Brief Summary:

A 1st November Reply to an Open Letter On the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza from the 20th October 2023

To see the letter that this is replying to, click here.

This also includes replies from two academics. Click here to see a reply to Dr Fanny Bessard and click here to see a reply to Dr Roxana Banu.

It was with astonishment that I read the Open Letter signed by forty-two distinguished Oxford professors in condemnation of Israel’s response to Hamas’s murderous onslaught on civilians, slaughtering babies, children, boys and girls, women and old age pensioners, as well as killing a small number of soldiers. I found it grievous to see some of my philosophy colleagues among the signatories. Their vocation is clarity of thought, but what use has philosophy been to them if they cannot think clearly on matters of such import?

The Open Letter, despite including professors of international relations among its authors, fails to place the Hamas onslaught in its current Middle Eastern context. Hamas is funded by Quatar and Iran, trained and armed by Iran. Iran, like its proxy, is explicitly dedicated to wiping Israel off the face of the earth. One immediate interest it has in supporting the Hamas attack was to put an end to the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia, its main regional Sunni adversary, and Israel, in conformity with the Abraham Accords – a rapprochement that might well have initiated a highly desirable movement towards a two-state solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is no coincidence that the Houtis in Yemen, who are also Iranian proxies, have now started firing missiles towards Israel from a thousand kilometres away. The war that Israel has declared on Hamas is therefore a response to an existential threat to the State of Israel.

To call on Israel for an immediate cessation of hostilities is akin to calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities by Britain and the USA on the eve of D-day in order to avoid civilian casualties. For Israel to cease its war before eradicating Hamas and its infra-structure would be to perpetuate its rule, to demonstrate Israel’s inability to destroy it, and to invite it to regroup and try again in a few years’ time, as it has done in the past. Indeed, Hamas’s spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, speaking on Lebanon’s LBC TV on 24 October, said: “Everything we do is justified”, adding “The Al Aqsa Flood [Hamas’s name for their onslaught] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve and the capabilities to fight.”

The Open Letter, in what is a tour de force of double-think of Orwellian (1984) proportions, holds that Israel’s war on Hamas is itself a “morally disastrous exercise” in as much as large numbers of innocent civilians are being killed. No doubt the Oxford Professors will be able to remind us of wars the British have waged in which no innocent civilians were killed and to tell us how the RAF supplied Germany with food and medical aid in World War II. Many hundreds of thousands of Germans, who had not voted for the Nazis in 1933 were killed in the Allied bombing and invasion. Unlike Israel in Gaza, the British and Americans did not warn the citizens of Hamburg or Berlin before bombing raids. The authors of the Open Letter accuse Israel of not allowing fuel supplies into Gaza. Do they not know that Hamas has tens of thousands of litres of fuel, siphoned off from hospitals, to provide them with light and air-conditioning for their tunnels and command and control centres? If they do not, these Oxford Professors should spend more time finding out facts before rushing in where angels fear to tread. The question the Oxford Professors ought to be raising is why Hamas, by placing its rocket-firing sites and its command-and-control centres underneath or next to schools and hospitals, is ensuring that so many innocent civilians are being killed.

These Oxford professors approve of the claim that Israel’s instructions to north Gazan citizens to evacuate their homes and move south is a ‘war crime of forcible transfer with no guarantee of safety or the right to return’. In fact, it has saved thousands of Gazan lives. To be sure, no one can guarantee the safety of civilians in a war zone, but very many more would have died had they stayed in the battlefield of north Gaza. That those who fled south have no right to return is pure Oxonian fantasy.

The death and injury of many Gazan civilians is deeply tragic, but it is an immediate consequence of Hamas’s unprovoked attack on Israel and of its wicked employment of civilians as human shields in what is tantamount to Leninist revolutionary doctrine. It is also a mediate consequence of Israel’s voluntary withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, when Ariel Sharon forcibly removed nine thousand Israeli settlers and granting the territory of Gaza unimpeded autonomy. The Oxford Professors accuse Israel of embracing “a central tenet of terrorism: that all citizens must pay a price for the misdeeds of their governments”, as well as “terrorism’s central practice: collective punishment”. It is amazing that so many famous Oxford Professors, who, as they explicitly declare, spend their lives thinking about such things, should find thinking so overwhelmingly difficult. Had the Israelis taken the view so shamefully ascribed to them, they would simply have carpet-bombed Gaza until no one was left. In fact, they warned Gazans to relocate, and Hamas did their best to discourage this.

