The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has called for a boycott of this year’s conference of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) in Jerusalem… The title of this year’s conference is, ironically, “Intersections: Holocaust Scholarship, Genocide Research and Histories of Mass Violence.”.. One of the scheduled speakers is Adama Dieng, special adviser on the prevention of genocide to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
… The conference is scheduled to take place from 26 to 29 July at Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, some of which was constructed on land that Israel illegally expropriated from Palestinians in East Jerusalem after Israel militarily occupied the West Bank in 1967… “The conference is sponsored by five deeply complicit Israeli academic institutions,” PACBI states. “Israeli universities are profoundly complicit in developing weapon systems and military doctrines deployed in Israel’s recent war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza; justifying the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, rationalizing the gradual ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians; providing moral justification for extrajudicial killings and indiscriminate attacks against civilians; systematically discriminating against ‘non-Jewish’ students in admissions, dormitory room eligibility, financial aid, etc.; and many other implicit and explicit violations of human rights and international law.”
… At the very least, says PACBI, “Whether Israel’s decades-old crimes against the Palestine people meet the UN definition of genocide or not, they should make any honest scholar think twice before participating in a conference on genocide organized by Israeli universities on occupied Palestinian land.”
