In this statement, we would like to reply to some concerns of the student and staff body of Maastricht University, specifically with regards to the Dean of Law’s blog post. We would also like to clear the air on some issues.
We are writing on behalf of the student body advocating in concern and solidarity with the Palestinian people. Last Thursday, we exercised our human and democratic right to protest against the ongoing occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people. Our plan that day was to raise awareness of Maastricht University’s complicity in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, to disrupt the complicit normalization surrounding the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and to make a statement that Palestine lives and will be free.
Allow us to introduce ourselves first. We are a group of students that collectively organizes for Palestinian rights within the university formally since 2021. After October 2023, we have formed an alliance of students that is working against the ongoing destruction of Gaza as well as the ruthless bombing, kidnapping, rape, starvation, and massacre of the people in Gaza. We are also fighting for the rights of Palestinians in the remaining occupied villages of Palestine who face daily brutal abuse, harassment, arrest, intimidation, and killing from Israeli settlers and the Israeli military. We are also standing in solidarity against the ruthless war unleashed on Lebanon. This genocide, the many ones before it, and the entirety of the occupation of Palestine are documented and recognized to be in violation of international law by various human rights organizations, organizations which this institution normally regards as the most trusted sources within human rights discourse. We also don’t need international law to tell us what has been happening to Palestinians for the past 76 years, is beyond evil, and must be resisted by any means necessary. The right of armed resistance of occupied people is enshrined by international law, as you may know.
We want to clear a couple of things out: why did we protest at university faculties and why were we so loud?
Thursday saw marginalized and racialized people reclaiming the spaces that they have so violently been excluded from for years.
We were loud because the suffering of Palestinian people has been ignored and justified within the halls of the university. Increasingly, the topic has been shushed away by professors in our very classrooms. Our lives and experiences were made invisible as if we don't have the right to exist.
We were loud because for too long we have heard that Palestinians' right to their land and right to survive was “complicated”, “controversial”, or even worse, “debatable”.
We were loud because there are things that are not debatable, like the duty to free Palestine and liberate its people, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Why, you may ask, do we use this “controversial” chant? Because In 1948, Zionist militias backed up by European and American powers ethnically cleansed, dispossessed, and massacred thousands of indigenous Palestinians; and they formed a state on our burnt villages and charred bodies of our grandparents, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
To reiterate, Palestine is occupied from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is why we chant and fight for a free Palestine from the river to the sea. We will accept nothing less. And no one has the right to lecture Palestinians or Lebanese on how they will resist and protect themselves from a genocidal occupying force, let alone someone looking at oppression as if it were just words on a paper, to be dissected and analyzed, from an ivory tower.
Again, why did we protest at university faculties and why were we so loud? Because as residents of Europe, it is our shared responsibility to fight for a free Palestine. Why you may ask? Because we reject the idea, that most of you like to argue, that without the existence of the state of Israel, Jewish people do not have the right to self-determination and can never be safe. Jewish people must be safe everywhere, and they do not need a genocidal right-wing government to protect that right. They must have the right to self-determination in any country, within any space. We reject the classic colonialist racist divisive rhetoric of divide and conquer, that wickedly argues that the self-determination of one racialized and oppressed group can only come at the cost of another. We wholeheartedly stand with the Jewish people’s right to safety, self-determination, and life.
This is why we firmly believe that European countries have a duty to provide reparations for the brutal genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people during the Shoah. However, we disagree that Israel is the reparation. We do not believe displacing thousands of Jewish people to an occupied land, and subsequently building an extremist exclusionary state built on military force, is true reparation. We do not believe that Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians should have their villages occupied and people massacred for Europeans to cleanse themselves of guilt and accountability from the Holocaust. We do not believe that they must bear the responsibility for Europe’s brutal history of anti-semitism that resulted in the massacre of 6 million Jewish people across Europe and the rest of the world. As citizens of Europe you have the responsibility to address and acknowledge the root causes of this “conflict,” recognizing the formation of Israel as a racist “solution” to Europe’s antisemitism. What also cannot be ignored is how this “solution” of ethnic cleansing of Jewish populations in continental Europe simultaneously furthered Western capitalist and imperial interests. If you want to combat anti-semitism, combat and criminalize the rise of neo-nazi and fascist right-wing extremists from the Netherlands to Germany and France.
In regards to your insinuation that we utilized a chant that is “objectively perceived as anti-semitic”, we would like to confirm and reiterate a couple of things. The student community has expressed deep concern with this accusation, and we believe that this has led to the further censorship and criminalization of our protest and our rights to freedom of speech in the eyes of the public. The weaponization of anti-semitism to silence Palestinian freedom and liberation is not a novel thing. Calling for the freedom of a people from ethnic cleansing, genocide, oppression, and systematic abuse is not anti-semitic. The state of Israel does not speak on behalf of Judaism nor it represents the Jewish people, and cannot claim a monopoly on what is considered anti-semitic and what is not. Furthermore, this allegation of anti-semitism neglects the recent Dutch Court ruling in the case against Thomas Hofland who was found not guilty of anti-Semitic speech in August of 2023 for the exact same slogan you accused of being “objectively” hate speech.
