FAQ

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called since 2004 for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. PACBI is the section of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) tasked with overseeing the academic and cultural boycott aspects of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), and its US wing is known as USACBI. The BDS call is based on the fact that universities are deeply complicit in planning, implementing, justifying and/or whitewashing the Israeli system of oppression that has denied or hampered basic rights guaranteed to Palestinians by international law, including academic freedom and the right to education. The BDS movement opposes all forms of discrimination, including Islamophobia, antisemitism, and discrimination on the basis of nationality.

The Israeli assault on Gaza has completely demolished normal university life, to the point that UN experts have described a “pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip” constitutes “scholasticide.” Such attempted scholasticide names “the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.” Israel has destroyed Gaza’s twelve universities, several of which had geography programs, including Alaqsa University, Al Azhar University, and the Islamic University of Gaza. Crucial geographical knowledge about the occupation now cannot be gathered and shared, though Palestinians in Gaza have against all odds found ways to sustain a modicum of university life, for instance through virtual teaching and learning. While the scale and pattern of attacks is unprecedented, it is important to remember that Israel’s systematic assault, obstruction and destruction of Palestinian spaces and sites of knowledge and learning have been ongoing.

Students in the West Bank face worsening learning environments. At Birzeit University in Ramallah, over 140 students were arrested or detained between October 2023 and May 2024, escalating a pattern of intervention in education. Our geography colleagues at Birzeit University’s geography department tell us that it is rare to be able to hold a full week of classes. This continues a pattern of decades of increasing infringement upon everyday life in the West Bank. The fragmented landscape of these occupied lands–which many characterize as a form of spatial apartheid–makes attending classes regularly and on-time difficult for Palestinian students, who must travel on segregated roads and bus systems. Una McGahern describes the experience of Kadoorie University in Tulkarem as under a state of “siege,” as Israeli military infrastructures increasingly interrupt the ability to conduct research and learning. Nonetheless, as McGahern notes, such university spaces in the West Bank still serve as “spaces of hope” worth protecting for many students, academics, and community members. The growing interest in geography in Palestine is being stifled by infringements upon academic freedom.

Geographers in the United States have faced retribution for their political stances associated with Palestine. In March 2025, Ranjani Srinivasan, a graduate student in the urban planning program at Columbia University, was one of the first forced to leave the United States after her student visa was revoked by the federal government. Srinivasan was slated to present her research at the AAG meeting in Detroit, but could no longer due to federal government actions. Concluding her account of these chilling events, Srinivasan does not call for quietism but instead that “we must exert maximum pressure on Columbia and other universities to protect international students from these arbitrary state actions.” Again, while these actions are of the most egregious kind leveraged upon our colleagues from the outside, they also continue a pattern. Palestinian-Canadian geographer Ghazi-Walid Falah was arrested by Israeli police while conducting fieldwork in Northern Galilee in 2006. [Falah wrote in]{.ul} [Society and Space]{.ul}](https://doi.org/10.1068/d2504ed) that he was arrested “because I was Ghazi-Walid Falah, the Palestinian geographer known to Shabak, a scholar who has consistently refused to adhere to writing the geography of Israel/Palestine as defined by the Israeli geography guild. I was arrested for my scholarship, seized in the very topography of what I study.” An international campaign to support Falah was organized online – demonstrating the need for more robust forms of protection of academic freedom to this day.

For these reasons, universities in Palestine have reaffirmed their call to “the international academic community to fulfill its intellectual and academic duty to seek the truth and hold perpetrators of genocide accountable.”

The call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel from Palestinian civil society is not a recent invention, even if it does recall the boycott of apartheid South Africa. Boycotts have a long history within Palestinian society, particularly in the 1930s and late 1980s, as described by Palestinian scholars Mazin B. Qumsiyeh (2011) and Abdel Rizzaq Takriti (2019). The recent BDS call has economic and cultural dimensions, seeking to wield institutional resources, power, and knowledge to contribute to a more principled and ethical global action in support of Palestinian liberation. It thus differs from consumer boycotts and is instead an attempt to use our particular status as professional geographers to highlight infringements on Palestinian academic freedom, among other injustices.