The Oxford Professors appear to have blinkered one eye. Hamas continues to shoot dozens, if not hundreds of rockets into Israel each day, directing them deliberately not at military targets, but at civilian population centres. This the Oxford Professors do not even bother to mention. All the Israeli towns and settlements in the vicinity of Gaza have been evacuated, and 200,000 Israeli civilians have been evacuated from northern Israel on the Lebanese border as a result of rocket fire from Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy. This the Oxford Professors do not appear to see. But none are so blind as those who do not wish to see.

The Oxford Professors, “who are all, all honourable men”, confidently cite Hamas and Hamas-controlled UNWRA figures for Gazan casualties. These have not been independently verified and are not trustworthy (as is evident from their report on the casualties at the Al Ahli hospital, consequent upon an errant missile shot by Islamic Jihad, asserting 471 deaths, rather than 100-300). Nor do Hamas figures on casualties to date mention how many are Hamas terrorists. Since the captagon (amphetamine) -intoxicated murderers who assaulted Israel on 7.10.23 numbered roughly three thousand and, fortunately, more than half have been killed, a significant proportion of the Gazan dead are heinous terrorists. To be sure, very many innocent civilians including children have been killed in this terrible war, but there is no such thing as a war without innocent civilian deaths – and this is not a war that Israel started. With what can only be described as glowing self-righteousness, the Oxford Professors, declare that the civilian casualties in Gaza constitute “an unprecedented human catastrophe”. To claim that this is either knavish or foolish. It is not a catastrophe of the order of the Nazi Holocaust, of the Turkish Armenian genocide under the Ittihadists, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Pol Pot or of Rwanda. It is a tragedy, a grievous loss of often innocent lives – for which Hamas is to blame. The Oxford Professors go on to assert that Israel’s actions “are an affront to basic moral dignity”. They should be ashamed of themselves.

A Reply to the 6th of May letter on The Oxford Action for Palestinian Solidarity Encampment signed by over 570 Oxford Academics

To see the letter that this is replying to, click here.

A letter, signed by more than 570 Oxford Academics, condemning Israel for a variety of wickednesses, has been circulating on the web. This letter consists largely of falsehoods and unsubstantiated accusations. These need to be refuted in the light of principles of international law, of the laws of war, and of history. The letter also requests Oxford University to take steps that would damage the interests of this country and of Europe. I shall select seven points that suffice to establish the lamentable ignorance, misdirected indignation, as well as the immoral judgements of the signatories.

1. The Academics’ Letter is indeed distinguished – distinguished by the amazing, almost incredible fact that it is full of moral, self-righteous indignation about the Gaza War, but fails even to mention Hamas. This is moral tunnel-vision of a high order.
   
   
2. The Academics’ Letter accuses Israel of genocide in its Gaza war against Hamas. It seems that these Oxford academics do not know what ‘genocide’ means. In international law, ‘genocide’ is defined as acts committed with the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The concept of genocide was introduced into international law by Rafael Lemkin (a Polish-Jewish lawyer) to describe the genocide of the Armenians inflicted by the Ottoman Ittihadists (the Young Turks) in 1915/16. It applied also to the Jewish Holocaust inflicted by the Nazis, who slaughtered 6 million Jews between 1942 and 1945. More recently, genocidal slaughter was committed in East Timor, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and Myanmar.
   
