Solidarity statement for Palestine by InSAF India
The following statement was our contribution to the public protest meeting organised by the collective ‘Indians for Palestine’ in New Delhi on 23 Feb 2024.
As Indian academics and independent researchers from around the world, we are filled with grief and horror at the unimaginable level of violence and destruction that has been unfolding in Gaza since 8 October 2023.
We are acutely aware that the genocide in Palestine is not a neatly localized phenomenon. It is a project made possible by a knotted web of government actors, capital interests and ideological groups operating the world over, whose punitive practices for repressing dissent tie colonial centres of power to the global periphery.
As scholars linked to universities around the world, we acknowledge the complicity of universities and research centres in making the genocide possible, developing the technologies that administer it, twisting the histories that enabled it and shaping the narratives that fuel it.
We are alarmed by the growing ties between Israel and India: from military and technological cooperation to university MoUs, from the ideological affinities between Hindutva and Zionism to their mutual sense of exceptionalism. Israel has long become the playbook for various forms of settler colonialisms in the Indian context – from Kashmir to Bastar. India’s disinformation industry has boosted the Hasbara propaganda machinery of the Israeli state. In turn, Israeli surveillance technologies such as Pegasus spyware have been used by the Indian government to incarcerate scholars and civic activists in India who continue to be in prison today. Were they not imprisoned in the first place, these same scholars would no doubt have been present at this event today and spoken out in full solidarity with Palestine.
Where India only boasts of being a Vishwaguru, South Africa has actually demonstrated global moral leadership by taking Israel to the international court of justice.
We urge the Indian government to unequivocally stand behind South Africa’s application. We call upon the Indian government to cut any ties with Israel that directly or indirectly contribute to the ongoing war.
We call on Indian universities, colleges and research institutions to end all cooperation with Israeli higher education institutions and for Indian civil society groups to endorse the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement.
We invite Indians around the world to put pressure at international levels to bring an end to this genocide and the occupation of Palestine and to bring about conditions that enable the unrestricted freedom and right to return for all inhabitants of the land from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea.
As an initiative committed to academic freedom in India and around the world, we join the groundswell of dissent that Indians for Palestine represents. We will continue to raise our voices in solidarity with the people of Palestine.