As profoundly disheartened, outraged members of the academic community at Erasmus University Rotterdam and its affiliated institutions, we aim to bring attention to a matter of utmost importance: our university’s hypocritical silence on the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Israel’s terrorizing genocide of Palestinians.
However, the university's complicity extends beyond mere silence: it actively collaborates with the occupying state. Continuing ties with the Israeli apartheid state and institutions that uphold its colonial domination of Palestine makes our university an active participant in the brutal and violent subjugation of Palestinians. One stark example of this involvement is Tel Aviv University, where our university has ties as an exchange partner for Rotterdam School of Management. Tel Aviv University has developed numerous weapon systems and contributed to the "Dahiya doctrine," a strategy involving brute force that has led to war crimes against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Furthermore, a study by Human Rights Watch has exposed Israel’s apartheid regime, including institutionalized racial discrimination against Palestinians within Israel's (higher) educational systems.
Palestinians are currently killed in unfathomable numbers at the hands of the settler-colonial state of Israel. In the past two weeks, the oppressive regime has conducted relentless airstrikes in a confined area, home to 2.2 million people – occupying a mere 365 km², twice the size of the Dutch island of Texel – with the only possibility of exit destroyed by Israel. With this statement, as students and scholars, we respond to the call of the scholars of Birzeit University in Palestine and use our words, “however futile they may feel in such critical times.” We write this letter as a call to action, demanding solidarity and accountability. The world is watching, and history will remember those who spoke out and acted in the face of injustice while etching into memory the silences that allowed these atrocities to continue.
For the past 75 years, the Palestinian people have endured the unrelenting injustice of ethnic cleansing by Israel, their lives marred by dispossession, displacement, and the destruction of their homes and communities. These atrocious horrors have been meticulously documented while the world has watched in cold silence. In response to Israel’s recent genocidal bombings, Western leaders have even repeatedly expressed their unconditional support for Israel’s ‘right to self-defense,’ a perplexing contradiction for a colonial entity that has been very explicit about its genocidal intentions. It is the erasure of the context of the settler-colonial condition that facilitates these mass atrocities, painting the colonizer as the victim, essentially erasing history.
It is more urgent now than ever for EUR to drop its cowardly ‘neutral’ stance on this colonial violence waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. Our university had no issue with taking a clear stance when Russia invaded Ukraine, freezing all ties with Russian and Belarussian organizations, putting out a statement, and providing immediate support for students. This clearly demonstrates that EUR does not hesitate to take a stance and has the will to act on geopolitical issues if it aligns with its political dispositions. Now that Israel has put Gaza under an illegal and immoral siege of genocidal proportions and dropped more bombs in one week than the United States had in any single year of its war in Afghanistan, to be neutral is to side with the oppressor.
This is not the first time EUR students and scholars have called upon the university to cut its ties with Israeli institutions, with petitions, protests, actions (2021, 2022, 2023), and statements. Until now, our university has chosen to either stay silent or repress our voices. Knowing the history of Rotterdam being bombed during WWII, it would be a shameful tragedy for EUR not to learn from this dark page of its own city’s history and remain complicit in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and all of humanity. We cannot sit back and must join efforts to stop it.
Therefore, we issue an uncompromising call to students and workers at our university to act in the name of justice. We demand our university to (1) unequivocally condemn the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the settler-colonial state of Israel, (2) to immediately implement an academic boycott of Israeli partnerships with the university, and (3) to call upon their academic partners to do the same. We must (4) stand unwaveringly in solidarity with Palestinian scholars, students, and staff. The time for action is long overdue.
Palestine Solidarity Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Colour, EUC Collxctive, OccupyEUR, Progressive Student Party
To read the original statement: click here