Cut ties with Israel? Dijkgraaf is opposed
Should universities cut their ties with Israel? Students have been demonstrating for that for weeks, now also in Tilburg. But Minister Dijkgraaf thinks, on the contrary, that it would be better for institutions to maintain contact with Israeli universities.
Pro-Palestinian protests are being staged in all sorts of places. The demand of protesters, occupiers, and hunger strikers is always the same: Our educational institution should cut ties with Israeli universities.
Israeli anthropologist Maya Wind is a strong advocate of this. She toured the Netherlands last week with her book, explaining how Israeli universities contribute to the oppression of Palestinians.
“In the West, there is still the idea that Israeli universities are bastions of liberalism and democracy,” Wind said recently in the daily newspaper NRC. “What I show is the gap between that myth and reality. Academic institutions are deeply embroiled in repression.”
That argument is getting a hearing here and there. The art academies in The Hague and Rotterdam have severed ties with Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Arts. Other art academies are reviewing or freezing that cooperation.
Good reasons
Outgoing education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf, on the other hand, thinks there are “good reasons” to “precisely” maintain contact with universities in Israel. “The biggest critics of the Israeli government are at those universities," Dijkgraaf said on the current affairs program Buitenhof last Sunday.
He called on universities and colleges to be “careful” about freezing or severing ties with Israel. Administrators should make such a decision only “with the consent of the university community” and after consultation with ethics committees, the minister believes.
Dijkgraaf is not alone. In Amsterdam, 400 employees and students of the University of Amsterdam have signed a petition in which they “distance themselves from those who use occupations and blockades to force the UvA to end its ties with Israeli scientists and institutions without question.”
Holocaust researcher Amanda Kluveld also opposes severing ties with Israel, she writes in the weekly EW. “Israeli academics, including many committed to peace and dialogue, would be isolated by this.” She does not understand why universities do not defend themselves more vigorously against the accusation that they are complicit in genocide.
Academic freedom
“The university is not a consensus machine,” Dijkgraaf said last Sunday. “The administrator’s job is actually to say: What opinion do you want to have, because then I'll connect you to the researcher who has that perspective.” With that comment, he supports administrators who do not want to take sides in the polarized debate.
Demonstrators, on the contrary, are doing everything they can to increase the pressure on administrators. In Tilburg, students are getting ready to set up their tents on campus, reports university newspaper Univers. In Nijmegen, students expanded their tent camp to a spot under the window of the university administration. In Maastricht, all attention is on the ongoing hunger strike.
Of the six students who began their hunger strike last Wednesday, four remain. This weekend one student had to quit due to health reasons. The other four say they will not eat until Maastricht University cuts ties with Israeli universities.
