“It is our duty to ask to sever relations with the Israeli academy until it takes part in the decolonization process.” Thus Maya Wind concludes the conversation with the poster. An Israeli anthropologist in British Columbia, you have recently published Verso il libro Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom in which he investigates the role of the academy in maintaining the system of oppression of the Palestinian people.
Let’s start with the historical role in the founding of the Israeli military industry.
Israeli universities have been a pillar of racial domination, apartheid and occupation and have served the state in many ways. First of all, the very place and the way in which the campuses were built on confiscated lands, to remove continuity from the Palestinian territory, makes them one of the infrastructures of dispossession. So is the production of knowledge functional to the military and intelligence system: many disciplines have been subordinated to the production of research that has provided models of military government for the Palestinians for decades. Finally, there is the technological aspect: the Israeli academy gave birth to the Israeli military industry. The leading companies still today were born within the Israeli academy, think of Science Corps, a research department within the Haganah militias, operating in the first three Israeli campuses, the Technion, the Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute. With the founding of the state, Israeli academics and scientists worked to ensure that Israel not only imported weapons and military technologies but also developed them. This is the origin of the Israeli military industry, of Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael, Elbit Systems, born within the universities, in particular at the Technion. These are the companies that later became global exporters. And from their origins the weapons produced are tested on Palestinians. Universities are the central laboratory of the Israeli military industry and their leaders speak about it openly. I quote them in the book when they say that without the academy Israel would never have reached its current level.
Is this collaboration still active and is it applied in the offensive on Gaza?
There is great obscurity surrounding collaborations. What we know is that all the technologies developed in the past are the foundation of the new ones, it is like a building that grows. Rafael, Elbit, Iai are internal to the academic system in different ways: scholarships for students, funding of research and entire laboratories, revolving doors of researchers and employees. They are two inseparable systems. And then there’s another type of industry, particularly at Tel Aviv University, that deals with artificial intelligence.
Is there also a political role in legitimizing military practices?
For years, and particularly in the last six months, academics have been reacting to attempts to judge Israel internationally. For example at the International Court of Justice: Israeli academics and jurists produce interpretations of humanitarian law and the law of war to protect Israel from charges of genocide. For decades they have fabricated innovative interpretations of international law to argue that Israel does not violate it and that military offensives against the Palestinians do not involve war crimes. Universities are indeed central players in the mechanism of legitimizing and supporting Israeli impunity. When South Africa turned to the ICJ, law faculties and jurists immediately moved to produce counterarguments. Among the most active is the former head of the army’s international law department who now works at Tel Aviv University and who said, and I quote: «The international arena is a battlefield. You have to know your enemy and know how to deal with him, we don’t want to supply him with ammunition.”
On the political level, we have witnessed not only a lack of condemnation of the offensive on Gaza but also the internal repression of critical voices on campus.
Since its origins, Israeli academia has been a hostile and repressive place for Palestinian students and professors. There has certainly been an escalation, with university administrations suspending students, kicking them out of dormitories with just 24 hours’ notice, and demanding investigations against them. The witch hunt is facilitated by Israeli Jewish faculty and student groups, such as the National Student Union which polices Palestinians and denounces them. The case of Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is exemplary: she was arrested and interrogated last week. The reason why she has been persecuted for years is that she has the courage to research colonial violence and state violence. The Hebrew University is directly responsible for what is happening to her: for years it decided not to support her and finally suspended her, contributing to the climate of incitement against her.
What is the relationship between Israeli and Palestinian academia?
This is what Palestinian intellectual Kamal Nabulsi calls the scholastic side of the occupation. Israel has always seen Palestinian education as a threat, like every other colonial administration. For this reason it has always repressed it both within Israel and in the occupied territories. Israeli universities have played a role because they have conditioned the enrollment of Palestinian citizens into allegiance to the state for decades and have continually repressed critical Palestinian research and internal campus mobilization. Not to mention the silence of the Israeli academic world in the face of the destruction of all the universities in Gaza, the continuous raids and arrests on campuses in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the detention of Palestinian students and professors in Israeli military prisons.
Protests to end collaborations with Israeli universities have been ongoing for months in Italy. The same is true in the United States. We ask to boycott the institutions, not the individual teachers. What do you think?
My book aims to provide clear evidence of Israeli academia’s complicity in the oppression of Palestinians. It is a fact that it is complicit in the system of apartheid, occupation and colonialism. This is why I support the boycott. I think that for teachers, students and university administrations around the world (particularly in the West: it is Western universities that finance and legitimize Israeli academia) it is essential to take responsibility for their own complicity in the lack of freedom for the Palestinians.
