It is hard to determine what angers me more: Policker’s prose or argumentation. The former is lacking, the latter abhorrent. Yet the seemingly “educated” signees of the open letter have it all wrong, sounds the declaration, with their “twisted logic if not morals”. In the light of such a strong statement, it is surprising that her article submits various dubious claims of its own that either resort to fallacious reasoning or forsake the elementary academic responsibility of citing reliable sources.
Genocide, Hamas and ‘enabling terrorism’
Palestinian genocide is a conspiracy, Policker claims for example, because its population continued to grow. This argument does not only reveal a grand misunderstanding of genocide and the gross dismissal of the weight a formal accusation of genocide bears, but also hinges on the assumption that the current accusations of genocide are of a historical nature. The ICJ case, however, exclusively focuses on Israeli conduct in Gaza from October 7th onwards. Plaintiff South Africa draws attention to violent conflicts and de facto apartheid in the past as a contextual basis for the current accusation, but does not view them as genocidal per se. Historic population growth is, therefore, beside the point.
Looking further, what are we to make of statements about Hamas’ conduct towards Gazan civilians? How are we to verify that they create bombs from water pipes? How are we respond to accusations that “UNWRA [sic]” is “overflowing with antisemitism” when Policker provides no source for this? If anything, the opinion article illustrates the need for credible citations through its utter lack of these.
The picture grows bleaker if we look at the claims with sourcing. They fight from UN buildings, Policker says, providing footage of three armed combatants merely passing two UN vehicles. These accusations are hypocritical, is said (or so Neuer claims in the UN debate), because China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, commits a genocide itself against Uyghurs. Are we even supposed to take such a callous tu quoque seriously? Calls for the unconditional restoration of the 1948 borders, a permanent ceasefire or Israeli withdrawal from Gaza do not belong to some international purity contest. They are desperate attempts to prevent profuse bloodshed in a region that has seen civilian lives harmed, degraded and endangered for decades. The crimes of other nations can never exempt Israel from persecution, let alone condemnation.
War is hell, Policker claims, but not before proving that this war is hardly hell at all. Not only does the opinion writer shed unfounded doubt on the death tolls the Gaza Ministry of Health’s records (which the WHO, the OCHA and an editorial from The Lancet, among others, deem reliable and likely underreported), but she also accepts the Israeli Defence Force statistics at a face value. Next to nothing is known about their calculation methods, let alone about their reliability. Commentators fear they record civilians casualties as Hamas combatants, with even the Israel embassy in the UK noting the difficulty of separating dead civilians from Hamas members. The ratio of combatants to civilians, then, is in all likelihood skewed to the latter. Even if this was not the case, “challenging” others to find three conflicts with worse statistics remains horrifying. For someone who condemns the open letter for shying away from the “cynical aspects of the conflict”, Policker display an unsettling attitude. Human losses are not an idle mathematical exercise.
Although all ‘counterarguments’ are fallacious, they commit an even greater error: they attack a strawman. The central thesis of Policker’s indignation is that by not mentioning Hamas, signees of the open letter “enable terrorism”. Not mentioning a terrorist organisation in a public document that is not about said terrorist organisation is not “enabling terrorism”, nor condoning it, nor supporting it. Any attempt to suggest otherwise, with or without invalid arguments, has no place in a healthy academic community.
Peace
The Hamas-Israel war, and more broadly the Israel-Palestine conflict, is a traumatic event that ripped open old wounds and created new ones for all involved. These cannot be disregarded. I deeply empathise with the shock that Policker and countless others have felt and still feel. That being said, we cannot tolerate that arguments are steeped in vague evidence. When one aims to prove “how twisted [their] logic if not [their] morals are”, the least we should expect is arguments that make sense, respond to the actual document it purports to argue against and do not engage in sheer misinformation. It saddens me that nothing in Policker’s article fulfils these aims.
We all want peace, whether that is in the form of two independent states (as Policker suggests), or in some other form (such as an Israeli-Palestinian confederacy, as Thomas Piketty proposes). But if we want Palestinians and Israelis to live together in harmony, prosperity and friendship, severing ties with Israeli institutions is not counter to that goal; it is essential to it. We can solely create durable peace through internationally coordinated sanctions of the Israeli government and Hamas. Although Maastricht University does not yield great institutional, let alone international power, it remains vital to break bonds with all Israeli institutions. Even if we are a mere drop in a river or a sea, we must take our responsibility for peace and against violations of international law. And for the sake of our academic community, we must foster open discussion, but only on the basis of logically sound arguments and grammatically correct sentences.
Ayra van den Heuvel
Footnotes and citations were removed in order to comply with the editorial guideline of Observant