It feels extremely disconcerting to keep having to convince some of the brightest minds that a centre of learning should not be assisting a foreign state in murdering children. TU Delft still works with a recognised apartheid state that has committed genocide.
We need to divest from Israeli universities as we are obliged to do under international law. As with apartheid South Africa in the seventies, cutting ties with Israeli universities will be essential to end Israeli apartheid.
However, the Executive Board continues to drag its heels. We cannot make TU Delft divest without the broad support of its own academic community. That is why we have launched a new initiative: Educate to Liberate! We are giving 400 professors individual boxes filled with evidence that proves the need to divest.
Inside, there will also be a copy of the book Towers of Ivory and Steel by Dr Maya Wind – who describes herself as ‘a Jewish Israeli, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors’. She used her privileged position as a white Jewish academic to access several key Israeli historical archives that are barred to Palestinians, further highlighting the inherent apartheid in Israeli academia.
As she takes pains to remind us, she is only saying what Palestinian academics have been saying for so long: universities in Israel are not just centres for learning, they are intertwined with the state and play a crucial and active role in upholding systemic repression and violation of Palestinian rights. ‘Inhabiting the settler university, […] is a state of complicity by default’, she writes on page 17.
Despite a year of unrelenting campaigns for TU Delft to cut its ties with the occupation, we find ourselves having the same conversations over and over again: the confusion of institutional with individual boycotts; the purporting of academic freedom while supporting academic apartheid; and, the defeatist attitude towards TU Delft’s influence on the genocide. Meanwhile, malicious attempts to brand any anti-genocide action as anti-Semitic continue.
‘As this decision concerns everyone, we should all be informed’
The purpose of our initiative is to refocus the conversation to TU Delft’s obligations under international law and the failure of the Executive Board to adhere to it thus far.
Our ties with Israeli universities have not been used as leverage to put any tangible pressure behind the ‘call for a ceasefire. For almost 18,000 children it is already too late. TU Delft asked for a ceasefire while simultaneously working on the development of the weapons that were used to massacre people in Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. It refused to cut the ties (in Dutch) in the name of ‘academic freedom’, even as Israel bombarded every single university in Gaza to ashes.
In two months of ‘ceasefire’, Israel killed hundreds of people in Gaza. It violated nearly all the conditions it agreed to, preventing the entry of food and aid and refusing to advance the peace process. It emptied entire cities in the West Bank, displacing thousands. On 17 March, it shattered even this limited calm, resuming large-scale bombing of Gaza and murdering 183 children in a single night. If these massacres go unpunished, who can expect them to end?
We have had many meetings with the Board over the last year and a half. Our initiative for an academic discussion is not new. We have seen all possible forms of protest at Dutch universities. Amid all the scrutiny of these protests, people overlook the gravity of complicity in genocide.
Dutch university rectors have decided to keep collaborating with Israeli institutions (in Dutch) without consulting the broader academic space – you and me. As this decision concerns everyone, we should all be informed. Which is why an electronic version of the box will be available on our Instagram and YouTube channels, and on our future website. This way, ‘Educate to Liberate’ will extend a hand to everyone at TU Delft.
This April, we will distribute the 400 personalised boxes. A month later we will have a follow-up event to which professors, staff and students are invited, with renowned speakers to bring academic discussion at TU Delft back to life. In a campus filled with fear and hesitation, we hope to break the silence with this eye-opening gift.
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