A letter from South Africa, for all educators who stand in solidarity with Palestine

October 2023 We are educators, artists, students and cultural workers in South Africa, writing this letter in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle. We are also writing with deep concern for how educators, both locally and globally, are facing mounting intimidation, harassment and criminalisation for speaking out about the atrocities of apartheid Israel in both their personal and professional capacities. We write to offer our support for, and solidarity with, educators who stand in solidarity with Palestine. Our own history has shown the crucial role of educators in overthrowing apartheid, and we call on all educational institutions to defend educators who take principled positions against Israel’s apartheid project in Palestine and the current genocide which Israel is committing on the Palestinian people. On the 12th of October 2023, South African-Palestinian literature professor Haidar Eid of Al-Aqsa University sent a voice recording from Gaza, where he lives with his wife and two children, their flat having just been bombed: “My flat was bombed by apartheid Israel. Israel has said that Gazans must leave… We have no food, no electricity, water, and hospitals are bombed. The international community is standing idle, supporting apartheid Israel and blaming the victim. What is going on right now is genocide.” This horrific situation, which continues to evolve in ever more harrowing ways including the targeted decimation of Palestinian educational institutions by Israeli weapons of war, is an iteration of colonial racism and land dispossession that stretches back the length of the 20th century. Yet instead of supporting educators around the world to help teach and open this predicament to young people, what we are seeing both in our own South African context, and even more severely around the world, is the targeting and silencing of educators attempting to speak out about the atrocities of apartheid Israel – even on their personal platforms – by institutions, governments and the mainstream media. The Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was founded at the beginning of the 2000s by Palestinian cultural workers and educators, prompting a growth in solidarity and organising in educational spaces across the world. The impact of this movement led Israel and its allies to launch and escalate a global campaign to stifle criticism of Israel. Many organisational fronts - costing many millions of dollars - have been rallied for this effort, such as the Israel on Campus Coalition, founded in 2002, coordinating pro-Israel agendas on university campuses; Hillel, an international student organisation that influences Jewish life and ideas on over 500 campuses; the Hasbara fellowships, which take hundreds of students each year on 16-day trips to Israel to train them to become pro-Israel advocates on their campuses; and the Amcha Initiative, which characterises the Boycott Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitism. These organisations, set up to collectively dismantle critique of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, understand educational institutions to be key sites in the articulation of a political future for Israel and Palestine. Their primary ideological weapon has been to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, accusing all educators who assert the right of Palestinians to their land of being ipso facto antisemitic. This global and co-ordinated effort to disable critique of Israel in educational institutions around the world is happening in concert with rising right-wing attacks on progressive curricula and pedagogy in many parts of the world. While there are particular hostilities that fuel the Zionist attacks on pro-Palestine educators, we understand them to be operating towards the same historical ends as the right wing attack on critical race theory and LGBTIAQ+ literature in the United States educational institutions and the Hindutvaisation of the Indian curriculum under Modi. Education is increasingly becoming the site of a political backlash in which a series of conservative projects seeks to sever the relationship between formal education and the historically-informed work of liberation. This moment crystalises a crucial question about the meaning and purpose of education. The narrowing of the frame of education by the right-wing as well as by neoliberal capitalist austerity, constrains the idea of education to a mechanism for securing the status quo, limiting imagination of different and more liberated ways of organising ourselves, our relationships and our societies. We know, however, that education has the possibility of moving us towards a society characterised by social justice, care, and the flourishing of humanity and the earth as a whole. This latter orientation to education has long roots in South Africa’s history. There are countless examples of educators using their classrooms and curricula to expose injustices and atrocities, for the conscientisation of young people about colonial history, the context for understanding inequalities, opening up possibilities for critique, and nurturing broad action towards justice. We remember those teachers in 1970s South Africa (notably those in Soweto) who, at great risk to themselves, refused to leave their politics at the doors of their classrooms, but instead recognised these spaces as crucial to the work of bringing apartheid to its end. We remember the ways educators in universities and schools all over the world taught anti-apartheid material to young people, who picketed, boycotted and supported black South Africans to close down white minority rule. Education should be the place to ask the most difficult questions, develop the most principled positions, and open alternatives when these appear to be foreclosed. This is what makes educators so important, and so dangerous to the status quo. It is exactly this proximity of education to liberation that we must defend and upon which, in these moments, we must insist. We assert the right to teach against antisemitism and against the occupation of Palestine as a duty of educators who oppose the long history of racism and settler colonialism in which we are all entailed. We call for educational institutions to protect educators who stand with Palestine, we call for their right to speak out openly, and we call for the right to support the BDS Campaign. We add our voices to theirs, demanding an end to apartheid Israel’s occupation, an end to the siege on Gaza, and the right to return for all Palestinians.