On June 29, the International Sociological Association (ISA) Executive Committee voted to suspend the Israeli Sociological Society (ISS) over its failure to condemn Israel’s ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has welcomed the decision as a necessary but insufficient step to end complicity in Israel’s crimes against Indigenous Palestinians. Regardless, it is important that international sociologists and the ISA know the facts about the ISS and that its complicity goes well beyond failure to condemn Israel’s most recent heinous atrocity crimes.
Despite having declared in 2018 that it would hold no activities in illegal Israeli settlement institutions, the ISS openly welcomes faculty members from those institutions. Israel’s settlement enterprise constitutes a war crime under international law, and those who work or reside there, or provide material support to them, are knowingly participating in a war crime and must, accordingly, be held accountable. In addition, the ISS continues to list the Ariel University sociology department on its website, illustrating that its 2018 declaration was merely cosmetic and for public relations purposes to show its “partners” in the West its prettier face.
Members of the ISS have served in the Israeli military, and the organization has never called for conscientious objection, even throughout Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. A prime example is Prof. Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Uzi Ben-Shalom, who actively serves in the military reserves. Ben-Shalom is also Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ariel University, which is built on occupied Palestinian land in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel. Ben-Shalom, who is therefore knowingly participating in a war crime, was elected as the chairman of the ISS military and security community in 2015 and served until as recently as 2022.
The ISS holds its annual conferences at public and private Israeli academic institutions, universities, and research centers that are deeply complicit in Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid regime. Israeli higher education institutions have long played a role in planning, implementing, and justifying Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid policies, and now genocide, while maintaining a uniquely close link to the Israeli military and security apparatus. Much of Israel’s military arsenal and patently criminal and dehumanizing doctrines are developed in deep collaboration with Israeli universities such as Ben Gurion University, Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University, all of which have hosted ISS conferences.
The ISS leadership may want to muddy the waters by claiming that there is disagreement among members of the organization, appealing to notions of healthy “democratic” debate, and that this should be welcomed. However, that the ISS might have individual members who hypothetically disagree with its policies or positions, and who may not support the genocide or even settler-colonial apartheid, is irrelevant to the overall positions and complicity of the ISS as an institution. The fact is, in addition to all the above, the ISS has never taken a position on Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, nor is it even able to name what takes place in Gaza as genocide, let alone to situate Israeli oppression in 77 years of settler colonialism.
Given this record of ISS’s complicity with Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid, military occupation and now genocide, ISA was right to suspend the ISS. It must maintain the suspension until the ISS meets the following ethical requirements established by PACBI in consensus with Palestinian academic and civil society organizations:
- Publicly and unequivocally recognizing the Indigenous Palestinian people’s inalienable rights under international law, foremost among them the right to self-determination, the right of return – and reparations – for Palestinian refugees, and an end to Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid regime;
- Ending all forms of its complicity with Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights, and acknowledging the complicity of each and every Israeli university in Israel’s decades-long system of colonial oppression.
ISA must also do more to meet its ethical obligations. It must heed the main Palestinian demands raised in PACBI’s statement of 24 June – that were widely endorsed by Arab and international sociologists as well as by the Palestinian Sociological and Anthropological Society, the Moroccan Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (MACBI), among others. This includes requiring Land Acknowledgement for universities in all settler-colonial situations, including Palestine, acknowledging the complicity of Israeli universities in their state’s crimes against Palestinians, and vetting Israeli scholars for possible involvement in Israel’s gross human rights violations against Palestinians, particularly war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.