The “Israel Genocide?” campaign adds its voice to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) call to UN officials, academic associations and scholars, to boycott the 2016 conference of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS).
We maintain that Israel is in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in particular Article II, which defines the crime:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
We view the holding of the conference in a colonial state that violates the genocide convention, not only as a cynical act, but an act that lends Israel legitimacy to continue violating the convention, thus harming the global community’s ability to prevent genocide. There should be no exceptions to a rule that strives to protect humanity from the most heinous crimes.
While Israel and Israeli officials have yet to be tried for the crime of genocide in courts of law that has authority to deliver punishment, we recognize the fact that genocide is the least tried crime in the category of Crimes Against Humanity. We trust that genocide scholars know first hand the frustration of watching crimes on a mass scale being committed while legal bureaucracies fail to implement solutions.
Israel is no stranger to scholarly debates over its systematic violations within the field of genocide, and we believe academics are not only theorists, but also moral agents who have impact on the real world. You are now in a position to act against genocide. Please boycott the INoGS Conference unless this conference is relocated from Israel and its colonies, and its organizers reject institutional Israeli sponsorship of this event.