There is an urgent need for international solidarity with Palestine. Palestinians are facing an ongoing and accelerating genocide, and we all have a moral duty to do what we can to stop it. 

As of 11 January 2024, at least 23,469 Palestinians have been killed and 59,604 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since October 7, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. The UK-based charity Oxfam stated that "the daily death toll of Palestinians in Israel’s war on Gaza surpasses that of any other major conflict in the 21st century, while survivors remain at high risk due to hunger, diseases and cold, as well as ongoing Israeli bombardments", and the United States-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) group said in its World Report 2024 that civilians in Gaza have been “targeted, attacked, abused, and killed over the past year at a scale unprecedented in the recent history of Israel and Palestine”. On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled “that Israel must take all measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza", but since then the killing and displacement of innocent Palestinians have only continued.

As well as the continued direct violence that civilians are facing from the Israeli military, the recent decision by many states to stop funding the UNRWA, based on limited evidence, has intensified the risk of forced starvation imposed on people in Gaza by Israeli blockades and attacks on aid vehicles.

There are aspects of this genocide that are particularly relevant to internet research, and to those concerned with the intersection of academic freedoms, universal human rights, and the internet. 

The direct violence that Palestinians face is accompanied by attempts to destroy their culture and history. As part of a mission to destroy Gazan cultural and educational sites, all universities in Gaza have been bombed or heavily damaged with many academics killed.

Even those Palestinian academics who have managed to escape the direct violence are under attack. Palestinian academics, including those living and working internationally, are unsafe speaking up.

Internet connections are being blocked, disrupting Palestinian's efforts to even communicate with the outside world about the violence they are facing. Civilian-targeted bombing is being aided by artificial intelligence while facial recognition software is used on civilians fleeing for safety. These are but a few examples of the intersection of Israeli online warfare strategies. This reality, though, is far from novel: the Israeli authorities have strategically constructed and maintained an apartheid regime of automated surveillance and control, often with the financial, military and political support of the West.

Mainstream media and politicians in many countries have been contributing to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate.

Meanwhile, a targeted online propaganda and surveillance campaign is used across global networks to target pro-Palestinian activists and academics. We also note that many academics within AoIR, early-career and insecure academics, have spoken to us privately about fear for their future career prospects should they speak up in solidarity with Palestine. Some have already faced significant consequences.

We are compelled to make this statement after issuing a call to the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) executive, and to the AoIR community as a whole, to take action in solidarity with Palestinians. 

This call was grounded in an understanding that AoIR claims to be “committed to the most fundamental principles of academic freedom, equality of opportunity, and human dignity.”

In addition to this, AoIR has positioned itself as an organisation willing to host political discussions, running conferences on the themes of Decolonising the Internet and Revolutions. Conference calls for proposals signalled a desire by AoIR to highlight marginalised voices, issuing “a special invitation to .. scholars from the Global South, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Globally”.

Many of us are involved with AoIR specifically because it has seemed like a community with some commitment to principles of justice and inclusion. We are taking the time to write this letter because we still hope that AoIR can live up to these principles.

The AoIR Executive Committee, in discussion with four past presidents of AoIR, issued a lukewarm statement on the mailing list that foregrounded that the discussion had been ‘intense and trying’ and implicitly positioned the ‘loss of civilian life’ as beginning on October 7, 2023.

We do not believe that it is possible to be neutral in situations of injustice, human rights abuses, and genocide. Silence - and the call for others to be silent - is a political position. 

Those of us who are AoIR members, attend AoIR conferences, or participate in the wider AoIR community, call on the AoIR Executive and the broader AoIR community, to live up to the ideals professed in the Diversity and Inclusivity statement and in other AoIR spaces. 

The Palestinian people are no less deserving of universal human rights than any other group. They, too, deserve “academic freedom, equality of opportunity, and human dignity”. 

Therefore: 

1. We are establishing an AoIR Palestine Solidarity affinity group for all scholars who believe that AoIR's commitment to equality, justice, academic freedoms, and supporting marginalised voices should extend to Palestinian people. We welcome scholars to this group who agree that violence against civilians (including blockades of food and medicine) is not acceptable, that Palestinians displaced from their land since 1948 should have a right to return along with their families, that the Israeli state does not speak for all Jewish people, and that an enduring peace can only come with justice for all. If you wish to join, please complete this form.

2. We call on the AoIR Executive to join other academic institutions, including over 220 African Studies Scholars from around the globe that issued a statement on Israel’s Attacks on Gaza that condemns the “genocide enabled by the billions of dollars of military aid that the United States government annually sends to Israel”, in issuing a statement calling on our respective governments to stop enabling the ongoing genocide. 

3. We call on the AoIR Executive to make it clear whether they will take action, and what action will be taken, if members of AoIR or people in AoIR spaces call for violence against Palestinian people, in line with the Diversity and Inclusivity statement, as we presume they would in the case that such statements were made against other people.

4. We call on the AoIR Executive to affirm a commitment to ensuring that AoIR work actively to promote and protect the academic freedom of its members, including from potential blacklisting by senior scholars, for the expression of legitimate political views. This should involve them coming up with a plan on how to do this, to be enacted at the next AoIR meeting.

5. We call on the AoIR Executive to affirm that antisemitism (a form of hate speech that by definition is abhorrent) does not include political criticisms of Israel or support for the (legitimate) political rights of Palestinians to self-determination. 

6. We call on the AoIR Executive, and on the AoIR community as a whole, to explore ways to show material solidarity with the Palestinian people, which may include joining the international call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and investigating ways in which our own academic institutions are complicit in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people through research ties and investments.

More broadly, we call for all Internet researchers to take an active stance for justice and solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

We call on all internet researchers to observe these intersections and strategies deployed in war. There is already evidence that as well as the devastating effect of these practices and technologies within Israel and Palestine, they will also be used to further surveillance and anti-democratic efforts elsewhere.

We call on all those teaching at universities to highlight the situation in Palestine and open space for discussion of solidarity with Palestine.

We recognise that Israeli academic institutions are currently playing a role in providing technical, material, and ideological support for the ongoing occupation of Palestine and violence against Palestinians. We have now seen directly, within AoIR, the mechanisms by which some Israeli academics work to undermine attempts to build solidarity with Palestine. 

Some of us therefore call for an immediate academic boycott of Israeli research institutions. Others believe that the path lies in urging our universities to investigate their ties with Israeli institutions and how these partnerships might end up in dual-use by the latter and, thus, offer complicity in the genocide.