Letter to the University of Helsinki in response to the suspension of exchange agreements with Israeli universities
Letter by Avichag Ohayon, May 22nd 2024
For the attention of Markus Laitinen,
I am deeply disturbed and disappointed to read that the University of Helsinki has chosen to fully suspend university-level exchange activities with Israeli universities in light of the Israel-Hamas war.
I question whether you have taken the time to speak to a representative cross-section of your Israeli students and staff before reaching this decision on behalf of the entire institution.
Furthermore, I am shocked that of all the possible courses of action, the one you have chosen is to target the institutions that are doing the most to further dialogue and critical thought in an area of the world where support for both is most needed.
University staff and students are among the most liberal members of Israeli society, the most invested in the peace process. The Israeli academic community also includes large numbers of Palestinian students and staff. Israeli academic institutions were instrumental in the nine-month-long protests against the judicial reform proposed by the Netanyahu government in Israel that was rocking Israeli society until Hamas attacked Israel on the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, on 7.10.23. Israeli universities collaborated with one another to go on a coordinated strike in March 2023, to safeguard Israeli democracy. The academic community in Israel continues to be at the forefront in efforts to end the current war. Is this really who you are trying to isolate?
The Hamas attacks were not only the bloodiest and deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust, filmed and uploaded live by the terrorists who perpetrated these heinous acts, but they also catalyzed a wave of antisemitism across the globe, the likes of which we have not seen in decades. Jewish and Israeli students and staff in your institution, here in Helsinki, feel afraid and unsupported, and yet, this is where you choose to focus. On reducing the opportunities for collaboration and cooperation that can increase dialogue and cross-cultural understanding. You are choosing to reduce opportunities to support the very Israelis who are actually working on the ground to change the situation and who have been doing so long before Finnish students cared about this issue.
The whole beauty of higher education is to learn to research, to weigh one’s ideas against another’s, and to gain a more complex and nuanced understanding by having debates in the spirit of joint inquiry. These ends are furthered by precisely the sorts of student exchange programs that you have chosen to suspend. I think it is shameful that the University of Helsinki has capitulated so easily to the counterproductive demands of protesters and has done so in a way that harms their alleged cause by undermining those in Israel who most reliably work toward peace and justice in the Middle East. Students and non-student agitators are sitting outside your doors calling for an Arab Palestine “from the river to the sea.” Instead of asking them to see how this might be affecting the Jewish and Israeli members of your community, you reward them by cutting off opportunities for dialogue.
I hope you reconsider this decision. An abiding commitment to the university’s mission of dialogue and critical inquiry is surely preferable to a politically expedient decision that undermines your colleagues in Israel, isolates Israeli members of your own academic community, and cuts off exchange opportunities for your students and for their counterparts in Israel.
Avichag Ohayon
Jewish Program Director | Jewish Community of Helsinki