Hundreds of academics call for boycott of conference in Israel

Almost 300 academics have called for the cancellation of the Fifth Global Conference on Genocide, which is set to take place at an Israeli university in June, the Academics for Palestine group said in a press release on Monday.

The Global Conference on Genocide, organized by the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), is scheduled to take place from June 26 to 29 at the Hebrew University in the occupied al-Quds ('Jerusalem').

The theme of this year’s conference, according to the INoGS website, will be “Intersections: Holocaust scholarship, genocide research, and histories of mass violence.”

“We urgently call on InoGS to act in a principled way by canceling the Jerusalem venue for their conference and transferring it to a location in another country,” a letter signed by 270 academics read.

“Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people -- from the Nakba to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians from their lands, and from repeated military offensives against Gaza to the ongoing blockade -- are increasingly being viewed through lenses of ethnic cleansing and genocide linked to settler colonialism,” the letter added.

“It is therefore shocking that INoGS plans to hold its 2016 Global Conference at the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University that is partially built on stolen Palestinian land” in the occupied city.