Activistenpartij UvA

The United Front For Palestine Reacts to the CvB’s recent statement on ties with Israeli institutions.

Statement released on 21/10/2025.

After two years of deafening silence, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has finally taken responsibility and spoken out about collaborations with ‘Israeli’ institutions.
Last Wednesday, the central executive board (CvB) and nearly all deans published a letter explaining that they “will not collaborate with Israel at this time.”
The United Front for Palestine (UFP) is happy to see that this long-overdue step has finally been taken.

Most importantly, the UvA recognises the irrefutable evidence for the genocide happening in Palestine and cites it as a reason why collaborations cannot be continued. The UvA also recognises that higher education institutions in the colonial entity “have close ties to their government”. This brings the UvA to partly instate and partly continue a ban on new institutional ties with ‘Israeli’ partners. This includes Horizon projects. The UvA will also be “exploring the (legal) scope for withdrawing from current Horizon collaborations in the coming period.” We applaud this commitment, but emphasise that this promise must not be allowed to fade into words. It must be acted upon, seriously and transparently. The UFP expects regular updates on the legal possibilities that are being explored, either publicly or to the student councils.

This stance would not have come about without the more than two years of student and staff struggle for an academic boycott. We sent letters and had meetings about breaking our complicit ties since day one, but this achieved little. Only the continuous demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes, actions and occupations made the university management change its mind. We therefore want to thoroughly thank all students and staff who attended and made these actions possible.

Yet we must not celebrate too much. In true UvA fashion, the statement is vague enough to allow the CvB to evade a degree of accountability. This vagueness stands in stark contrast to the clear genocide we have been witnessing for over two years. We see, even when the current so-called ‘ceasefire’ is in effect, that Gaza continues to be bombed and Palestinians murdered, all kinds of humanitarian aid still gets blocked, and the Israeli occupation forces still occupy the majority of the Gaza Strip. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is an accepted reality in ‘Israel’, and absurd excuses have already been used to continue the bombings. This ‘ceasefire’ brings neither justice nor peace. The ‘ceasefire’ is nothing more than a set of dictated terms under the threat of genocide. A set of terms that has now, as expected, already been scandalously broken by the Zionist entity to continue its genocide. Yet, nowhere in this statement does the UvA name Palestinians or the state of Palestine, perpetuating the pattern of dehumanisation of Palestinians and normalisation of the Zionist occupation that we see every day in Western media.

In this context, the UFP expresses its total disbelief over the fact that the UvA chose to let one exchange agreement, with the University of Tel Aviv, continue. This exchange agreement will expire next year, but we refuse to wait. An agreement that is inactive due to a negative travel advice is not equal to a boycott. As ‘Israel’ continues its crimes in Gaza and the West Bank while violating the ‘ceasefire’, it has never been more urgent to break the ties than now. We will not accept any further stalling from the CvB. But even when the Tel Aviv agreement expires, we are not done yet. The university must ensure that it does not invest in ‘Israeli’ companies and companies that profit from genocide through UvA Ventures holding BV. If there are no such investments, this needs to be clearly communicated. The UFP also demands that the UvA terminate and replace all contracts with companies on the boycott-divest-sanctions (BDS) list. It is our duty to ensure that our academic community does not, in any way, support or enable a colonial genocide.

All in all, we must conclude that a free Palestine still seems very far away. Western imperialism still has the upper hand, for now, and Palestinians continue to suffer. This statement from the UvA will change little about that directly, but we must recognise that we achieved something. Overthrowing the capitalist system will not occur overnight, but the little domino we were responsible for has definitely passed its tipping point. It is only a matter of time before it crashes into the next, and we will continue to fight for action on that front, be it by fighting the normalisation of a settler-colonial apartheid regime, or doing our utmost to keep the increasing militarisation of our university at bay.