   Hamas is an organization identified by the British and many other governments as a terrorist organization. It is committed by its constitution to destroying the State of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. It is therefore a genocidal organisation. Hamas assaulted the State of Israel on 7th of October 2023 with some three to four thousand drug-intoxicated terrorists (using captagon, an amphetamine), who murdered more that 1100 people, mostly civilians, in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip. Many of the victims were teenagers at a rave. They raped girls, often shooting them in the head while raping them, or shooting them in the genitals after rape. They shot babies through the head at point blank range; they burnt many of their victims alive; they decapitated some of their victims and mutilated the corpses of others. More than 4,400 innocent Israeli civilians were wounded in the course of this killing spree. Over 240 Israelis, mostly civilians, old age pensioners, women and children as well as babies, were forcibly taken hostage and dragged into the Gaza Strip. More than 130 are still in the hands of their torturers, although how many are still alive is unclear. The young women in the hands of Hamas are forced to commit sexual acts on their captors.
   
   A Hamas spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, speaking on Lebanon’s LBC TV on 24th of October declared “Everything we do is justified”, adding, “The Al Aqsa Flood [Hamas’s name for their slaughter] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve and the capabilities to fight.’ It is therefore patent that it is Hamas who are indisputable, self-confessed, génocidaires. To accuse Israel of genocide is comparable to the medieval blood-libel against the Jews. It is, to put it mildly, obscene.
   
   According to Hamas’s indisputably false figures, Israel’s war against Hamas has involved the deaths of 35,000 Gazans. This estimated figure does not discriminate between the deaths of terrorist operatives and civilian collateral deaths. The UN has recently scaled down the estimated number of women and children killed by almost 50% (as significant numbers of deaths have not had their sex identified). The IDF claims to have killed more than 13,000 gun-carrying terrorists over the eight months since October 7th 2023. So the collateral civilian deaths is less than fifteen thousand (some of whom were killed by Hamas rockets falling with the Gaza Strip, killing their own civilians). Given a Gazan population of two million, if this is genocide, it is also an amazingly inefficient genocide for eight months of war – and inefficiency is not a characteristic normally attributed to the IDF. It is also a ratio of enemy combatant deaths to civilian deaths (1.14: 1) far lower than that of any army in the history of warfare. The measures the IDF takes to reduce collateral deaths are without parallel in any army in the world.
   
   
3. The Academics’ Letter alleges that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague has characterised the Israeli conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza as “plausibly amounting to genocide”. This is a positively grotesque misunderstanding of what is going on at the ICJ and what the ICJ has pronounced. South Africa, a state with friendly relations with the Hamas terror organisation, applied to the ICJ to rule not on the commission of genocide, but rather on whether South Africa was claiming for Palestinians rights, which can plausibly be supposed to come under the jurisdiction of the ICJ with respect to the International Convention on Genocide, to which Israel is a signatory. The Court gave a provisional ruling that the rights South Africa is claiming for Palestinians do fall within its jurisdiction. The Court (as its President James Donaghue explained) was not ruling on whether Israel had committed genocide or on whether there was any reason to suppose it had.
   
   To assert, on the basis of this, that the International Court of Justice had ruled that it is plausible to suppose that Israel had committed genocide, is egregious. It betokens ignorance of international law and a deeply rooted antisemitism comparable to the medieval blood libel. One might have hoped better from Oxford academics, who are supposed to be able to think and reason more clearly than their bigoted and hysterical students.
   
   
4. The Oxford Academics, following their students, accuse Israel of practising apartheid against the Palestinians. It is not clear whether this allegation is meant to apply to the State of Israel or to the occupied West Bank. The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. Israeli Arabs have the vote, have their elected representatives in the Israeli Knesset, enjoy freedom of the press and publication, belong to the Israeli health services, enjoy pension and unemployment rights, have full access to Israeli universities, and are represented on the judiciary. As to the West Bank, it is not clear what is meant by claiming that it is run as an apartheid state in as much as the large part of it is under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian authority, with their own schools and universities (which, to the best of my knowledge, do not admit Jews). The accusation of apartheid is not a trivial one. Before making it, some knowledge and some careful thought is necessary. This seems to be beyond the powers of Oxford Academics who signed this letter.
   
