“What is a university and who is it for?”
This was the question to which this essay was supposed to respond. It’s a question I turn over and over again in my mind, walking myself in circles. Federal agents have detained, kidnapped, and disappeared multiple graduate students for their participation in peaceful protest against Israeli genocide. Anti-Zionist speech is an act of domestic terror. The president explicitly rejects professional historical scholarship on the legacies of racism in the US and seeks to banish “improper ideology” from the nation’s museums. There is a real and immediate future in which US universities as we’ve known them and academic freedom as we’ve known it—however imperfect, and always with a Palestine exception—no longer exists. Columbia is already there.
This piece began, in part, as an effort to think about complicity. We watched for weeks last fall and spring as Israeli military forces in Gaza burned hospital patients alive in their tents and blockaded the territory into a famine and raped and tortured the civilians they imprisoned. Meanwhile, at the behest of university administrators, police forces both public and private criminalized and brutalized the students who spoke out at against this and against the billions of dollars spent by the US to pay for the bombs. There is no language I have to express these horrors.
The student encampments issued widespread calls for universities to divest their endowments from Israeli companies and companies that do business with Israel, such as weapons manufacturers. Any profits from such investments, the students argue, render the universities complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Implicit in this critique of complicity is the idea that universities, as institutions of learning, have moral and ethical obligations that other corporations do not have. Meanwhile, for years, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s call to boycott Israeli academic institutions has sparked backlash because of the perception that scholars at Israeli universities are not necessarily political—and not responsible for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In an imperfect world, how do we know what lines to draw, and when? How do we choose and hold on to basic principles while leaving room for—and needing to live in—what can feel like a morally cacophonous world?
Two books from Israeli scholars, published more than a decade apart, detail the costs and consequences, to academic integrity and for human flourishing, of the structural role Israeli universities play in supporting the Israeli state. Both Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel and Ilan Pappé’s Out of the Frame identify the universities as arms of the Israeli state’s settler project, a project premised on the erasure and elimination of Palestinian history and Palestinian life. A year ago, the histories and policies detailed by Wind and Pappé seemed like particularly egregious examples of what the absence of academic freedom looks like—a contrast to what academics in the US enjoyed. Today, they read more like warnings than exposés.
The Tantura affair, recently resurfaced by a 2022 documentary, remains one of the more well-publicized instances of Israeli state’s repression of scholarly knowledge. In 1999, Theodore Katz submitted a master’s thesis to the University of Haifa in which he chronicled the history he had compiled, through archival research and oral history interviews, of the massacre of more than 200 Palestinians in the village of Tantura in May 1948. Originally passed with high marks, the thesis became a lightning rod when a journalist publicized its findings; soldiers whom Katz had interviewed sued him for libel, and the university revoked his degree. Writing of the affair in his intellectual autobiography Out of the Frame, Israeli “New Historian” Ilan Pappé—who did not advise the thesis, but who backed Katz’s research and became himself the target of a boycott and a trial by the university—is scathing on the subject: “The academic community of Haifa University almost unanimously parroted every move of the government’s without the slightest criticism … immoral and cowardly behaviour [by] a group of scholars in the so-called ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’”
Today, the willingness of US university administrators to throw their students to the wolves and the spinelessness so many of them have thus far demonstrated in the face of the Trump administration’s hostile extortions should make clear to faculty and students alike that there is nothing inherent in the structure of the university that guarantees protection for the integrity of academic work. As Steven Salaita (whose hiring by the University of Illinois was notoriously “canceled” over his tweets about Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza) has noted, “Neither free speech nor academic freedom … has ever consistently protected systematic critique of structural racism, capitalism, iniquity, and militarism.” In our era of the “corporatized university,” the ideal of the university as an “‘inviolable refuge from [the] tyranny of [public opinion],” “immune to powerful economic and political interests” seems quaint, at best, and more than a little naive. Universities are “sites of power,” places that, through their work in education, play a critical role in shaping social norms and expectations—and therein lies their significance.
The scholarly narratives allowed within Israel’s nine universities are limited to those that accord with the Zionist narratives of the state, which often flatly contradict historical experience.
In August 2024, the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) adopted a statement that read, in part, “Academic freedom and productive debate may not always be appropriately secured by a categorical position that disregards nuance and is inattentive to context.” The delicacy of these words belies their radicalism: After 20 years, the preeminent organization dedicated to the protection of academic freedom in the United States reversed its stance against academic boycotts.
