As signatories of this letter, we form a collective of University of Nottingham (UoN) staff who individually commit to the terms of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a position held by our national union and overwhelmingly supported by our student union.
We join calls from Palestinian trade union, education, and civil society organisations – including the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology – for international solidarity to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, apartheid regime, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and now, as ruled by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024, to end the plausible case of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. As legal observers have pointed out, this means that all institutions around the world, including universities, must avoid institutional complicity.
As the BDS movement has long highlighted, Israeli higher education institutions play a central role in supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the related apartheid system. This includes systematic discrimination against Palestinian students and staff, as well as developing military systems, doctrines, and moral and legal rationales for the occupation, ethnic cleansing, and now unfolding genocide of Palestinians. From October 2023 until the time of writing at least 95 university professors, and hundreds of school teachers and educators have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, including UoN alumni Dr Said Al-Zebda and Ikram Ghanem, who were murdered along with their children Sumayyah, Intisar and Izzeddin. What is more all 12 universities and well over 300 schools and colleges in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, as well as countless archives, libraries, and museums. A vocabulary of ‘educide’ and ‘scholasticide’ has emerged as attacks on civilian infrastructure can be understood as war crimes, with schools and universities protected spaces under international humanitarian law.
These issues are of direct importance at UoN given a range of research industry partnerships and financial investments (for more detail see this report). For instance, as the upcoming report shows the university currently has £1,006,806.73 of investments in Booking Holdings, which was included in the UN OHCHR’s list of businesses active in illegal Israeli settlements based on stolen Palestinian land. Moreover, UoN is engaged in partnerships with companies like BAE systems, the largest British arms producer (6th largest in the world), which manufactures weapons used in war crimes against Palestinians. On its website BAE systems, which derives approximately 97% of its revenue from the manufacture and sale of arms, celebrates its cooperation with UoN’s Institute for Advanced Manufacturing.
Despite their involvement in the billion dollar industry producing military equipment used in plausible genocide, arms companies are also routinely platformed at careers fairs on campus. This is despite the university having a policy on “Ethical Finance and Investments” with a commitment to screening out ‘all arms companies; manufacture and sale to military regimes’ (for more detail and on the other commitments see this report). As U.N. experts have stated that “arms exports to Israel must stop immediately” to avoid violating international humanitarian law, the university’s partnerships with arms manufacturers are in direct contravention of research ethics framework and international law at large.
We, workers at the University of Nottingham (UoN), thus pledge to the terms of the BDS movement as part of our broader solidarity with Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and plausible genocide and commit to the following actions:
(1) Refusing to participate in any formal or informal engagement with Israeli higher education institutions involved in supporting Israeli occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide in Palestine. This does not apply to individual scholars acting in their individual capacity at Israeli universities, as is made clear in the PACBI guidelines. We note four universities in Norway have suspended all ties with Israeli universities, writing that Israel’s actions in Gaza “undermine the democratic foundation on which all universities must build”.
(2) Refusing to participate in any formal or informal engagement with any corporation involved in supporting Israeli occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide in Palestine. We note UCU national policy supports members’ right to refuse complicity in Israeli apartheid and occupation through support of boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns.
(3) Working to provide direct support for Palestinian higher education institutions, academics, educators and students.
(4) Speaking out against all attempts to silence Palestine solidarity action and speech on our campus and beyond. We note the recent statement from the UN OHCHR.
(5) Calling on the Vice Chancellor and Council to end UoN’s investments in, and procurement contracts with, companies funding and supplying weapons to the Israeli military. This extends to technology companies providing services to Israel as well as any other industrial partner which, given existing evidence, is plausibly complicit in illegal settlement activities, occupation, and plausible genocide. We note the Student Union policy on short-, medium, and long-term goals related to disinvestment.
(6) Supporting a wider BDS campaign at UoN. We call on research centre, programme, department, faculty and university leaders from across UoN to join us in committing to these principles, and ensure that UoN, as a world leading “global” university, takes a strong stand against occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide, whenever and wherever these may occur.
All UoN staff (including academic and professional staff as well as PhD students) are invited to join the signatories below in committing to the BDS movement for Palestine.