of white settlers in the city of Oran as if it had no historical context of over a hundred years of French abuse and oppression of the Algerian people.
These contexts explain the event, they do not justify it. They certainly clarify for us why the chorus of the Israeli left is shocked by what it defines as an insufficient response from the global left, and why its prominent spokespeople accuse the global left of anti-Semitism and immorality. As horrific as the massacre was, it does not absolve Israel of its past crimes against the Palestinians, does not justify the ethnic cleansing Israel is currently carrying out in both the Strip and the West Bank.
Moreover, and perhaps most importantly. As terrifying and horrible as it is, this is not a constitutive event: Israel will remain a settler colonial state, with features of an apartheid regime, Palestinian resistance will continue, global civil society will continue to support it, and Israel will rely solely on the support of Western elites. This is a clear recipe for continued bloodshed, with no winners, only losers, a reality in which calling for a ceasefire, which could lead to the return of the kidnapped, is considered treason, and the continuation of fighting and abandoning the kidnapped to their fate is preferred.
When the very mention of context itself is considered anti-Semitic, then pretext takes its place. The massacre serves as a pretext for ethnic cleansing in the Strip and West Bank and an excuse to muzzle and intimidate the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It also serves as a pretext for the United States to return its army to the region, from which it was expelled in disgrace after the failed attempt to impose democracy by force. It serves as a pretext for Western governments to severely undermine freedom of expression and opinion in the name of fighting terror.
Moral compass and awareness of contexts exposes the pretexts and their disaster-laden results, and above all focuses on what matters now: recognizing again that Palestinians and Israelis have only two options: mutual destruction or living together.
Professor Ilan Pappé, at the Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, is the author of "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."
🚨 FAO UK academics concerned about academic freedom and/or #Palestine:
Tory minister Michelle Donelan is trying to intimidate UKRI into silencing #academics who have expressed legitimate criticism of the genocide in #Gaza. She appears to be succeeding.
If you want UKRI to stand up for us, please sign this open letter.