WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – Columbia University’s announcement to open a center in Tel Aviv has drawn outrage from nearly 100 faculty members who say the university should reverse the decision because of the new far-right Zionist cabinet, as well as the occupying regime’s discrimination against Palestinians.
The plans for the new center, would include programs on climate change, technology and entrepreneurship and would build on several programs the university already has with the Zionist regime.
But in the weeks leading up to the announcement, Columbia law professor Katherine Franke began to circulate a letter in opposition to the center.
The letter so far has 95 signatures, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
“Israel, through formal and informal law, policy, and practice, refuses to abide by international human rights laws and norms both domestically and in its treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories,” Franke wrote in the letter.
English professor Mariane Hirsch, an immigrant from Romania who first visited the occupied territories after the 1967 war, also signed Franke’s letter.
“I’ve been watching with great sorrow and shock some of Israel’s policies against Palestinians and against its own Palestinian population,” Hirsch told the Columbia Daily Spectator. “The hope that I felt when I first went to Israel as a teenager has dissipated.”
“The issue really is that those academic collaborations have become more and more difficult when they exclude a large part of the population and also the neighboring population.”
A separate letter in support of the university’s decision has received around 172 signatures, according to The New York Times.
The letter opposing the new center also argued that the Zionist regime would bar certain faculty members based on their identity, politics, and scholarship.
A number of faculty and students at the university have been barred from entering the occupied territories in recent years including Franke, who in 2018 was denied entry after being detained and interrogated at Ben Gurion International Airport for 14 hours over her political positions.