Dear colleagues and participants of the 5th ISA Forum in Rabat,
This call comes at a critical and urgent time. As the genocide in Gaza continues, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, displaced, or starved, we write to reaffirm and amplify the call for boycott issued this week by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). PACBI is a founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society leading the global BDS campaign.
📌 Read PACBI’s full statement here: PACBI Statement on the ISA Forum
PACBI has called for a boycott of the 5th ISA Forum in Rabat (July 6–11, 2025) due to the ISA’s continued refusal to exclude academic representatives of Israeli institutions complicit in occupation, apartheid, and genocide. This is not a call against individual Israeli scholars who have taken a principled stand for Palestinian national liberation. Rather, it is a call to boycott the Israeli Sociological Association and institutional representation, in line with the ethical framework of the academic boycott.
This call has also been supported by the Palestinian Sociological and Anthropological Association (PSAA), a member of the International Sociological Association, and our colleagues in Morocco, including the Moroccan Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (MACBI), who highlight how ISA’s refusal to act aligns with the Moroccan regime’s broader normalization agenda with Israel, at a time when Israel is committing grave war crimes across Palestine and military expansionism in the region. Maintaining business-as-usual with Israeli institutions in this context renders ISA actively complicit in that agenda.
We believe that attending the Forum without challenging these conditions not only normalizes Israeli war crimes and occupation but also undermines the ethical and political integrity of our scholarly community and contradicts the values at the core of our discipline.
ISA’s Double Standards
The ISA’s position reflects a deeply troubling double standard. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the ISA:
- Relocated its meeting out of Russia,
- Froze the membership of the Russian Sociological Association, and
- Declared it would pause dialogue “until just peace prevails.” (ISA statement on Ukraine)
Yet, it has categorically refused to take similar action against the Israeli Sociological Society (ISS), despite:
- Israel’s ongoing mass atrocities and genocidal violence in Gaza;
- The well-documented entanglement of Israeli academia with the military and intelligence apparatus; and
- The ISS’s complete silence—its failure to condemn, or even acknowledge, the genocide unfolding in real time.
This silence is not neutrality—it is an active form of complicity.
For instance, the Israeli Sociological Society maintains a dedicated “Army & Security” subgroup that has worked in close coordination with the Israeli military and intelligence establishment, a clear example of how Israeli academic institutions directly contribute to military operations against Palestinians.
Moreover, Israeli adults are subject to a compulsory draft and serve in the military reserves after their draft, including many academics who may have directly participated in or enabled war crimes. In this context, the ISS’s refusal to take clear action on this matter raises serious ethical and political concerns about the organization’s integrity.
There is no place in our academic institutions for the normalization of regimes engaged in occupation, apartheid, and genocide. At this moment of profound political, humanitarian, and moral emergency, we must uphold the principle that there is no academic business as usual with institutions complicit in such crimes.
We invite you to stand in active solidarity with Palestinians, Moroccan civil society, and all those resisting academic complicity in colonial violence. Join efforts to organize alternative panels (including panels currently scheduled for the Forum) and scholarly spaces in Rabat, in coordination with our local Moroccan colleagues, independent civil society and the Global Sociologists for Palestine network. These spaces will allow us to continue our academic engagement in a principled and just manner.
For more information, please contact us at [email protected]. Also, consider joining our mailing list ([email protected]) and following us on our website: www.gs4p.org/
In solidarity,
Global Sociologists for Palestine