Honoring the Dishonorable: An Open Letter to the University Catolica de Murcia
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the University Teachers’ Association and the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) view with grave concern the University Catolica de Murica intention to honor Benjamin Netanyahu with an Honorary Doctorate.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the University Teachers’ Association and the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) view with grave concern the University Catolica de Murica intention to honor Benjamin Netanyahu with an Honorary Doctorate. It is both cynical and hard to believe that a prestigious university like the University Catolica de Murica is honoring an Israeli prime minister whose record directly points to a series of war crimes. Such honors will immeasurably tarnish the image of the University Catolica de Murcia (UCAM). Those who have received this prestigious degree from your university will be tainted by being in the company of such a notorious personality.
- Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under a brutal and unlawful military occupation. Israel restricts Palestinians’ freedom of movement and of speech; blocks access to lands, health care, and education; imprisons Palestinian leaders and human rights activists without charge or trial; and inflicts, on a daily basis, humiliation and violence at the more than 600 military checkpoints and roadblocks strangling the West Bank. All the while, Israel continues to build its illegal wall on Palestinian land and to support the ever-expanding network of illegal, Jewish-only settlements that divide the West Bank into Bantustans.
- Palestinian citizens of Israel face a growing system of Apartheid within Israel‘s borders, with laws and policies that deny them the rights that their Jewish counterparts enjoy. These laws and policies affect education, land ownership, housing, employment, marriage, and all other aspects of people‘s daily lives. In many ways this system strikingly resembles Jim Crow and apartheid South Africa.
- Since 1948, when Israel dispossessed more than 750,000 Palestinian people in order to form an exclusivist Jewish state, Israel has denied Palestinian refugees their internationally recognized right to return to their homes and their lands. Israel also continues to expel people from their homes in Jerusalem and the Naqab (Negev). Today, there are more than 7 million Palestinian refugees still struggling for their right to return to their homes, like all refugees around the world.
- In Gaza, Palestinians have been subjected to a criminal and immoral siege since 2006. As part of this siege, Israel has prevented not only various types of medicines, candles, crayons, clothing, shoes, blankets, pasta, tea, coffee and chocolate, but also books from reaching the 1.5 million Palestinians incarcerated in the world’s largest open-air prison [2].