[Marxism] Another academic stands trial

["pierre loiselle" <pierre_loiselle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A letter from Ilan Pappe of Haifa University

Dear Friends,

I have received today an invitation to stand for a trial in my university,
the university of Haifa. The prosecution, represented by Haifa's Dean of
Humanities demands my expulsion from the university
due to the positions I have taken on the Katz affair. It calls upon the
court
"to judge Dr.Pappe on the offences he has committed and to use to the full
the court's legal authority to expel him from the university." These
offences are, in a nutshell, my past critique of the university's conduct
in the Katz affair, the MA student who discovered the Tantura massacre in
1948 and was disqualified for that. The reason the university
waited so long is that now the time is ripe in Israel for any act of
silencing
academic freedom.

My intent to teach a course on the Nakbah next year and my support for
boycott on Israel has led the university to the conclusion that I can
only be stopped by expulsion.

Judging by past procedures this is not a request, but already a
verdict, given the position of the person in question in the
university and the way things had been done in the past. The ostensible
procedure of a 'fair trial' does not exist and hence I do not even intend to
participate in a McCarthyist charade.

I do not appeal to you for my own sake. I ask you at
this stage before a final decision has been taken to voice your opinion in
whatever form you can and to whatever stage you have access to, not in order
to prevent my expulsion (in many ways in the present atmosphere in
Israel it will come now, and if not now later on, as the Israeli academia
has decided almost unanimously to support the government and to help
silence any criticism).

I ask those who are willing to do so, to take this case as part of your
overall appreciation of, and attitude to, the preset situation in
Israel.  This should shed light also on the debate whether or
not to boycott Israeli academia.

This is not, I stress, and an appeal for personal help
- my situation is far better than that of my colleagues in the occupied
territories living under the daily harassment and brutal abuses of the
Israeli
army. It is an opening gambit and many of colleagues, especially my
Palestinian Israeli  colleagues, can be next. A testimony to the tragic
circumstances
of my own university is that I know there is no use in distributing this
letter on its internal web-site, as all of my colleagues in the past when it
came to the  crucial moment - for understandable reasons - felt they could
do very little to help me, without risking their own position in the
university.

I know many of you have access to world media and can help to expose
the already dismal picture and false pretense of Israel being the 'only
democracy in the Middle East.'

Yours,

Ilan Pappe

http://www.petitiononline.com/pappe/petition.html


Visit http://academicsforjustice.org



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