   
5. The Oxford Academics join their students in condemning the destruction of the Gazan Universities by Israel in its war against Hamas. They seem ignorant of the fact that all institutions of learning, as well as hospitals and mosques, were used by Hamas as weapon-stores and as underground launching pads for their rockets. Since October 7th, 2023, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have fired over 10,000 rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns and villages with the intention of killing as many Israelis as possible. They are still firing rockets from Rafah (278 in the last week). Small wonder that the IDF had to destroy Gazan University buildings in order to protect the citizens of Israel (including Arab citizens) from the barrages of rockets shot from such buildings. Israel not only has a right to defend itself in international law, it has a duty to defend its own citizens.
   
   
6. The Oxford Academics join the students in calling for an immediate ceasefire. Are they really unaware of the fact that this would leave Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip and free to resume its genocidal war against Israel as soon as it has regrouped and rearmed with the aid of its supporters?
   
   The Oxford Academics make no mention of the fact that Hamas is funded, primarily by Qatar and Iran, to the tune of more than a billion US dollars a year. Iran, ruled by savage, fanatical octogenarian mullahs, is fighting a proxy war against Israel on multiple fronts: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Huttis in Yemen, as well as terrorist cells on the West Bank. Are Oxford Academics really comfortable in siding with Hamas genocidal murderers on the one hand, and with one of the most savage, intolerant and murderous regimes in the world?
   
   
7. The Oxford Academics join their students in demanding that Oxford University explicitly restrict all investment in arms, weapons, and other instruments of war, such as warplanes. Does the University seriously consider that providing the British armed forces with weapons of warfare is not in British interests? Quite apart from denying Israel arms (which would greatly encourage Hamas), should Britain also be required to refrain from providing Ukraine with the weapons it desperately needs to defend itself against Russia?
   
   It is striking that so many Oxford academics are eager to boycott, divest, and discriminate against Israel, but none appear to be signing petitions against Russia’s unprovoked and savage invasion of Ukraine, or against the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs and Tibetans.
   
   It is a sad and sorry day to find many hundreds of academics in Oxford committing themselves to what is patently an anti-Zionist ideology that would deny Israel its right to exist and to what is in fact a novel form of antisemitism. But to be sure, it is easy to sign a piece of paper and then feel self-righteous. It is much more difficult to go to the trouble of finding out the facts, understanding the history, and obtaining an overview of the murky world of Middle Eastern politics. It is even more difficult to think for oneself.
   
   P.M.S. Hacker
   Emeritus Fellow in Philosophy
   St John’s College, Oxford.
   18 May 2024

A Reply to the Wadham SU Statement in Solidarity with Palestine (15th May 2024)

To see the motion that this is replying to, click here.

The Wadham SU statement in solidarity with Palestine is the egregious product of ignorance, misinformation, and antisemitism.

Israel was attacked on October 7th 2023 by Hamas gunmen, intoxicated with captagon pills (an amphetamine ), who murdered more than 1100 Israelis, many of them teenagers celebrating at a rave, injured more than four thousand people, and took more than 240 Israelis hostage, including octogenarians, women, children and babies. In their slaughter, they shot babies in the head at point blank range, raped teen-age girls often shooting them in the head while raping them, or later shooting them in their genitals. They decapitated some of their victims, and burnt many alive. Are these gunmen the freedom fighters the Wadham SU wishes to side with?

1. Gazans are not THE people of Palestine but are rather those Palestinians who dwell in the Gaza Strip. They were governed by the Palestinian Authority (headed by Mahmoud Abbas) when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, removing approximately nine thousand Israeli settlers and granting the Gazans complete autonomy under the Palestinian Authority. In 2006, the USA induced the Palestinian Authority to hold an election. The citizens of Gaza voted for Hamas, who promptly murdered all remaining PA administrators. Hamas has been in power ever since.
   
   
2. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate a people. The Germans inflicted genocide upon the Herreros in German South-west Africa (today’s Namibia). The Turks inflicted genocide upon the Armenians in 1916. The Nazis slaughtered more than six million Jews between 1942-5. Genocide was committed in Rwanda more recently.
   
