This open letter is intended for the University of Edinburgh administration. It has been written by the mother of a student graduating in the 2024/25 academic year and has been signed by other students’ parents and families approving its message and calling for divestment now.

"It is with immense pride and joy that in a few weeks time I will travel to Edinburgh to attend the graduation ceremony of my eldest child. Nothing though, can diminish the sadness stemming from the fact that the University giving my child his degree is the same University that continues to be complicit in the genocide currently being perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people.

I do not use the words genocide and complicit lightly. The International Court of Justice, the highest United Nations judicial body, has stated that there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to describe what is happening in Palestine as genocide. By failing to divest from any company involved in the current situation in Palestine, the University of Edinburgh is complicit in the genocide.

Complicity is insidious, and can take many forms. When learning is denied to a whole population, when all places of learning, from schools to universities to hospitals, are bombed and destroyed, how can the University of Edinburgh fail to take a clear stance? How can a place of learning fail to vehemently, forcefully and uncompromisingly condemn those who are denying to many the possibility to learn? This too is complicity. Of course, the University of Edinburgh has a complex historical legacy when it comes to Palestine. Arthur James Balfour was, after all, one of the University’s former Chancellors and his 1917 declaration led to the denial of the right of national self determination for the Palestinian people, enabling their ongoing dispossession, displacement and subjugation. More reasons why the University of Edinburgh could, should, must do better than this.

Complicity is well paired with hypocrisy, empty words hiding reproachable actions. Your students and many of your lecturers have repeatedly (with encampments, demonstrations, letters etc.) called for the University to divest and to abide by the determinations of the International Court of Justice. The University has failed to fully engage with or respond to these calls, let alone actually divest.

And so, many lecturers find themselves in the impossible position of teaching students facts, arguments and reasons, that will find no support in the practices of the institutions within which they are taught. Students are confronted with the sad reality that what matters are words, not actions, that hypocrisy rules.

How frustrating it must be for lecturers to teach students about international law, when its principles are not abided to; about the horrors of apartheid, when the word is not applied when it must; about colonialism and its legacy, to then be asked to ignore it in its current permutations; about the concepts of race and ethnicity and how they intertwine with injustice and shape the world we live in, but to ignore them when these are all around them.

What a lesson to learn, to theorise goodness but permit evil.

And finally, students will leave Edinburgh with a degree, and a significant debt. A debt that it will take years to repay. And with the knowledge that within this debt there is money which will have most likely been invested to fund companies complicit in the genocide. It might be a matter of a few pennies, of a couple of pounds. But it matters not how small the amount might be, what matters is that students have unknowingly and unvoluntary been made complicit in a genocide that they firmly and enduringly oppose. Any of their money so invested, should be reinvested for the reconstruction of Palestine.

I will attend graduation with joy and pride. For my child, and for the many friends he has met along the way. I am grateful to the many lecturers who have taught him: interesting, enthusiastic, curious, generous, intelligent and kind. I am grateful to the University for all it has given to my child, which I recognise and appreciate. I only wish that such happiness and joy was not tainted by the unreasonable, unconscionable failure of the University to act ethically and forcefully to end the genocide."