Sarra Grira — : When we talk about Israeli universities and their role in the occupation or in settlement policies, the first thing that comes to mind is usually their cooperation with the Israeli military. But in your book, you show that these universities were conceived, from the very beginning, as part of the Zionist settlement project. What you highlight is particularly striking — how institutions like the Hebrew University of Jerusalem or the University of Haifa were deliberately built in specific locations in that order.
Maya Wind — Settler colonial regimes tend to follow shared patterns. In that context, I think of Israeli universities as settler universities, in the sense that the universities themselves are central infrastructure to sustaining the Zionist project. They help reproduce Israeli society as a settler society. But this dynamic isn’t unique to Israel. I have learned a lot from Indigenous scholars in North America and elsewhere, who examine the relationship between the university and the broader settlement project in other settler states. Of course, each colonial context is different: French, British, and Spanish settler colonialism… all have distinct timelines and methods. The Israeli settler project developed under the aegis of the British Empire, and so it shares characteristics with its settler states in North America, Australia, New Zealand, or even if we look at South Africa, there are some parallels there. In all of these places, Indigenous scholars have shown how universities were established on land seized through the Indigenous genocide, and how the universities became themselves anchors for ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Land is central to settler states. So when I came to look at the Israeli university system, I knew I had to start with the question of land itself. Because land is so central to the Palestinian liberation struggle, and to any anti-colonial Indigenous resistance. I became curious where these universities were built. Why those locations specifically? What histories shaped their placement? For the Israeli settler state, you see how different regions of strategic concern pose different problems, and projects of settlement follow different patterns. In the Galilee, from the Israeli perspective, the problem is that there are too many Palestinians remaining. It was, and still is, a central region where, after the Nakba, you have the highest concentration of Palestinian citizens, and Israel was incredibly concerned about Palestinian national liberation momentum in that region. And so they were very concerned with what Israel calls ‘Judaizing’ the Galilee, which is simply Israeli terminology for colonization. The University of Haifa played an important role when it was founded in the 1970s, in anchoring Judaization programs in response to the Palestinian Land Day protests.
The idea was not only to control the Galilee region, but also to anchor that control in the city itself. If we look at the Naqab, from the Israeli state’s perspective, the problem there is that it’s a large desert where very few Jewish Israelis wanted to live. So, in 1969, the state established Ben-Gurion University to “make the desert bloom” as the slogan of the Zionist movement put it, using typical colonial terminology. Ben Gurion University was established anchor the Judaization of the Naqab. The university played a central role: it’s impossible to understand the colonization of the Naqab without recognizing that anchor. Later, the project expanded to include the military. There’s an ongoing effort still underway to relocate major military bases from central Israel, where land has become very expensive, south to the Naqab. Ben-Gurion University helps anchor that transition. And importantly, the students themselves are part of the settlement project. They build what they call “student villages”, which are Jewish student colonies, on Palestinian Bedouin land. So they play a direct role in helping the state push out Indigenous Palestinian communities. Hebrew University also plays a similar role in occupied East Jerusalem.
S. G.— : One interesting point you make is that the cooperation between universities and the State of Israel is not just about fields like engineeering and defense. It also involves the humanities and law. Archaeology might be the clearest example, since it’s easy to see why Israel is longing for historical legitimacy. But the two examples I found most intriguing are Middle East studies and law. Could you say a word about those?
M. W.— : This point is important for me because we need to continue to develop critical scholarship on the militarization of higher education. There is a lot of good research, in the U.S. during the height of the Cold War, many universities were actively recruited to carry out research projects and develop fields like area studies: studying East Asia, Russia, China. Entire disciplines in the American academy were brought into the project of serving U.S. empire, whether by producing expert knowledge or developing weapons for the U.S. And those relationships are still ongoing. Of course, this also happens in France, and across Europe, and many other places around the world.
