This letter was sent to VCs at UK universities on 6 February 2024
Dear Vice Chancellor,
In light of the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel in relation to breaches of the Genocide Convention, we are writing to you on behalf of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Campaigns (BRISMES Campaigns) to request that your university do more to support educators and the education system in the Gaza Strip.
Over the past four months we have witnessed Israel’s wholesale destruction of the education system in Gaza, which is made up of over 625,000 students and about 23,000 teachers and professors, all of whom have been impacted by the war. As at 24 January 2024, Israel had killed 4,327 students and injured 8,109. Further, Israel had killed 231 teachers and administrators and injured 756. The number of students and educational staff killed in such a short period is unprecedented in the region’s history. Those students and teachers who have not been killed are among the more than 1.7 million people who have been forcibly displaced and who are living in overcrowded and unsanitary shelters or sleeping in the open. Like the rest of the population in Gaza, they are at risk of dying of hunger and disease, with no access to food, potable water, electricity, heating or medicine. Whereas we focus on Higher education, we contextualize the educational system in Gaza to grasp the long-term destruction that amounts to Educide. Israel has destroyed Higher Education infrastructure in Gaza on a massive scale, the impact cannot be understood outside the massive destruction of middle and elementary education and staff, taken together this illustrates how a whole school generation is destroyed.
Israel has systematically destroyed all of Gaza’s universities. On 17 January, Israel blew up Al-Israa University, the last university left standing in Gaza. Footage shared by the BBC shows the university being completely destroyed. This act of wanton destruction follows the repeated targeting by Israel of Gaza’s universities since the start of its military operation: the Islamic University and the University College of Applied Sciences were bombed on 11 and 19 October, respectively. On 4 November, Israeli forces bombed Al Azhar University, the second largest university in Gaza, and this was followed by the destruction of Al Quds University on 15 November. The medical school in the Islamic University was bombed on 10 December, while Al-Aqsa University and the Palestine Technical College have also been severely damaged.
In addition to the destruction of universities, a majority of school buildings in Gaza have been damaged. Israeli soldiers have filmed some of their acts of destruction, including in one video which shows the moment the Israeli army blew up a UN school in Beit Hanoun in December. As a result of the destruction of Gaza’s schools, hundreds of thousands of children who have already been deprived of education for several months will not have a school to return to once Israel’s attacks subside. Moreover, Israeli forces have attacked multiple schools serving as temporary shelters, killing Palestinians who sought refuge in them. For example, in November 2023 Israeli forces attacked the UNRWA-run Al-Fakhoura and Al-Buraq schools, killing at least 40 people and wounding many others, while in December 2023, they killed 15 Palestinians in attacks on Shadia Abu Ghazala School.
Alongside the decimation of the physical infrastructure of higher education in the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces have killed 94 members of Gaza’s higher education community, including numerous internationally respected scholars, who comprised part of the region’s intellectual leadership. These include Professor Sufian Tayeh, president of the Islamic University of Gaza, Professor Muhammad Eid Shabir, a microbiologist and Tayeh’s predecessor at the university for 15 years, Dr Said Al-Zubda, president of the University College of Applied Sciences, and Professor Refaat Alareer, co-founder of the ‘We Are Not Numbers’ project and one of Gaza’s most prominent intellectuals.
As you will no doubt be aware, Israel’s killing of students and academic staff and its deliberate destruction of educational infrastructure constitute breaches of international humanitarian law, which requires Israel to take all feasible measures to spare civilians and civilian objects. It is self-evident that Israel has failed to comply with these requirements. As the UN Secretary General noted in late October, ‘we are witnessing…clear violations of international humanitarian law…in Gaza’. Further, as South Africa argued before the ICJ, Israel’s attacks on education and students should be viewed as further evidence that Israel is deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction, in contravention of the Genocide Convention. As you will be aware, the ICJ has ruled that South Africa’s case that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza is a plausible one.
In light of all of the above, we request that your university do the following:
- Condemn Israel’s destruction of the education system in the Gaza Strip and express support for Gaza’s universities, staff and students, just as UK Universities did in regard to Ukraine’s higher education system within a month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Failure to do so now would raise serious questions about the consistency of moral standards at UK universities.
- Review all partnerships, including research cooperation, student exchange programmes, and funding relations, with Israeli educational and other institutions, and end any relation that might be connected to ‘plausibly genocidal acts’ within the terms of the ICJ ruling, including support to the actions of Israeli armed forces and acts of genocidal incitement carried out by members of Israeli institutions, as well as discriminatory or recriminatory actions against Jewish and Arab Israelis who have criticized the war in Gaza.
- To commit to set up placements, fellowships and scholarships for new students from Palestine, as well as hardship funds for students affected by the war on Gaza, and to enhance provision of placements for existing Palestinian academics and students, including through the British Academy’s Researchers at Risk Fellowship Programme, which is supporting Ukrainian researchers affected by the war in Ukraine but is not supporting Palestinian researchers.
- To actively support Palestine’s universities through inter-institutional cooperation, including virtual exchanges, library sharing and infrastructural support. We note with regret that there are currently no partnerships between UK universities and universities in Gaza, exposing a clear double standard when set against the response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine: within four months of Russia’s invasion, 71 partnerships were in place with Ukrainian universities, and UK universities had ‘come forward in droves to support their Ukrainian counterparts, backed by UK Government initiatives and funding’. We expect UK universities to support their Gazan counterparts in the same way.
We kindly ask you to respond within two weeks of receipt of this letter. We look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
BRISMES Campaigns
BRISMES Campaigns 