Student Appeal for Palestine
We, students at Stockholm university, are appalled by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. We witness the ruthless killing and starvation of students, teachers, researchers, journalists, and cultural workers, as well as the systematic destruction of schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural heritage, and cultural institutions, which has eradicated the entire education sector in Gaza. By making all education in Gaza impossible and destroying all material and immaterial cultural heritage, including burial sites, Israel is not only annihilating the Palestinian people in the present but also erasing their past and future. Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid is deliberately designed to punish, harm, destroy, and displace Gaza’s civilian population, half of whom are children and youth. Gaza has become a graveyard for pupils, students, and international law alike.
We, students at Stockholm university, believe that universities, of which we are an integral part, carry a collective responsibility to protect knowledge, uphold the dignity of learners, and preserve spaces where critical inquiry can thrive. These objectives are cornerstones of academic freedom. Hence, we are ashamed that Swedish universities and university colleges continue to maintain formal collaborations with Israeli counterparts who are complicit in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other violations of international law and academic freedom.
We call on our universities' leadership to take this seriously and do everything in their power to terminate agreements with Israeli institutions and to pressure the government to act against the genocide in Gaza and the apartheid regime in Palestine. This is a step toward stopping the genocide, taking moral responsibility, and acting in accordance with the requirements set by the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague for all member states.
We welcome our teachers’ refusal to participate in collaborations with Israeli institutions in accordance with the Uppsala Declaration. We are also dismayed by our leadership’s unwillingness to similarly examine their role in the grave violations of international law being committed before our eyes.
On the other side of the walls and fortifications that have surrounded and isolated Gaza from the outside world since 2007, Israel’s universities have a long history of involvement in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, such as illegal occupation, land theft and settler colonialism, apartheid, and now genocide. The universities have played an active role in developing the weapons and surveillance systems, as well as military and legal strategies, used to maintain the illegal occupation of Palestine and the oppression of Palestinians, and to justify ethnic cleansing and extrajudicial executions, as well as the illegal colonization and annexation of occupied land. While training soldiers and intelligence agents, they have systematically discriminated against Palestinian students and staff (Wind 2024). Israeli universities are therefore complicit in what the International Court of Justice in The Hague has determined constitutes an illegal occupation of Palestine, a country that Sweden, together with a majority of the world’s nations, has recognized as a sovereign state.
We, the undersigned, urge our universities and university colleges to respect the international legal system and human rights. We call on our fellow students and teachers in Sweden to reject international partners who are complicit in crimes and instead collaborate with partners who comply with international law.
If your council wants to sign the appeal, please contact SUS presidium.