But I didn’t want just to talk about weapons or the most obvious aspects. I wanted to show how Zionist epistemology, is co-created, designed and developed in service of the settler-colonial project. My goal was to expose the less intuitive ways that this system operates because I think it’s crucial to understand the scope and structure: in a settler society, nothing is untouched by the settlement project. And now, of course, we’re nearly two years into a genocide, watching it unfold. The international legal system, meant to prevent what we are seeing, has abjectly failed. We’re witnessing war crimes and the worst crimes against humanity, including genocide. So the question is: how has this system failed to stop it, or to hold Israel accountable? We need to look at the legal groundwork that was laid. Noura Erakat, an incredible legal scholar whom I cite, and I learned from over many years, often uses the analogy that law is a sail, but the wind is politics. Law is not a fixed entity; is always subject to interpretation. So one of the things I wanted to examine was: what kinds of legal interpretations have been legitimized, especially in the West, and how have these been shaped by Israel in ways that allow it to carry out genocide in the present moment? Israeli universities have anchored much of this legal innovation. International humanitarian law, including the laws of war, is always subject to interpretation. Over the years, Israel has systematically eroded the legitimacy of international institutions, the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and undermined their authority to adjudicate questions related to Israeli war crimes, the legality of the occupation, and apartheid. And when international legal probes did happen, like in 2014 during what was then a massive offensive on Gaza, grave war crimes were committed. But the Israeli legal system, along with universities and legal experts, mobilized immediately to undermine any form of accountability. As a result, Israel was never held accountable. And here we are now, a decade later, facing this legal impunity. It didn’t emerge overnight, it was built over decades. That’s what I aimed to show in the book. Of course, I submitted the manuscript before this current escalated phase of the genocide began, but the book lays out much of the foundation that made it possible.
Middle East studies is another really interesting example. The School of Oriental Studies was one of the first three founding faculties of Hebrew University. That, in itself, shows the importance of understanding what the “Orient” was from the Israeli perspective. And from the very beginning, it was never a civilian project. It was heavily militarized. The Israeli security state was tightly intertwined with academic institutions, there was a revolving door between military governors of occupied Palestinian territory and university professors. The study of Arabic and the Middle East in Israel has always been a military project, to advance colonial rule over Palestinians.
For example, the first and most central department of Middle East Studies at Hebrew University houses the regional and linguistic training program for the intelligence corps. So you’re seeing not only the historical roots of this relationship, but also how the discipline continues to put itself in direct service of the state. What I’m really showing is that, discipline after discipline, the dominant paradigms of Israeli academia—despite there always some critical work in many fields—remain structurally in service of the Zionist project.
S. G.— : And yet, in the West—in countries like France, for example — it’s hard to get people to support the boycott of Israeli universities, because they are seen as a progressive space, maybe the last one in Israel, in a country with a far-right government and a deeply far-right society. And you try to deconstruct this image. Even when we talk about figures like the “New Historians,” the truth is that these universities have never truly been a safe space for them.
M. W.— : Absolutely. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because, I’ve been in the North American academic system for some time, and I kept seeing the same narrative again and again. This book is, in part, a response to that. One thing we have to recognize is that, in the Western academy, movement there has been a production of ignorance about Palestine. This is starting to change now in the last couple of years due to the student encampments and the broader student. But in general in the West, we don’t read Palestinian scholarship, we don’t include Palestinian works in our syllabi, and there’s a general lack of engagement with critical Palestinian intellectual projects. This has produced a lot of ignorance.
And then coupled with that, there are all these deep affinities with Israeli universities and scholars. So it’s no coincidence that the narrative about Israeli universities has been very carefully produced by Israelis and then uncritically accepted by Western scholars. This is a real problem, it speaks to the racism in the West, but also to the way these academic ties have been structured. The connection between the Israeli and Western academic systems is designed to keep Palestinians out while mainstream Zionism. European universities continue to protect Israeli universities, giving them continued legitimacy and funding; think of Horizon Europe’s inclusion of Israel, which is an astounding example. Israel doesn’t even meet the basic requirements of Europe’s own laws, and many countries would love to have access to this very lucrative stream of funding, while Palestinian universities and most universities in the Middle East are excluded.
Israeli universities continue to develop these relationships with Western institutions. I saw this firsthand in Europe in the spring of 2024 during the encampments. I met with student activists, faculty, and staff, and went on delegations to meet rectors across European universities. Time after time, I encountered administrators, deans, and rectors, those in charge of international exchange programs and higher education administration, and I ask every time, “Do you know any Palestinian university head? Do you know any dean?” No relationships. Israeli scholars are invited to come to Europe on fellowships, sabbaticals, and lectures, while Palestinians are isolated by Israel. This is not a global problem; it’s a problem of the West. The West has actively participated in isolating Palestinian academia and intellectuals. They don’t engage with them; they don’t create opportunities for them, while they do so for Israelis. Over time, Israelis have built personal relationships, goodwill and diplomatic ties with Western institutions. This is not accidental. These narratives have been entrenched in the Western academy through a very deliberate mechanism, to say nothing of the hasbara (Israeli state propaganda) on college campuses. This isn’t something new, it’s been going on for at least 20 years, especially since the Second Intifada. We’re seeing more and more activism in Western campuses about Palestine, and Israel has been immediately very concerned about this. So it starts intercepting these movements, delegitimizing student activists, spying on them, and promoting its own narrative through propaganda and programming on Western campuses. This is a carefully calculated campaign that has been funded and executed over decades.
