Students reply to rectors: “Nothing can or will stop us”
The rectors of all Dutch universities wrote last week in Trouw that they do not want to cut ties with Israeli universities. The response came today from students of fourteen universities. “Our response? Time is up. We, students, will continue campaigning until our call for justice is heard.”
Last weekend the joint rectors of the 15 Dutch universities wrote an opinion piece in the newspaper Trouw with their response to the pro-Palestine demonstrations of recent months. In short, it indicates that despite the protests, the universities do not want to sever their ties with Israeli scientific institutions (in Dutch).
The opinion piece provoked surprise and anger among many students and staff involved in organizing encampments, occupations, and demonstrations protesting those collaborations. Many universities, including the UvA, are now working to establish ethics committees or toughen the ethical framework required for collaborations with foreign institutions.
Evaluation framework
“The response of some universities, after eight months of genocide, is to set up ethics committees. Apparently now is the time to meet for a few weeks if not months to discuss an evaluation framework, while tens of thousands of Palestinians have already been killed and hundreds more are added every day,” Itaï van de Wal (UU), Rania Ali (VU), and Ties van den Bogaard (RU) write today as a rejoinder in Trouw (in Dutch) on behalf of students from 14 universities.
“The administrators also immediately indicate in the article how much they will heed the committees’ findings by already announcing that they will continue to cooperate with institutions and companies complicit in genocide,” the students write.
The universities claim that they do not want to isolate critical Israeli scholars. “But who these critical voices are remains unclear in the piece, or what they could mean for the millions of Palestinians whose lives are uncertain. The rectors do not address that these much-cherished critical voices are harshly suppressed by the institutions they wish to continue cooperating with.”
Time is up
The students are fed up, they write. “Our response? Time is up. We, students from the encampments, occupations, and demonstrations, will continue campaigning until our call for justice – to boycott and divest from complicit institutions and companies - is heard. Police brutality, evictions, stalling with committees, deliberately misrepresenting our actions, and demands in a university-wide e-mail or opinion piece - nothing can or will stop us. We will continue until rectors hold so-called ‘sister institutions’ and other partners accountable for their complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ human rights.”
