As the International Communication Association (ICA) convenes in Cape Town, South Africa, we, South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP), address the more than 50 Israeli academics currently on our soil.
You have arrived in a country that has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide. You have arrived in a country whose citizens, like those from numerous countries worldwide, were abducted, beaten, and tortured on the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters simply for trying to deliver humanitarian aid to a starving population. When soldiers discovered that some of the flotilla activists were South African, they beat them, saying: “You want to take us to court? We’ll show you.” These activists were met with brutality in response to our country’s courageous court case at the ICJ, accusing Israel of genocide.
Meanwhile, you are here to present papers. Papers on media framing, on digital diplomacy, on communication strategies. Some of these directly serve Israeli state propaganda. This is the banality of academic evil: the quiet, professional, well-footnoted participation in a system of genocide.
We ask you, as we ask all people of conscience: condemn the genocide in Gaza, the illegal occupation, and Israeli apartheid.
Your institutions are not neutral. Israeli universities host IDF units on campus, produce research designed to undermine genocide findings at the ICJ, and have suppressed Palestinian students’ freedom of speech. You are academics of an apartheid state. To attend conferences on South African soil under the banner of these institutions while ignoring genocide is not neutrality. It is complicity. We stand in solidarity with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and the broader pro-Palestinian movement in demanding:
- That Israeli academics at ICA 2026 publicly and unequivocally condemn the genocide in Gaza, the illegal occupation, and Israeli apartheid.
- That conference organisers in future require this condemnation as a condition of participation, rather than host Israeli academics unquestioningly under the guise of neutrality.
- That, in future years, any Israeli academics hosted by the ICA will be expected not only to condemn Israel’s crimes but attend the conference without institutional affiliation.
- That South African academics honour our history and boycott Israeli institutions, as we have long called for.
This aligns with SAJFP’s ‘Disrupt the IOF’ campaign, which calls for prohibiting IOF recruitment in South Africa, prosecuting those who serve in the IOF, and preventing perpetrators of genocide from entering South Africa. The presence of complicit Israeli academics on South African soil contradicts these principles.
We know from our own struggle: during apartheid, South African academics who remained silent were not neutral. The Palestinian call for an academic boycott is a call for accountability, not discrimination.
We note, as the PSC did in a statement, that some Israeli academics have spoken out. We acknowledge their courage. It proves that silence, for the rest, is a choice. We call on all Israeli academics to choose the path of justice in accordance with the Jewish principle of
pikuach nefesh, which highlights the sanctity of all human life and reminds us of our duty to preserve it. The alternative is complicity in genocide and the myriad other crimes of the Zionist state.