BY HANK REICHMAN
On May 25, the Black Flag Action Group, formed by scholars at Israeli colleges and universities, issued an important Urgent Call to Action demanding the heads of Israeli academic institutions “speak out” and “act immediately” to stop the war on Gaza. By May 31 the Call had collected over 1,400 signatures. As Al Jazeera noted, the Black Flag call is the “latest in a growing number of open letters protesting the war from within Israel. However, while many other letters have objected to the political reasons for Israel’s latest offensive, or claimed that it puts Israel’s remaining captives held in Gaza at risk, the academics’ letter is unique in that it places Palestinian suffering at the heart of its objections to the war.”
“As academics, we recognize our own role in these crimes,” the Call states. “It is human societies, not governments alone, that commit crimes against humanity. Some do so by means of direct violence. Others do so by sanctioning the crimes and justifying them, before and after the fact, and by keeping quiet and silencing voices in the halls of learning. It is this bond of silence that allows clearly evident crimes to continue unabated without penetrating the barriers of recognition.”
“We cannot claim that we did not know,” it continues. “We have been silent for too long. For the sake of the lives of innocents and the safety of all the people of this land … if we do not call to halt the war immediately, history will not forgive us.”
“I understand lots of people object to the war for different reasons,” Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Chair of the English Department at the University of Haifa (and a UC Berkeley Ph.D), told Al Jazeera, “but right now, I welcome anyone that’s opposed to it. It sounds hollow, I know, but we wanted to make Palestinian suffering central. We wanted to say that we stand alongside and in solidarity with Palestinians. This was also about taking responsibility for what we are doing in Gaza and opening people’s eyes to it.”
In an interview, Avner Wishnitzer, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, explained that
Black Flag is an action group of academics in Israel that was established early last week to resist the mass killing, starvation and displacement of the population in Gaza. In Israel, the term “black flag” (degel shachor) symbolises an illegal or blatantly immoral order that soldiers must refuse to obey. It originates from the aftermath of the 1956 Kfar Qassim massacre, when Israeli Border Police shot and killed 49 Palestinian citizens of Israel for violating a sudden curfew. In its landmark ruling, the Israeli Supreme Court stated that some orders are so clearly illegal that a “black flag of illegality flies over them,” and thus no soldier can justify obeying them. We use this phrase, that any Israeli would recognise, to say that a black flag flies over what Israel is doing in Gaza.
Here is the full text of the Urgent Call. (A list of all 1,403 signatories as of May 31 can be found along with the text here. Full texts in Hebrew, Arabic, and English are here.)
An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel
To the Association of University Heads in Israel, the Board of Academic Public Colleges, and Academics for Israeli Democracy,
We, members of the academic and administrative staff in institutions of higher education in Israel, call on you to act immediately to mobilize the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza.
Israeli higher education institutions play a central role in the struggle against the judicial overhaul. It is precisely against this backdrop that their silence in the face of the killing, starvation, and destruction in Gaza, and in the face of the complete elimination of the educational system there, its people, and its structures, is so striking.
Since Israel violated the ceasefire on March 18, almost 3,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The vast majority of them were civilians. Since the start of the war, at least 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including at least 15,000 children and at least 41 Israeli hostages. At the same time, many international bodies are warning of acute starvation – the result of intentional and openly declared Israeli government policy – as well as of the rendering of Gaza into an area unfit for human habitation. Israel continues to bomb hospitals, schools, and other institutions. Among the war’s declared goals, as defined in the orders for the current military operation “Gideon’s Chariots,” is the “concentration and displacement of population.” This is a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing.
As academics, we recognize our own role in these crimes. It is human societies, not governments alone, that commit crimes against humanity. Some do so by means of direct violence. Others do so by sanctioning the crimes and justifying them, before and after the fact, and by keeping quiet and silencing voices in the halls of learning. It is this bond of silence that allows clearly evident crimes to continue unabated without penetrating the barriers of recognition.
We cannot claim that we did not know. We have been silent for too long. For the sake of the lives of innocents and the safety of all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jews; for the sake of the return of the hostages; if we do not call to halt the war immediately, history will not forgive us. We will not forgive ourselves. It is our duty to act to stop the slaughter; it is our duty to save lives. It is our duty to save what can still be saved of this land’s future. The institutions of higher education in Israel must raise their voices, address their students and the public at large, look at reality directly and call things what they are – unspeakable actions being done in our name, with our own hands, that will ultimately result in destroying higher education in Israel and the entire society from within.
“Black Flag” Action Group
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.