This reversal is all the more remarkable because the idea of an academic boycott of Israel has been fiercely criticized for years as a betrayal of academic freedom. What good could possibly come, critics argued, from closing off avenues of communication and punishing individuals who bear no responsibility for Israel’s apartheid policies? The fact that the call from the BDS movement was only ever for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions, never Israeli academics as individuals, was a nuance often ignored. In the meantime, Israel enforced (and enforces) far more reaching forms of repression against Palestinian learning and Palestinian academics. For four years during the First Intifada, Israeli authorities shuttered all Palestinian universities. Israeli military forces continue to systematically target the infrastructure of Palestinian education, and restrictions on movement in and out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have long prohibited scholars living there from participating in academic and research activities abroad. Most fundamentally, though, the idea that an academic boycott of Israel would violate fundamental principles of academic freedom rests on the assumption that Israeli universities are independent and neutral institutions, that their work of education and research has nothing to do with the Israeli state’s 76-year-long occupation of Palestine. “For too long,” Wind writes in Towers of Ivory and Steel, “the Western academic community has taken … the claim that Israeli universities must be institutionally distinguished from the Israeli state … at face value.”
In recent years, Israeli universities have materially contributed to the annihilation of universities in Gaza, the assassination of Palestinian academics, and the repression of Palestinian students and their supporters, and intentionally shaped research to accommodate state prerogatives, but the imbrication of the university with the Israeli settler project dates back much farther. The very planning and construction of Israel’s universities was designed to further the Israeli state aims of territorial expansion, with the universities as “pillars of regional demographic engineering.” This includes Hebrew University’s establishment, decades before Israel became a state, “as a strategic outpost for the Zionist movement to state symbolic and political claim to Jerusalem”; the construction of Ben-Gurion University in the “Naqab (Negev) region most sparsely populated by Jewish Israelis”; and the 2012 accreditation of Ariel University, located in one of the largest illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The institutional and administrative infrastructure of these universities continue to serve the state’s military ambitions. They operate as training sites for Israeli soldiers and security personnel to “enhance” and “hone” their operations. They blur the line between “military training base” and “university campus” by designing academic programs specifically tailored to military needs, as well as by hosting entire military units on their campuses. These active partnerships and collaborations generate advancements for Israel’s state military industries and facilitate a university-to-military pipeline.
These universities reinforce Zionist state ideology, according to Wind, in three registers. They reinforce the state through their work in “knowledge” production; their contributions to the development of Israel’s military and security capacities; and their active silencing of anti-Zionist critique (commonly, but not exclusively, taking the form of Palestinian student repression). In particular, Wind traces the mutually beneficial exchange of scientific and technical research and expertise in what she terms the “university-military-industrial complex.” Moreover, she notes, “all seven of the major public universities in Israel have also established subsidiary commercialization companies” to facilitate the export of security-related research for profit. Crucially, the successful marketing of these R&D projects rests on the use of occupied Palestine as a “laboratory,” adding value to Israeli military and security technology that can subsequently be marketed abroad as “battle proven.”
The political and territorial imperatives of the Israeli state have also fundamentally shaped the character and quality of Israeli academic work more broadly. In each of the fields Wind discusses—legal studies, archaeology, and Middle Eastern studies—“expertise” produced by Israeli academics functions to justify and sustain Israeli state narratives and state action. Israeli legal “innovations” undergird cost-benefit analyses that explicitly disregard the loss of Palestinian life in the planning of military operations and generally work to extend a veil of legitimacy over “practices that have been traditionally defined as extralegal in international humanitarian law.” The complicity of such a seemingly apolitical field as archaeology is not, perhaps, intuitive. But it makes perfect sense within a national ideology so tightly tied to a narrative of historic occupancy. The choice of dig sites, for example, facilitates Israeli encroachment and further forcibly dispossesses Palestinian residents of Israel (and the West Bank, where Israeli archaeologists excavate illegally). Most damning, though, are the multiple documented ways in which Israeli archaeologists have engaged in what some of their own colleagues have criticized as “bad archaeology”—including the purposeful destruction of archaeological layers bearing evidence of historic non-Jewish culture and inhabitation—in what is ultimately a “compromising scientific standards to advance Israeli claims to land.” The scholarly narratives allowed within Israel’s nine universities—and the work generated by scholars within those institutions—are limited to those that accord with the Zionist narratives of the state, which often flatly contradict historical experience.
Lastly, university administrations target and discriminate against their Palestinian and Muslim students. The universities marginalize these students through discriminatory admissions policies, the generalized militarization of campus spaces, the refusal to place them in student housing, and the denial of access to spaces adequate for prayer. They also target these students through the policing of any expression of Palestinian identity as a threat to campus—and national—security, a policing that includes collaboration with Israeli security forces to enable arrests of student organizers from campus. Even in university classrooms, Palestinian students must sit alongside active-duty soldiers, whose “daily work” terrorizes Palestinian communities. The presence of these soldiers there violates the academic freedom of Palestinian students.
