Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities

Introduction: You're listening to the world of higher education podcast, season three, episode 22.
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Alex Usher: Hi, I'm Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. Over the past few years, calls for the boycott of Israeli universities have grown louder. This discourse generally entwines two different sets of arguments.
The first is about the effectiveness or validity of academic boycotts in general. And the second, because it's Israel, is about whether Israeli universities are being unfairly targeted Due to anti semitism. Curiously, what Israeli university themselves might or might not have done specifically to deserve boycott is often relegated to an afterthought.
My guest today is Maya Wind. She's an Israeli citizen and a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Riverside. She's also the author of Towers of Ivory and Steel, How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, published last year by Verso Press. Her book is a direct answer to that last question.
The charge sheet that she brings against Israeli universities is a long one, and it should give people pause before thinking that Israeli universities are unproblematic. Some of you are not going to like this interview. I suspect some will not enjoy the platform being given to these opinions. But given the tenor of the times, I very much think it's worth a listen.
There are two points in particular that I think are worth pondering. The first is whether the boycott is about the universities themselves or about Israel in general. And the second is the standard for boycott. Wind makes it clear that she doesn't see an absolute standard here, other than what some oppressed group requests of its allies.
For her, the relative level of complicity of Israeli universities in the dispossession of Palestinians and, say, that of Chinese universities in the repression of Uyghurs is irrelevant, because the key factor is that one group asked for a boycott and another one didn't. It's about consistent allyship rather than relative guilt.
That wasn't something I'd understood beforehand, and I'm guessing it might be new for many of you as well. It's worth a thought in any event. But maybe it's best if I let my guest explain things on her own. And so, over to Maya.
Maya, your book lays out the case for sanctions against Israeli universities, or boycotting, the case for boycotting Israeli universities. But before we get to that case, I want to ask something which you don't really cover in the book, which is what's the evidence that, that boycotts or academic sanctions are an effective strategy Uh, you know, to force political change.
Do do they change anything? Do we have examples of that anywhere in the world?
Maya Wind: Yeah, certainly. I think that's a really crucial question. And, uh, first just to say for, for listeners who may not be as familiar with the context, uh, the movement for boycott divestment and sanctions, uh, was first called for by Palestinians and society organizations back in 2005. So 20 years ago now, uh, and the BDS movement that includes the call for the academic boycott, uh, of Israeli universities, uh, was very much modeled and took a lot of inspiration from the movement against apartheid in South Africa, where the isolation of many apartheid institutions, including universities, were actually key in bringing an end to the system of political apartheid there. And of course, you know, we are all students of history here as academics, as students, uh, and I think, you know, more broadly to understand the, that if, if we are to take seriously that the Israeli state is a settler state and the Israelis are colonizers, there is no example in history of colonizers beginning the process of decolonization of their own volition. There has always been in every single case of the settler colonialism, uh, a form of external force that compelled colonizers, uh, to participate in that process of decolonization. And so the BDS movement is precisely seeking to create, uh, this external force through building a grassroots international, uh, movement to, uh, to build pressure on, uh, the Israeli state, including it's universities. And so, you know, PACBI, which is the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, in fact, predates the full call for BDS by a full year. So PACBI came together as a coalition in 2004. And they identified already over at this point, 21 years ago, they identified the Israeli university system as a pillar of Israeli racial rule, as a pillar of the regime of apartheid. And so those of us who are academics, particularly in the West, have an obligation to respond to this call to sever our own ties, uh, to Israeli universities.
Otherwise we remain directly complicit.
Alex Usher: So your charge sheet, if I can put it that way, against Israeli institutions is really threefold. Um, the, the first big charge here is, and I want to use your words from the epilogue, um, you know, is that is that they need to stop denying that their campuses stand on expropriated Palestinian lands and cease to serve as engines of Judaization, colonization, and Palestinian dispossession. What do Israeli institutions do in this area exactly? And why does this matter so much?
Maya Wind: Right, so here I'm following, you know, not only, uh, Palestinian civil society and Palestinian scholars, but also indigenous scholars, uh, around the world, uh, in settler states who have for a long time investigated, uh, the settler university, uh, and have called attention to the ways in which universities, uh, have often served as pillars of, uh, continual indigenous dispossession, uh, built on, uh, stolen lands, lands cleared through genocide of indigenous peoples. So this is, uh, also a, a global movement, uh, and, and there's a lot of critical scholarship about this subject, you know, in, in other settler states as well, but, you know, in the, in the context of the Israeli settler state, you know, Judaization is the official terminology of the Israeli state itself, and it really just seeks to describe what many other settler states, uh, do, uh, which is the sort of twinned project of, uh, continual removal, uh, and, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that the transfer of Palestinian land ownership from Palestinians to Jewish Israelis, and at the same time the continual expansion of Israeli frontiers and the continual, and the distribution of Jewish population across what was historic Palestine.
And so what we see is starting with Hebrew University, the first university of the Zionist movement, and then, uh, if we're tracing all the universities of the Israeli state built since that time, whether it's University of Haifa in the Galilee region, the region most populous with Palestinians, whether we're looking at Ben Gurion University in the Nakab, that's in the arid region to the south, where historically Jewish Israelis were least likely to settle, whether we're looking at the latest university to be accredited, which is Ariel, built in the illegal settlement of Ariel in the heart of the occupied West Bank, In all of these cases, really for over a century, what we're seeing is that Israeli universities were built as their, their, their physical campuses were designed and built and planned as physical infrastructure to aid in this state project of continual Palestinian dispossession in regions of particular strategic concern to the Israeli state. And so, uh, a reckoning with the ways in which Israeli universities or settler universities absolutely must begin with the question of land itself. And so, you know, that is what one of the topics that I cover in the book.
