Professor Haim Bresheeth, an eminent filmmaker, photographer, and a film studies scholar teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, who conceived of and issued “An Open Letter to Israeli Academics.” Bresheeth explained why he started this effort: As the son of Holocaust survivors, who was born in a DP camp in Italy, and grew up in Jaffa in the evacuated home of Palestinians who were made refugees by Israel’s army and never allowed to return, I am acutely sensitized to the meaning of refugee life and its injustices. Academics and intellectuals have, I think, a moral and socio-political duty to speak up against oppression and injustice. They enjoy heightened status and many social benefits, and must ‘speak truth to power’. If they do not, then a social collapse of the kind that happened in Germany in the 1930s or in the USA during McCarthyism, brings about a destructive social process. This has now happened in Israel, where fascist and racist tendencies have taken over the public sphere. We have called on our colleagues in Israel to play an active role in stopping the immoral, illegal war on Gaza, and assisting towards bringing about a political solution, leading to a just peace and the end of the occupation. So far, they have not risen to this challenge, unfortunately
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:10:35 +0000
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