University of California researcher Maya Wind's book centers on the question: Are Israeli universities complicit in violating Palestinian rights?
Afrasianet - Shaima Akram Saidam obtained an average of 99.6% in the 2023 high school exam, and this earned her the title of the first in the literary branch at the level of Palestine. Shaima joined the Islamic University with a major in English.
In the uproar of news about the genocide in Gaza, the news of the martyrdom of Shaima and her family in the Nuseirat area in the Gaza Strip passes as if nothing had happened, as if it were just a number added to the list of numbers.
Who killed her? And with what weapon? Where did the killer form his Zionist identity and terrorist ideology? And with what justification? Perhaps these are questions that lead us to a place that many overlook: Israeli universities, where the minds of the Israeli army are refined, where many security and military apparatuses that monitor, kill and torture Palestinians develop, and where weapons are made, propaganda and justification for destruction. Shaima has been deprived of her right to education by an Israeli university structure that produces genocide, apartheid and destruction of the Palestinian people.
Israeli universities and research centers are one of the most important pillars of the Zionist movement and the Jewish state, as these academic institutions build Zionist identity and propaganda, manufacture weapons, justify Israeli policies, apartheid, Israeli aggression and violations of Palestinian rights, perpetuate settlements, marginalize and refute the Palestinian identity, and train army and intelligence units in various disciplines.
These Israeli institutions practice not only discrimination, oppression and oppression against Palestinians, but against any individual, even a Jew, who defends Palestinian rights and freedoms.
Boycott of the Israeli University
In light of these and other realities, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel was established in 2004, with the aim of calling for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a central actor in the oppression and violation of Palestinian rights and freedoms.
Maya Wind's book is a distinctive and important contribution in this context, to prove the involvement of Israeli universities as a basis and a major driver in violations of Palestinian rights and freedoms, and even to consider the policies of Israeli universities as part of the system of consolidating Israel's racist and settlement policy.
Maya Wind, a researcher at the University of California, centered around the question: Are Israeli universities complicit in violating Palestinian rights? She seeks to answer this question by revealing how Israeli universities are highly intertwined with Israeli regimes of oppression, and the researcher is distinguished in this context - as she says - by being a white Jewish Israeli citizen, which allowed her easy access to the military archives and libraries of the Israeli government, and thus she was able to read documents, memoirs, official political reports, and unpublished studies. Such as master's theses and doctoral theses that have been accredited by Israeli universities.
In addition, he interviewed Palestinian and Jewish students and academics working at Israeli universities. The book consists of two parts and each part has three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, and a closing speech by Professor Robin D.J. Kelly.
Nadia Abu al-Haj of Columbia University presents the book and reminds the reader that Israel is a settler nation-state founded on the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their land, a state based on organized ethnic cleansing. Therefore, Israel should not be described as a democracy.
Rather, the structure on which the State of Israel was founded is a racist structure based on the denial and exclusion of non-Jews. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – as well as the Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Yesh Din – declared Israel an apartheid state in 2021 and 2022.
In her introduction to the book, Nadia asserts that there is no "democratic Israel" that can be separated from the Palestinian cause, as Israel is a settler-replacement state. Its foundational commitments and actions, its entrenched Zionist political perception and in the work of its institutions and even its political parties, both liberal and illiberal, are racist and anti-democratic to the core.
This racist and exclusionary founding structure of Israel explains why the vast majority of Israeli academics, and even university administrations and presidents, remain silent, as there is no institutional defense of academic freedom when it comes to Palestinians.
Maya Wind emphasizes these ideas in the book's introduction, pointing out that campuses in all Israeli-ruled territories are not a safe place for Palestinian students as these universities are not independent but rather an extension of the violence of the Israeli state and its repressive institutions. Israel's apartheid regime cannot be completely dismantled without recognizing that it is a settler-colonial regime.
The academic boycott is therefore the essential step towards ending this colonialism. As this book illustrates, Israel's eight universities all serve the state directly and perform vital functions in supporting its policies, thus forming key pillars of Israeli settler colonialism.
Academia in the service of the Israeli government
For example, Israeli universities collaborate with Israeli arms companies to research and develop technology used by the Israeli military and security services in the occupied Palestinian territories. The technology is also later sold abroad as field-tested or "battle-proven."
The author began by discussing "complicity" and "subjugation experience," how to develop Israeli academic disciplines as a means of serving the Israeli government and the security state, and how it continues to provide material support for state projects. The leading departments and professors in Israeli universities and in various disciplines are intellectually and theoretically subject to the requirements of the Israeli state, as evidenced by the focus on three disciplines.
All Israeli universities conduct excavations at archaeological sites run by Jewish settler organizations or settler regional councils, and this academic major focuses on erasing Arab and Islamic history and is dedicated to the expansion of Jewish settlements and the confiscation of Palestinian land.
