We are witnessing unprecedented violence against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, where 2.3 million Palestinians - half of whom are children - are suffering unprecedented bombardment and cutting off food, water, fuel, electricity and humanitarian aid. Of course, the ongoing events - Israeli violence and the attack by Hamas - didn't emerge out of a vacuum. The Israeli occupation of Palestine has been ongoing for 75 years. Over this time, Western governments and institutions - including academic institutions - have been complicit in Palestine's dispossession and military occupation.

For decades, Palestinians have brought their plight to the international community through pleas to international law, human rights regimes, boycotts and sanctions. They followed the remit of the Peace Process but to no avail. Today, Palestinian movements, such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, are widely criminalised just as they were during South African Apartheid, even as Palestinian, Israeli and global rights organisations have reached a consensus that Israeli is indeed practising the crime of Apartheid. Still, expressions of solidarity with Palestine are being criminalised across the West through tools like the IHRA and anti-boycott and anti-protest legislation eroding democratic values to protest and free speech. This has left engaged scholars who wish to express solidarity with Palestinians in a bind.
 
In this event, we discuss these issues with two speakers, Rania Madi,  legal advisor for Palestine and expert in migration and refugees, and Samer Abdelnour, an academic based at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He co-founded Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network, and occasionally writes and speaks on Palestine.