​DOUBLE STANDARDS ON FREE PALESTINE BANNER at WdKA/Piet Zwart Institute/Hogeschool Rotterdam

All power to the people.

In solidarity

Regardless of ones opinion, the academy has always been political in it's teachings and should act on what it preaches. Silencing students doesn't seem in line with that from my eyes.

end the hypocrisy!

Everything is political. It's just a matter of which side you choose to stand on. Silence and neutrality means complicity.

war is a crime as is ethnic cleansing

Dear Florian, First of all, thank you for signing the petition, second of all I find it problematic that you as a tutor come with an enormous accumulation of academic and scholarly background and voice publicly your critiques on the student’s terminology, instead of approaching us and challenging our terminology, or educating us otherwise. But since this is the dynamic I have asked scholars for help and here what I have constituted in reply to your points: - The concept of Friend/enemy by Carl Schmitt you referred to, is not how we see what is happening in Palestine, for us, it is a duality of colonizer/colonized, two sides of a barrier wall that constitutes an apartheid. So questioning this duality means questioning the legitimacy of the liberation of colonized nations after 1945. - As for your comment “voicing support of a nation-state instead of the people” Palestine is not a nation-state. Unfortunately, it is not recognized as a state in the UN and it is just an observing member, it has no right to vote on anything. So how can we defend a nation-state when the state isn’t recognized in the first place? We are nonetheless, defending national minorities, who under modern law are not recognized as nations, and are in danger to their right to live. - As for the term ‘genocide’, we apologize if it triggered any traumatic memories to Jewish communities and other ethnicities all over the world, our intent though is to show the following facts: “Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.” And to stress that if a term under the international law was not passed when we speak of Israel, doesn’t mean Israel didn’t do all the requirements that cons

5 years ago Featured

The outdated epistemic position that teaching and politics are unrelated foregoes the simple fact that teaching, whether art or science, takes place in the world. Whoever can afford to make the choice not to translate entanglement into engagement prefers complicity over solidarity.

Free Palestine!

Student of ArtEZ Arnhem stands with you !!

Following how the uncomfortable will be adressed and questions will be answered.

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WdKA needs to change to NOT stay the same

multimedia artist and tutor at HKU MA Scenography

I regret paying them

#free_Palestine and #Free_our_voices!

Klaar met de neutrale politieke houding wanneer dat niet van toepassing is

I distance myself from the wording "colonial settler violence" in relation to Israel in this petition (which in my opinion reduces the complexity of the situation, although I want Netanyahu and his coalition partners in the court of The Hague, and condemn the dispropriation of Palestinians and Arab Israelis). I am personally critical about the students' action voicing support of a nation state instead of the people and fiercely disagree with their use of the word 'genocide' in relation to Israel. If colonial violence is being studied, then one needs to avoid the traps of anti-imperialist discourse and of falling into Schmittian friend/enemy schemes, and take good care not to end up with the wrong bedfellows. Radical intersectionality means IMHO not to identify with nations, or to side with one nation against another, but to dismantle the construct of the nation. In addition, the use of the word "settler" as a pejorative is in contradiction to a politics of denouncing borders, and lacks distinction between imperial powers and diasporas. (Next to the Israeli/Palestinian situation, it might be worth studying Liberia - as a colonial project of formerly enslaved African Americans - as another such difficult example that doesn't fit simplifying binaries.) All that said, I am still signing this petition because I fully agree with its points regarding the political dimension of our education, and of arts practice in general. To leave aside the epistemological, aesthetic and ethical arguments to be made here, and just argue on a formal policy level: if we, as an art school, live up to the standards of the Dutch HBO polytechnical higher education system with its central requirement of educating students as closely as possible to their later professional practice (in our case: of working as artists and designers), we cannot artificially depoliticize our education and thereby create a false image of arts practice that is detached from actual arts practice, and from what