This text was shared by email on September 17 to the University of New Brunswick community by members of the UNB Department of Historical Studies. It has since been signed by 128 people associated with UNB, as of October 5.
As scholars of the past who have dedicated our professional lives to understanding and interpreting historical reality, we members of the Department of Historical Studies and the Department of History and Politics of the University of New Brunswick, can no longer remain collectively silent about our university’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal violence against the people of Gaza and of Palestine more generally.
While we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants on October 7, 2023, we have become increasingly outraged by the massive disproportionality of Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people. In the last 23 months its assault on Gaza has killed over 67,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children. Credible scholarly analysis estimates that the death toll is far higher. Israeli forces continue to deliberately target journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and medical personnel. Israel’s ongoing blockade of food, water, baby formula, medicine, and other necessities of life has now resulted in widespread famine and disease. The mass starvation of Palestinian civilians is a deliberately engineered strategy, as statements from Israeli political and military leaders confirm. In recent months, hundreds of civilians desperately seeking aid at distribution sites have been murdered by Israeli forces. And for every Palestinian killed, many more are wounded, permanently maimed, and traumatized for life. The physical destruction of critical infrastructure roads, hospitals, sanitation systems, water and electrical facilities–has proceeded with the stated intent of making Gaza unlivable. We are especially disturbed, as educators, by the fact that all of Gaza’s twelve universities, and most of its libraries, archives, cultural centers, museums, and heritage sites, now lie in ruins. The situation on the ground is apocalyptic. It may once have been possible to interpret Israel’s war on Gaza as an attempt to defeat Hamas and rescue hostages. That time has long passed. Israel’s systematic war crimes and violations of international law–features of its illegal occupation of Palestinian land for many decades–are now eclipsed by the overarching crime of genocide.
Our job as historians is to interpret and evaluate what has happened in human societies. We believe that understanding the past can help humankind do a better job of navigating the present and shaping the future. The task has an indelible moral dimension. Not only do we seek to describe and explain the Holocaust, for example, we condemn it, and we seek to instill in our students the conviction that such horror never be allowed to happen again. And just as we judge that the empirical evidence of the Holocaust is so overwhelming that no unbiased person could deny it, we view the current genocide in Gaza as an undeniable historical reality, voluminously documented in real time by its victims, its perpetrators, and a multitude of international observers and organizations. Unlike the Holocaust, however, this unconscionable reality continues to unfold as we speak. “Never again,” it seems, is now. (more...)
UNB historians denounce their university’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal violence in Palestine
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