Executive Board & Students for Palestine joint statement

Dear ArtEZ community, fellow art institutions and artists,

The past few months we have looked towards Gaza with horror and grief. This led to
conversations between students and the executive board of ArtEZ. This letter and its contents
are the fruits of these conversations. ArtEZ does not want to be complicit in silence. We are very
proud that ArtEZ and its students have been able to come to fruitful dialogues and this joint
statement.

We condemn the plausible genocide (as per the International Court of Justice) committed by the
State of Israel on Palestinians, and we condemn the violence perpetrated by Hamas.

The board and students of ArtEZ call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the cessation of
the attack on Rafah, as per the International Court of Justice’s order of Friday, May 24th, 2024.

Since arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court for the leaders of the
State of Israel, we will not, as we already have been doing, engage in any activities with
institutions of higher education that support the State of Israel or are supported by the State of
Israel.

We suspended our agreement with Bezalel Academy of Arts on May 15th. The existing
arrangement involved student exchanges that were based on individual requests and weighted
on substantive grounds. No financial transfers were involved in these exchanges.

An ethical framework is being developed by the Vereniging Hogescholen in collaboration with
students. We will decide on further measures based upon this framework.

Since arrest warrants have been issued by the International Criminal Court for the leaders of
Hamas, we will not, as we already have been doing, engage in any activities with institutions of
higher education that support or are supported by Hamas.

While ending partnerships, we must also look forward to new connections. With this in mind we
are open to engage with Palestinian institutions.

It is and remains vital to emphasize that all students, regardless of nationality, are welcome to
enroll at ArtEZ. We do not reject anyone based on their ethnicity or nationality.

ArtEZ will address the issue of investment policy of the pension fund currently used by ArtEZ
(ABP) via the Vereniging Hogescholen.

ArtEZ emphasizes the importance of freedom of expression and the right to protest.
One of our buildings on the Oude Kraan reads “Art is the mother of resistance”. We believe it is
crucial to practice what we preach, and to resist and speak out against any form of oppression
in our society.

We want to emphasize the importance we place on our University being a place for art, debate,
reflection and opinion formation. It is our responsibility to facilitate and expand the space for
this.

If you want to stay updated on the activities of the student movement or become active yourself,
you can find them on Instagram @olivebranchartez.

Written by the Executive Board of ArtEZ University of the Arts and The Olive Branch, the ArtEZ
students for Palestine movement.

We Journey towards a Home

By Mahmoud Darwish

We journey towards a home not of our flesh. Its chestnut trees are not of our bones.

Its rocks are not like goats in the mountain hymn. The pebbles' eyes are not lilies.

We journey towards a home that does not halo our heads with a special sun.

Mythical women applaud us. A sea for us, a sea against us.

When water and wheat are not at hand, eat our love and drink our tears . . .

There are mourning scarves for poets. A row of marble statues will lift our voice.

And an urn to keep the dust of time away from our souls. Roses for us and against us.

You have your glory, we have ours. Of our home we see only the unseen: our mystery.

Glory is ours: a throne carried on feet torn by roads that led to every home but our own!

The soul must recognize itself in its very soul, or die here.

Student Addendum

In this addendum, we, ArtEZ students for Palestine group The Olive Branch, share some of
our positions that the Executive Board did not agree with.

All our actions and initiatives acknowledge the picket line that Palestinian resistance has
drawn before us. We stand in full solidarity with PACBI and still demand ArtEZ joins the
academic and cultural boycott of the Israeli zionist entity.

We condemn the brutal police violence against all anti-genocide protesters.

While we condemn all war crimes, we recognize that violence committed by the occupied
should not be held to the same standard as violence committed by the occupier; violence
does not happen in a vacuum. International law decrees that occupied people have a right
to resist (Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions); consequently, Palestinians have the right
to armed struggle.

Zionism is a settler-colonial project, and Israel the contemporary vanguard of Western
imperialism and white-supremacist colonialism. The Zionist project is upheld by the
unwavering support of the West and other powers due to their respective financial and
geopolitical interests. Some of them, including the Netherlands, which supplies F-35 parts,
are guilty of complicity in genocide (Genocide Convention Article III, e). The founders of
Israel deemed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Palestinian culture necessary for the
survival of the Israeli ethnostate. Therefore, the current genocide is not an anomaly, but
merely the culmination of the principles upon which Israel was founded.

ArtEZ is suspending its ties with complicit Israeli institutions, but only until the 'war' is over.
Thus, ArtEZ is holding these institutions accountable during their genocidal campaign, but
not afterward. Furthermore, ArtEZ refuses to hold them accountable for their complicity in
apartheid and colonialism. According to ArtEZ, this is due to the lack of an existing ethical
framework. This framework is going to be developed by De Vereniging Hogescholen in
collaboration with students.

Given the Dutch state’s policies and the tendency for policy to trickle down into institutions,
we are skeptical that this framework will prove to be morally right. But we hope and look
forward to being proven wrong.

The ABP invests billions in illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. We demand that
ArtEZ fights for the national organization (Vereniging Hogescholen), of which they are a
part, to divest from these illegal settlements or to find a different pension fund to work with.

We call for other educational institutions to divest from Israeli institutions and publish a
statement condemning both the genocide perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians as well as
Israeli apartheid. We call on them to use their platform and power to speak up and practice
the progressive values they preach. We condemn the hypocrisy of institutions contributing
to a settler-colonial project while offering decolonial education to its students.

Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
By Noor Hindi

Colonizers write about flowers.

I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.