Below is a letter in the
@IrishTimes
from a group of academics in Ireland - including myself - opposing a call for an Irish boycott of all Israeli universities.
It focuses both on what was said (and not said) in the pro-boycott letter of 4 November.
@Bentonra
Strange, but unsurprising, how the letter humanises Israeli victims’ suffering but not Palestinian victims’ and then goes on to mount a thinly veiled technical justification of the Israeli actions.
@Bentonra
Glad to see some people standing strong & not bowing to the pressures of the howling mob. They seem completely unable to be objective. Apparently it's impossible to disagree with 🇮🇱 policy&decry the massacre of 🇵🇸 people while simultaneously decrying the butchery of 🇮🇱 civilians
@Bentonra
Cutting off ties to Israeli universities is soft anti semitism as their staff will be mostly Jewish. Opposing policies of a government doesn’t require punishing their citizens
@Bentonra
okay i've asked others so i will ask you too - when you say Israel has engaged in "excessive violence" but proclaim there is no genocide - what exactly do YOU mean by excessive violence? is it a War Crime ? is this just a random adjective you have chosen that means nothing?
@Bentonra
Think this speach is worth it's weight in gold!
Supercedes what any of our academics think!
@AcaforPalestine
Truth! & you can bet Israel has tried to Bury it!
@Bentonra
I had not seen the Israeli attack on Gaza’s population as a left wing / right wing issue but it is interesting to observe how Irish academia has now so neatly bifurcated, with the hard right in support of Israel’s action and the rest so strongly opposed to the actions of Israel.