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We are writing to demand that the University of St Andrews sever its links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJ) and all other Israeli universities in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. While these links have been in place for sometime, we were alerted to them when, on 26 May 2025, some members of the University of St Andrews received an email notifying them that the university was part of a network called the Global Universities for Societal Impact which includes HUJ as a participating institution.
For over twenty years, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has been calling for a boycott of Israeli universities to protest Israel’s occupation of Palestine which has long been considered a violation of international law.[1] This demand assumes intensified urgency in light of the complete destruction of Gaza’s university system and the targeting of its academics, a process that has been described as ‘scholasticide’. Israeli universities are deeply complicit in the processes that entrench Israel’s settler colonialism, military occupation and apartheid in Palestine. As the Israeli academic Maya Wind has demonstrated, scholarship produced by Israeli universities – particularly in the fields of law, philosophy, ethics, archaeology, history, criminology and area studies – has consistently furthered Israeli settler colonialism. Israeli universities are deeply embedded in the country’s military-industrial complex, helping to develop leading weapons companies such as Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defence Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, whose products are used daily to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. Israeli university campuses are strategic outposts for Israel’s territorial and demographic project, functioning as engines of ‘Judaization’ that fuel further Jewish Israeli settlement and employment on Palestinian land.[2]
HUJ exemplifies many of these tendencies. As Israeli economist Shir Hever (amongst many others) notes, HUJ is built on occupied land in East Jerusalem.[3] In May 2022, Israeli authorities approved plans to build 1600 new settlement units in East Jerusalem to expand the premises of the university.[4] HUJ currently hosts the elite Havatzalot programme which enables soldiers in the Military Intelligence Directorate to acquire regional and linguistic expertise in Middle Eastern Studies while undergoing military training. Soldiers live and train on the campus in a space designated as a military base while using university infrastructure alongside civilian students.[5] In 2020, Palestinian students at the university made a short film depicting the intolerability of university life amidst such militarisation, with soldiers strolling around campus and snipers stationed on the roof of university buildings. As they put it, ‘In the library, they sat next to us. At the checkpoints, they humiliate our families! On one hand they drink coffee with us, on the other hand they point a rifle at us.’[6]
Given these conditions, it is inappropriate for the University of St Andrews to be hosting joint programmes with HUJ such as the two year masters in the Study of Judaism and Christianity. It is inconceivable that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students with an intellectual interest in such subjects would be able to participate in such programmes in ways that are consonant with their wellbeing. The de facto non-availability of such programmes to these students clearly violates the University of St Andrews’ professed commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion.
It is additionally clear that HUJ does not support the work of its own Palestinian faculty. In April 2024, leading Palestinian legal scholar Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian – who is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at HUJ and Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London – was arrested over comments made on a podcast a month earlier. Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was strip-searched, handcuffed, denied access to food, water and medication for several hours, and held in conditions that her lawyers described as ‘terrible’ and designed to humiliate.[7] More than 100 faculty members of HUJ published an open letter backing her and criticising their own university for not supporting her. Many noted that HUJ had itself fuelled months of political attacks on one of their own faculty in the run-up to her detention, with the Rector demanding her resignation in late 2023 after she signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and describing Israel’s campaign there as a genocide; she was also briefly suspended from the university over the podcast cited as the reason for her arrest.
The email of May 2025 informing us of the existence of the Global Universities for Societal Impact, which includes both the University of St Andrews and HUJ as participating institutions, stated that ‘one of the network’s initial aims is to explore opportunities for research collaboration across a broad range of disciplines connected to Artificial Intelligence’. In April 2024, Israeli journalists relying on information from six Israeli intelligence officers who had all served during the current war on Gaza, reported on the extensive use of an AI programme called ‘Lavender’ to prepare kill lists of people alleged to be members of Hamas and other Palestinian militant organisations, who were marked out for assassination. Operating with minimal human oversight and with an unconscionable tolerance for ‘collateral’ casualties of up to 15–20 (and often more) civilians per military target, the system identified 37,000 Palestinians as targets and proceeded to eliminate them in their homes along with entire families.[8] Given the well documented use of AI in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it is frankly heinous for the University of St Andrews to invite research collaboration in the field of AI with Israeli universities at this time.
The severing of links with Israeli universities would not be without recent precedent. Within two weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the University of St Andrews announced that it had suspended its joint masters programme with Moscow State University and had divested from Russian holdings. While this suspension appears to have been effected at the behest of the UK government of the day, the university is not precluded from adopting a morally consistent approach in its response to global conflicts. Indeed given its much vaunted commitment to a global orientation, it seems incumbent upon a Global St Andrews to value human life and flourishing equally across the globe.
Please note that in compiling this information, we have relied almost entirely on Israeli sources because University of St Andrews management has on previous occasions sought to discredit communications that have relied on Palestinian sources. The signatories to this letter in no way endorse such a hierarchy of sources.
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[1] https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/pacbi-call.
[2] Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (London: Verso, 2024).
[3] Shir Hever, ‘Economy of the Occupation’, Academic Boycott of Israel and the Complicity of Israeli Academic Institutions in Occupied Palestinian Territories, No. 23 (October 2009), Alternative Information Centre, 37–8.
[4] Qassam Muaddi, ‘Israel approves 1600 settlement units in Jerusalem as Bennett says “no foreign intervention” on Al-Aqsa’, The New Arab, 11 May 2022, https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-approves-1600-settlement-units-jerusalem.
[5] Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel, 50–54.
[6] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=393273021567639. See also Oren Ziv, “Palestinian students battle militarization of Hebrew University”, +972 Magazine, May 27, 2020, https://www.972mag.com/palestinian-students-militarization-hebrew-university/.
[7] Emma Graham-Harrison and Quique Kierszenbaum, ‘“Political arrest” of Palestinian academic in Israel marks new civil liberties threat’, Guardian, 26 April 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/26/political-arrest-palestinian-academic-nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian-israel-civil-liberties-threat.
[8] Yuval Abraham, ‘“Lavender”: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza’, +972 Magazine, April 3, 2024, https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/.