Israeli academics accuse state of ‘plausible genocide’
A lecturer at an Israeli university is going on unpaid leave after students demanded he be fired for signing a petition that claims Israel “appears to” be guilty of genocide.
Regev Nathansohn, who teaches communications at Sapir College, is one of two dozen Israeli academics who have signed a petition calling for the United States to stop arming Israel in its war with Hamas. The petition, which more than 1,000 academics from around the world have signed, characterizes Israel’s conduct as a “plausible genocide.”
“President Biden, do not let the United States go down in history as the enabler of genocide,” said the petition, which has more than 1,000 signatories, from a group called Academics4Peace. “Respect the US’s obligation under international law and basic morality. The only way to stop the starvation of two million people, including 100+ Israeli hostages, is to end this war.”
Sapir is located in Sderot, one of the towns attacked in Hamas’s October 7 invasion. Many of the school’s students and staff hail from the area, and hundreds of its students signed a letter asking the college administration to fire Nathansohn for signing the petition. Israel rejects accusations of genocide and says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties.
“We will not tolerate educators who incite and call for a boycott against our country, as well as those who slander our soldiers,” said the students’ letter.
Nathansohn has not been fired. But the school released a statement to the press condemning the petition, distancing Sapir from its content, and saying it had instructed him not to use his academic affiliation while making political statements. Since then, Nathansohn and the administration have fought over
what the college owes one of its faculty members, whether and how he should be protected, and more broadly, how far academic freedom should extend.
Nathansohn, who earned his doctorate at the University of Michigan, is one of at least five Israeli signatories who have faced intense backlash from students, according to the petition’s organizer, Shira Klein, an Israeli American history professor at Chapman University in California. She said the others are Eran Fisher of the Open University of Israel, and three scholars at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba: Michal Givoni, Maor Zeev-Wolf, and Uri Mor. .
More than 20 Israeli academics have signed the letter, among more than 1,000 overall. Outside of Israel, signatories include two Nobel laureates and numerous scholars of the Holocaust and Jewish history. Klein is an expert on the Holocaust and has studied contemporary antisemitism.
The campus conflicts are especially notable in Israel, where institutions of higher education, including Sapir, are one of the few spaces in which Jewish and Arab Israelis interact. Other campus conflicts have erupted in the country since October 7.
“We forcefully condemn the rhetoric against IDF soldiers and take very seriously the offense felt by the students,” Sapir’s statement said. “The petition, and its signatories, do not represent Sapir in any way.”
It continued, “While upholding basic principles of academic freedom and free speech, which the college has respected since its founding, the college unequivocally directed the lecturer not to use the name of the college in personal and/ or political contexts and that he doesn’t represent the college in these contexts.”
Nathansohn said the college should have done more to defend his right to free expression. Following coverage of the students’ letter in the Israeli press, he said he had received anonymous phone calls and messages from fellow faculty members condemning him.
In a letter to Sapir’s administrators on March 28, Nathansohn said they did not “prevent the creation of a hostile work atmosphere in the college.” He said he could not teach in the spring semester, which was due to begin April 1, and requested a leave of absence.
Administrators understood his email as a request for unpaid leave, said granting a paid leave would not be possible according to the school’s regulations, and offered an unpaid leave of six months, according to correspondence reviewed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Administrators also rejected his accusations, saying they had vigorously defended his continued employment on the grounds of academic freedom.
“In recent days, we have unequivocally defended your right to express your opinion as a private citizen, in the face of a range of fronts that we are contending with – from the students’ association to government agencies,” read a letter dated April 1 from Sapir CEO Orna Gigi and its rector, Omri Herzog. The college did not reply to a request for comment from JTA.
Nathansohn eventually agreed to take an unpaid leave, but he did not consider the choice voluntary.
“They presented me with a mafioso-like choice: Either go back to teaching without protections and with more limited freedom of speech, or remain on unpaid leave that dramatically affects my livelihood,” Nathansohn said.
The petition is the fourth organized by Academics4Peace. The first, in August, sought to direct attention to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amid mass protests against the government’s efforts to reform the judiciary, which they said would weaken it. The next three have focused on October 7 and its aftermath.