Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Law, spoke at a recent event hosted by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and accused Israel of engaging in ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and “always” killing Palestinian civilians and children.
“When Palestinians refuse and resist, Israel always kills Palestinian civilians,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian asserted. “We see that our children became a political capital in the hands of the state, to further unchild them, arrest them and kill [them], and govern their hopes.”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian was one of the featured speakers at UCHRI’s “Said’s Palestine” event, which was held earlier this month, and “engaged in an analysis and discussion of contemporary conditions in Palestine through the terms of analysis Edward Said’s corpus of work offers us.”
During the event, Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who serves as the Lawrence D. Biele Chair of Law at Hebrew University, also accused Israel of acting “through the viciousness of killing and caging Palestinians in Gaza, [and] through the militarization and Judaization of Jerusalem and the Old City, Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Wadi Yasul where ethnic cleansing is ongoing to Judaize.”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian also charged that strategies of Zionism include murder, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.
“Zionism through the state and its multiple mobs had continued to create new strategies for land and life grabbing to penetrate our homes and penetrate our homeland,” she said. “It invades our everydayness, on the way to school for kids, during birth for women, during funerals, through home evictions and demolitions, to ethnically cleanse.”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian also made a connection between the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and the “Palestinians,” arguing that “Yes, Black Lives Matter is Palestine Lives Matter, and George Floyd is a part of us.”
Shalhoub-Kevorkian concluded her speech by promoting international action against Israel. “I want to insist on the need today, at this moment, for a global political movement. We see it in Kashmir when they are supporting us. But we really need much more in order to not continue the Nakba the way it is now,” she said.
In 2019, Shalhoub-Kevorkian drew outrage after she delivered lectures at conferences in Amsterdam and at Columbia University in New York accusing Israel of exploiting and murdering Palestinian children to promote arms sales.
Matan Peleg, CEO of the Zionist watchdog group Im Tirtzu, which first reported Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s talk, said that “it’s a disgrace that this professor – whose salary is paid for by the Israeli taxpayer – takes advantage of her position at Hebrew University to slander Israel and fuel the fires of BDS.”
“If she thinks Israel is so bad, she is welcome to renounce her Israeli citizenship and go live under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. She won’t be missed,” added Peleg.
