The Board announced at the end of May that they would ‘freeze’ existing administrative ties with Israeli institutes, but collaborations between individual scientists would be left intact. Furthermore, no new partnerships would be entered into. According to the signatories – the largest group is from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences – this “is not in line with the proportions of this humanitarian crisis”.
Clean hands or not
They feel that the announced Human Rights Due Diligence tool, which UM intends use to determine whether partners in the conflict areas have clean hands or not, “is a step in the right direction” but do have questions about it: will existing collaborations be screened or just new ones? Will the results of such an assessment be binding? Also, will they determine beforehand whether such a collaboration can stand the test of criticism or only afterwards, when human rights have already been violated? They fear that the instrument will become a paper tiger, a sop to silence critical voices, as “is often the case”. They would also like, in addition to staff members, that experts by experience are given a say, such as the students “who fought so hard to bring this issue to your attention” – i.e., who participated in the various pro-Palestinian demonstrations that took place this academic year in Maastricht as well.
Dialogue
The writers of the open letter are also hoping for an “active dialogue” within UM. This should be about “our role and responsibilities as a higher education institution” and should provide space for the voices of people “who are personally affected by the conflict at hand”.
Click here to read the open letter.