Open Letter to Academic Leadership, by Oct-7-Academic*
We appeal to you to:
1. Address Increasing Antisemitism and Campus Safety: Academic leaders are urged to actively confront and quell rising antisemitism and ensure the safety of campuses worldwide.
2. Demand Action Against Hamas Terrorism: Call for immediate international action against Hamas for its October 7 attacks, hostage-taking, and ongoing aggression.
3. Oppose Academic Boycotts and Promote Intellectual Freedom: Strongly reject boycotts against Israeli academia, emphasizing the critical role of academic institutions in fostering free discourse and moral guidance.
4. Combat Anti-Israel Sentiment and Antisemitism in Education: Educational institutions are called upon to prevent the spread of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric on campuses and to address the misuse of terms like “genocide” and “apartheid” in relation to Israel.
November 20, 2023
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Dear Colleagues,
As members of the international academic community who endeavor to uphold universal values of enlightenment, truth, justice, and progress for the sake of humanity, we wish to express our gravest concerns over the silence and pusillanimity of many in the academic leadership worldwide. The lack of a strong, lucid, and unequivocal response to the atrocities of October 7 is kindling a rise in anti-Semitism and compromises safety in campuses around the world.
We call on the leadership of all academic institutions and organizations to clearly, openly, and unequivocally condemn the genocidal attacks by Hamas terrorists on Israel on October 7, Hamas’ ongoing holding of hostages, and its relentless rocket attacks on Israel. During the October 7 attack, Hamas murdered over 1,200 Israelis and citizens of other countries—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—wounded hundreds, and took 240 people hostage into Gaza, including babies, children, women, and the elderly. We demand that Hamas return all of the hostages immediately.
As the events have unfolded over the last few weeks, we have watched with horror the extent of Hamas’ use of the Palestinian civilian population as captive human shields, utilizing schools, playgrounds, mosques, and even hospitals for its terror activities. The actions of Hamas against both the Israeli and the Palestinian people constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We call for Hamas to enable the International Committee of the Red Cross to gain mandated access to the hostages so that it can carry out its humanitarian mission to locate and safeguard all the hostages and address their basic needs—including their basic right for freedom and release from captivity. Withholding such access constitutes another war crime. We call on the international community to focus its pressure on Hamas, as per the approach advocated in this The New York Times article by David French, who points out “the misguided logic of focusing most peace efforts on Israel”. We also call for widespread acknowledgement of Israel’s right to self-defense by all means necessary and in accordance with international law. At the same time, we are deeply saddened by the loss of innocent Palestinian lives.
As educators and researchers, we aspire to reveal the truth and see to it that our students are able to identify superficial slogans and seek deeper understanding of complex issues as part of an effort to distinguish right from wrong, intellectually and morally, and to stand up for what is right. We strongly believe that academia plays a central role in directing the moral compass of societies and thereby swaying public opinion. We unequivocally reject calls to boycott Israeli academia and Israeli academics. Such boycotts contradict the academic commitment to open discussion. Furthermore, ignoring the war crimes committed by Hamas and Israel’s right to self-defense undermines the strong and productive bonds between colleagues who share the same values and who, together, have brought critically important knowledge and discovery to the world, for the benefit of all.
We must join together around our common values, which include the protection of human life, enlightenment, education, truth, freedom, morality, democracy, and the protection of minorities and women’s rights. In unity around these values, we will be an antidote to the ideology of Hamas, thereby sidelining and squelching the influence of this terrorist organization whose only mission is global jihad and the eradication of all peace-loving peoples who stand in its way. We also hope that Palestinian children in Gaza will no longer be educated to hate Israel and Jews and that Gaza and the Palestinian people will join in our aspiration for peace and the improvement of human life.
We are deeply dismayed by the rising tide of anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism on college campuses, as documented in this New York Times op-ed by three American students at Ivy League schools. We believe that faculty and leadership of colleges and universities throughout the world must ensure that our campuses and classrooms do not become breeding grounds for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric and bigotry. Instead, they must be places in which faculty will guide the moral and ethical development of students. Institutions of higher education have a leading role to play in distinguishing between constructive dialogue and destructive rhetoric; exposing hypocrisy and the disproportionate fixation on Israel, while turning a blind eye to murderous regimes in the region that have left a trail of death and destruction (including of Palestinians) in their wake; and condemning statements that justify murder, rape, violence, and calls for genocide.
We disdain the misuse of language, labels, and the twisting of meaning to serve pre-conceived agendas, as we are seeing, for example, with the use of the words colonialism and genocide. The attempts to position Israel as engaged in a genocide against the Palestinian people has no basis in fact. Conversely, Hamas’ founding charter, written in 1988, calls for obliterating Israel; and the UN has defined Hamas as a genocidal organization. It is unconscionable that Israel’s war on Hamas has resulted in voices labeling Israel’s response in Gaza as genocidal. As The Economist wrote on November 10, “Israel, by contrast [to Hamas] does not meet the test of genocide. There is little evidence that Israel, like Hamas, ‘intends’ to destroy an ethnic group—the Palestinians.” The genocidal intent of Hamas has been described as more brutal than that of ISIS, as expert Dr. Qanta A. Ahmed outlines in this lecture and in this Wall Street Journal article.
With the same vigor, we are appalled by the silence of women’s groups following the documented sexual atrocities committed against Israeli women on October 7, including rapes and gang rapes, as described by multiple media outlets, including The New York Times in this article, and in this webinar on gender-based violence. These women’s groups include the most prominent of all, UN Women, which purports to protect and champion women’s rights and prevent violence against women and girls, yet it has gone deafeningly silent on the sexual atrocities committed against Israeli women. This is a distortion nothing short of malice, whose only explanation can be anti-Semitism. Israel’s KAN 11 TV describes the violence against women on October 7 and asks for an explanation for the double standard in this short video.
Attaching words such as colonialism and genocide to Israel—the only democracy in the Middle East, which, among other things, provided a safe haven for Holocaust refugees and for Jewish refugees from Arab countries—is repugnant in its dishonesty. Ignoring sexual violence against Israeli women is inexcusable. A failure to distinguish between the radical mission of Hamas and the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for freedom is unjust—both to Israel and to the Palestinian people. Allowing colleges and universities, ostensibly the thought leaders of the world, to become the tip of the spear against Israel and Jews, is a distortion of education and the good that they are expected to bring to the world.
We look forward to working together in partnership and toward a more peaceful future.
Signed,
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*Oct-7-Academic
Oct 7-Academic is a grassroots effort by Israeli academics in the sciences and humanities. Our goal is to fine-tune and advocate for fact-based understanding of the Hamas terror attack on Israel on October 7 and the ongoing war in Gaza, with a focus on our community: academic associations and publications, colleges and universities, and other relevant initiatives that arise from the arena of higher education.
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