   If the Israelis are committing genocide in Gaza, they are amazingly inefficient, in as much as after eight months of warfare, all they have killed according to Hamas’s own false figures is approximately 34,000 (according to recent UN figures the number of bodies who has had their sex identified is approximately 24,000), some approximate 13,000 of which are Hamas gunmen. If this is genocide, it barely keeps up with the birth-rate.
   
   
3. Francesca Albanese is not an expert on human rights, but a bigoted anti-Zionist who denies the State of Israel the right to exist. She appears to think that the Hamas slaughter of Israelis (raping, murdering, decapitating, burning alive) on 7 October was legitimate freedom fighting. Her remarks have been condemned as antisemitic by the French Foreign Office.
   
   
4. Israel was not a colonial project. Jewish immigrants prior to World War 1 were refugees from Russian pogroms, not colonial settlers with a homeland elsewhere. Palestine was a British Mandate established after World War 1 to ensure a National Home for the Jews. Prior to that, the Land of Israel (the ancestral home of the Jews) was Ottoman. It was divided into the Sanjaks of Jerusalem, Balqa, Acre,and Beirut. Jerusalem had not been a capital city of any state since the fall of Outremer (the Crusader State destroyed by Salah-adin). Jewish immigration between the wars consists of refugees fleeing from Nazi persecution. Jewish immigration between 1945 and 1948 consisted of those Jews who had survived the nazi Holocaust. Jewish immigration after 1948 consisted largely of Jews expelled from Arab states (Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco). More Jews were expelled from Arab states than Palestinian refugees from Israel after the defeat of Arab armies in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Israel is a nation of refugees, not of colonial settlers.
   
   
5. Israel is not an apartheid state. Arab citizens of Israel have a vote, there are Israeli Arab members of the Knesset, there are Arabs in the judiciary, there are Arab newspapers, and Arabs have access to all the Universities in Israel.
   
   

Comments from 20th May on motion submitted to Kellogg College MCR (13th May)

To see the motion that this is replying to, click here.

The motion is based on false factual premises and is also ultra vires and unlawful since it promotes a political campaign outside the MCR’s charitable objects. Furthermore the main action demanded by the resolution, divestment, is also likely to be unlawful, by being in breach of fiduciary duties.

1. Paragraph i of the “notes” section states: “The present situation in Gaza is catastrophic; the International Court of Justice has characterised it as plausibly amounting to genocide”. Most of the rest of the motion is based on this supposed finding of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). However, it is a misinterpretation of the Provisional Measures Order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) of 26 January 2024.
   
   Judge Donoghue, who was the President of the ICJ when it made the Order, was asked by Stephen Sackur in an interview for the BBC’s HARDtalk programme broadcast on 25 April 2024:
   
   
   • “Would it be fair to say that the key point — that you made your initial order and ruling upon — was whether or not there was a plausible case that should be taken on by the court of genocide in the case of Israel's actions in Gaza after October 7 — and you quite clearly decided that there was a plausible case? Is it right to say that’s at the heart of what you decided?”
     
     
   She answered:
   
   
   • “I’m glad to have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility — but the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa. So the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court.
     
     It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide — and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media — it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.
     
     It did emphasise in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand that often appears — which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide —isn’t what the court decided.”
     
     
   Video here: https://x.com/UKLFI/status/1785305902276301019
   More detailed explanation here: https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/exclusive-uk-lawyers-for-israel-issues-fresh-riposte-over-call-for-sanctions/5119350.article
   
   Commentary by Joshua Rozenberg KC here: https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/top-judge-corrects-media
   
   
2. Paragraph ii states “The ongoing offensive in Gaza can only be properly understood in the context of Israel’s ongoing apartheid regime against Palestinians”.
   
