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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 Dean's 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 deiced 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 of being the 'only
democracy in the Middle East'.
Yours
Ilan Pappe
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