Support Pr Ilan PAPPE

From: Habib K. [mailto:habibkaram@yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 7:47 AM
To: Wasim Dibbini; Awni Elias; Maroon Farah; George Habib; Hanin Habib; Nader Haj; Bassel Jabally; Muneer Karram; Elias Khalil; Fatin Khalil; Bishara Khell; Violet Khoury; Bader Mansour; Botrus Mansour; Baseema Mazzawi; Roni Mazzawi; Ghali Qupty; Sabeel Office; Hala Salem; Elias Shakour; Sana Shakour; Emad Shalash; Janan Simaan; Soona
Subject: Support Prof.Ilan Pappe(fwd)

Dear Friends, >
I have received today an invitation to stand for a trial in my
university, the university of Haifa. The prosecution, represented by
Haifa’s Dean of > Humanities demands my expulsion from the university
due to the positions I have taken on the Katz affair. It calls upon the
court “to judge Dr.Pappe on the offences he has committed and to use to
the full the court’s legal authority to expel him from the university.”
These offences are, in a nutshell, my past critique of the university’s
conduct in the Katz affair, the MA student who discovered the Tantura
massacre in 1948 and was disqualified for that. The reason the
university waited so long is that now the time is ripe in Israel for any
act of silencing academic freedom. My intent to teach a course on the
Nakbah next year and my support for boycott on Israel has led the
university to the conclusion that I can only be stopped by expulsion. >
Judging by past procedures this is not a request, but already a
verdict, given the position of the person in question in the university
and the way things had been done in the past. The ostensible procedure
of a ’fair trial’ does not exist and hence I do not even intend to
participate in a McCarthyist charade. > I do not appeal to you for my
own sake. I ask you at this stage before a final decision has been taken
to voice your opinion in whatever form you can and to whatever stage you
have access to, not in order to prevent my expulsion (in many ways in
the present atmosphere in Israel it will come now, and if not now later
on, as the Israeli academia has decided almost unanimously to support
the government and to help silence any criticism). > I ask those who are
willing to do so, to take this case as part of your overall appreciation
of, and attitude to, the preset situation in Israel. This should shed
light also on the debate whether or not to boycott Israeli academia. >
This is not, I stress, an appeal for personal help - my situation is
far better than that of my colleagues in the occupied territories living
under the daily harassment and brutal abuses of the Israeli army. It is
an opening gambit and many of colleagues, especially my Palestinian
Israeli colleagues, can be next. A testimony to the tragic circumstances
of my own university is that I know there is no use in distributing this
letter on its internal web-site, as all of my colleagues in the past
when it came to the crucial moment - for understandable reasons - felt
they could do very little to help me, without risking their own position
in the university. > I know many of you have access to world media and
can help to expose the > already dismal picture and false pretense of
Israel being the ’only democracy in the Middle East.’ >

Yours,
Ilan Pappe >

http:// www.petitiononline.com/pappe/petition.html
<http://www.petitiononline.com/pappe...>

visit http://academicsforjustice.org <http://academicsforjustice.org/>
>Contact your representatives and elected officials: use
>http://cflweb.org/congress_merge_.htm > >For other ways to help, see
http://BoycottIsraeliGoods.org