For example, Israeli universities are excavating Susiya in the southern West Bank and are directly seizing these Palestinian areas.
Israeli archaeology has also ostensibly emerged as an academic discipline for Israel's assertion of a continuing ancient Jewish presence in Palestine. At the same time, archaeological research has been used to obscure any Palestinian and Arab claims or evidence of existence on this very land.
These excavations are a direct violation of international laws and regulations, yet Israeli archaeologists and universities continue to participate in excavations throughout the Palestinian territories under the protection of the Israeli army. Archaeology therefore structurally facilitates Israel's theft of antiquities and Palestinian land and facilitates their ongoing illegal seizure.
Second Specialization: Legal Studies, the author explains that Israel considers the Occupied Palestinian Territory as its laboratory. Given its decades-long illegal rule of the Palestinian people through military occupation, it has developed a set of laws and legal interpretations to justify its permanent military regime.
Israel has established the legal infrastructure to justify extrajudicial assassinations, torture, and the dissemination of what amounts to a disproportionate use of force against the civilian population, amounting to war crimes. Maya Wind argues that legal studies and the moral philosophy on which it is based were created to justify violations of Palestinian rights and freedom.
Specialization III: Middle Eastern Studies The researcher shows that with the establishment of a military government by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories in 1967, opportunities for academic cooperation with the state were renewed. For example, Hebrew University professors Menachem Milson, Amnon Cohen, Moshe Sharon, and Moshe Maoz have served as advisors on Arab affairs to the Israeli military and government.
Milson also served as the first head of the Civil Administration, Israel's military administration in the occupied Palestinian territories, and oversaw the forced closure of Palestinian Birzeit University beginning in 1981; Cohen, Sharon, and Maoz served as colonels and served with the army throughout their academic careers.
The Middle East Studies departments also offer academic programs in the field of regional experience for active-duty soldiers in elite military units, and courses specifically designed for the security services. The Hebrew University offered a bachelor's program in Middle Eastern Studies to the Shin Bet security service as part of staff training.
Thus Israeli majors in the humanities and social sciences were recruited to support Israeli settler colonialism. Archaeology, legal studies, and Middle Eastern studies developed in conjunction with and through the Israeli military occupation.
The author then went on to study a number of Israeli universities on the grounds that "universities: outposts" were created and designed to serve as strategic outposts for the Israeli state project. The Hebrew University in occupied East Jerusalem; the University of Haifa in the Triangle; Ben-Gurion University in the Negev; Ariel University in the West Bank: All these institutions are key drivers of "Judaization" projects in their areas.
In the run-up to and during the 1948 war, students, faculty, and administrators at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem actively supported the Haganah military organization, treated the campus as a base, conducted military training, and even stored weapons on university buildings.
For more than a century, Israeli universities have been expanding and enshrining the borders of the Jewish state – "Jewish sovereignty" over all of historic Palestine. These universities continue to play a central role in the expansion of outposts on Palestinian lands, and their libraries are looted Palestinian book repositories, as is the case with the Hebrew University library, which houses many Arabic books stolen from Palestinians.
The researcher moved on to the concept of a "scientific security state": it shows how the development of Israeli universities was linked to the rise of Israeli military industries. These universities were designed as state-building institutions and were recruited to support their violent apparatus soon after their founding.
After the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1918, the Zionist movement established two additional institutions of higher education in Palestine: the Technion in Haifa in 1925 and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in 1934. The Hebrew University was the first comprehensive university of the Zionist movement dedicated to research and teaching in various disciplines; the Technion was designed to be an engineering center; and the Weizmann Institute was committed to scientific research for nation-building.
The researcher shows how Israeli universities and research centers serve as an academic arm of the Israeli security state. Institutes and universities serve the state through research and policy recommendations, which aim not only to preserve Israeli military rule, but also to undermine the Palestinian rights movement on the international stage.
For example, the daily work of Israeli intelligence soldiers violates Palestinian human rights, enshrined in international law and the Geneva Convention. Many soldiers graduating from specially designed graduate programs at the Hebrew University serve in Unit 8200, the largest and most centralized unit of the intelligence force. Unit 8200 is the army's central assembly unit and is responsible for collecting all intelligence communications, including phone calls, text messages, and emails. The author concludes the chapter by emphasizing Far from struggling to become civilian institutions, Israeli universities continue to expand their operations not only as military training bases, but as state weapons laboratories.
The second section of the book, Repression, opens with the idea of "cognitive occupation" and explains how Israeli universities systematically prevent critical academic research, teaching, and discussion of Israeli settler colonialism, military occupation, and apartheid.
