Academics Call on EU Commission to Exclude Israeli Companies from EU-Funded Research

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Academics Call on EU Commission to Exclude Israeli Companies from EU-Funded Research

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following letter was issued by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine to the EU Commisioner for Research, Innovation and Science on 10 July 2012. The letter was signed by 250 academics from over fourteen different countries, mainly in Europe but also inlcuding the United States and elsewhere. It urges the European Commission to take action to prevent Israeli arms companies and other companies involved in abuse of Palestinian human rights from participating in EU-funded research consortia.]

Maire Geoghegan-Quin
EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science
Brussells

 10, July 2012

 Dear Maire Geoghegan-Quin,

European Union research programs have become a key mechanism for the funding of research and the exchange of knowledge. However, the participation in these programs of private Israeli companies actively engaged in violating international law seriously undermines both the reputation of these programs and the stated goals of the European Union and its member states.

Ahava DSL is a private Israeli cosmetics company based in and partially owned by the council of an illegal Israeli settlement in occupied Palestinian territory. Through its participation in the EU’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7), Ahava DSL has been awarded €1.08m of EU research funding since 2008.[1] Despite the concerns raised by MEPs and civil society, and assurances to the media that it would address the issue of Ahava’s participation, the European Commission has just allowed Ahava DSL to engage in a new project consortium that it is funding to the tune of €3.49m.[2]

Two other participants in FP7 projects, Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries, play an active role in the construction and maintenance of Israel’s Wall, ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004.[3]

Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union obliges the EU to uphold human rights and to strictly observe and support the development of international law in all of its external relations. 

By allowing companies that actively participate in and aid and assist with serious breaches of international law and maintain that such actions are legal to participate in FP7 projects, the EU is entrusting resources to companies that cannot be relied upon to use them in a manner in accordance with the EU’s own legal obligations.

Academics and institutions that participate in EU research programs depend on the good judgement of the European Commission. In lacing companies such as Ahava DSL and Elbit Systems on its list of approved research partners, the EU is recommending companies engaged in violations of international law as suitable research, exposing academics and institutions to reputational and economic risks.

As advocates of a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians based on international law, e call upon the European Commission to exclude such companies and institutions from receiving EU funding and to introduce new legislation that would prevent them from doing so. Violations of international law and universal human rights will surely continue for at least as long as institutions such as the EU provide funding to those that perpetrate them.

[Signatories to the letter include Gérard Toulouse (member of the French Academy of Science), Malcolm Levitt (member of the UK Royal Society), and renowned philosopher Slavjoj Zizek. Click here for a full list of signatories.]

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412