   Allegations that Israel is guilty of apartheid are based on falsely reframing the meaning of apartheid, as explained by Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg in these papers: https://www.9brchambers.co.uk/media/1743/hbk-apartheid-1-converted.pdf and https://ngo-monitor.org/pdf/NGOMonitor_ApartheidReport_2022.pdf and by Salo Aizenberg in this article: https://fathomjournal.org/how-ngos-fabricate-the-legal-definition-of-apartheid-to-attack-israel/
   
   They are also premised on extensive false facts, as discussed here: https://ngo-monitor.org/pdf/ThresholdCrossed_2022.pdf and here https://www.camera.org/article/human-rights-watch-report-maligns-israel-with-lies-on-top-of-lies/
   
   Furthermore no Israelis have lived in the Gaza Strip since 2005, so it cannot possibly be said there has been any apartheid within the Gaza Strip since then.
   
   
3. Paragraph ii continues by referring to “[Israel’s] illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem”. The Advisory Opinion of the ICJ in the so-called “Wall” case, although generally adverse to Israel, presupposed that Israel is in lawful occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in accordance with the 4th Geneva Convention. In the Oslo Accords, the PLO, representing the Palestinian people, agreed to the continuation of Israeli administration of East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank until their final status is resolved by negotiations.
   
   We would go further and argue that Israel is validly exercising sovereignty over the united city of Jerusalem and entitled to exercise sovereignty over the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) in accordance with the rule of uti possidetis juris. The position is discussed in our submission to the ICJ in the pending Advisory Opinion case.
   
   According to an opinion poll in December 2021 by the Palestinian News Agency SHFA, 93% of Arabs of East Jerusalem prefer a continuation of Israeli rule. Thus it appears that overwhelming majorities of both main ethnic communities in Jerusalem favour the continutation of Israeli rule.
   
   
4. d Paragraph iii refers to “destruction” of universities in Gaza. While there has been damage to a number of universities, because they are used by Hamas for military purposes and therefore legitimate military targets, it is an exaggeration to claim that they have all been entirely destroyed. Paragraphs (iii) and (iv) also refer to alleged casualties among university staff and students and healthcare workers. Statistics of Palestinian casualties are not reliable: at least five separate studies by statisticians have shown that the figures provided by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health and Government Media Office are likely to have been fabricated or manipulated. See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers
   
   Furthermore, many of these casualties may well have been combatants, even if they are also students, academics or healthcare workers. Others would be civilians unfortunately killed because Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organisations operate in, around and underneath civilian communities and buildings. However, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in Gaza, is much lower than usual in urban conflict, despite the extreme difficulty of operating in densely populated urban areas against terrorists with very extensive, underground tunnels and facilities.
   
   At the end of February 2024 the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) estimated that they had eliminated 13,000 terrorists. (See https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/briefings-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari/february-24-press-briefings/press-briefing-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari-february-29th-2024/) At that date, the Gaza Ministry of Health was claiming total Palestinian fatalities of 30,035 (See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68430925) these do not differentiate between civilians and combatants, nor between civilians killed by Israeli forces and those killed by Palestinian fire, bombs or rockets falling short in Gaza (11%). If one accepts these figures, the civilian: military casualty ratio was 1.3:1. By contrast, a UN report found that the ratio of civilian to military casualties in urban warfare worldwide in 2021 was more than 8:1. More recently, on 10 May 2024, the Israeli government has estimated that the IDF has killed over 14,000 combatants and about 16,000 civilians (See https://x.com/AviHyman/status/1790024952860627423 ), indicating a civilian: combatant ratio of 1.14:1.
   
   Of course, each civilian casualty is a tragedy, but these figures do indicate the considerable care that it is being taken by the IDF to minimise casualties in a very difficult environment.
   
   
5. Paragraph I of the “believes” section states: “Oxford University should not be financing or accepting funds from the suppliers of weapons used to commit genocidal acts”.
   
   This is evidently premised on the misinterpretation of the ICJ’s Provisional Measures Order discussed above.
   
   However, the only relevant genocide is that committed by Hamas and its allies on 7 October 2023. It is not clear what weapons were used for this and whether the manufacturers of those weapons have any responsibility for them getting into the hands of Hamas and its allies.
   
