To the Executive Board of Leiden University: Your words are empty until you take action

Joint statement of Leiden Scholars for Palestine and Students for Palestine

The recently published advice by the Committee Human Rights and Conflict Areas on the collaboration between Leiden University and ‘israeli’ institutions marks a watershed. It recommends ending nearly all of these relationships. 

Since the campaign for academic boycott began in earnest at Leiden University in 2021, this is the first institutional recognition in the university that - as students and staff have repeatedly pointed out through articles, petitions, demonstrations, and occupations - ‘israeli’ institutions are structurally complicit in settler colonialism, apartheid, and the ongoing genocide committed against the Palestinian people. 

That it took 2.5 years of genocide and 78 years of occupation to get to this acknowledgment is a moral and intellectual failure that can not easily be swept under the carpet. 

Despite acknowledging these realities, the committee stops short of drawing the full logical conclusions of its findings. It continues to limit its advice to measures on a case-by-case basis. As the committee found - ‘israeli’ universities are complicit in these crimes and therefore unsuitable partners, so all institutional relations must be halted. Failing to do so only provides institutional and reputational cover for them. We therefore restate our demand - echoing the call made by the Palestinian campaign for academic and cultural boycott since 2005 - to break off all ties, now. 

Worse still has been the reaction by the university’s Executive Board, which immediately put out a statement stating that they would selectively adopt the findings of the committee. The situation is more complex, they claim. And we will need to wait - wait again! - to hear what they do with the advice published by a committee the Board commissioned themselves nearly 2 years ago today.. 

There are a number of fundamental issues with the Board’s statement.  

1. The Executive Board discards two of the four central arguments of their ethics committee– arguments that we have been stating for years. These are a) continuing to collaborate with ‘israeli’ universities provides them with international legitimacy, recognition, and validation as if they are institutions upholding human rights; and b) providing material and immaterial support to ‘Israeli’ universities, Leiden University directly contradicts its stated values. Instead of seriously considering these points, the Board affirms what we already know. They have more concern for potential backlash and administrative hurdles than Palestinian lives.
2. The Board places more importance on the potential ‘humanitarian’ or ‘democratizing’ value of research projects with ‘israeli’ universities than on the systematic denial of Palestinian human rights and self determination that these universities uphold. With this stance, they continue to legitimize and defend the ongoing complicity of these institutions.   
3. The Executive Board’s statement never truly recognizes how ‘israel’, and ‘israeli’ universities, have perpetrated serious violations of Palestinian rights for decades, and not just since this genocide began in 2023. If the Board doesn’t recognize these basic historical facts, then they will also be far too quick to announce things are “good enough” to resume collaborations. Things have never been “good enough” to ethically justify collaborating with institutions like Hebrew University, which was explicitly established as a “strategic outpost for the Zionist movement” to colonize Palestine (quote from the university’s founding charter). Its scholars developed “population dispersal plans” for the new Zionist government to violently displace Palestinians– only one of countless ways ‘israeli’ universities are complicit.
4. The Board’s argument that Leiden University’s collaboration with ‘israeli’ universities can somehow build stronger ethical standards or critical resistance to the Zionist regime is incredibly foolish. If that were the case, there would have been a modicum of (institutional, or widespread) resistance from Israeli universities in the decades that Leiden has collaborated with them. Instead, ‘israeli’ universities are still deeply involved with the state and its crimes; and continue to be disturbingly silent when ‘israel’ suppresses and murders Palestinian academics and students, when it repeatedly commits scholasticide, genocide, and as it expands the violent colonization of Palestine and beyond.
5. There is no accountability – it is not even acknowledged – that this process has been unforgivably drawn-out. The conclusions of the ethics committee and of the Executive Board are closely in line with what Erasmus University Rotterdam, University of Amsterdam, and Utrecht University all published themselves… yet these reports were all released a year or more earlier. We cannot celebrate these institutions either– they too have done far too little, far too late.
6. The statement does not include a clear commitment to act, nor any concrete timeline, nor any reporting mechanism on how and when the academic community will be updated in the future. If it has taken two years from the announcement of the ethics committee to the publishing of a preliminary decision, we can only imagine how many more years it will take for action.

It has been possible for ‘israel’ to commit a live streamed genocide in Gaza for over two years- indiscriminate murder, destruction of schools and universities, murder of journalists and political leaders, the deliberate targeting of all conditions for life - and export these methods to Lebanon and Iran because the world continues to refuse to hold them accountable. There have been countless moments where states and institutions– like Leiden University– have been faced by a choice: continue supporting Zionist imperialism, or uphold the values of human rights and international justice they claim to stand for. Time and time again, they’ve chosen to defend a genocidal settler project. We must hold those who commit these crimes against humanity accountable, in tangible ways, or be complicit in their impunity. 

We would not be here today without the continuous pressure from students and staff. The formation of the committee, its findings, and their selective  adoption would never have happened without their efforts.. We have a duty to continue pushing for a full academic boycott, and call on the Leiden community to continue organizing and mobilizing to demand an end to any collaboration with colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.