Zionist Diego Olstein Expelled from UNAM

ByInter-University and Popular Assembly for Palestine

This statement was released by the Inter-University and Popular Assembly for Palestine on March 7, 2026.

Yesterday, March 6, 2026, students from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and other faculties of the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) decided to boycott, cancel, prevent, and expel Diego Olstein from our facilities. We did so consciously and politically because of his public stance in favor of Zionism and against the pro-Palestinian university organization.

Diego Olstein is a historian trained at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an Argentine citizen by birth and an Israeli by choice, who in 2024 published an open letter against the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Pittsburgh. In that text, he openly opposed the student movement that demanded an end to the genocide in Gaza. He demanded that the encampment condemn October 7 as if there were a parity of forces between the resistance of the people occupied for almost eight decades and a colonial, military, and genocidal state sustained by U.S. imperialism.

In that same letter, Olstein defended the idea that taking a stand against Zionism is tantamount to discriminating against Jews. In doing so, he reproduced a central lie of Israeli hasbara: the equation of Judaism with Zionism, used for decades to politically shield Israel, portray the Zionist state as a victim before the world, and delegitimize all solidarity with Palestine.

He also attacked the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and defended the so-called two-state solution, ignoring that as long as the State of Israel exists as a colonial, expansionist, racist, and supremacist enclave, there will be no real possibility of Palestinian liberation. The two-state policy has served for decades to administer apartheid and indefinitely postpone the freedom of the Palestinian people.

In the current context, giving space to an avowed Zionist and a public opponent of the pro-Palestinian university movement means normalizing colonialism, illegal settlements, and genocide under the guise of academic pluralism. The Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) should be enough to prevent figures of this kind from receiving political or academic legitimacy in a public institution sustained by the Mexican working class.

Furthermore, this invitation comes after the authorities responded tepidly last year to student protests against the Faculty’s ties to Zionism, denying links and responsibilities, only to then open institutional space to a figure who has publicly spoken out against the pro-Palestinian university student organization.

From the Inter-University and Popular Assembly for Palestine, we demand that the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and the College of History be held accountable for this

Invitation to the student community, workers, and professors of the faculty who have spoken out against Zionism countless times. We also demand that our spaces be free of apartheid, Zionism, and any other form of racial supremacism.

If the College of History wants to open serious historiographical debates on Palestine, colonialism, and memory, and wants to invite Israeli historians, then invite critical and anti-Zionist voices like Ilan Pappé, Shlomo Sand, or Palestinian historians and humanists like Walaa Alqaisiya, Nur Masalha, or Rashid Khalidi. Translate their works, discuss them in class, and foster critical thinking about discourses of racial supremacism, so far removed from a humanist education.

The public university cannot continue to function as a platform for Zionism.

We call for university and popular organization against Zionism, the imperialist advance, and the normalization of supremacist and fascist ideologies in our spaces.

Zionists out of UNAM
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

Inter-University and People’s Assembly for Palestine