Image courtesy: Newsclick
Five students of Jamia Millia Islamia university have been served show cause notices for participating in a protest in their campus. The protest was against Israel being a country partner for an international conference titled Global Health Zenith Confluence 2019 on Medical Infrastructure Planning organised by the Faculty of Architecture and Ekistics, held on October 5 and 6. The students were physically assaulted by university guards and have been threatened with disciplinary action.
How hypocritical is it that Israel is co-sponsoring a conference on health infrastructure at a time when healthcare in Gaza is at a breaking point because of Israel's siege. Due to its several year-long blockade of Gaza, Palestinians cannot access basic healthcare and life saving medicines, and even paramedics are at times killed by snipers as we saw last year when 21 years old Razan Al-Najar, a paramedic helping protesters at the Great Return March was shot dead. Events like the one at Jamia university help deflect attention from Israel’s crimes and violation of Palestinian human rights. The only moral thing to do in this scenario is to protest such whitewashing.
We support the students' right to peacefully express their opinions about events happening on their campus and we strongly feel that space for expressing political disagreements and dissent should not shrink on our campuses. In particular, we support their right to criticise any collaboration with Israel, given Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and its documented history of human rights violations; and we urge the administration to drop all charges against the students.
