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Nightly on the news, in front of our eyes, an atrocity is unfolding. The pictures of children starved in Gaza are almost unwatchable. The daily statistics of death and destruction are numbing.
Even an ex-Israeli Prime Minister claims Israel is planning to build a giant concentration camp in Gaza. Even Israeli human rights organisations now acknowledge what those on the receiving end have been saying all along: what is happening is a genocide.
The aim of the war, they explain, is not just to defeat Hamas but to make Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland so that the Palestinians walk out and the Israelis can then walk in.
So why is so little being done about it? Why are we still talking and trading and even arming Israel? Why do Palestinians feel utterly abandoned by the world? Why, as so many times before, do we simply shrug and turn aside?
Suppression of pro-Palestinian speech
There are many answers. But in this case, there is one distinctive factor. There is a systematic attempt to outlaw criticism of Israeli actions. This is enshrined in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
More specifically, two of its illustrations suggest that criticism of the Israeli state could be a form of hatred of Jewish people. This has been weaponised in order to suggest that any criticism of the Israeli state is antisemitic.
Universities in particular have used it to suppress critical voices and it has had a chilling effect on scholarship and research. Even the original author of the declaration, Kenneth Stern, wrote bemoaning the fact that the IHRA definition “has been primarily used (and I argue, grossly abused) to suppress and chill pro-Palestinian speech”. That is why he recently urged Columbia University not to adopt it.
One defence of the IHRA definition is to say that Jewish people support it and feel threatened by attacks on Israel. Some certainly do. But many don’t. Indeed, one of the important consequences of Israeli action in Gaza is that they have led many Jews to come together and speak out against the genocide. That includes Jewish staff at Edinburgh University and across Scottish universities.
Not in our name
There have always been multiple Jewish traditions, some rooted in nationalism and self-defence, others rooted in internationalism and solidarity, and many variants of each. We in the Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network (SUJSN) don’t agree on everything.
But we broadly side with Marek Edelman, the great leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, who declared: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.” We feel as outraged by the suffering of a Palestinian child as by that of our own child.
Particularly because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has the audacity to claim he acts in the name of all Jews, we in SUJSN are compelled to speak out against Israeli atrocities – and to contest the IHRA definition which seeks to silence us.
We declare for the world to hear that we, and an ever-growing number of Jews, stand with the Palestinians being oppressed in Gaza, never with their IDF oppressors. For if we stay silent, we are complicit and we besmirch what it truly means to be Jewish.
Stephen Reicher, Wardlaw professor of psychology, University of St Andrews. Written on behalf of the Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network.