We, have attempted time and time again to bring to your attention KTHs failure to work by its core values, ethical policies and international law during an ongoing
genocide. Every Tuesday since November 2023, we have left our lectures and seminars to gather outside the KTH entrance to spread awareness and express our dissatisfaction with our university’s actions. We have reached out by email, written articles, and most recently handed in our petition to you.

It has now been six weeks since we handed in our petition demanding that KTH end its collaborations with Israeli universities complicit in the Israeli military’s crimes against Palestinians, and condemn Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. It was handed in with the then 283 names that had signed along with a list of universities that had already taken steps toward ending their partnerships and a document presenting relevant collaborations and answers to the principal’s arguments against the academic boycott.

Within a few days, the principal sent his response, reiterating a few of the points that we answered in the previously submitted document without elaborating on or answering any of our concerns. In our reply, we asked if this was the official response after having read and considered all the information in the submitted documents, to ensure that the given response reflects the management’s common position after a full and updated understanding of the situation regarding the involvement of KTH’s partners in the ongoing genocide. But we have yet to receive any answer, one and a half months later.

We’re months into witnessing the horrific genocide in Gaza. During these months every university in Gaza has been bombed. Academics and scientists have been directly targeted. The education system has been annihilated. More than30,000 people have been killed, and the number rises, day by day. Israel is carrying out genocide on a besieged population and you continue to collaborate with universities with direct ties to these crimes against humanity. We are years into what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have explained as an apartheid system. And KTH is still showing its reluctance to properly answer the urgent questions of its students and faculty members about the institution’s collaborators with documented accomplices. We now have over 450 signatures of KTH academics demanding an end to these complicit collaborations and this selective silence which is falsely presented as neutrality.

 The principal claims that KTH only follows the government’s line on foreign policy issues. This indication of a lack of self-determination and autonomy from our institution is deeply worrying. Meanwhile, the minister of Education, Mats Persson, said himself in a debate in the Swedish Parliament on March 1st 2024 that, “The state universities are largely self-determining over their activities, and that it is not the government’s business to decide which international cooperation projects they should be part of”. Is it not the time for us to follow up on this clear statement given by the government themselves?

Furthermore, our efforts to ensure that KTH works by its core values have continued to be undermined. Most recently with the claim from KTH security, saying we cannot stand on KTH property during our walkouts. In our email exchange with the KTH security department, they have continued to justify this attempt to restrict our freedom of speech and freedom of demonstration based on an agreement that they can neither provide nor explain.

We want to remind you that the ICJ ruled, in ‘South Africa v Israel,’ that there’s a plausible case of genocide by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza, and then put emphasis on the obligation ofstate parties, including Sweden,to prevent genocide as per the Genocide Convention.Therefore, as a third-state institution that upholds the principles of international law, KTH must prevent complicity, which naturally entails ending collaborations with documented collaborators with the Israeli military.

Instead, you are enabling heinous crimes against humanity through your collaborations with universities that directly contribute to the colonisation, settler programmes, illegal military occupations in Palestine, apartheid regime, and the genocide against Palestinians.

This has long surpassed a question of academic debate, it is a question of international justice and peace. It is a question of upholding the decision of the highest international legal institution and respecting international law. History is watching. The time to act is long overdue. End your collaborations – end your hypocrisy.

Each flag planted outside of your office represents a Palestinian professor or educator that has been murdered in the ongoing Palestinian genocide. While Israel continues to commit genocide, you collaborate with institutions directly complicit in the deaths of these academics.

Action Group

KTH for Palestine 26 March 2024