Statement on Academic Boycotts of Israeli Institutions (December 2024)
Statement on Academic Boycotts of Israeli Institutions (December 2024)
We wish to address the recent petition titled "Mathematicians Against the Genocide in Gaza," signed by several influential mathematicians. This petition presents a one-sided and factually questionable narrative of the ongoing military conflict involving Israel. It further calls for the cessation of institutional scientific collaborations with Israeli universities while nominally allowing individual collaborations to continue. In our view, both the narrative and the call are biased and fail to adequately acknowledge the complexity of the situation.
As mathematicians, we emphasize that our professional activities inherently represent the institutions with which we are affiliated. The call for a boycott proposes to draw a distinction between Israeli universities and the individual researchers working within them. However, the two are intrinsically connected and inseparable. A boycott of academic institutions carries serious repercussions for researchers associated with these institutions and is bound to cause significant harm to individual mathematicians in Israel.
We strongly believe that Israeli academic institutions must not be subjected to boycotts in any professional or academic framework. Academic dialogue and cooperation should transcend political divisions to ensure the continued growth and vitality of the global mathematical community. We urge the international mathematical community to reject this call for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and to reaffirm its unwavering commitment to international cooperation.
Noga Alon (Princeton University and Tel Aviv University)
Scott Armstrong (New York University)
Alexander Barvinok (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Gérard Ben Arous (New York University)
Paul Biran (ETH Zurich)
Bela Bollobas (University of Cambridge and University of Memphis)
Mark Braverman (Princeton University)
Emmanuel Candes (Stanford)
Sylvain Cappell (New York University)
Jeff Cheeger (New York University)
Maria Chudnovsky (Princeton University)
Ronald Coifman (Yale University)
Peter Constantin (Princeton University)
Ivan Corwin (Columbia University)
Galia Dafni (Concordia University)
Henri Darmon (McGill University)
Percy Deift (New York University)
Amir Dembo (Stanford University)
David Donoho (Stanford University and Associé Etranger, Académie des Sciences)
Vladimir Drinfeld (University of Chicago)
Yakov Eliashberg (Stanford University)
Michael Entov (Technion)
Alex Eskin (University of Chicago)
Pavel Etingof (MIT)
Benson Farb (University of Chicago)
Jacob Fox (Stanford University)
David Gabai (Princeton University)
George I. Glauberman (University of Chicago)
Samuel Grushevsky (Stony Brook University and Simons Center for Geometry and Physics)
Alex Iosevich (University of Rochester)
Svetlana Jitomirskaya (UC Berkeley)
Svetlana Katok (Pennsylvania State University)
Sergiu Klainerman (Princeton University)
Michael Krivelevich (Tel Aviv University)
David Kazhdan (Hebrew University)
Konstantin Khanin (University of Toronto)
Elon Lindenstrauss (IAS, Princeton)
Martin Loebl (Charles University)
Alexander Logunov (MIT)
Eyal Lubetzky (New York University)
Alex Lubotzky (Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University)
Mikhail Lyubich (Stony Brook University)
Stéphane Mallat (Collège de France)
Gregory Margulis (Yale University)
Govind Menon (Brown University)
Vitali Milman (Tel Aviv University)
Fedor Nazarov (Kent State University)
Yaron Ostrover (Tel Aviv University)
Peter Ozsvath (Princeton University)
Igor Pak (UCLA)
Yakov Pesin (Pennsylvania State University)
Iosif Polterovich (Université de Montréal)
Leonid Polterovich (Tel Aviv University)
Alexander Razborov (University of Chicago)
Vladimir Rokhlin (Yale University)
Mark Rudelson (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
Lenya Ryzhik (Stanford University)
Richard Evan Schwartz (Brown University)
Vera Serganova (UC Berkeley)
Barry Simon (Caltech)
Amit Singer (Princeton University)
Mikhail Sodin (Tel Aviv University)
Benny Sudakov (ETH Zurich)
Sergei Tabachnikov (Pennsylvania State University)
Shmuel Weinberger (University of Chicago)
Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann Institute and New York University)
Efim Zelmanov (Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen)
Tamar Ziegler (Hebrew University)
The Statement is permanently closed for signatures.