Open letter to the AHK Executive Board
To the Executive Board of the AHK
We are staff, teachers, students, researchers and alumni of the AHK writing to express our full solidarity with and support for the 3 demands made to the AHK Executive Board by the ATD Student Organization.
For different reasons, not everyone from the AHK community who supports these demands has been able to express that support through the actions so far. This open letter is designed to allow individual staff, teachers, students, researchers and alumni of the AHK to demonstrate their solidarity with the call to the AHK Executive Board.
Joining with the students, we - the undersigned - demand:
Acknowledgment of the genocide and condemnation of the IDFs war crimes.
Behind a false guise of “neutrality”, thus far, the AHK has not named this “war” for what it is: a genocide against the Palestinian people. This is no political opinion, but a fact, established by, among others, the UN special rapporteur, the ICJ (believing there are reasonable grounds for a genocide investigation) and many other authorities.
Condemnation of the police violence and other repressions against non-violent protests by students.
We demand a clear statement of the AHK against the actions of management at UvA and UU authorising riot police to be called on their own students as a response to non-violent protest. To put their students into harm’s way like this is appalling and troubling. We must uphold the right to non-violent protest.
Disclose and divest
We demand that the AHK divests its finances from the Rabobank. Rabobank, aside from investing in fossil fuels, has close ties to the Israeli military complex and invests in the illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. This is unacceptable and we demand the AHK’s immediate divestment.
It is good to see that the AHK publicly disclosed what it claims is a full list of its ties to Israeli institutions - following the earlier demand from the ATD Student Assembly. However, we call upon them to cut the ties with Beit Berl College and specifically the Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts north of Tel Aviv. As Sruti Bala - a member of the ATD advisory board - put it so clearly in her speech to the assembly: “The argument of maintaining ties with critical Israeli partners is a straw man argument. It must be repeated time and again that the principles of BDS do not prevent anyone from working with individuals, as it is a boycott of institutions and not individuals. Not one single higher educational institution in Israel has publicly condemned the destruction of all universities in Gaza”.
“There simply is no good argument or reason to not fulfill these three demands. The facts are screaming at us around the clock. It is nothing but a lack of political will and a fear of repercussions that is stopping our institutions and our institutional leaders from doing what needs to be done”.