The Teach-In Circle is an independent initiative to organize a series of discussions where teaching and research staff of Leiden University draw on their areas of academic expertise to invite students and colleagues to learn about different aspects of the violent crisis in Palestine/Israel, its history and background, and its reverberations around the world.

Participants in the network came together motivated by the observation that it has become more difficult than ever to safely have open discussion of this issue, at the very moment when it reaches an unprecedented level of televised killing, destruction, and displacement.

We are alarmed by this suffering, and by the tendency of leaders of European governments and institutions to downplay or justify it. We reject any attempt to inhibit expressions of solidarity, or to silence or police lucid discussion of what many international legal experts have identified as a genocidal campaign by Israel.