We, staff, students and alumni of the University of Warwick, residents of Coventry and Warwickshire and members of the wider academic community are deeply dismayed to learn that Mark Regev, Israeli Ambassador to the UK, will speak at the University of Warwick. Mr Regev is best known for his commentaries defending and justifying Israel’s deadly military attacks amounting to war crimes on the Gaza Strip.

The invitation extended to Mr Regev is a blatant snub to the Palestinian victims of these crimes as well as Israel’s discrimination and illegal Occupation.

As we write, Ahed al-Tamimi and around 400 other Palestinian child prisoners remain incarcerated in Israeli jails; illegal Israeli settlements continue to be expanded across the West Bank, extending 70 years of dispossession and displacement of Palestinians from their land; Palestinians in Gaza are suffering a humanitarian crisis under an illegal Israeli siege; and deportations are underway of 35,000 African refugees who are at risk of death or detention in their home countries.

Nonetheless, Mr Regev will be given an academic platform at Warwick to normalise and justify Israel’s crimes and to transmit Israeli state propaganda. This event will not be an exercise of freedom of speech, but an exercise in the extension of state power into an institution of learning.

We stand firmly with Palestinian staff and students of the Warwick community for whom Mr Regev’s presence represents not only an insult, but also creates a threatening atmosphere. He will be accompanied by his own armed security team from the Israeli Embassy and we stress that this in itself is detrimental to our collective campus ethos and our community as a whole. We therefore wholly condemn Mark Regev’s presence on campus as divisive and alienating for Palestinian and other Arab students, as well as being antithetical to our academic principles and ideals.

• Shirin Rai, PAIS
• Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, English
• Nickie Charles, Sociology
• Virinder Kalra, Sociology
• Dennis Leech, Economics
• Nicola Pratt, PAIS
• Claude Baesens, Mathematics
• Goldie Osuri, Sociology
• Mahmoud Abdou, PAIS
• Craig Gent, CIM
• Marijn Nieuwenhuis, PAIS
• Aya Nassar, PAIS
• António Ferraz, PAIS
• Jennifer Philippa Eggert, IAS/PAIS
• Mohamed El-Shewy, PAIS
• Sharifah Sekalala, Law
• Teodora Todorova, Sociology
• Amin Abdelaziz, IFP Law
• Lorenzo Feltrin, PAIS
• Leon Sealey-Huggins, GSD
• Myka Tucker-Abramson, English
• Juanita Elias, PAIS
• Rashmi Varma, English
• Nick Lawrence, English
• Charlotte Heath-Kelly, PAIS
• Barclay Lane, Library
• Julia Welland, PAIS
• Lisa Tilley, Warwick/QMUL
• Rebecca Roberts, Consultant, Coventry