The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that leads the global BDS movement, calls upon academics standing in solidarity with the inalienable rights of the Indigenous people of Palestine, to pressure the International Sociological Association (ISA) to cancel the participation of academics de facto representing Israeli institutions complicit in Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid regime in the 5th ISA Forum of Sociology, scheduled to take place at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, from July 6–11, 2025. This participation is a violation of the BDS movement’s academic boycott guidelines and the anti-normalization guidelines that apply to the Arab region.
Should the ISA fail to cancel the participation of scholars representing complicit Israeli academic institutions, we call for boycotting the ISA 5th Forum.
At a time when Israel, supported by the colonial West, is perpetrating the world’s first livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, and in line with international law, Israel should be isolated and expelled from all international fora.
Following the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 determination that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is entirely illegal and that it is violating the prohibition against apartheid, dozens of UN human rights experts called on all states to “cancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory” [Emphasis added].
By accepting Israeli institutions to be represented in a conference held in an Arab country* the ISA and its members are in breach of the Palestinian civil society picket line that refuses to normalize with Israel within all fields, including academic normalization. Israeli academics participating in conferences in the Arab world can only be seen as representatives of their country and institution – as representing their “flags,” so to speak – rather than as private individuals.* This violates the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines.
It is precisely this representation, which comes in the context of Israeli academics at complicit Israeli institutions establishing relations with Arabs and the Arab region, that creates a situation of normalization because it attempts to present Israel and its institutions as a normal part of the region. It also serves to further colonize people’s minds with a deceptive normalcy and a false premise of symmetry/parity between the oppressors and the oppressed, ultimately perpetuating the oppressive status quo. Such normalization undermines the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self-determination as well as the international solidarity movement’s inspiring efforts to cut the links of state, corporate, institutional, and academic complicity in Israel’s regime of colonial oppression.
Recognizing the deep complicity of all Israeli universities in the state’s regime of illegal occupation and apartheid, international law experts at the University of Antwerp in Belgium published a legal opinion in August 2024 calling on universities and research institutions in Belgium and beyond to meet their legal obligations by ending “all collaborations with [Israeli] academic and other institutions directly or indirectly implicated in the violations of international law.” Severing all links with Israel – including with its complicit institutions – that aid or assist in maintaining its occupation and apartheid regime is a legal, not just moral, duty.
The ISA 5th Forum, which is held under the theme of “Knowing Justice in the Anthropocene,” contradicts itself by including broad participation from complicit Israeli universities, including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University, Bar-Ilan University, the Open University of Israel, and Tel Aviv University. Can sociologists claim “knowing justice” when their own academic association is criminally complicit in systems of injustice?
Israeli higher education institutions have long played a role in planning, implementing, and justifying Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies 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. There is also institutionalized racial discrimination against Palestinians throughout Israel’s education system, including higher education institutions.
To give a few examples of this deep criminal complicity of Israeli universities, the Hebrew University Mount Scopus campus is partially built on land illegally expropriated from Palestinian owners in Israeli occupied Jerusalem directly serving the ongoing land theft and dispossession of Palestinians; it also hosts a military base on campus to offer academic training to Israeli soldiers. Ben Gurion University (BGU) hosts the Homeland Security Institute whose partnerships include Israel’s top weapons companies and the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The Israeli military is building a technology campus next to its campus aimed at furthering the ties between the military and BGU to “reinforce the army's operational capabilities.” Tel Aviv University runs joint centers with the Israeli military and Israel’s arms industries; it also hosts the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which developed the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, or doctrine of disproportionate force. This doctrine, adopted by the Israeli military, calls for “the destruction of the national infrastructure, and intense suffering among the [civilian] population.”
Furthermore, the representation of complicit Israeli universities strengthens and solidifies their presence in the Arab region, which seems to contradict ISA’s much appreciated recent statement in solidarity with the Palestinian people in which it condemns “those universities and higher education institutions in Israel that have played a central role in Israel’s… settler-colonial and apartheid regime, including their links to military intelligence, epistemicide, and scholasticide.”
Although the primary responsibility falls upon the ISA, Israeli participation in a forum hosted by a public Moroccan university further demonstrates the Moroccan authoritarian regime's complicity in Israel's oppression and crimes against Palestinians. During Israel’s ongoing genocide, Moroccan ports have facilitated U.S. military equipment transfers to Israel’s army. The regime has also chosen Elbit Systems—Israel’s leading arms company that is directly implicated in Israel’s genocide and other atrocity crimes against Palestinians—as a primary arms supplier, and hosted joint military exercises with Israeli forces involved in the Gaza genocide.
In this context, Moroccan universities, all under direct regime control, have engaged in persistent attempts at normalization through partnerships with Israeli academic institutions despite firm mass opposition from thousands of Moroccan students and academics, not to mention Moroccan society at large. These normalization actions reflect the regime’s disregard for the people's will and expose its role in enabling Israel’s academic whitewashing. By engaging in this normalization, the ISA aligns itself directly with the despotic Moroccan regime, its policies of normalization with the Israeli state, and its complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. By being a party to this normalization, the ISA places itself in opposition to the struggle waged by Palestinian and Arab civil society, including academic unions and associations, against normalizing Israeli settler-colonialism. In this context of the Arab region, we call on the ISA to do no harm.
PACBI also calls for pressure to be exerted on Mohammed V University to respect the Palestinian boycott call and to align with the academic boycott and anti-normalization guidelines.
PACBI demands the cancellation of the participation of Israeli academics affiliated with complicit universities that have, for decades, played a central role in sustaining Israel’s system of oppression, unless the following conditions are met:
- The Israeli participant publicly and unequivocally recognizes the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights under international law, foremost among them the right of return for Palestinian refugees and an end to Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid;
- The Israeli participant’s presentation falls within the framework of co-resistance to oppression and not coexistence under oppression, and if they state the Israeli universities to which they are affiliated, ISA must add a land acknowledgement* and a brief description of those universities’ complicity;
- The conference organizers investigate all Israeli participants to insure that they have not been directly or indirectly involved—including through incitement or dehumanizing justification—in Israel’s grave violations of Palestinian rights, particularly war crimes, crimes against humanity (including apartheid), or genocide.
Finally, PACBI calls on all Palestinian, Arab, and international academics to boycott the ISA 5th forum entirely should it fail to meet the above demands.
* Upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the BDS movement condemns racism and discrimination (according to the UN criteria) in all its forms. It rejects the exclusion of national/ethnic minorities in the Arab region as well as all discrimination or persecution against them. It understands “Arabism” not in its narrow ethnic or national sense, but rather in its progressive and inclusive sense of democratic citizenry that considers national/ethnic minorities as an integral part of the composition of the Arab region and its peoples.
* The BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines state: “ensuring that joint projects and activities between Arabs and Israelis do not undermine the principle that the struggle for the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights is an Arab struggle is certainly not the same as a boycott of Israeli individuals because of their Israeli identity. Indeed, the BNC has never called for or condoned the latter. What anti-normalization principles reject are attempts to represent Israel alongside Arab countries as if it were a normal part of the region, not a settler-colonial and apartheid state. This stance emerges from the particular context of this struggle and the centuries-old intimate relationship between Palestinians and other Arab peoples of the region.”
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* Upholding the United Nations’ 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ISA must acknowledge the inalienable rights of Indigenous peoples, including Palestinians, to “the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired” (Article 26), in all its events and publications.