On this May Day, a historic day for the international labour movement commemorating workers' struggles for dignity and justice, Palestinian trade unions reiterate their call on trade unions across the world to build campaigns to end complicity with Israel’s genocidal 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid.
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The heads of nine Israeli universities issued a statement making vile, dangerous and entirely unfounded accusations against the inspiring student mobilizations for divestment from Israeli genocide and apartheid. These same universities uphold Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. Here’s how they do it, and the reason why Palestinians call for a boycott of complicit Israeli universities:
The Nakba of 1948 marks a grave chapter in history, where approximately 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes as part of a systematic campaign orchestrated by Zionist militias and later the Israeli army. This tragic event was not merely a singular moment of displacement but also the commencement of decades of oppression and denial of Palestinian rights. Since then, the Palestinian people have experienced the entrenchment of Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and military occupation of their land, which continues to this day.
Students and faculty across the world - from the US to Australia, from the UK to France - are rising up in what is rapidly escalating to a global mobilization focusing on Israel’s Western-enabled genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip and, crucially, on the complicity of institutions in it. It is an urgent wave of defiance and determination of a new generation that refuses a world of unhinged brutality, impunity, racism and oppression, whether targeting Palestinians or oppressed communities everywhere.
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) is deeply inspired by the unprecedented wave of protest camps sprouting up on campuses across the US against Israel’s #GazaGenocide and university complicity. The selfless determination of students seeking to rid their campuses of ties to Israel’s regime of apartheid and genocide against millions of Palestinians, in the face of shameful repression by university administrations and police, gives us hope.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) strongly condemns the shameful arrest of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian by Israeli forces in occupied Jerusalem. Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian is an internationally renowned Palestinian feminist scholar whose work focuses on gendered violence and violence against children, in particular in the context of Israeli settler colonialism.
Pitzer College makes history once again, as the College Council votes by 71% for full institutional boycott of Israeli universities over their complicity in Israel's regime of military occupation, apartheid and now genocide, against millions of Palestinians.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) welcomes news that Pitzer College has closed its study abroad program with Haifa University following years of campaigning. Pitzer College is the first US higher education institution to enact a significant measure of the academic boycott of Israel.
New research analyzing AXA’s financial holdings in Israeli banks has been conducted by the civil society organization, Ekō. It shows that the insurance giant divested $9.4 million dollars of shares from the Israel Discount Bank and Bank Leumi at the end of 2023. The data on AXA holdings extracted from Bloomberg Terminal shows that as of 15 February the AXA Group still owns shares of $2.6 millions in Bank Hapoalim.
Samsung Next, the innovation arm of the Korean technology giant, Samsung, is shutting down its Tel Aviv operations, yet another strong indicator of the dramatically declining confidence in the Israeli economy.
Israel is plausibly committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, as ruled by the International Court of Justice. International sporting bodies have a moral obligation to take all measures to prevent genocide, or risk being held criminally liable. Yet two of the world’s top cycling races are planning to allow Team Genocide to participate, helping Israel sportswash its gravest crimes.