university maintains at the settlement of Ariel, you stated that this was "an entirely non-political issue" and that said college was nothing more than "the largest of five colleges which Bar Ilan maintains at different locations in Israel."
Indeed, you declared yourself and your colleagues to be proud of the decision to establish the Ariel college, and you felt no contradiction between continuing to maintain that college, at the investment of a considerable part of Bar Ilan's total resources, and the maintenance of extensive ties with universities worldwide, including in Britain.
As an example you mentioned your own ties as a physicist with Cambridge University and your plans to spend some time at Cambridge this summer-plans which, as you stated, remain unchanged also in the wake of the British lecturers' decision.
Surely, a person of your intelligence and experience can be expected to note the obvious contradictions in the above position. As you well know, Ariel is not "a location in Israel." Rather, Ariel is a location in a territory under military occupation, a territory that is not and has never been part of the state of Israel. Moreover, Ariel is a special kind of location: it is an armed enclave, created by armed force and dependent for its continued existence on force, and force alone.
The creation of Ariel is a severe violation of international law, specifically of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which specifically forbids an occupying power from transferring its own citizens to and settling them in occupied territory. On the ground, the creation and maintenance of Ariel entailed and continues to entail untold hardships to the Palestinians who happen to live in the nearby town of Salfit and in numerous villages a long distance all around. Palestinian inhabitants are exposed to ongoing confiscation of their land so as to feed the land hunger of the ever-expending Ariel settlement, and their daily lives are subjected to increasingly stringent travel limitations in the name of "preserving the settlers' security."
The government-approved plans to extend the "Separation Fence" so as to create a corridor linking Ariel to the Israeli border necessitate the confiscation of yet more vast tracts of Palestinian land, depriving thousands of villagers of their sole source of livelihood. Moreover, should the Ariel corridor be completed, it would cut deeply through the territory which the international community earmarked for creation of a Palestinian state, depriving that state of territorial continuity and viability. For that reason, the plan aroused widespread international opposition, not least from the United States, our main ally in the international arena.
In all of this the Bar Ilan University, of which you are president,