Newsletter Archive:


  December  2011 www.pacbi.org  
 

 Islamic University of Gaza building destroyed by Israel in the 2008-09 assault

Open Letter to Cornell University: Don’t Collaborate with Apartheid

It was recently revealed that Cornell University plans to collaborate with Israel’s Technion Israel Institute of Technology to build a joint campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, including the use of $100 million in public funds.  The US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) has appealed to “colleagues–students and faculty alike–at Cornell University to join [their] peers at McGill and Concordia Universities in Canada to refuse complicity in Israel’s military-industrial complex. “  The letter further states that Israeli academic institutions provide for the technological foundation for Israel’s practices of occupation, colonization and apartheid.  “Technion, like all Israeli academic institutions, is deeply complicit with Israel’s military, providing it with the technological infrastructure to maintain and expand its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land.”

We join USACBI when they state, “Cornell’s project means the active participation in an apartheid regime that oppresses Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese people through its military apparatus, bolstered by its academic institutions.”  Along with USACBI, we call on “our colleagues to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian call for [BDS] until Israel meets its obligations to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law.”





British students reject twinning with Israel's Hebrew University

Students at Britain's University of York have rejected a proposal to twin the institution with the Hebrew University in occupied Jerusalem. The vote on the issue was carried out by York University's Student Union: 891 students voted against the twinning proposal, with 144 in favour and 127 abstained.  



Time for outrage against academic support for Israel

Heaping research subsidies on Israel's war industry is an affront to the notion that science should serve the public good.  If there was more knowledge among Europe's taxpayers about how our money is going to companies that profit from the suffering of Palestinians, … most decent people would be outraged. 




Introducing Freedom Funnies – ‘My Name is Samia Halaby’

Ethan Heitner will be producing a series of comics for Mondoweiss. Heitner is freelance illustrator and cartoonist who volunteers with Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel. More of his work can be seen on his website, www.freedomfunnies.com.  


  



PACBI Editorial

2012: A Year to Further
Intensify Academic Boycott

2011 was a year of hope and revolution. PACBI began the year with a message of solidarity with the people behind the revolutions in the region. By mid-year, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) expressed a similar sentiment of solidarity with movements around the world that seized on this revolutionary moment.

As 2012 begins, we wish to reaffirm our strong support for and solidarity with the progressive revolutionary voices of the world valiantly putting their life at risk for our collective freedom, justice and dignity, especially in the face of counterrevolutionary forces, often from within.

We call on activists to intensify all aspects of BDS, but to especially focus on academic boycott.  Specifically, we call on faculty and student activists to pressure their academic organizations to end collaboration with complicit Israeli academic institutions or organizations, and not to organize or participate in conferences in Israel.  Furthermore, we appeal to academics not to publish in Israeli academic journals and to withdraw from editorial boards of international journals based at Israeli universities.  We also urge academics and students to oppose study-abroad programs that place students from the US and Europe at Israeli universities and, for those in Europe, to rally against Israeli academic collaboration under FP7.   
 
  PACBI Welcomes Cancellation of Joker Performance, Condemns Violent Threats

PACBI strongly and unequivocally condemns any violent threats made against Joker or any other cultural or academic figure who decides to visit Israel in violation of the Palestinian boycott of Israel.

     

Jane Birkin: No Balance with Apartheid!
 

Birkin’s performance in Tel Aviv would undermine our boycott against Israel's cultural institutions and provide Israel with a valuable cover of normalcy to whitewash its occupation and apartheid.		      

International Society for Justice Research: Working for Social Injustice?

ISJR must be aware of how disingenuous and ironic it is to hold a conference in Israel on social justice while ignoring the demands and voices of [Palestinians] seeking freedom, equality and justice.		  
   
 
 
  Risala in Arabic means mission, message or letter pacbi@pacbi.org