A conversation with Maya Wind, University of British Columbia - Omar Barghouti, Palestinian-led BDS movement for Palestinian rights - Samier Khaled, KU Leuven and Marc Botenga, Workers’ Party of Belgium/European Parliament.

This event is organised by OMAM, Brussels Centre for Urban Studies, the Fatima Mernissi Chair – RHEA, VUB Palestine Solidarity Network and Law and Development Research Group in collaboration with the Palestine Solidarity Network, BACBI, Break Up with Israel, Front de solidarité pour la Palestine de l’ULB and Citylab Pianofabriek.

This event will be held in english and is open to the public.

During the past seven months, the State of Israel has killed more than 5,000 academics and students including 95 deans and professors and three university presidents. All universities in the Gaza Strip, some 200 schools as well as archives, libraries and museums have been looted and either partially or totally destroyed. As many scholars have pointed out, this qualifies as ‘scholasticide’ or ‘educide’, that is the intentional and systematic destruction of the material and immaterial infrastructures for research and education. In response, scholars, students and workers across the world have raised up in this historical moment to decolonise our universities and organise for Palestinian freedom. In this conversation panel we will discuss the historical role of Israeli higher education institutions in supporting Palestinian dispossession. And we will also consider the ways scholars, students and workers are calling on academic institutions to take a principled stand in solidarity with Palestinians by demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire and by ending any collaboration with the arms industry and Israel's universities.

Maya Wind is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her scholarship broadly investigates how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. She has received support for her research from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024), investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid.

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the Palestinian-led BDS movement for Palestinian rights. He is a co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, NY, and is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy (ethics) at the University of Amsterdam. His commentaries and views have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, among many others.

Marc Botenga is a member of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, which he represents in the European Parliament as a member of the Left group.

Samier Khaled is a Belgian-Palestinian medical student at the KU Leuven, and initiator of the national campaign Break Up With Israel."

Wednesday 22nd May 2024, 7pm - 9pm.

Zabriskie Point Room
Rue du Fort 35
1060 Saint-Gilles