Some 50 students and professors demonstrated on Wednesday at the headquarters of the Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad (VLIR -Flemish Interuniversity Council) in Ravenstein Gallery in Brussels, to press demands for a boycott of academic institutions in Israel.
The demonstrators drew attention to the fact that the academic community had called for the boycott in an open letter published in mid-January and signed by 7,000 PhDs, assistants, professors, other staff and students from several Belgian academic institutions.
Well-known figures with honorary doctorates at various institutions also signed a call for academic action against Israel. They included television producer and war journalist Rudi Vranckx, climate activist Greta Thunberg, UCL honorary doctor and musician Brian Eno and TV presenter, author and director Ish Ait Hamou.
'Complicity with genocide'
On Wednesday afternoon, staff and students dressed as judges, symbolically denounced the silence of the Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad (VLIR - Flemish Inter-University Council) and the Conseil des rectrices et recteurs (CRef - Council of Rectors).
Among other things, they referred to "complicity with genocide and the violation of international law."
Mingtje Wang, a student at UGent, said she believed Belgian universities "have a moral obligation to stop cooperating with Israeli institutions."
"We know that those institutions collaborate in the oppression of the Palestinian people, for example by developing weapons or giving scholarships to Israeli soldiers," Wang said. "They help write the laws and systems that implement apartheid against Palestinians. They are not simply complicit, but a pillar of years of colonisation and now genocide."
The protesters also believe that "Belgian universities, as public institutions, are legally bound by Belgium's international obligations," noted Hanna De Boe of KU Leuven. ‘The ruling of the International Court of Justice in the genocide case against Israel obliges the Belgian state to do everything to prevent a genocide."
Individual universities suspend collaboration with Israeli institutions
Earlier in the day, various universities decided on their own to suspend academic collaboration with Israeli institutions, following months of pressure from student movements and occupations on campuses in Ghent, Leuven and Brussels, among others.
"At UGent, they issued a declaration of intent to cut ties with Israel," Wang said. However, she added, only a teaching collaboration has been broken off at UGent. All collaborations under the European Horizon research programme, which includes most academic collaborations with Israel, are still in place, she said.
"More than eight months after the declaration of intent, we are still investigating how to break the remaining ties," the UGent student added. "We demand transparency and haste."
The spontaneous demonstration at the VLIR started at noon and lasted for an hour, before being broken up by the police.
The Flemish Inter-University Council was yet to respond to the students' demands. VLIR President Jan Danckaert (Brussels Free University, VUB) was also not immediately available for comment on the open letter and the demonstration.
