University of Antwerp Workers in Solidarity with Palestine

UA Workers 4 Palestine is a collective made up of academic staff, researchers, administrative workers, and other university employees committed to the liberation of Palestine and other struggles through education, advocacy, and collective action. We are based at the University of Antwerp and work in solidarity with students, trade unions, civil society organisations, and colleagues across Belgium and beyond who refuse silence in the face of genocide, apartheid, military occupation, and settler colonialism.

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We came together in May 2021 with the Unity Intifada in response to the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life and infrastructures, including universities, schools, hospitals, cultural institutions, libraries, archives, and places of worship. We condemn the targeting, intimidation, imprisonment, displacement, and killing of students, teachers, scholars, journalists, health workers, and cultural workers.

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We understand the genocide in Gaza and the broader violence against Palestinians, and Israel’s genocidal aims beyond Palestine’s border not as isolated events, but as part of a longer global history of settler colonialism, racial domination, dispossession, apartheid, and imperial violence. As university workers, we reject the fiction that academia stands outside politics. Universities are already implicated — through partnerships, funding structures, research collaborations, exchange programmes, investments, and institutional silence. Universities here are not neutral. It is complicity dressed up in formal language.

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We organise to end academic complicity at the University of Antwerp and to sever all institutional ties with Israeli universities and other institutions that are complicit in genocide, apartheid, occupation, and the denial of Palestinian rights. We support the principles of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and call for a full academic boycott of complicit Israeli institutions until they are no longer involved in sustaining these structures of violence and domination.​ At the same time, we support building meaningful forms of solidarity with Palestinian scholars, students, and universities. This means not only refusing complicity, but also creating material, academic, and institutional support for Palestinian education and intellectual life.

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We defend the right to teach, research, speak, and organise on our campuses about Palestine, Zionism, settler colonialism, racism, empire, and resistance without intimidation, censorship, or disciplinary retaliation. We stand with students and staff targeted for speaking out in solidarity with Palestine. We reject attempts to weaponise accusations of antisemitism in order to suppress legitimate criticism of the Israeli state and its institutions, while remaining firmly committed to opposing antisemitism in all its forms.

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We are equally committed to opposing anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and all structures of exclusion and domination. Our solidarity is grounded in the understanding that struggles against colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, racism, militarism, and fascism are interconnected.

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We call for:

• an immediate, permanent ceasefire and end of Israel’s violence in the region and world;

• an end to the siege of Gaza, theft and annexation of lands in the West Bank and South Lebanon;

• an end to the occupation of Palestine from the river to the sea, the Golan Heights;

• the dismantling of apartheid;

• accountability for genocide and war crimes;

• the right of Palestinians to education, dignity, return, self-determination, and collective liberation;

• and the immediate severing of all complicit institutional ties between the University of Antwerp and Israeli institutions.

 

We invite university workers, students, and allies to join us in building principled, organised, and uncompromising solidarity.

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Contact us @ uaworkers4palestine@proton.me