Staff petition council to sever ties with Israeli university

In response to the demand of 600 university professors and administrative staff, the presidency of the Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi, or the Abdelmalek Essaadi University, located in the northern city of Tetouan, Morocco, is planning to review its 2022 academic partnership agreement with the Israeli University of Haifa.

This was the outcome of a meeting on 30 May between Professor Al-Moumni Boushti, the university’s president, and 12 professors and employees, representing the signatories of the petition.

Boushti pledged to include the petition’s demands as an agenda point at the next university council meeting, with the purpose of cancelling the September 2022 partnership agreement between the universities.

Local media organisation Akhbarona published a copy of the committee’s letter to the president and a video clip shows the handing over of the petition.

The Moroccan Observatory Against Normalisation, an umbrella organisation for various political parties opposing links with Israel, posted a video of one of the professors, a petitioner, calling on the council to cancel its cooperation with the University of Haifa.

He said: “After the United Nations’ top court, [the] International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Netherlands, ordered Israel on 24 May to immediately halt its military assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, in a landmark emergency ruling, in South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide, it became morally and legally unacceptable to our university to cooperate with Israel, which is not respecting international laws, and killing children.”

On 31 May, 52% of the death toll in Gaza (36,284) were women and children and 82,057 people had been injured, according to figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) which noted that 6,200 students and educational staff have been killed and 625,000 Palestinian students have no access to education. According to the UN, 1.1 million people in Gaza are facing “catastrophic levels” of food insecurity.

Demands

In a petition addressed to the university president, the signatories also demanded “the cessation of all forms of [diplomatic] normalisation with Israel”.

The petition added: “Our initiative comes as a step of solidarity with the Palestinian people …” and it states that Palestinian university presidents, deans, professors and students have been killed,

This petition came after the 16 May statement issued by the regional office of the Moroccan Union of Higher Education and Scientific Research Academic Staff calling for the cutting of ties with Israeli universities.

Abdelmalek Essaadi University is set to join several European, Asian, African, Latin American and North American universities which have ended their relationships with Israeli universities in response to the war in Gaza.

According to a 19 May report issued by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, the student-led and faculty-supported global campus mobilisation aimed at applying pressure on Israel, dozens of universities across the world have been prompted to review or suspend their relations with academic institutions in Israel.

As of 2 June, BDS’ roundup of divestment and academic boycott measures taken against Israeli academic institutions from universities across the world include higher education institutions from the US, the UK, Norway, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Mexico, Chile, Ireland, Italy, Brazil, Canada and South Africa.

Following the normalisation of relations with Israel in December 2020, many Moroccan governmental sectors, including the Moroccan Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research signed memorandums of understanding with Israeli partners.

Also, several Morocco-Israel universities cooperation agreements were signed, including an August 2021 agreement between the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the International University of Rabat and Ben Gurion University in November 2022, and three 2023 agreements between the Euro-Mediterranean University in Fez and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv University and the Shenkar University.

When Morocco resumed diplomatic ties with Israel in December 2020, it joined several others in the region: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, in addition to Egypt and Jordan, which had officially recognised Israel by signing peace agreements in 1979 and 1994 respectively.