We must never cease to condemn the attack of October 7 and the hostage-taking of Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas. But the scale of the Israeli response, its total lack of discernment and the crimes perpetrated by one of the world’s most powerful armies against civilians, most of them children, are devoid of any form of humanity.

In the space of seven months, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and the Gaza Strip razed to the ground to make life impossible. The dehumanization of a people and the desire to wipe it out must provoke a reaction from all those who still believe in humanity.

After receiving unconditional support from its traditional Western allies, Israel’s far-right government is seeing its image compromised and its moral isolation gradually creep in, given the scale of its crimes.

Read the column – Words against Ills in the National Press

Public opinion around the world, faced with the massive and disproportionate response, has expressed its deep emotion at what the International Court of Justice has described as a plausible risk of genocide. We are in the 21st century, and this barbarism that is taking hold before the eyes of a powerless world is intolerable.

Western youth everywhere are raising their voices to denounce the war crimes and even crimes against humanity committed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of openly racist Jewish supremacists, who have repeatedly called for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

American universities are in a whirlwind, with students committed to the Palestinian cause calling for a ceasefire for months, despite the inertia of a Biden administration whose support for Israel is absolute. Above all, if this war continues, it is also thanks to Washington’s support, in funds and weapons, for the Israeli government. Faced with the mass nature of the protests, accusations of anti-Semitism quickly emerged to delegitimize a voice that is not hemiplegic and which says that the Palestinians exist and must not see their dignity of existence scorned.

Read the column – Gaza and the Values with Variable Geometry

In France too, the controversy is heated. Students at Science-Po Paris demonstrated for an end to the massacre in Gaza. Several conferences were organized on the premises of the prestigious institution and in many other universities to denounce the scale of Netanyahu’s crimes against Palestinian civilians. Disturbances were even noted on rue Saint-Guillaume, generating a national public media debate between two distinct lines. Sometimes accused of supporting Hamas, sometimes subject to accusations of anti-Semitism, young students are taking responsibility for raising their voices in the face of what has become unbearable for any slightly righteous conscience.

 

In our country, we have a long and unbroken historical and diplomatic tradition of supporting the Palestinian cause. Since Senghor’s tenure, we have raised our voice on the Middle East crisis at the United Nations. Even in recent years, I remember the determination and formidable efficiency, always with infinite delicacy, of ambassadors Paul Badji, Fodé Seck and Cheikh Niang, who fought at the United Nations for peace and a two-state solution.

What are universities doing alongside the state? At a time when young people in Europe, America and Asia are working for peace in Palestine/Israel, what are Senegalese students, so quick to take to the streets and the airwaves for various causes, demanding?

Read the column – The Senegalese Cultural Exception

Historically, Ucad has been a major supporter of the Palestinian people, as it was in the fight against apartheid. Our country has always been at the heart of the world’s convulsions, in the name of our values of peace, tolerance and humanism. But these values are crumbling, and in addition to the mediocrity that has spread to the world of thought, there is now a lack of interest in the great universalist principles. More and more, our universities are breeding students and teachers who are more concerned with petty local political squabbles, for which they can set fire to a den of learning or sign countless petitions that often have no interest other than defending fascists. Increasingly, they are also defending conservative and retrograde ideas, rather than producing new progressive imaginaries in line with the direction of history.

I am astonished by the silence of some of our illustrious academics and thinkers on a crime of this magnitude and gravity, which touches on what is most essential to humanity, even though they claim to be paragons of virtue and great values, and in the name of these values have disturbed our peace of mind with their massively signed tribunes in defence of a rancid political orientation animated by people of more than dubious republican morality.

Given the international context in which many voices critical of Israeli policy are being blackmailed as anti-Semitic, the silence of our intellectuals teaching in American and European institutions is understandable.

If they support the Hebrew state, they will come under attack from our compatriots, who will immediately label them as apologists of the “Islamophobic West”. And, conversely, if they take a public stand in favour of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, their race, origin or even religious faith will be used to harass them, stigmatize them and perhaps demand their excommunication. And this will be their social death in the Western intellectual field, with its conferences, meetings and other colloquia.

On the other hand, at least from the amphitheatres and campuses of our country’s faculties, where they can’t raise the argument of the risk of trials of intent and racial profiling, students, academics and the rentier civil society of all causes should take a stronger stand for the Palestinian people. For peace, for two states side by side within secure and recognized borders, in the name of international law, but above all in the name of simple humanity.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Ndey T. SOSSEH / Serigne S. DIAGNE