Petition: Boycott the Public Lecture by South African Israeli Architect Dan Price at Wits University 

To: The WITS University Administration, Faculty, and Student Body

We, the undersigned, call for the immediate cancellation of the public lecture by Israeli architect Dan Price, scheduled for August 28th.

This petition is an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people and a response to the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The BDS movement is a peaceful, strategic campaign to pressure Israel to comply with international law and uphold Palestinian rights.

Our institution must not provide a platform for individuals who are deeply complicit in the ongoing oppression of Palestinians. Our call for boycott is based on the following principles:

1. Institutional Complicity: Dan Price’s career is fundamentally tied to the Israeli state apparatus. His most prominent work, the Israeli Supreme Court building (designed with Ram Karmi and Ada Karmi-Melamede), is not a neutral structure. It is a powerful symbol of Israeli state power that systematically legitimizes the dispossession, military occupation, and apartheid system enforced upon the Palestinian people. By designing such an iconic institution, the architect is directly complicit in normalizing this system.

2. Cultural Whitewashing: Featuring an architect of major Israeli state buildings constitutes "cultural whitewashing." It uses art and architecture to create a facade of normalcy and sophistication, obscuring the brutal reality of Israel's violations of international law. Hosting this lecture implicitly endorses this whitewashing and contradicts our university's stated values of justice and human rights.

3. Academic Responsibility: As an academic institution, we have a responsibility to stand on the right side of history and not remain silent in the face of injustice. Providing a platform to figures from a state that is currently facing charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is morally indefensible and undermines our academic integrity.

We are not calling for this boycott because of Dan Price’s individual beliefs, but because of his professional and institutional role in a state that practices apartheid. The BDS movement specifically targets institutions and individuals that are complicit in violating Palestinian rights.

Critique of Dan Price's Scholarly and Professional Work

While the academic study of architecture is vital. His research and built projects are not neutral; they are deeply intertwined with the project of Israeli nation-building, a process that has historically involved the displacement and erasure of indigenous Palestinian presence.

His co-authorship of ‘Architecture in Palestine during the British Mandate, 1917-1948’ examines modernism in a specific historical period. However, without a critical framework, such work risks normalizing an architectural history that served as a precursor and foundation for the establishment of a Zionist state, often overlooking the narrative of the Palestinian communities who also inhabited that land.

Furthermore, his latest research into Israeli social housing from 1948-1967, a period known as the foundational era of the state, is particularly ethically fraught. Much of this housing was constructed on land expropriated from Palestinians and was used as a tool for the demographic engineering of the state, solidifying Jewish Israeli control over the territory and preventing the return of Palestinian refugees. To celebrate these "Commons" without a rigorous critique of their role in the ongoing displacement of Palestinians is to sanitize a deeply problematic history.

Therefore, presenting this work as apolitical academic scholarship is misleading. It represents an architectural practice and historiography that is complicit in normalizing the structures of state power and settlement. A responsible academic institution must ensure that such work is presented not as a mere technical or historical lecture, but is contextualized within critical discussions of power, colonialism, and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights. 

We Demand:

• The immediate cancellation of the lecture by Dan Price.
•  A public commitment from the university to adhere to the academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions and their representatives, as called for by Palestinian civil society.
•  That the university instead use its resources to platform voices advocating for Palestinian liberation, human rights, and justice.

By signing this petition, we urge the university to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and cancel this event.

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