The UPV/EHU Palestine was born with the aim of breaking with all Israeli companies and institutions that are carrying out and working with genocide in Palestine. Israel’s impunity comes from its political, military, economic, scientific and academic relations in Europe and the United States. That is why the students, teachers and workers who are an active part of the university community of the UPV/EHU, we wanted to bring to our university what the international campaign of Boikot, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has been proposing for a long time: Let the UPV/EHU take charge of these complicities and disassociate itself from them. Such campaigns were effective, inter alia, against apartheid in South Africa.

The advances that the UPV/EHU has made so far have been lukewarm and late. The gravity of the Palestinian situation and the mobilizations that have taken place at the international level and in the neighbourhoods and cities have fuelled the movement: In our country, the student camps, the motions that were approved in the departments or the acts and concentrations with other State universities.

The Governing Council of the UPV/EHU made a statement on 24 April. As we denounced at the time, this statement placed the problem in erroneous terms and the statement contained little detail. Furthermore, it did not propose any action, in the case of the UPV/EHU supplying companies involved in genocide and apartheid, and did not take into account the request to set up a commission to give specifications to all this from the UPV/EHU Palestine.

We propose the creation of a transparent, effective and binding committee for the observation, knowledge and publication of all these relations. This committee should represent the various members of the university community, as well as those working in the field. The objectives of the Commission can be summarised as follows:

• The active breakdown of the network for legitimizing and protecting genocide within the UPV/EHU.
• The lack of signing of relations or contracts with companies and institutions cooperating with the State of Israel, especially those who are playing genocide and the active role in apartheid.
• Break with your relationship with the HP company and ensure that no relationship with companies like CAF will be maintained from now on.
• Suspend and not sign conventions and programmes on mobility, collaboration, cooperation and research with Israeli universities.
• Implementation of projects to strengthen the Palestinian academic community.

We have started a collection of signatures to encourage the creation of the Commission, among other things, to publicly press the two candidates for the election, and we have already collected over 1,000 signatures. During the campaign, we transferred our proposal to the two candidatures to make firm decisions and progress in assessing the creation of the committee and making it possible.

Eva Ferreira’s candidature for the Presidency of the Government of Navarre has not undertaken to form the Commission. We have to say that we have had a meeting with the members of this candidacy, but the current Rector has not met us so far, despite having proposed it some time ago. Joxerra Bengoetxea’s candidacy pledged to set up the committee, but it did not join our whole proposal.

In this area, we would like to stress that the committee cannot justify ambiguous positions, that it needs to have a real impact, and that formulas should therefore be sought for all the committee’s proposals to be carried out.

We want to turn the UPV into a university free of apartheid and genocide. Solidarity with Palestine and actions against genocide and occupation, as well as its implementation by the institutions, are in the hands of collective pressure. In the Western countries, they are primarily responsible for Israel ' s international complicity and the academic community can become a tool to break this implicit consensus with Israel ' s actions. In order for the new leadership team to emerge from the elections to be associated with the committee’s proposed constitution, it is essential to continue to mobilise.