Scholars urge pressure as letter signed by Nobel laureates ‘ignored’ by White House
The US government has not responded to a letter signed by five Nobel laureates and hundreds of prominent figures, asking President Joe Biden to halt support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza, an academic said.
American Jewish history professor Shira Klein emailed the letter to the White House in December. “I never heard back,” she told The National.
Among the signatories was Christopher Pissarides, a 2010 Nobel economics prize winner, filmmaker Ethan Coen, best known for making 1996’s Fargo with his brother Joel, and Stanford Emeritus professor Joel Beinin, a prominent historian.
Many of those who signed are also Jewish. Israel, they wrote to Mr Biden, is enforcing a segregation system of “apartheid” and other transgressions in the occupied West Bank because the US allows it to flout UN Security Council resolutions.
They called for a US policy shift, from managing the conflict to “solving it within a short and reasonable time frame”.
“Two peoples live and will continue living between the Jordan river and the sea,” they wrote. “The only way forward is recognising the right of both to self-determination.”
But the group has been facing a struggle to make their ideas politically relevant.
“What we have is our words, our brains, our connections and our ability to articulate things well, which we are using to try [to] influence public opinion,” said Prof Klein. She teaches Holocaust history and other topics at Chapman University in California.
One of only a few Arab signatories is Lebanese law professor Chibli Mallat, who has published a proposal on ending the Palestine-Israrel conflict.
Prof Mallat said the group of 2,500 signatories can play a role as soon as there is a ceasefire in the Gaza war because “the next day people will be looking for a political solution”.
Their approach, however, needs to become “a little bit more political”.
“The jump into the political arena is one which it seems to me worth trying,” Prof Mallat said, suggesting approaching US Senate members critical of Mr Biden’s stance on the war.