No Neutrality In The Face Of Genocide in Gaza

*This description is extracted from a broader counter-statement endorsed by multiple societies against an email sent by Maynooth University, which can be read here
https://publuu.com/flip-book/392331/889456 *

I am a student/staff of Maynooth University and you do not have my support in your statement regarding the Israeli Apartheid of Palestine. It is disgraceful to email the community 3 days after the International Court of Justice's decision that there was a plausible case for Israel to answer and ordering it to take action to "prevent genocide". The fact of the matter is that choosing neutrality instead of taking a stance against Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is enabling a continued violation of human rights.

Your statement was released within the minute following your call for submissions regarding Social Justice Week. It is deeply hypocritical to discuss the concept of peace but choose not to actively support the ceasefire in your position of influence. I compare your actions to Maynooth University's statement condemning the invasion of Ukraine only one day after Russian launched their military campaign. Thus, your statement is a clear demonstration of Maynooth University's endorsement of the current atrocities being committed by the Israeli government.

over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and over 6,000 Palestinians were killed as part of an ethnic cleansing decades before the 7th of October . To be pro-Palestinian is not ‘anti-Semitic’ but critical of Israel’s state-sponsored terrorism in pursuit of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Indeed, such claim is an effort to silence teachings about the Palestine cause. This is not an equal-sided conflict but an anti-colonial war which an Irish university should viscerally understand the impact of.

Since the 7th of October, all universities in Gaza have been annihilated and the Israeli-occupied West Bank is being illegally struck by drones. Moreover, since the 7th of October, over 25,000 Palestinian people have been murdered by Israel; thousand-year-old native olive trees of Bethlehem have been uprooted; and over 1.5 million Palestinians have been displaced across the Gaza strip. In other words, the number of students and staff currently attending Maynooth has been killed twice.

Do not misunderstand, I am appalled by the 7th of October attack. Yet, I also acknowledge that Hamas was financially supported by the Israeli military and politicians for years and mere months prior to the 7th of October to destabilise Palestinian democracy. The Israeli government has been creating propaganda targeting the Western audience to dismiss decades of the Palestinian genocide as a 'right to defend itself’ . Vice-President, your EDI office and the executives have failed to showcase the critical analysis about global humanitarian issues that this academic institution aims to foster in our students and Staff.

Although your email claimed to portray the university as neutral, this is far from the truth due to the continuation of the university’s connection with companies profiting from this genocide, such as Starbucks and Intel, with the latter just recently donating a grant of €150,000 to the building of a new robotics lab on campus. Intel operates four development and production sites in Israel, including a manufacturing plant 42km from the Gaza strip. Amid the genocide, Intel announced its plan to expand the Kiryat gat plant, with Netanahu saying it was the largest investment ever in Israel, and the Israeli Finance minister stating “This investment, at a time when Israel wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity,”. The university must divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, boycott products supporting Israel and pressure the Irish government to demand an internationally-enforced ceasefire now. As Desmond Tutu famously said ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice have chosen the side of the oppressor’.