Israel has long brokered an image of itself as a diverse and pluralist society, investing heavily in its image as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” These claims to multiculturalism are widely cited by the US universities who’ve built partnerships and exchanges with Israeli universities, but they are claims that, as Wind writes, “ring entirely hollow” in the context of the “daily monitoring … and repression of Palestinian political expression.” And yet the repression is, in a sense, necessary to the state: since any claim to Palestinian identity contradicts a vision of Israel as a state built on a “land without a people for a people without a land.”
The Tantura affair is one demonstration of the institutionalized silencing of critical scholarship “that might challenge Zionist hegemony.” Another paradigmatic case study of this institutionalized academic repression is the career of Ilan Pappé; and Pappe’s autobiography, Out of the Frame, elaborates the structural complicity of Israeli academia that Wind’s research demonstrates. Out of the Frame is, Pappé writes, a “modest attempt to try to decipher the riddle of an ideology”— Zionism—that transformed for him from “the ultimate expression of pristine humanity” to “a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life.”
Born in Haifa and raised, as he recounts, within a typical Zionist family, Pappé is one of Israel’s “New Historians.” This was a cohort of scholars who, in the 1980s, began to research the extent of ethnic cleansing and Palestinian dispossession perpetrated in order to establish the state of Israel. Pappé’s research, along with that of his colleagues, helped spur a brief moment of “openness and pluralism” in the 1990s within the academy and in other cultural spheres. That openness disappeared with the Second Intifada, a disappearance that Pappé ties to the broader disintegration of the Israeli left. “Academia,” he writes, “had always had a strong presence in the left, and when [the left] began to disappear, academia changed with it.”
What he found by the time he entered Israeli academia—and what, perhaps, contemporary US academics should fear the most in their own context—was “a stagnant establishment[,] painfully loyal to the prevailing Zionist ideology in every field of research touching on Israeli reality, past or present.” In the early aughts, the Israeli state escalated its policy of “incremental genocide” toward the Gaza Strip; illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank multiplied aggressively; and Israeli politics took a decidedly right-wing turn, marked by the 2009 election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Government repression, social ostracization, and threats on Pappé’s life led him to move to a position at the University of Exeter in England in 2007, a few years before the publication of Out of the Frame in 2010.
Pappe’s memoir reflects the time he has spent dwelling on the character of history and history writing and points to yet another kind of violence: methodological violence. Nearly 15 years before Wind, he writes that the “Israeli academic perspective erased the Nakbah as a historical event.” At a conference in Paris in 1998, for example, “some of the Israeli historians … rejected ‑ on the basis of Israeli documents ‑ many essential Palestinian points, such as the depiction of Zionism as a colonialist movement or of the 1948 expulsion as an ethnic cleansing operation.” These historians, Pappé writes, “doubted the ability of Palestinians to have the expertise or the historical materials for writing their own history,” a point also made by Wind. Particularly compelling is his simple identification of the overwhelming commitment of Israeli society, over and against the formal archive, to oral narratives of the Holocaust; and the same society’s categorical refusal to accept as evidence oral histories of the Palestinian Nakba.
the story of Israeli universities serves as a warning for what U.S. academia could become.
We know excruciatingly well that the accumulation of knowledge is, in itself, no guarantee of a more just future, but knowledge remains the bare minimum of what we need to build a different world. Just as crucially, not all claims to knowledge are created equal. Academic scholarship and the production of knowledge are collective endeavors, not individual affairs. Academics in all disciplines function within an international community of peers; academic freedom does not represent a license to say anything, but rather the right to conduct scholarly inquiry independent from—and often contradictory to—state agendas.
I wrote the first draft of this essay in June 2024, when the BDS movement still stood in tension with the formal bounds of academic freedom laid out by the AAUP. I wrote a second draft in August, when the AAUP revised its stance on the relationship of academic boycott to academic freedom. I wrote a third in late March, after Columbia University’s administration complied with a series of demands from the Trump administration, including the appointment of an administrator to “oversee” its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies departments and the Center for Palestine Studies; and a fourth in early April, after the administration announced its intention to place all of Columbia under a federal consent decree and the State Department declared its intention to deport Mahmoud Khalil for “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements or associations that are otherwise lawful.”
We cannot abandon the university, because our work—the real work of knowledge production, of historical analysis and critical thinking—is essential. Nor can the university be the limit of the educational work that we do. Pappé’s “home university,” an informal reading and discussion group he organized with a group of neighbors hostile to his scholarship, is just one example of the ways in which education easily exceeds the boundaries of the campus. We can look, too, to the long history of extracurricular education in the US: freedman’s schools, Freedom Schools; the work of Grace Lee Boggs and the Black Panthers, to name just a few.
In the context of an unparalleled effort in the US to cripple academic freedom and academic knowledge production under the banner of fighting antisemitism, the story of Israeli universities past and present serves as a warning for what US academia could become. Such a future remains contingent, but the time to organize was yesterday and the time to fight is now. 