Update

After Hebrew U conference cancellation - intensify academic boycotts!

Nobel laureate says majority of participants “would not want to cross lines of peaceful protestors or signal tacit support to the actions of the Netanyahu government”

Following the cancellation of a major international conference on behavioral economics which was to be held at the Hebrew University, Palestinians call for intensifying academic boycotts of complicit Israeli institutions to help end Israel’s regime of apartheid and settler-colonialism.

A member of the conference’s organizing committee, Professor Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, Nobel Memorial Prize laureate for Economic Sciences in 2017, said that the majority of participants would not have attended.

Prof. Thaler said that the organizers believed that most participants “would not want to cross lines of peaceful protestors or signal tacit support to the actions of the Netanyahu government” - the most far-right, racist, fundamentalist, sexist and homophobic in Israel’s history.

Yet the academics who had planned on attending this conference were clearly opposed to the tactic of academic boycott when called for by the Indigenous oppressed Palestinians, and are instead answering the call of oppressors, who want to safeguard their ‘settler democracy’.

Like all Israeli universities, Hebrew University is deeply complicit in Israel’s regime of oppression and should be boycotted. Hebrew U is itself partially built on stolen Palestinian land in occupied Jerusalem, and actively cooperates with Israeli occupation forces.

We are proud that hundreds of international academic departments, centers, unions and societies worldwide – as well as thousands of scholars, staff and students – have endorsed statements supporting Palestinian rights, including support for academic boycott of Israel

PACBI – endorsed by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), and a broad consensus of Palestinian academics and academic associations – calls for intensifying boycotts of Israeli universities for their pivotal role in apartheid.



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