Dr. Jaishankar Raman
Executive Director, International Affairs 
CSU Office of the Chancellor
International Programs
401 Golden Shore, Second Floor
Long Beach, CA 90802
Email: csuip@calstate.edu | Phone: (562) 951-4782

Dear Dr. Raman,

We write as students, alumni, parents, faculty, staff, community/industry partners, and supporters of the California State University. We are proud that the CSU is the “nation's largest and most diverse four-year public university” (1) and “is committed to fostering a vibrant community of diverse students, faculty, staff, and administrators” (2) to support the “upward mobility [of] students across the state [to] empower them to become leaders in the changing workforce" (3). Like California State University International Programs (CSUIP), we support CSU student participation in Study Abroad opportunities to enhance student education, build student resumes, support the development of student self-awareness, and teach understanding of another culture (4). 

Given these shared commitments and our belief in universal human rights, we are writing to urge you to immediately end the CSUIP partnership with the University of Haifa in Israel. 

In 2002, the CSU suspended its University of Haifa program due to safety concerns. It was reinstituted in 2012. At the time, in an open letter to then CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, CSU faculty, staff, and students protested the renewal of this program due to ongoing State Department concerns about safety, the real potential for discriminatory treatment of CSU students in the program (or de facto discriminatory limitations on which CSU students are eligible to participate), and the growing recognition of Israel’s occupation of Palestine as apartheid, including its role in limiting access to education for Palestinians (5).

Fast Forward to 2023: Israel’s military and related actions in the Palestinian Occupied Territories have been recognized as a system of “collective punishment” by the United Nations (6). In 2022, Amnesty International concluded that Israel’s “intent to create and maintain a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians … amounts to apartheid” and that “Israel must dismantle this cruel system and the international community must pressure it to do so" (7). Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) has documented an “endless stream of unconscionable violence” by the Israeli Defense Force in Gaza since 10/7/23 (8). On 11/3/23, the National Lawyers Guild, Palestine Legal, and the Center for Constitutional Rights sent a notice to all U.S. legislators in the House of Representatives and Senate warning them of their complicity in and liability for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity under international law (9).

The CSUIP partnership with the University of Haifa makes the CSU likewise complicit.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) argues that “[a]cademic institutions are a key part of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of Israel’s regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people'' and that “[s]ince its founding, the Israeli academy has cast its lot with the hegemonic political-military establishment in Israel, and notwithstanding the efforts of a handful of principled academics, the Israeli academy is profoundly implicated in supporting and perpetuating Israel’s systematic denial of Palestinian rights" (10).

In 2020, the South African Academic Network Against Apartheid Israel (SAANAI), in their efforts to end the University of Free State’s study abroad partnership, documented that the University of Haifa:

• “discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel through exclusionary practices;
• houses the Department for Geo-Strategy, one of whose objectives is to ‘solve’ Israel’s ‘demographic problem’ - a euphemism for ‘ethnically cleansing’ Israel of the indigenous Palestinians, who now make up around 20 percent of the population (excluding the West Bank, Gaza and the millions of Palestinian refugees);
• sponsors a scholarship solely for Israeli military veterans, thus supporting the Israeli occupation machinery;
• offered special assistance to students who served in Israel’s 2008 attack on the Gaza Strip, called ‘Operation Cast Lead’ by Israel, in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom more than 900 were civilians, including 288 children;
• hosted the Havatzalot programme until 2019, an elite IDF programme through which Israeli students are trained to be commanders in intelligence and includes a military training component” – meaning, amongst other things, that there was an IDF military base on campus (11). 

While the Havatzalot program is now hosted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (12), the University of Haifa continues to award “degrees to three [Israeli] military colleges, including the army’s Command and Staff College” (13). This relationship has existed since 2018, when Haifa University “earned the right to manage three military colleges: the National Defense College, the Command and Staff College and the Tactical Command College” (14). The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) argues that, “[u]nifying the three colleges under the academic supervision of Haifa University creates a direct responsibility for the university over the training and education of the Israeli officer corps" (15).

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has documented that the University of Haifa has regularly violated the “right of the students to organize a public event on campus as part of their constitutional right to express their opinion and their right to human dignity” (16). In 2022, Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported that Arab students, who then made up approximately 41% of the University of Haifa's student body, were effectively excluded from a primary scholarship program (17). Since 10/7/23, there have been numerous reports that the University of Haifa has expelled Palestinian students based on their social media posts (18). By 10/12/23, Adalah reported that it had “received complaints from around 80 Palestinian students, citizens of Israel, expelled or suspended from their Israeli universities and colleges due to their social media posts,” including at the University of Haifa (19).

More broadly, as part of its current war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Force has purposefully targeted universities in Gaza. The IDF confirmed that it had bombed the Islamic University of Gaza on 10/11/23 (20). Bizreit University reports that "19 higher education organizations suspended the educational process in Gaza, depriving 88,000 students of their right to education due to the Israeli occupation's assault" (21). On 11/4/23, the IDF “flattened” Al-Azhar University (22). The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said on 11/4/23 that “the far-right Israeli government’s destruction of Al-Azhar University in Gaza, another massacre of civilians in a refugee camp and the deadly bombing of a U.N. facility housing refugees are further proof that the international community must act to stop Israel’s ‘genocidal campaign’ targeting the Palestinian people” (23).

For all of these reasons and more, we believe that the CSUIP partnership with the University of Haifa is unconscionable, makes the CSU complicit in apartheid, and must be ended immediately. We urge you to take action to end this program now.