Complicity, Silence, Historical Amnesia: Universities and the Genocide in Gaza

University of Pretoria Staff For Palestine (UPS4Palestine) 

As an academic collective from the University of Pretoria, we offer the following reflections on the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as a contribution to a growing number of South African academic voices against the genocide.      

The increased horrors faced by the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and especially from March 2025, with the enforcement of a total siege and blockade of all humanitarian aid (barring the trickle that Israel permits), are on an unimaginable scale. It has been confirmed that Israel has directly killed more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, more than 17,000 of them children, and has carried out daily “aid” massacres of Palestinians who are waiting for food and water at distribution points since instituting a total aid blockade in March 2025.      

With thousands of bodies still buried under the rubble, and many more dying of hunger and preventable diseases, due to the destruction of hospitals and worsening living conditions, some have estimated the real death toll in Gaza to be far higher. According to the United Nations, the illegal and immoral weaponization of food has led to the death of at least 70 Palestinian children from malnutrition.

Further, in the West Bank, Israel has killed 1,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023. It has also ramped up the incarceration of Palestinians, with more than 10,000 detained in its torture dungeons by April 2025. Furthermore, the ongoing attacks on Palestinian children have resulted in about 3,000 children having amputations as a result of traumatic force injuries, burns, and infection.  This has resulted in thousands of children with a new disability facing uncertain futures.      

Starving and quarantined within a desolate strip of land, denied basic human rights and continually brutalised by the Israeli Defence Force, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza is a stain on the human conscience, especially the leading Western nations and leaders of the world, who have sacrificed international law and human rights in favour of their imperialist interests in West Asia, as represented by Israel. Effectively, the genocide in Gaza reveals the persistence of the global division of humanity produced and maintained by centuries of European colonialism. 

It is a genocide transmitted in real time, watched by millions of outraged people around the world and by complicit leaders, journalists, academics, and religious figures, especially in the West and in the Arab world. The Palestinian genocide that has been unfolding for the last 20 months has shown up the fallacy of the international rule of law - permitting Israel the right to carry out this genocide in the full glare of world attention;  and also turning a blind eye to Israeli occupation, violent settler colonialism and the denial of Palestinian human rights and sovereignty since Israel’s official establishment in 1948.

The increasing evidence of the genocide in Gaza, which includes scholasticide, has not sufficiently galvanised many institutions, such as universities, including many in South Africa. While a few South African universities have taken a brave stand, such as the University of Fort Hare and Nelson Mandela University, and thereby risked not only public opprobrium from sectors of South African society but also much-needed funding, other universities blithely carry on ‘with business as usual’.

Debates in some institutions invariably devolve into spurious and disingenuous comparisons with atrocities in other parts of the world – the by-now common ‘whataboutism’ – to even more fallacious arguments about a complex situation, two-sidedism, ‘not our problem’, and the ‘hand-wringing, what can we do’ argument.

The global solidarity we garnered in our struggle against apartheid is a long-distant memory for some. For others who were quite comfortable with apartheid, the international cultural, academic, sports, and economic boycott against apartheid South Africa was an outrage. For such South Africans, a similar outrage should not be perpetrated against Israel, a historical ally of the apartheid government. 

The inaction and ‘apolitical neutrality’ of historically white universities, which were bastions and intellectual playgrounds of apartheid, is particularly shameful and is indicative of the superficiality of transformation in these institutions as well as the lack of a genuine commitment to the pursuit of justice. While university leaders spout empty rhetoric about transformation, the pursuit of justice, and responsiveness to local and global issues, their inaction is more telling of their complicity. 

Erasure through violence and destruction of both tangible and intangible traces of place and belonging, and denial of sovereignty and personhood are core elements of settler colonialism, whether in the Americas, Australia, Africa, or Palestine. These core elements are inextricably linked to race and ethnicity.

Thus, as early as 1917, the discourse of erasure and denial of sovereignty and personhood is already clearly evident in the Balfour Declaration, which not only favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, but also posited the Palestinians as the ‘other’ in contradistinction to the Jewish people.

Historian Avi Shlaim argues that the genocide in Gaza is a “direct result of the Balfour Declaration”.  It set in motion the colonisation of historic Palestine and the systemic erasure of native Palestinians. Whereas Jews constituted only 10% of the population and owned a meagre two per cent of the land by 1917, the so-called British Mandate facilitated the mass invasion of mainly European Jews into Palestine and the displacement of Palestinians. This freed up land for Jewish settlements in historic Palestine to create the state of Israel.

