Internationally renowned scholar Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has been under fire since joining over 1,000 child researchers in signing a call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Following her signature, the leadership of Hebrew University of Jerusalem sent Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian a letter denouncing her and pressuring her to resign. This letter was then leaked to the media, including major Israeli television channels, and Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has subsequently been the target of a public hate campaign.
In response, an international letter-writing movement has begun in Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s defense. Below is a letter from Dr. Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California-Berkeley, to Hebrew University leadership that illuminates the legal and moral meaning of genocide and the obligation of university administrators to uphold academic freedom.
Please consider sending your own letter to University President Asher Cohen and University Rector Tamir Sheafer. Please follow this link for further details, including a suggested text for the letter to Hebrew University.
– Rosalind Petchesky and Lama Khouri, JVP-NYC
October 31, 2023
To: Professor Asher Cohen, President of Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Professor Tamir Sheafer, Rector, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
I join an expanding chorus of scholars imploring you to respect the rights of association and speech exercised by Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who is currently the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law and the Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. I presume you know how important her research has been on issues such as trauma, surveillance, and gender violence. Her work on children in conflict zones has been taken up by scholars and policy makers throughout the world. Her scholarship, and her critical voice, are important to the world today as we seek to produce a more just and less violent world.
I shall presume that you know full well the academic and institutional importance of the work of Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian. Her early work on the effect of militarization on women in conflict zones is a model in the field. And her work on security and the politics of fear is a stunning investigation of the psychosocial dimensions of securitarian regimes. Her book on Palestinian childhood introduces the idea of “unchilding” which has been widely praised as an original and trenchant understanding of the accumulated trauma of children living under militarized regimes. She has worked assiduously to develop models of campus-community understanding in conflict zones, and hers is a voice for peace, for enhanced mutual understanding, and for the alleviation and repair of accumulated human suffering.
It makes sense that Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian would speak up in the face of contemporary violence waged against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Although you have stated your disagreement with her viewpoint, it is your responsibility as administrators to protect against viewpoint discrimination and to foster rights of association and extra-curricular free speech. Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian now suffers threats against her life by virtue of the steps taken against her. These steps should be rescinded immediately so that university administrative actions do not further the violence that has already overwhelmed the region.
As you doubtless know, the views of Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian comport with a number of international legal viewpoints. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York issued a document warning that Israeli actions may well be prosecutable as acts of genocide. They write, “mass killings are one means by which genocide is committed, but that is not the only method by which a group is “destroyed” or exterminated (in whole or in part). Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer credited with coining the term, said that genocide often includes “a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight . . . . It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity.”
In your rebuttal, you offer only the stated aims of the Israeli military policy in Gaza, but Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian joins many legal and historical scholars who are consulting both The Genocide Convention and Article II of the UN Resolution on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which defines the term as any effort to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to group members, imposing “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” You have every right to disagree with Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, but it is a travesty of justice to ask that she suspend her own informed viewpoint in favor of reproducing explicit state policy. That constitutes, as you surely know, an unjustifiable intervention into both academic freedom and extra-curricular rights of expression. You may not like the fact that there is a growing chorus of people who are using “genocide” to describe the horrific situation in Gaza, but then it is your obligation as representatives of a major research university to engage the debate, and to make room for an informed discussion of the matter free of threats. Anything else is rank censorship that destroys the aims and ideals of the university itself that you are charged with safeguarding.
Sincerely,
Judith Butler
Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California-Berkeley
Thank you! I applaud your letter, your restraint, and your reasoning!
However, you have fallen into the well laid trap into which so many other Americans have been manipulated and baited.
The Israel lobby via its stooges in Congress or Israeli officials directly via US mainstream media has spent decades feeding the American people so much BS about “Israeli Democray”, “shared values”, “shared interests” and “liberal values”, usually delivered in perfect American accents, because they usually are Americans who made aliyah.
This sleight of hand has been so subtle and going on for so long, that the average American can’t help but view Israel as an extension of our own territory and thus through the lens of our own laws and Constitution. Which couldn’t be further from reality.
Israel is not our 51st state or remote territory. It is not some miraculous western outpost nestled in the Middle East. Israel has no Constitution! Its laws are wildly different, and in many cases, completely opposite to our own. Israel doesn’t guarantee freedom of speech. It doesn’t guarantee academic freedom. It doesn’t guarantee freedom of movement. It doesn’t guarantee the right to assemble. It doesn’t guarantee freedom of association.it doesn’t guarantee freedom of expression. It doesn’t guarantee your right to religious expression or liberty. It doesn’t guarantee protection from arbitrary search, seizure, detention, and incarceration. It guarantees NOTHING we in the west have come to accept and very much take for granted.
This is why such a well reasoned letter based on American values, aspirations, laws, rights, and the Constitution itself, is utterly pointless and guaranteed to fall on deaf ears. You are dealing with a racist, radical, supremacist, theocratic, oppressive, Apartheid state that talks a good game, but merely cosplays as a western-style democracy and faux extension of Europe or the US – depending on who it is trying to grift on the day.
Pick at the surface for a few seconds and you’ll realize that the veneer of liberal western democracy isn’t even skin deep. Israel is nothing more than just another highly repressive Middle Eastern autocracy riding roughshod over most of its people and neighbors all on the American taxpayers’ dime and protection. And just like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, or Egypt, you simply can’t apply US values, aspirations, laws and rights when trying to reason with anyone or any official in Israel.
We need to wake the heck up and accept this reality. We need to course correct immediately and start treating Israel like we treat every other nation in the Middle East and quit pretending that the cute little cuckoo egg in the nest is one of our own!
Where was the Hebrew University campus built? No doubt professors Cohen and Sheafer know that well but try to hide it too like they are with the ongoing genocide.
Beautifully articulated challenge to integrity of Hebrew Univ.
We may be seeing our constitutional rights being compromised on the basis of “baby beheading” and “annihilation” threats.