By: Mason Mattu, News Writer
In September 2024, a group of SFU senior administrators met with Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed. This information was published in an open letter from SFU Faculty for Palestine (F4P) on December 10 titled “Does SFU Support Genocide?”
This meeting occurred during the ambassador’s visit to Vancouver, where his goal was to “establish and expand collaborations between Israeli and Canadian academic institutions in the fields of medicine, agriculture, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and applied research.” The president’s office stated that BC and SFU’s tech and innovation work were discussed with ambassador Moed. The office also stated that “no new [institutional] partnerships were proposed at this meeting.”
The person overseeing Moed at the time, Israeli minister of defense Israel Katz, called for the immediate “cut off of water supply from Israel to Gaza,” on X. He also stated, “We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.” F4P believes that “these are the values that ambassador Moed represents.”
The F4P letter claims SFU president Joy Johnson was also present at this meeting. In a statement to The Peak, SFU stated that “the meeting was attended by members of the provost and vice-president research offices” and not Johnson.
The Peak corresponded with Alberto Toscano, a term research associate professor at SFU’s School of Communication and author of Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Toscano said F4P was “shocked and upset by the fact that the meeting took place, and by the failure of leadership and moral intelligence it represented.” SFU continues to invest roughly $7.2 million in companies that supply “military arms and war-related products” to Israel, including “BAE systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CAE inc.” In November 2024, SFU told The Peak they expected to bring a “proposed timeline for community consultation” to the Board of Governors for approval that month. They also planned to begin community consultation with the “Simon Fraser Student Society (SFSS), Graduate Student Society (GSS), and employee groups” in December, with a “full community consultation” in early 2025.
In a recent statement to The Peak, SFU confirmed that the community consultation took place “to provide information on the policy update process for the university’s Responsible Investment Policy.” A full community consultation to revise and provide feedback for this policy “is expected to take place in January and February. Feedback and proposed policy updates will be shared with the SFU Board of Governors in the spring.”
“Given the integral part played by the Israeli tech sector in the ongoing genocide, it is disturbing that SFU leadership would treat this as an unproblematic topic of discussion.” — Alberto Toscano, term research associate professor, SFU’s School of Communication and member of Faculty 4 Palestine
“Given the integral part played by the Israeli tech sector in the ongoing genocide, it is disturbing that SFU leadership would treat this as an unproblematic topic of discussion,” said Toscano. Israel’s tech industry continues to aid in the state’s mass surveillance of Palestinians and creating weapons of war. For example, according to The Guardian, Israel uses the AI system Lavender to identify Palestinian men as suspected militants and locate their homes as bombing targets. Last year, the Israeli tech sector grew its capital by 38%, making it the “second-largest behind Silicon Valley.”
Toscano said SFU treated the meeting with ambassador Moed as “business as usual.” In a message addressed to the SFU community, Johnson expressed that SFU “must refrain from taking public positions on topics unrelated to the business of the university, including partisan matters and world events.” The University Act — a law governing the operations and structures of universities — declares that universities must be “non-political in principle.” In their open letter, F4P asked if institutional neutrality extends to neutrality regarding genocide.
SFU told The Peak that it has “a process in place to accept meetings with ambassadors from any country that has a diplomatic relationship with Canada.”
“It is absurd to suggest that it would be in breach of the University Act to decline a meeting with the representative of a state which is being prosecuted by international legal bodies for war crimes, apartheid, and genocide,” said Toscano. “It pushes the university into a kind of moral nihilism, which in this case means a dangerous indifference even to minimal standards of international law and human rights.”
Toscano stated that if these meetings are required as part of university procedure, administration should consult the broader community, “detailing the conditions for university leadership taking meetings with representatives of foreign states.”
