To the Conference Organizers, Speakers, Participants and Sponsors:

Re: The 2021 Annual Conference of the Berkeley Centre on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law which is being co-hosted with the UCT Law Faculty from 14 – 16 July 2021.

The Conference is entitled: Inequality in a Time of Global Crisis: What have we learned about effective and proportionate responses? It is being held on zoom from 14 – 16 July.

The conference is of great significance as it takes place in the midst of a raging Covid-19 pandemic which exposes, deepens and entrenches the stark, intractable inequalities between and within countries globally.

The conference is also taking place against the background of the recent escalation of violence perpetrated against Palestinians in which the world witnessed the invasion of the sacred Al-Aqsa mosque whilst people were worshipping and the attempts to forcibly remove Palestinian families from homes they have lived in for decades in occupied East Jerusalem and replace them with illegal Jewish settlers. The people of Gaza faced a massive onslaught on the part of the Israeli Defence Force which resulted in the massacre of at least 248 people, including 66 children with more than 1900 people wounded (AJE, 22 May) and the destruction of civilian buildings and a building housing the media.

The increasing severity of Israel’s violations and its impunity obliges us to respond to the call issued by the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society organisations. Having lived for decades under Israel’s regime of occupation, colonization and apartheid, Palestinians are urging the world to demonstrate their solidarity by taking measures that will ensure that this situation is not normalised.

Given our own history as South Africans, we are morally, ethically and politically compelled to act in support of the Palestinian people. International solidarity extended to us in our struggle against apartheid South Africa helped to defeat that vile regime. It is incumbent on us to play a leading role globally to ensure that apartheid Israel is similarly treated as a pariah state by the international community, facing full economic sanctions and an arms embargo. We cannot sit by and watch as the Palestinian people suffer an incremental genocide. And we should not ignore the denial of life-saving medicine to Palestinians by the Israeli state.

While we are unequivocal in our support for the theme of the conference, we are concerned about the participation of two academics with connections to two Israeli universities in the conference. After careful consideration of the call for solidarity endorsed by the vast majority of Palestinian academics (https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi) we respond as follows.

We ask the organizers, speakers, participants and sponsors to act courageously in a show of moral, political and historical conscience by:
• honouring the South African history of struggle against apartheid;
• acting in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid and its occupation of Palestine;
• honouring the integrity and importance of the conference theme;
• supporting the rationale of the call for the academic and cultural boycott.

We call on the conference organizers to request the two Israeli academics to issue statements distancing themselves from support for any actions of the Israeli state which are in violation of international and humanitarian law, and which deny the rights of Palestinians to equality, human dignity and civil liberties. Failing this we request the organisers to withdraw the participation of the Israeli academics.

Background to our call

Many academic, human rights, research and legal bodies throughout the world, including the South African Human Science Research Council (HSRC [http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/researchdata/view/4634], Human Rights Watch (2020), B’Tselem (2021) and the United Nations (2019) have recognised Israel as an apartheid state according to the international legal definition of apartheid. Through Israel’s “matrix of control” Palestinians and Jewish Israelis are subjected to vastly unequal and differentiated legal, spatial and administrative methods of governance which meets the criteria of the definition of an apartheid state as defined by the United Nations and international human rights law. The passing of the ‘Nation-State’ law in July 2018 has entrenched privileged citizenship rights for Jewish Israelis and negated the right to equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, amongst many other egregious violations of basic human rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank are subject to the draconian laws of Israel’s military administration which governs them whilst the approximately 400 000 Jewish settlers who live in settlements in these areas are subjected only to Israeli civil law.

The world has witnessed Israel’s blatant disregard of its responsibilities as an occupying power, in terms of international law, for protecting the health of citizens in occupied territories. While Israel has vaccinated more than 60 percent of its population, giving it the highest Covid-19 vaccination rate in the world; and while it is slated to have millions of excess vaccines, it has refused to provide vaccinations for Palestinians in the occupied territories. As a result, just about 5 percent of the Palestinian population has been vaccinated, despite skyrocketing infection and mortality rates. (https://www.thenation.com/article/world/vaccine-palestine-israel/).

Colleagues in Palestine have called on solidarity organizations and all people of conscience to ratchet up solidarity work in the light of what Israeli academic, Ilan Pappe, has termed, ‘incremental genocide’ in Gaza.

The complicity of academic institutions

There are many ways in which Israeli academic institutions collude with and advance the occupation, ethnic cleansing and racism in fields as diverse as e engineering, geography, demography, hydrology, archaeology, law, history and even psychology. (See for example, https://bdsmovement.net/files/2011/02/EOO23-24-Web.pdf). Academic institutional complicity with state practices of apartheid has produced an atmosphere of suspicion, fear and censorship with punitive consequences for open and critical inquiry. Academics and students who are outspoken in their dissent experience surveillance by university administrations, colleagues, other students and state intelligence services. At Palestinian universities conditions are incomparably worse with frequent Israeli military invasions and the bombing of campuses, arrests of students and academic faculty, the prevention of entry for international academics and students or renewal of study and work visas. Most significantly, the arduous bureaucracy involved for Palestinian academics to acquire permits and permission to travel for research, conference presentations and other scholarly events is often wielded so as to prevent the free movement of Palestinian scholars and graduate students. This is in a context where the basic right of freedom of movement for Palestinians is already severely curtailed by the Apartheid Wall, check points, lock downs and an onerous system of permit applications.

The call for academic and cultural boycott

The vast majority of Palestinian academics and some progressive Israeli academics have agreed on an academic boycott until Israel agrees to extend full human and civil rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel, to end the occupation and enable the Palestinian right to return [https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/academic-boycott-guidelines]. All these demands are consistent with international law.

In the absence, to the best of our knowledge, of a publicly known position in support of the rationale calling for an academic boycott, we assume that the Israeli delegates remain part of the silent majority implicated in a currently unfolding historical trauma. We reject any kind of normalisation of Israeli oppression in the context of the Palestinian struggle for human rights. Normalisation is an entrenchment of the current status quo through participation in activities that bring together Palestinians and Israelis in ways that do not explicitly resist the occupation and all forms of discrimination, inequality and oppression of Palestinians including those who are citizens of Israel. Our call applies to the seeming absence of authentic Palestinian representation in the Conference as well.

Given our own settler colonial and apartheid past, our freedom struggle and the legacy of inequality, violence, racism and trauma we live with today, we find the false symmetry between an aggressor state and the popular resistance movement to be egregious. We cannot abide by a move which effectively “normalizes” Israeli apartheid.

Our appeal

We call on the conference organizers to request the two Israeli academics to issue statements distancing themselves from support for any actions of the Israeli state which are in violation of international and humanitarian law and which deny the rights of Palestinians to equality, human dignity and civil liberties. Failing this we request the organisers to withdraw the participation of the Israeli academics.

We therefore urge the organizers, participants and sponsors not to turn away from the urgent and discomforting issues we raise. We acknowledge that the conference organizers put out an open call for papers. This is not an appeal to boycott the conference as a whole. However, in the absence of the visiting Israeli academics’ support for the Palestinians’ struggle for their human rights, their participation at a conference of such moral and intellectual significance is unacceptable in the context of the worsening situation in Israel-Palestine and in respect of the call of the vast majority of Palestinian colleagues. Sad as it might be towards the individuals as colleagues and as fellow human beings, we cannot avoid this difficult moment by calling for a strong message of solidarity with Palestinians and with resistance to Israeli apartheid. The Palestinian people have made a clear and unambiguous call for us to respond that we cannot ignore.