The Haagse Stadspartij stands in solidarity with the peaceful student demonstrations across the country. They are following in a tradition of students advocating for peace, rights, and equality. The students are – rightly – passionate about severing ties with a state guilty of human rights violations, international law violations, and breaches of the laws of war; A state that has already leveled almost the entire Gaza Strip. We cannot continue to look away and pretend not to see. Therefore, we previously submitted a motion to the Hague City Council calling for a permanent ceasefire.
It is not enough to simply say that the right to demonstrate must be respected and that students should be facilitated. This moment also demands a loud and powerful judgment. Where do you stand as a political party?
The occupation of the Wijnhaven building and the support demonstrations were not just intended to “serve as a valve” as GroenLinks describes it. Nor is it about “wanting to contribute to a solution” as the Partij voor de Dieren calls it. The students’ demands are clear. Leiden University can and must not do business with an apartheid state that tramples on international law and human rights. The status quo, continuing on the same path, looking away when it becomes uncomfortable. It is precisely against this that the students have risen.
We stand with the students!
About the academic boycott:
Israeli universities are major, willing, and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid.
They are involved in developing weapon systems and military doctrines deployed in Israel’s recent war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza, justifying the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, rationalizing gradual ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, providing moral justification for extra-judicial killings, systematically discriminating against “non-Jewish” students, and other implicit and explicit violations of human rights and international law.
To end this complicity in Israel’s violations of international law, Palestinian civil society has called for an academic boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions. Refusing to normalize oppression, many academic associations, student governments, and unions as well as thousands of international academics now support the academic boycott of Israel.
