Does SFU Support Genocide?
An Open Letter on the Visit of the Israeli Ambassador
An Open Letter on the Visit of the Israeli Ambassador
December 10, 2024
In September of this year, President Joy Johnson and a group of SFU senior administrators met with the Israeli ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed. In correspondence with SFU Faculty for Palestine (F4P), President Johnson’s Executive Director and Chief of Staff James Beresford confirmed that the meeting had taken place and explained to F4P that “SFU has a process in place to accept meetings with ambassadors from any country that has a diplomatic relationship with Canada,” and that “Per our standard processes for these meetings, we shared information about SFU’s priorities and strategic plan and heard an update from the ambassador.” Upon further queries from F4P on the content of the meeting, Beresford added: “The ambassador was particularly interested in B.C.’s tech sector and landscape, and university representatives shared an overview of SFU, our innovation ecosystem and our tech and innovation work more broadly. SFU does not currently have any active institutional relationships in Israel and no new partnerships were proposed at this meeting.”
In light of SFUFA’s commitment to boycotting Israeli higher education institutions due to their amply documented complicity with occupation, apartheid, and the ongoing mass atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Gaza – as certified by motions passed at our AGM – we are relieved that SFU is not actively seeking to initiate institutional collaboration with Israeli universities.
But we are shocked and dismayed – if not surprised – that SFU administration would meet with the envoy of a state that has been deemed to be in the process of committing genocide by the foremost international legal bodies (the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court), as well as the most respected international humanitarian organisations (more recently Amnesty International), and many leading Holocaust and genocide scholars, including in Israel itself. Ambassador Moed’s boss at the time of his meeting with SFU administrators, then Foreign Minister Israel Katz, was the Minister for Energy and Infrastructure on October 7. On October 9, he issued an order to "immediately cut off the water supply from Israel to Gaza." He added: "Electricity and fuel were cut off yesterday. What was will not be. All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave." Katz’s statements were quoted in the International Court of Justice's January 26 provisional order for Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. In his capacity as Foreign Minister, Katz also declared the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel and threatened countries the UN who recognised the State of Palestine. In 2022, responding to Palestinian citizens of Israel who, as students, raised the Palestinian flag in Israeli universities, he told them: “Remember our independence war and your Nakba. Don't stretch the rope too much... If you don't calm down, we'll teach you a lesson that won't be forgotten."
These are the values that Ambassador Moed represents. The meeting with the Ambassador occurred shortly after President Johnson released her statement on ‘The Role of Universities in Polarized Times.’ We want to know whether meeting with the representative of a state currently perpetrating mass atrocities against civilians, academics, journalists, health workers, and countless children represents ‘living by our values’. Does institutional neutrality and ‘refrain[ing] from taking positions … on world events’ extend to neutrality vis-à-vis genocide? There is no indication from James Beresford’s messages that President Johnson and her colleagues even broached the question of the war on Gaza in their meeting with the Israeli envoy.
The Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu is currently the object of an international arrest warrant for war crimes from the ICC. Does this make no difference to SFU’s relationship to the official representatives of the Israeli state? Would President Johnson and SFU administrators meet with the Russian ambassador notwithstanding the war of aggression against Ukraine? Would they have met with the Myanmar ambassador at the time of the Rohingya genocide? Would they have met with the Serbian ambassador in the wake of Srebrenica? And if so, what exactly are these ‘values’ that SFU lives by?
The Office of the President tells us that Ambassador Moed was interested in discussing BC’s “tech sector” with President Johnson and the SFU leadership. Given the crucial contribution of Israel’s tech sector to the ongoing genocide against Palestinians, there is nothing innocuous about such a conversation. Whether we’re talking about the use of AI programmes like Gospel or Where’s Daddy? to target and kill scores of Palestinians, the testing out of ballistic technologies on Palestinian civilians, or the use of lethal drones equipped with recordings of crying children, technological research and development is at the core of the exceptional violence we can all witness on our own devices. In advance of their exchanges with Ambassador Moed, President Johnson and her team could have educated themselves on these questions by reading Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory, Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel, Amnesty International’s report Automating Apartheid or the testimonials from Palestinian harmed by the Israeli “tech sector” gathered by No Tech for Apartheid.
In accepting a meeting with the official representative of a state currently carrying out genocidal violence against Palestinian civilians, President Johnson and SFU administrators have made a mockery of the idea that SFU has any values that it lives by and, in the process, tarnished the university’s reputation. This meeting is profoundly offensive to any Palestinians in the SFU community, as well as to those of us committed to equality, human rights and justice. We hope that President Johnson and SFU administrators will reflect on the profound error and offence constituted by this meeting and pledge to change SFU’s institutional protocols, in consultation with the SFU community, to – at the very least – correct the disastrous idea that the institution can be “neutral” toward ongoing war crimes.
Sincerely,
Read the SFU Faculty for Palestine Basis of Unity Statement, endorsed by over 220 SFU faculty and staff, and the Call for Divestment Petition, signed by over 1,100 faculty, staff, students, and alumni.