Further, this statement seemingly rejects the stance of the institution you represent, a stance shown in the university’s repeated rejection of adopting the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. This definition has been rejected by many more institutions, criticized for conflating anti-Israel sentiments with anti-semitism. The impact of such a definition is the degradation of the human right to freedom of speech, as any criticisms of the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” would be criminalized under this definition. Your use of this definition of anti-semitism takes away from the fight against real antisemitism that is alive and well in this country and in Europe. In addition, your accusation further criminalizes, marginalizes and intimidates anyone who fights for the full freedom of the Palestinian people. As taught in your classrooms when studying human rights law, the freedoms and rights of Palestinians do not exist because of the state of Israel. As taught in your classrooms, this “democratic” settler colonial apartheid state is a case study on impunity within systems of international law. We hope to see the practical application of theory.
To reiterate, we reject the conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism. Calling for the dismantling of a settler colonial state that has inflicted brutal crimes against humanity must not be conflated with incitements to violence, extremism, and anti-semitism. Other prominent definitions of anti-semitism acknowledge this separation of anti-Israeli sentiments with anti-semitism, notably the 2021 Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism. We are fighting for a free Palestine, a nation where all people are free regardless of their religion, ethnicity, or race. Something that Israel is the opposite of, an ethno-state, enabled by European and American imperialism, that has committed countless international law and human rights violations and war crimes; something that we should all be concerned about. Something that this university should condemn. However it is clear that the massacre of more than 30,000 Palestinian people is not enough for you to write a statement or blog post, but a peaceful and righteous protest was.
If we let states like Israel oppress and massacre with impunity, with support and no condemnation, we are setting a dangerous precedent. As states all over the world are becoming more fascist and exclusionary, all free people are at risk. We are here fighting for the basic values of freedom, dignity, and humanity. We understand the concern of disrupting education, but that was precisely the aim of our protest, to make a statement and break the neutrality of the university in the face of this barbaric genocide. That’s the aim of a protest. It is to shake the spaces that enable the problem you are protesting against.
We are not terrorists. We do not incite violence. We are not the unreasonable monsters that you painted us to be. For the past 6 months, we have suffered incomprehensible pain witnessing our people genocided and our lands raped; not knowing if we can ever go back home.
What have you done? We wish you had done nothing. Instead, you have ostracized us, demonized us, criminalized us; all while giving us a big wide smile. A big wide smile of fake concern, of fake empathy; making us feel like monsters, for fighting to survive. You will never know how we feel, and we never wish this on anyone. Feeling stranded, hopeless, millions of miles away from home. In a country that is sending money, soldiers and weapons to destroy your home. We don’t wish this on anyone. We hope you never experience this. We hope you never experience having dozens of your family members killed; your favorite cafe bombed to shreds; your school, your university, your workplace, destroyed.Your home incinerated; trapped in an open-air prison, with no food, water, or medicine. Waiting for your death. To either be killed by a rocket, famine, or disease.
But we do hope your choices weigh heavily on you, we wish you might have done something different, because you can, send less money, less support, and less legitimacy to the genocidal war machine of Israel. It seems you value your comfort over human life.
While you sip on your cappuccino in the early afternoon, with clothes on your body, a roof over your head, a home to go back to, and a hot meal awaiting you with your family. Think about the Palestinians who’ve had EVERYTHING taken away from them. The Palestinians with torn limbs, starving and dying of thirst.
You claim we were too loud and disruptive, do you know how loud a genocide is? Constant bombardment from the sounds of drones, fighter jets, screams of their dying loved ones, and of the F15 planes that your beloved country so willingly sends to Israel in violation of international law and a recent Dutch court ruling. While you sit at your university, surrounded by your colleagues, anticipating your classes, meetings and assignments, think of all the Gazans that have had their dreams crushed. They do not have the privilege to go to school or university. Israel have bombed them into rubble.
Imagine the screams of Palestinian women, being raped in front of their family members, whilst taking refuge in Al Shifa hospital. Isn’t that more disturbing than the sounds of our megaphones and our chants for freedom?
So as long as you are complicit in the normalization of the killing, starvation, rape, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of our people and our lands, we will keep showing up. We will keep exhausting you and being a burden. And again, if it’s too annoying to see public displays of disruption and confrontation, look away from that disruption, and look away from the graffiti, the protests, the flyers, just as you look away from human suffering. From our torn body parts and charred limbs. From our scorched lands and destroyed homes.
Freedom is taken, not given.
FREE PALESTINE, FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA.
Free Palestine Maastricht and UM Students for Palestine
Signatories List
