OPINION: We must speak up for human rights in Palestine

Photo by Olivier Fitoussi

By The Editorial Board

As the annual Palestine Trek (PalTrek) and Israel Trek (itrek) approach, bringing a few hundred SIPA students to the region, we urge our classmates to reflect on the moral and ethical questions that arise from traveling to a country that continues to occupy Palestinian territories in direct violation of international law.

Two weeks ago, UN Secretary-General António Guterres publicly stated that the “long-standing drivers of conflict” include the “ongoing occupation, settlement expansion, home demolitions and evictions,” which “heighten anger, despair, and hopelessness.” According to Guterres, the “United Nations’ position is clear: peace must advance — the occupation must end.”

The UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, also minces no words in her most recent report: “In a tragic irony, Palestinians have experienced an entrenching settler colonialism at a moment in history when the rest of the world was slowly progressing towards decolonization.” An international lawyer appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, she presents the stakes explicitly: “in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, Israeli expansionism [has] consolidated into an apartheid regime through the longest occupation in modern history.”

In October, Albanese spoke directly to the Columbia community, detailing the “profound illegality of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory” and how it “emanates from the intentional unlawful displacement of its native (and refugee) Palestinian inhabitants.” But beyond the legal standard of apartheid, Albanese went further, asserting that ending apartheid alone is not enough to restore the foundational right to self-determination for Palestinians — as for any people — and to address the stark power disparity between Israelis and Palestinians.

Likewise, in a June 2020 open letter, more than 500 scholars of Jewish studies emphasized that the “annexation of Palestinian territories will cement into place an anti-democratic system of separate and unequal law and systemic discrimination against the Palestinian population.” Under international law, they specified, “such discrimination on the basis of racial, ethnic, religious, or national background is defined as ‘conditions of apartheid’ and a ‘crime against humanity.’”

Since 1967, Israel has illegally occupied land beyond its sovereign borders. And for decades, Israel has illegally transferred civilian populations onto occupied land in clear violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, amounting to a war crime. The UN Security Council reaffirmed in 2016 that Israeli settlements in the West Bank have “no legal validity.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights non-profit B’Tselem, two consecutive UN special rapporteurs on Palestine, and the special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing have all described Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory as amounting to a system of apartheid.

As an Editorial Board, we echo these objections and call on our classmates to also speak up for Palestinian human rights.  

Why does this matter for SIPA?

When nearly 200 SIPA students returned from the Palestine and Israel Treks this March, controversy and strife quickly broke out. Students clashed over the divergence in their respective experiences and particularly the decision of itrek attendees to participate in a trip that many Palestinians criticize as a whitewash of Israeli apartheid. While one PalTrek participant reflected on the way forward through a human rights framework, one of SIPA’s past itrek leaders participated in a flag march in East Jerusalem, internationally recognized as illegally occupied, on a day when Israeli police injured over 100 Palestinians. 

Our Editorial Board also takes our position in light of comments from a recent interview with SIPA’s new dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo. Speaking to The Morningside Post in October, Dean Yarhi-Milo declined to state a position when asked about the controversy surrounding the two trips. “Anything about the Arab-Israeli conflict, given where I grew up, I am not going to say a word about,” she said. “I'm the dean of everybody here.”

Our new dean had the opportunity to credibly and authoritatively criticize — or at least acknowledge — an oppressive system that is known to her, and yet she chose not to. For many Palestinians, the term “Arab-Israeli” itself can paint the struggle as a conflict between Israelis and Arabs — without any mention of Palestinians.

A Call for Scrutiny and Action

As the South African anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu famously said, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

The decision to publish an editorial is not taken lightly. But the facts speak for themselves. In the face of such clear and deafening injustice, neutrality and silence are not acceptable.

In the 1980s, the international community mobilized to oppose racial apartheid in South Africa, and Columbia was no exception. Following student pressure, the university acted decisively to end investment in apartheid South Africa due to its racist policies.

As international consensus grows regarding Israel’s guilt, there can be no double standard. This July, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, Naledi Pandor, stated unequivocally, “the State of Israel is committing crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians.” According to Pandor, the “Palestinian narrative evokes experiences of South Africa’s own history of racial segregation and oppression.” 

Her appeal was clear: “We cannot stand by while another generation of Palestinians are left behind.” While recognizing that South Africa and Israel have distinct histories and nuances, we maintain that the facts on the ground are difficult to ignore.

As our dean introduces a new policy specialization in democratic governance and resilience, our responsibility to call out the clear fallacy of Israel’s claim as the region’s only democracy grows ever more apparent. The clear Jewish supremacy articulated by Israel’s 2018 nation-state law, at the cost of non-Jewish citizens, is incompatible with the fundamental principles from which true democracy is formed. 

Through all of this, we must — at the same time — condemn discrimination and prejudice in all its forms. Jews, and people of any religion or ethnicity, deserve the right to live and practice their faith freely. Jewish people all over the world continue to face horrifying, and even deadly, antisemitism. The genocidal mass violence of the Holocaust must never be forgotten. We join with all students to unequivocally condemn and disavow antisemitism in all its forms, and to stand in soldarity with Jewish people as antisemitic statements continue to repugnantly persist in public discourse.

It’s with these human rights principles in mind that we join student movements across the U.S. in calling out the Israeli government’s violations of international law — policies that do not represent the values and stances of all Jewish people worldwide. We commend our undergraduate peers at Columbia College for their successful 2020 referendum calling for divestment from companies profiting from Israeli settlements, the April 2022 Harvard Crimson editorial, and student activism at Georgetown University, Brown University, and other educational institutions.

U.S. complicity in Israeli war crimes and human rights violations cannot stand, nor with any other governments. Under the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, Congress has required that no assistance can be given to a foreign government “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

We call on the administrations of SIPA and Columbia to make a similar commitment: to state publicly and for transparency that not one dollar of endowment investment will go to companies engaged in human rights violations, including those with activities in the occupied Palestinian territories. 

Such a commitment arises directly from international law, separate and distinct from the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s wider calls. There is a clear distinction between goods and services made within Israel and goods and services made illegally beyond its borders in occupied Palestine. Companies producing the latter in occupied territory profit from the proceeds of war crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention. 

That being said, the right to participate in a political boycott is an expression of the right to freedom of speech. If boycotts and sanctions can be deployed against South Africa and Russia, such an approach must be entirely legitimate for Israel. 

As students of international relations and public policy, we cannot let the silence of our administration continue. Every semester, SIPA faculty teach classes in international law, human rights, and humanitarian response, although not classes focused on Palestine. On every floor of the International Affairs Building, we learn about the importance of the rules-based international order as we are trained to take human rights into the workplace after graduation.

We therefore ask our administration to practice what it preaches and reflect these important moral and ethical standards in its governance, academic programs, and public statements. We welcomed the statement from the SIPA administration in support of Ukraine earlier this year. We ask that our solidarity is expressed consistently and with all those experiencing imperialism, military occupation, and oppression around the world.