UNIVERSITY – Faculty appeals against boycotting Israel: “A political, human and moral disaster”

“We’ve already received about 2,000 signatures, and hundreds more are on their way. This is a very important signal.” David Meghnagi, the former coordinator of the Master’s program in the Didactics of the Shoah at Rome’s University Roma Tre, is one of six academics who launched an appeal “against the boycott of Israeli universities and against antisemitism in Italian universities.” First addressed to the Italian Minister of University and Research and the Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities (CRUI), the appeal denounces “the resolution to boycott Israeli universities, institutes of research, and their teaching staff and students launched by some Italian universities.”

These initiatives, reads the document, “even when not intentionally antisemitic, contrast the very vocation of universities and research, which must stay spaces of liberty, critical confront and international cooperation, and contribute to bringing to the surface latent forms of antisemitism.” This is an issue about which the CRUI should “take a clear stance, because boycotting Israeli universities is a political, human and moral disaster,” David Meghnagi said to Pagine Ebraiche.

Israeli universities, he recalled, “were born partly from the tragedy of fascist persecutions. After being removed from teaching by the racial laws of 1938, many Italian academics contributed to shaping and renewing Israeli research in various fields.” They were a remarkable group, second only to the Germans. “We should open a moral reflection on what is happening,” said Meghnagi, “pointing out that the grandchildren of those who then turned their backs, allowing the suicide of Italian university, now participate in the boycott of the grandchildren of those who were persecuted.”

He also noted that it is disappointing “that all this happens only seven years after the ‘Remembrance and Apologies ceremony,’ in which Italian universities gathered in Pisa (Tuscany) and addressed that issue after 80 years.”

According to Meghnagi, “Israeli universities carry an important message, even in these difficult times, by continuing to protect the value of coexistence between different cultural and religious groups.” He hopes that Arab and Islamic voices will soon make themselves heard in the academic world defending those same values.

“It would lay the groundwork for the cultural conditions necessary to resolve the tragedy in the Middle East,” Meghnagi explained. “We are not political decision-makers, but teachers. As such, our duty is to provide good practices and nurture empathy.” In this direction, he concluded, “Italian psychologists and psychoanalysts have also missed an opportunity by participating in a drift of thought.”

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Photo: the backyard of the Palazzo della Sapienza in Pisa, Tuscany, where the “Remembrance and Amends” ceremony took place in 2018. This event marked the eightieth anniversary of the expulsion of Jewish faculty members and students from Italian universities.