S. G.— : There is also a willing to depoliticize the academic field, in the sense of making it a non-political field.
M. W.— : Yes, and here I think faculty have a particular role to play. I don’t think students have the same issue, but many faculty, especially mainstream ones, though even some who are supposed to be critical, buy into this idea that they are philosophers, just floating around with their ideas. What gets lost in the process is the materialist analysis. But we need ask: What are the material conditions that sustain the university? On whose lands does it sit? Who funds the laboratories? What is the relationship between the university and the state? What role does the university play in the state’s colonial project? This is a relevant question in Europe, no less than elsewhere. We don’t ask these questions. For me, university should be about developing critical thinking, and that means critically examining the university itself, its role in producing knowledge and the conditions that make that possible. And when we study and produce knowledge, we need to ask: for what purpose? To what end? These are questions that many faculty have avoided. But what you’re seeing now in the encampments is a generation of students saying, “Now, we are centering these questions. We want to know how you decided what the canon is, why certain texts are excluded from the libraries.” One of the most inspiring things about the encampments for me was seeing the libraries. Why do they have to make their own libraries? Because the libraries of their institutions didn’t carry Palestinian literature, Palestinian critique.
S. G.— : The National Library of Israel is still holding some stolen Palestinian assets, including funds, due to the Absentee Property Law after the Nakba. For decades, Palestinians have been fighting to recover these books, and they have made significant progress. It is also a war on knowledge.
M. W.— : Yes, that’s the other important aspect. It’s what Karma Nabulsi has called Scholasticide, and again it’s a very classic colonial tactic: preventing the native population from accessing education in order to suppress their struggle for liberation. Education and collective study are central to any liberation movement, which is why Israel has always targeted Palestinian education from the very beginning. But the West also has a lot to answer for, because the West has participated in suppression of Palestinian analysis and critical questions. And that’s the shift we’re seeing now: students are saying, “No more.” They’re demanding to know: “What is our university invested in? What kind of exchange programs do we support?” And internally, what are our ties to weapons manufacturers, even domestic French companies? So the students are asking the questions that the universities really resisted.
S. G.— : Would you say that Israeli universities are complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza?
M. W.— : Absolutely. Universities are deeply implicated in this genocide. One very concrete example is how Israeli universities function as crucial sites for training labor: soldiers, police officers, secret police, the Israeli security agency… That training continues, and they’re still running programs to train soldiers. More than that, this genocide in Gaza wouldn’t be sustainable without the majority of soldiers being in the reserves. The actual number of soldiers in mandatory service is very small; Israel relies heavily on reservists to maintain its occupation and the genocide in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran. Here is where Israeli universities play an important role: they have done everything in their power to facilitate the ability of these reservists to carry out this genocide while continuing their studies. For example, three times now, Israeli universities have granted special benefits, such as exemptions from certain assignments, accommodations for exams, and more. They’ve also worked to give special scholarships to soldiers in the reserves who are currently committing genocide in Gaza. Most egregiously, these universities have even granted university course credits for reserve service, which is a cross-the-board policy, they came together in agreement with the Ministry of Higher Education as well and the military. So, imagine this: you go to Gaza, participate in the genocide, then come back to receive university credits for it. This is direct participation in the genocide. You are facilitating this for them. One part of it is also ensuring that Israelis continue to agree to serve. And Israeli universities are playing a role in that by saying, “We’ll help you, we’ll accommodate you. Go out there and do the labor, and we’ll make it work for you.” That’s just one example, but I could give many more.
They are also involved in developing weapons and technologies used in Gaza. And you see the continual development of Hasbara materials, and there’s legal scholarship being produced to refute undermine the case brought by South Africa. To the ICJ charging Israel with the crime of genocide. They are repressing Palestinian student and faculty mobilizations against the war and the ongoing Nakba. The repression of Palestinian student political mobilization has gotten exponentially worse over the last two years. So they are also repressing a crucial site of resistance to the genocide.
