The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) welcomes the decision of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) to exclude from its WAC 10 congress a scholar affiliated with illegal Israeli settlement-based Ariel University.
It was a first and minimal step for WAC on the path outlined by Palestinian archaeologists and civil society organizations and Archaeologists Against Apartheid (AAA) to ensure WAC is not complicit in Israel’s decades-long crimes against the Indigenous Palestinian people, including its ongoing genocide in Gaza and its deliberate mass destruction and looting of Palestinian cultural heritage.
Israel’s settlement enterprise constitutes a war crime under international law. The Ariel University scholar is not only knowingly taking part in a war crime, but has also recently participated in an Israeli government-sponsored conference dedicated entirely to illegal Israeli archaeological digs in the occupied Palestinian territory. The scholar’s affiliation was furthermore falsely listed as “Ariel University, Israel” in the WAC 10 program.
These multiple failures on the part of WAC to ensure compliance with international law, its own stated ethics, and its duty to its membership are testament to the urgent need for WAC to institute a comprehensive ethical policy, such as that proposed by Archaeologists Against Apartheid to ensure no complicity in Israel’s grave crimes, including the destruction and looting of Palestinian cultural heritage.
Archaeologists Against Apartheid, in response to the call from Palestinian archaeologists, has been showing WAC the way for a year now, with little to no response. It is time for WAC to heed the call from Palestinians and AAA.
We urge WAC members and WAC 10 participants to join AAA in pushing WAC to become the ethical organization it claims to be.