   
Ultra Vires and Illegality


6. The objects of Kellogg MCR are set out in clause 2.1 of its Constitution. They do not appear to cover a political campaign to end a foreign war in a particular way and undermine a foreign State. The provision for representation in sub-paragraph (d) is limited to the government and administration of Kellogg College. That in sub-paragraph (e) is limited to representation in regard to affairs of the university and in other external affairs of importance to students, through affiliated bodies.
   
   
7. These objects should moreover be interpreted in the context that the Kellogg MCR exists for the purpose of further education at Kellogg College. This does not encompass political action to resolve foreign conflicts: see the decision of Hoffman J in Webb v O’Doherty (attached) where it was held to be illegal for a university student union to support a campaign against the Gulf War of 1991.
   
   
8. Furthermore, the main action demanded by the resolution, divestment targeting Israel and its defence, is likely to be itself unlawful. Trustees and managers of investment funds have fiduciary duties to maximise the financial return. Investment decisions may only be made on the basis of non-financial consideration if
   
   
   • the trustees and managers have good reason to think that beneficiaries generally share the concern and
     
     
   • there is no risk of significant financial detriment to the fund (See this link ).
   
   
9. Strongly divergent views are on Israel are held, so there is no consensus required by the first of the above conditions. In addition, the Israeli economy has been highly successful and resilient in recent years. A policy of divesting from companies because they are Israeli or operate in Israel is therefore liable to have a significant financial detriment, so the second condition is also not satisfied.
   
   
Jonathan Turner
UK Lawyers for Israel
20 May 2024

Additional points regarding the SEH motion

To see the additional points that this is replying to, click here.

1. This motion also relies on an assertion by UNHRC Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide … has been met”.
   
   Ms Albanese cannot reasonably be regarded as objective. In June 2022, she justified Palestinian terrorism, stating that “Israel says ‘resistance equals terrorism’ but an occupation requires violence and generates violence. The Palestinians have no other room for dissent than violence.” https://twitter.com/UNWatch/status/1538830194332639232; https://unwatch.org/legal-analysis-of-un-palestine-rapporteur-francesca-albaneses-2023-report-to-unhrc/
   
   In November 2022, she spoke at a Hamas conference in Gaza attended by senior members of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist groups, and effectively endorsed their violent tactics saying, “you have a right to resist this occupation.”https://www.jns.org/un-envoy-to-hamas-you-have-the-right-to-fight-israel/; https://unwatch.org/legal-analysis-of-un-palestine-rapporteur-francesca-albaneses-2023-report-to-unhrc/
   
   She responded to French President Macron’s description of the atrocities of 7 October 2023 as “the greatest antisemitic massacre of our century” as follows:
   
   
   • “Non, M. @EmmanuelMacron. Les victimes du 7/10 n'ont pas été tuées à cause de leur judaïsme, mais en réaction de l'oppression d'Israël. La France & la communauté int'le n'ont rien fait pour l'empêcher. Mes respects aux victimes.”
     
     [“No, M. Macron. The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in reaction to the oppression of Israel. France and the international community did nothing to stop it. My respects to the victims.”]
   The French Foreign Ministry condemned this comment, reiterating: “The October 7 massacre is the largest antisemitic massacre of the 21st century. Disputing it is an error. Seeming to justify it by including the name of the United Nations is a disgrace.” The German Foreign Ministry similarly said: “making such statements in a UN capacity is a disgrace and goes against everything the United Nations stands for.”https://www.thejc.com/news/call-for-dismissal-of-uns-francesca-albanese-after-she-blames-october-7-on-israels-oppression-d04o5jo6
   
   Since 7 October 2023 she has posted dozens of offensive posts, a sampling of which are set out here: https://www.uklfi.com/francesca-albanese-reported-to-un-office-for-breaches-of-impartiality
   
   As stated in that post, UKLFI has reported Ms Albanese to the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services for violating UN codes on impartiality.
   
   
2. The academic boycott which the motion calls for would constitute illegal discrimination against academics and students with protected characteristics of Israeli nationality, Jewish ethnicity and/or religion, and Zionist philosophical belief, contrary to sections 39 and 91 of the Equality Act 2010.