November 15, 2023

Dear colleagues,

We, members of the Italian and Israeli academic communities, are aware of calls for an Italian boycott of Israeli academia and academics. We hereby jointly express our deep distress at efforts to undermine our strong and productive bonds as research partners and friends by wrongly condemning Israel in its war against Hamas and failing to clearly and publicly condemn Hamas for its horrific terror attack on Israel on October 7. This is the time to stand with Israel in its greatest time of need, not to distance oneself from Israel and our Israeli partners and friends.

In an attack unprecedented in its brutality, Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and international citizens—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—including several Italians. They raped women, and beheaded, mutilated, and burned the bodies of their victims, including babies, children and elderly, as well as people with severe illnesses and special needs, on that terrible day. These sadistic atrocities were described by foreign journalists, and war crime specialists as more brutal than ISIS (“The scenes of genocide I saw in Israeli morgues,” by Qanta A. Ahmed, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 10, 2023).

Hamas terrorists abducted 239 people and took them hostage into Gaza, including babies, children, women, and the elderly. Premeditated and intricately planned in its brutality, the attack also involved the terrorists documenting, flaunting, and celebrating with glee their acts of horror on video and on social media. Emergency medics and war correspondents who saw evidence of what happened that day said the level of cruelty was like nothing they had ever seen before. Meanwhile, Israelis continue to be under rocket attack and have spent the last five weeks running to bomb shelters and safe rooms to save their lives, multiple times every day.

In the wake of the attack, Israel declared war on Hamas—not on the Palestinian people. Israel’s goals in this war are of the highest moral value: (1) to bring home its captives, and (2) root out a vicious, evil terror organization that inflicts harm on Israel and on the Palestinian people, undermining aspirations for peace. Amidst its actions of self-defense, Israel is doing its utmost to minimize harm to innocent Palestinians —a formidable task given that Hamas cynically hides its armaments and facilities in hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential complexes, and shoots at Palestinian civilians heeding the extensive forewarnings of the Israel Defense Forces to flee in order to save their lives. Meanwhile, Hamas is preventing access to the hostages by the International Committee of the Red Cross, so it is not able to carry out its humanitarian mission.

As academics, we are committed to the concepts of truth, liberty, morality, democracy, including the protection of minorities and women’s rights. Our careers and our lives are built on the foundations of academic freedom and the generation of knowledge for the benefit of humanity. These are all core values that Israel, and Israeli academia, hold dear—and the opposite of the values that Hamas adheres to and promotes. These are the shared values that are at the core of the academic bond between Italian and Israeli researchers in the sciences and humanities, a deep and strong relationship between like-minded individuals which has led to over 10,000 joint academic publications in the last five years alone.

In the arena of public opinion, we are appalled at the inability to distinguish between the anti-Semitic genocidal aims of Hamas—which calls for erasing not only Israel but also killing Jews everywhere—and the legitimate aims for freedom and statehood of the Palestinian people. At best we see this as a lack of knowledge and failure of logic, and at worst as a deliberate, chosen stance to attach blame to Israel and the Jewish people. Neither, of course, is acceptable or tolerable.

As academics united by the values we share, we cannot stand by in silence as we witness a narrative of tyranny that is trying to mute our narrative: one of peaceful coexistence and collaboration, of freedom of thought, and advancement for the sake of humanity. For that reason, we object in no uncertain terms to any attempts to boycott Israeli academia and Israeli academics. We enjoin everyone who shares our values to sign this petition and, in doing so, stand firm with Israel and make a clear statement in favor of the values that are at the heart of education and progress, which are the foundations for the kind of world that we wish to live in, now and always.

Signed,

List of signees