Boycott is only one tactic, and geographers may be interested in undertaking other kinds of political activities in support of Palestinian liberation in their university or political contexts. Thus, we do not seek to privilege boycott as the only tactic which promises freedom. However, boycott is an action which is particularly appropriate and potentially for a collective representational body like an academic association to undertake and advocate. As the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) argued in a 2024 revision of policy, boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

It is clear that Israeli cultural politics has a fundamental interest in intervening in US universities due to the growing acceptance of BDS resolutions in our disciplines. In Towers of Ivory and Steel, Maya Wind argues that “It is only the growing traction of the academic boycott and increased international advocacy that has recently moved some Israeli university faculty and administrators to respond to campaigns by Palestinian universities” (2024, 183). A cultural and academic boycott is further about challenging ourselves and our colleagues to change the culture of silence and neutrality within our discipline, and instead become more principled advocates for institutional academic freedom.

It’s a good time for geographers to remember our ongoing charge to grapple with our discipline’s entanglement in colonialism and militarization. This BDS campaign thus differs from those of the professional societies of anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and American studies, and provides a unique complement to the BDS resolutions these disciplinary organizations have passed.

There are at least four important arenas of concern in which geographic practice is particularly implicated in Israeli university colonial practice: human-environment relations, national identity, geospatial and cartographic practice, and urban planning.

1. Many geographers take understanding the intertwining of cultural, political, and ecological regimes as a crucial aspect of our discipline. It probably goes without saying at this point that the scale of environmental devastation caused by the siege and attack on Gaza is unimaginable. From sewage and public health crises to pumping salt water underground to the massive carbon emissions of war as demonstrated by geographers (Neimarck et al 2024, 2025). Geographers such as Omar Tesdell (2017), Ghada Sasa (2022) and Irus Braverman (2023) have further demonstrated how the colonial production of “natural” landscapes and regions out of inhabited Palestinian lands extends environmental injustices towards Palestinians.

2. In 1989, Palestinian geographer Ghazi Falah described in Progress in Human Geography how the historical development of the discipline of “Israeli human geography” involved an erasure of Palestinian geographical knowledge “not on the level of actual landscape, but through work by Israeli geographers on Palestine/Israel.” In this way, the practice of Israeli geography directly involved the infringement of Palestinian academic freedoms and supported the larger project of colonization.

3. Zena Agha summarizes that “From the British Mandate to the present day, Zionist (later Israeli) cartographers have used maps to obfuscate and eradicate physical, geographic, and social markers of Palestinians’ connections to, and possession of, the land.” Describing such colonial cartographies and countercartographies has been a major theme of Palestinian geographies, and can be further explored on the “Palestine: Space and Politics” website.

4. Urban planning as practiced by academics and policymakers is an active tool of Israeli settler colonialism. This includes the Bauhaus architecture and urban planning of Tel Aviv developed as a tool to expropriate Palestinian land from Jaffaites and surrounding villages to the “urban planning” of Jerusalem which during and since the Nakba has expanded Israeli control while preventing Palestinian development.

As described below, these kinds of actions do not accord with the AAG’s Statement of Professional Ethics.

Here are a few reasons we urge you to support the boycott.

1. Geographers have a particular responsibility for the historic and ongoing injustices our spatial knowledge has produced in the realms of environmental politics, national identity, cartography and spatial science, and urban planning.

2. Academics have a responsibility to uphold principles such as “do no harm” as outlined in our statement of ethics. Our disciplinary societies are not in fact “neutral” but contain ethical principles.

3. The destruction of Palestinian schools and universities in Gaza constitutes a grave assault on spatial knowledge constituting “scholasticide,” and extends long-standing infringements upon Palestinian academic thought in the West Bank and within historic Palestine ("‘48" or internationally recognized Israeli borders).

4. The role of universities in upholding the ongoing genocidal project in Israel endangers academics and students in the US. Our disciplinary organization, the AAG, is not simply a collection of geographers, but a representational body that has a duty to protect its members and their academic freedom.

5. As a US-based institution, the American Association of Geographers has a particular responsibility to the way the US has professed and enacted outsized support for the genocide in Gaza through intelligence, material support, and political approval of government leaders. Israel is the leading recipient of U.S. military aid and the only state not required to detail how this military aid is being used. It is also shielded from accountability for its violations of international law by the U.S. government.

6. The AAG is lagging behind our peer disciplinary societies, many of whom like the American Anthropological Association and American Studies Association have already passed and implemented BDS resolutions thus affirming their commitment to academic ethics and freedom. Our discipline risks being understood by others, including potential students, as retrograde and out-of-touch.

7. Upholding the academic freedoms of Palestinian geographers is not a niche issue. It is a critical nodal point for protecting the academic rights and freedoms of immigrant and/or international geographers, undergraduate and graduate students, non-tenured faculty, critical geographers, and geographers who work on themes which can be under attack by political administrations, such as climate change and racial justice.