On Wednesday, 1,200 Israeli university academics and administrators issued an open letter protesting the “war crimes and even crimes against humanity” committed by the Israeli military in Gaza.
The letter—addressed to the Association of University Heads in Israel, the Board of Academic Public Colleges, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Academics for Israeli Democracy—is a reaction to the launching of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” in March, which is employing the mass starvation of the Palestinian population in pursuit of what is now the open policy of the Israeli government: the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
The statement declares:
Since Israel violated the ceasefire on March 18, almost 3,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The vast majority of them were civilians. Since the start of the war, at least 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including at least 15,000 children and at least 41 Israeli hostages. At the same time, many international bodies are warning of acute starvation—the result of intentional and openly declared Israeli government policy —as well as of the rendering of Gaza into an area unfit for human habitation. Israel continues to bomb hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Among the war’s declared goals, as defined in the orders for the current military operation “Gideon’s Chariots,” is the “concentration and displacement of the population.” This is a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing.
As academics, we recognize our own role in these crimes. It is human societies, not governments alone, that commit crimes against humanity. Some do so by means of direct violence. Others do so by sanctioning the crimes and justifying them, before and after the fact, and by keeping quiet and silencing voices in the halls of learning. It is this bond of silence that allows clearly evident crimes to continue unabated without penetrating the barriers of recognition.
The letter signifies the emergence of public opposition within Israel to the war. It is not yet clear how broadbased this opposition is. Recently published polls indicated that there still remains widespread support for the regime’s onslaught against the Palestinians, which—if the polls are accurate—reflects the deep social disorientation produced by decades of reactionary Zionist policies and propaganda.
However, given the relentless barrage of lies to which Israelis are subjected, the fact that more than 1,000 academics have denounced the policies of the government as criminal is a significant development.
The letter is a devastating indictment not only of Netanyahu’s government but of its international backers in Washington, London, Berlin and other capitals, who have denounced criticisms of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a form of “antisemitism.” The New York Times and other major imperialist media outlets have not reported on the letter, despite prominent coverage in Haaretz and Al Jazeera.
The letter contrasts the vocal role that Israeli universities played in the 2023 mass protests against the Netanyahu government’s attempt to suppress the judiciary with their relative silence on the ongoing genocide. It declares:
Israeli higher education institutions play a central role in the struggle against the judicial overhaul. It is precisely against this backdrop that their silence in the face of the killing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza, and in the face of the complete elimination of the educational system there, its people, and its structures, is so striking.
There are other signs of growing opposition in Israel to the Gaza genocide. The publication of the letter followed demonstrations Tuesday at universities throughout Israel, where students and lecturers protested the ongoing genocide in Gaza. “This is the first action against the ongoing denial and the silent support for crimes being committed in our name,” the organizers told Haaretz. At Tel Aviv University, students and lecturers protesting the genocide were assaulted by campus police officers.
One of the organizers of the protest told Haaretz, “There’s a sense of a breakthrough, that from now on, it won’t be possible to hold back.” She added, “There’s a whole community living under a kind of censorship, feeling stifled, with a scream lodged in their throats. The message we got from the students is clear: they need us to stop staying silent.”
Ayelet Ben-Yishai, a professor at the University of Haifa, told Al Jazeera that for some participants, the decision to publicly oppose the genocide was in response to “the breaking of the ceasefire in March. That was a watershed moment for many, plus witnessing the starvation we’ve been forcing on Gaza ever since then.”
The group organizing the publication of the letter is known as the “Black Flag Action Network.” Professor On Barak of Tel Aviv University told Haaretz that the group’s name is a reference to the term “coined by [then Jerusalem Magistrate Court] Judge Benjamin Halevy following the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, in which 48 innocent Palestinians were killed by the Israeli Border Police.” Judge Halevy wrote in his ruling, “The hallmark of manifest illegality is that it must wave like a black flag over the given order, a warning that says: ‘forbidden!’ Not formal illegality … but rather, the clear and obvious violation of law.”
Barak added, “The widespread indifference [toward Gazans] among many Israelis is the result of an intensive dehumanization campaign that must be actively resisted.”
Professor Yael Hashiloni-Dolev of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev told Haaretz, “Anyone with even a shred of responsibility or humanity can no longer buy into the propaganda. We must recognize that war crimes and crimes against humanity are openly being committed in Gaza. We’re in the midst of a moral collapse.”
Al Jazeera noted that “the academics’ letter is unique in that it places Palestinian suffering at the heart of its objections to the war.”
Professor Ben-Yishai told Al Jazeera, “we wanted to make Palestinian suffering central. We wanted to say that we stand alongside and in solidarity with Palestinians. This was also about taking responsibility for what we are doing in Gaza and opening people’s eyes to it.”
The letter appeals to “all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jews.” It declares, “For the sake of the lives of innocents and the safety of all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jews; for the sake of the return of the hostages; if we do not call to halt the war immediately, history will not forgive us.”
The letter has the character of a moral appeal. Its authors do not address the fundamental historical and political issues that underlie the genocide. But however deeply felt the outrage against the war, the development of an effective opposition to the regime requires a break with the ideology and policies of Zionism. The genocidal character of this war is the culmination of the policies based on the reactionary political foundations upon which the “Jewish state” was erected in 1948.
The opposition of Jewish and Arab socialists, and the Trotskyist Fourth International, to the formation of the Zionist state in 1948 has been vindicated.
The authors of the letter state that “It is our duty to save what can still be saved of this land’s future.” The phrasing leads one to hope that the reference to “this land” rather than to Israel indicates a growing awareness that the existence of the Israeli state, based on the expropriation and annihilation of the Palestinian people, forecloses any future other than one that perpetuates mass murder.
The only viable future is one that achieves the revolutionary dissolution of the existing Zionist state and the unification of the Palestinian and Jewish working class in a socialist republic.