This process of colonisation continues to this day, and explains why Britain, despite mass support from its citizens for the national liberation of Palestine, has provided unconditional support to Israel in the commission of the genocide in Gaza since October 2023.     

Defined by racism, oppression, and brutal violence, the Zionist project in Israel has consistently and continually sought to erase the Palestinian presence in its onward march to ‘Greater Israel’. This march to ‘Greater Israel’ has gathered a violent pace in the past 20 months. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian and foreign aid workers, predominantly Palestinian journalists, medical personnel, teachers, and academics, children, and the old are all cannon fodder to the Israeli march to ‘Greater Israel’. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as ‘any of the following acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ by any means of the following actions:

1. Killing members of the group
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and
5. Forcibly transferring children of one group to another.

Israeli actions in Gaza constitute a textbook case of genocide, according to Holocaust scholar, Raz Segal. Yet, like in the case of the genocides of the Harara, Herero, and the San, Western political elites, corporate media, and academics refute and deny the evidence. In the case of Gaza, the denial is particularly startling as the evidence is transmitted daily on social media platforms and independent media. The complicity of the so-called ‘democratic free’ world of the West is monstrously on display.

The UN Convention outlines actions that are punishable under international law. These are first, committing genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, and direct and public incitement to commit genocide. Since October 2023, there has been a mounting pile of evidence – along with bodies - that Israel has committed the ultimate crime of genocide, has conspired to commit genocide and has incited genocide, publicly, directly and pointedly.

The South African government’s brave action of taking Israel to the International Court of Justice, as well as other supportive actions taken by the governments of Malaysia, Ireland, Spain, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Chile, among others, has been deliberately blocked by Israel’s Western allies, especially the United States of America, Britain, Germany and France.

In response to the South African government taking Israel to the International Court of Justice, as well as other supportive actions taken by the governments of Malaysia, Ireland, Colombia, Brazil, and Chile, among others, Israel’s Western allies have resorted to bullying tactics. These include the United States of America’s (USA’s) spurious claim of a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa.

In addition, the USA’s sanctions against Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, are aimed at thwarting investigations into the criminal conduct of Israeli leaders and silencing those who are exposing the genocide.

And, in Germany and Britain, the pro-Zionist political establishments are cracking down on protests against the genocide, including the banning of Palestine Action, a peaceful protest movement that has taken direct action against Elbit Systems in Britain, Israel’s largest arms company.   

Palestinian lives are considered to be cheap and expendable. They don’t need homes, schools, hospitals, or universities. The rubble that is Gaza today covers hundreds of dead Palestinians whose bodies have yet to be recovered. The ‘napalm girl’, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, symbolised the horror of US-American atrocities in Vietnam.

Emaciated, crying children, corpses covered in the white kaffan laid out on the ground, the heartbreaking cries of parents and grandparents, and the vividly yet horrifically imagined case of babies in incubators slowly suffocating, have come to symbolise the genocide of the Palestinians. None of this has been sufficient to galvanise Western and/or Arab nations and leaders who can make a difference.

The genocide in Gaza clearly shows that the global division of humanity enacted by European colonisation remains intact. In the minds of many in Western societies, including political elites, the corporate media, etc., Palestinians are less deserving of empathy and solidarity because they are not fully human.    

Israel again violated international law on 9 June 2025, when it seized the crew of the Madeleen Freedom Flotilla together with the aid and medicines they carried for the people of Gaza in international waters. The Global March to Gaza, in which approximately 60 South Africans participated with representatives from more than 82 countries, was yet another effort to draw global attention to Gaza and the Palestinian genocide.

The blockade of the marchers by Egyptian authorities highlights a continuous effort to silence the resistance and the complicity of so many nations worldwide. The Freedom Flotilla and Global March are big – in the sense of global attention-drawing – measures. Small measures are no less meaningful, whether these are public lectures, film screenings, publications in popular media and other platforms, or universities taking a stand against injustice and the ‘crime of crimes’, genocide. Every effort counts, and humanity must take a stand. 

Finally, we call on South African universities, at an institutional level, especially historically white universities that have collaboration agreements with Israeli universities, to take an unambiguous stance against the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza.

In the context of misinformation, a failing mainstream media, and biased algorithms on social media, the voice of credible institutions like universities is all the more important. Taking a stance will be an important expression of our universities’ genuine commitment to social justice and equality everywhere.

* UPS4Palestine is an academic collective at the University of Pretoria that stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people against genocide, settler colonialism, and apartheid.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.