UNB historians denounce their university’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal violence in Palestine

Editor’s Note: This text was shared by email on September 17 to the University of New Brunswick community by members of the UNB Department of Historical Studies. It has since been signed by 128 people associated with UNB, as of October 5.

As scholars of the past who have dedicated our professional lives to understanding and interpreting historical reality, we members of the Department of Historical Studies and the Department of History and Politics of the University of New Brunswick, can no longer remain collectively silent about our university’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal violence against the people of Gaza and of Palestine more generally.

While we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants on October 7, 2023, we have become increasingly outraged by the massive disproportionality of Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people. In the last 23 months its assault on Gaza has killed over 67,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children. Credible scholarly analysis estimates that the death toll is far higher. Israeli forces continue to deliberately target journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and medical personnel. Israel’s ongoing blockade of food, water, baby formula, medicine, and other necessities of life has now resulted in widespread famine and disease. The mass starvation of Palestinian civilians is a deliberately engineered strategy, as statements from Israeli political and military leaders confirm. In recent months, hundreds of civilians desperately seeking aid at distribution sites have been murdered by Israeli forces. And for every Palestinian killed, many more are wounded, permanently maimed, and traumatized for life. The physical destruction of critical infrastructure roads, hospitals, sanitation systems, water and electrical facilities–has proceeded with the stated intent of making Gaza unlivable. We are especially disturbed, as educators, by the fact that all of Gaza’s twelve universities, and most of its libraries, archives, cultural centers, museums, and heritage sites, now lie in ruins.  The situation on the ground is apocalyptic. It may once have been possible to interpret Israel’s war on Gaza as an attempt to defeat Hamas and rescue hostages. That time has long passed. Israel’s systematic war crimes and violations of international law–features of its illegal occupation of Palestinian land for many decades–are now eclipsed by the overarching crime of genocide.

Our job as historians is to interpret and evaluate what has happened in human societies. We believe that understanding the past can help humankind do a better job of navigating the present and shaping the future. The task has an indelible moral dimension. Not only do we seek to describe and explain the Holocaust, for example, we condemn it, and we seek to instill in our students the conviction that such horror never be allowed to happen again. And just as we judge that the empirical evidence of the Holocaust is so overwhelming that no unbiased person could deny it, we view the current genocide in Gaza as an undeniable historical reality, voluminously documented in real time by its victims, its perpetrators, and a multitude of international observers and organizations. Unlike the Holocaust, however, this unconscionable reality continues to unfold as we speak. “Never again,” it seems, is now.

UNB historians are strong supporters of our university’s engagement in the Truth and Reconciliation Process. UNB’s commitment to seeking and acknowledging the truth of Canada’s settler-colonial past and present seems to us an overdue step in the right direction. “Seeking the truth” is the first principle of the Truth and Reconciliation Strategic Action Plan. It is likewise central to “Piluwitahasuwawsuwakon,” the Wolastaqey concept of “allowing your thinking to change so that action will follow in a good way toward truth” that inspires UNB’s “Toward 2030” Strategic Vision. “This commitment,” UNB proclaims, “lies behind all we do as a university.” Other aspirations articulated in “Toward 2030” include the goal of empowering students to “think critically and communicate clearly” and to be “problem solvers and leaders, full participants in a healthy and vibrant democracy.” Our university, we are told, will “enable positive social change” and help to build “a more just, sustainable, and inclusive world.”

UNB has betrayed these aspirations and principles by refusing to end its complicity in the Gaza genocide. The administration has either ignored or rejected calls for the university to disclose and divest itself of its financial interests in corporations arming, enabling, and profiting from Israel’s genocide. It has either ignored or rejected calls to cut ties with those Israeli academic and research institutions that support and sustain Israeli militarism, occupation, and apartheid. These calls have emanated from a wide array of individuals and organizations within the UNB community, including the Association of UNB Teachers, the Faculty Senate, and the Student Organizing Collective.

One of the most influential historians of the last century, Howard Zinn, famously argued that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” What he meant is that political neutrality is a pretense that is itself political. Not taking a stand against injustice and oppression simply perpetuates them and is thus a form of collaboration with their purveyors. UNB’s commitment to truth and reconciliation repudiates the settler colonial violence which sought to physically and culturally eradicate the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. On this issue, the university has taken a political and moral stand. Its policy of “political neutrality” with respect to Israel’s genocidal assault on the people of Palestine, however, is antithetical to this principled position. It allows the university not only to be indifferent to, but to actively support the most egregious, brazen, and murderous settler colonial violence in the world today.

If UNB is actually interested in “seeking the truth” and in “tackling society’s great challenges head on” to create “positive change,” it will recognize the truth of the genocide staring it in the face. Seeking the truth is rarely neutral. Because new truths, new knowledges, disrupt the settled assumptions that uphold the status quo, their recognition often has implications for relationships of power and are thus inherently political. This is why discovering the truth, acknowledging it, and being accountable for its consequences can be disconcerting. Being challenged, becoming uncomfortable, is in this sense an essential component of education. It is what universities do. But education, as “Toward 2030” makes clear, cannot stop there. UNB is not about ideas alone, we are told, it is dedicated to “turning ideas into action.” In other words, we have an obligation to apply our knowledge by acting on it in the real world. We must not only be seekers of truth; we must also be speakers of truth. And when necessary, we must speak that truth to power. As with the Holocaust, as with the genocidal oppression of Indigenous people here in Canada, the genocide in Gaza is no longer a political issue where there can be legitimate disagreement. Denying its reality and doing nothing is complicity. It is to stand on the side of a racist settler state engaged in the extermination and ethnic cleansing of a people every bit as entitled to life, health, education, opportunity, justice, freedom, self-determination, dignity, and respect as any other group of human beings.

Unfortunately, the administration’s recently unrolled policy of “institutional autonomy and political neutrality” is designed specifically to foreclose any possibility of a constructive response to student, staff, and faculty protests on behalf of Palestinian human rights. As recently as 2022, President Mazerolle issued a public statement condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, however, he has announced that the university will “refrain from taking public positions on political issues.” This selective neutrality has nothing to do with inclusion and freedom of expression as is claimed. On the contrary, it supplies the pretext for the administration’s efforts to intimidate and silence anti-genocide student activists. “Neutrality” is our administration’s disingenuous attempt to legitimize its denial of the truth and refusal to take action. In the case of Palestine, “allowing your thinking to change so that action will follow in a good way toward truth” is simply too inconvenient. It would, after all, oblige UNB to rethink some of its investments. It is possible, moreover, that it would displease some of UNB’s donors. And there are undoubtedly students, parents, and others associated with the university who would be made uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, we write this in the spirit of hope that UNB’s leadership can muster the courage of their convictions and take action despite its inconvenience. They must respond to the undeniable truth of the Gaza genocide with the integrity and boldness invoked in the “Toward 2030” vision. UNB must join the growing numbers of universities around the world that have taken a stand against occupation, apartheid, and genocide through disclosure, divestment, and boycotting (a list, incidentally, which includes a variety of UNB’s partner universities). It must end its complicity, and by extension the complicity of all of us, in Israel’s ongoing and intensifying efforts to uproot and obliterate the people and culture of Palestine, a society firmly established over many centuries in the land Israel claims exclusively for itself.

We invite members of the UNB community to express their support of this appeal by adding their names and affiliations in the response box provided at the end of the document.