The list of topics banned at Israeli universities has expanded as the far-right has grown in influence and political power over the past two decades. More recently, any criticism of the Israeli army or soldiers has become taboo at Israeli universities. For example, Maya Wind explains that the University of Haifa has two established traditions in Israeli academia: erasing the production of Palestinian academic knowledge and undermining evidence-based research that exposes the crimes of the Israeli state.
Israeli universities have allied with far-right groups and the Israeli government to restrict and monitor research and discourse related to the Nakba, for example. By extension, critical consideration of Israeli occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism is described as taboo.
Hence, fundamental critical debates have been excluded from Israeli academia, as Israeli universities define research and debate on Israel's historical and ongoing state violence as "illegitimate." In doing so, it deprives faculty and students not only of academic freedom, but also of the opportunity to debate and intervene in current and future injustices.
The author then moved on to the topic of the blockade imposed on Palestinian students and revealed the restrictions on the rights of Palestinian students to study, express and protest in Israeli universities. She revealed how university administrations constantly restrict the presence of Palestinian students on their campuses, and how they cooperate with the Israeli government to deny Palestinian students, especially active students, basic academic freedoms. Since joining Israeli higher education, Palestinian students have been criminalized, monitored and targeted by Their universities in collusion with the state.
Academic freedom in Israeli higher education does not apply to Palestinian students. University administrations have long shown that they are subservient to the state, cooperating with it to protect them from criticism and accountability for their military occupation and apartheid. The government increasingly censors any discussion of the Nakba and the State of Israel's radical injustice, both against the Palestinians it rules militarily in the OPT, and those it considers its citizens.
Academic complicity with the state against Palestinians is illustrated and that there is currently no movement in Israeli universities calling for severing ties with the Israeli military and the Israeli security state because of its repeated violations of the inalienable Palestinian right to education and other human rights.
Even progressive organizations operating in Israeli universities—such as the Joint Democratic Initiative or Academia for Equality," which include Israeli and Palestinian Jewish faculty and students (citizens)—largely fail to meet the demands of Palestinian universities. These activist groups have so far refused to support Palestinian calls to hold Israeli universities accountable for their complicity in Israel's violations of international law.
Israel views Palestinians, armed with education who challenge the apartheid regime without any hesitation, as a threat. As a result, Palestinian students are subjected to disciplinary hearings, interrogations, arrests at Israeli universities, abductions, torture, military arrests, and even killings at Palestinian universities. Israeli universities are key pillars of this system.
Not only does it conduct, research, train and cooperate with Israeli security forces that maintain the military occupation, but it also works alongside the Israeli government to oppress Palestinian students at its universities.
Ultimately, Israeli universities play a direct role in the Israeli state's suppression of Palestinian student movements for liberation — and in denying Palestinians academic freedom — for more than seventy-five years.
In the book's conclusion, the author asserts that Israel established and built Israeli higher education institutions on Palestinian land, and these institutions were designed to be tools for Jewish settlement expansion and the displacement of Palestinians, and were founded on the approach of land grabber universities.
Israeli universities continue not only to actively participate in the Israeli state's violence against Palestinians, but also contribute their resources, research, and scholarship to maintain, defend and justify this oppression. Finally, the author calls for a boycott of Israeli universities and insists that there is no academic freedom until it is applied to everyone.
In his closing remarks, Professor Robin DJ Kelly of the University of California asserts that the goal of the boycott is to end the occupation, dismantle the apartheid regime, respect the rights of Palestinian refugees enshrined in the United Nations, extend civil rights to all, end military arrests, repeated incursions into and monitoring of Palestinian institutions, and deliberate disruption of the educational process.
Israel's apartheid regime would not have lasted without the massive financial support, political legitimacy, and legal protections provided by the United States. The $3.8 billion in annual military funding (Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in history) contributes to funding ongoing state violence, repression, and inequality, with no accountability.
So, academic Kelly argues that Israel's apartheid system would not have survived without America's liberal silence. The truth is that there will be no real academic freedom in the region without a free Palestine, and there can be no free Palestine as long as universities are under occupation or strongholds of Zionism and settler colonialism. As long as the majority of Israeli intellectuals remain silent or do not realize that their freedom is linked to the freedom of Palestine, we will continue to boycott Israeli institutions because silence is A synonym for collusion, according to Kelly.
This book is of high scientific value, as it is a historical documentation with adequate details of the complicity of all Israeli universities and research centers without exception in the Israeli apartheid system, and it is one of the most important arms of the state in justifying its policies that violate international standards and laws.
This book can be read as an extension, advocacy, and new testimony to the claims of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel founded in 2004 that Israeli universities are a key pillar of Israeli apartheid and policies that violate international and humanitarian law.