Alex Usher: Uh, before I go into the other elements of the charge sheet, you've, you've raised the, the term settler and settler colonialism a couple of times here. What's the distinction, if any, that you draw between, um, you know, as you say, so there's a need to boycott that activity in Israel, but you could make the same case historically anyway, uh, here in Canada or the United States.
What's the distinction that you draw between the 2? Why, why sanction 1 and not the other?
Maya Wind: Right. So I think this is a really important question and I think that the first and primary answer to this question really is that the indigenous population most directly impacted by the violence of these settler universities, in our case the Palestinians, have asked, have asked for a boycott. A boycott is not a value, it is a tactic. And indigenous movements around the world have deployed different tactics to further the project of decolonization, and those tactics vary over time and they are very much context dependent. Uh, in the case in question, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society came together over 20 years ago, uh, to, to advance their, their liberation cause, and they have outlined for, for all of us in the international community, a theory of change.
And that theory of change is that the West and particularly the Western governments who are heavily invested in the project of the Israeli settler state and continue to provide it not only with arms, but also with diplomatic and legal, uh, immunity to continue to carry out war crimes, including most recently, the crime of genocide. That these, um, all of us in the international community have an obligation to rise up and to put pressure on our own governments to sever ties and to isolate the Israeli regime until, uh, until we, uh, begin the process of decolonization and dismantle the system of apartheid. And so it is a grassroots movement and we need not wait for our governments.
Alex Usher: Um, thanks, great, that's a, that's a useful clarification. The, the 2nd area that you're most critical about here is about the cooperation between universities. On the one hand, and the military, Shin Bet, and the rest of the security services on the other. And you write about how scientific research, the connection between, uh, university research and, um, and the military is a little bit different in, in Israel than it is in the United States or, or other countries, simply because the, you know, the, the, the research institutes that do it cooperate. So directly, um, what is this military cooperation look like in practice? And is it just about research? Or is there also an academic programming element as well?
Maya Wind: right? So the uh, this is a very important question because the Collaboration and the imbrication of the Israeli security state and Israeli military industries is, uh, incredibly deep and, uh, comprehensive with the university system in Israel. And we see this in a number of ways. 1 is the ways in which Israeli universities take on the function of military bases by. designing and operating specialized, tailored degree granting programs for security state personnel, including the Israeli security agency, the Sheen bits, uh, Israeli police forces and Israeli soldiers, all of whom participate in the daily violation of Palestinian rights and international law over decades.
And of course this is well documented. Um, and these programs in fact, Train soldiers and security state personnel to hone their operations. Um, we see this in, for example, one of many examples we could name, the Hebrew University that trains through its Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies, uh, trains Israeli soldiers in the Intelligence Corps, uh, with offering them linguistic and regional expertise to better surveil, uh, the Palestinian population and, in fact, create tar target banks for killing in Gaza over the last 16 months. That's just one of many examples. Another is conducting research and collaborations. You know, the Institute for Criminology at Hebrew University, the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, they work very closely with a military and security state. Experts to produce scholarship, um, that helps advance the work of the security state and, and, and help by conducting research that, that produces policy recommendations for the security state. And another example that is worth mentioning is the implication with. military industries. It's not known enough, I think, that in fact, Rafael, Israel's aerospace industries, um, Elbit Systems, Israel's largest weapons producers, the main suppliers of the Israeli military, and also Israel's largest and most prominent global exporters of technologies and weaponry, uh, that, that hone their technologies and use them to violate international law and human rights law. Every day and try them on occupied Palestinians and then on this basis, export them abroad as battle proven these same industries, not only were they birthed, in fact, on the campuses of Israeli universities, but they continue to offer their campuses as critical laboratories for these industries to this day.
And so in all of these ways, you cannot understand the. Israeli security state, uh, and the Israeli military industries without an analysis of the Israeli University system.
Alex Usher: Got it. So, the 3rd charge that you talk about is, is really that Israeli universities are not academically neutral in the sense that they give all their staff and students equal chances to be, uh, protected from outside influence or to thrive academically. I mean, you know, we often hear that Israel universities discriminate against no one, but you've got a different story to tell.
I think
Maya Wind: Yes, and I think one of the things that really struck me, uh, in the context of researching and writing this book, you know, I, I spent, uh, a lot of time doing an ethnography of Israeli University. So I spent many hours on across Israel's major ma, major eight public universities. Uh, I spoke with an accompanied Palestinian student organizers, and I also interviewed, uh, Palestinian and Jewish Israeli. faculty and staff. And what was really striking to me, uh, is also when I was doing background research for this book, what a rich body of scholarly work already exists, uh, not only in Hebrew and Arabic, but also in English, often published in leading peer reviewed publications, uh, based in Europe and North America, um, by Palestinian, produced by Palestinian scholars, not only in Palestinian universities, but also in Israeli universities. Who have really written very extensively about the constraints of knowledge production, Palestinian critical epistemology, anti colonial scholarship, uh, produced, uh, you know, under the confines of the Zionist university system in Israel, uh, the ways that Palestinian students have been systematically, uh, discriminated against, um, and their experiences, and, and yet that scholarship broadly I find is not read. In the Western academic community. And so we have a lot of accounting to do, I think, uh, in the West as to how it is that this scholarship is not something that we've engaged with and for how it is that we've allowed for so long, Jewish Israelis, university administrators, Jewish Israeli scholars to narrate to us, uh, the, the Israeli university system as a beacon of democracy, um, And when in fact this has not been the case, and it has never been the case, and Palestinians have been writing about this and documenting this for a very long time. And so I cite this work in the book, and I also corroborated it with my own interviews, and what I really found is not only that there is a total system of apartheid, of course, that continues to manifest, In the university system, right, the university, the universities in Israel are embedded in the state itself.
And so, of course, they are not outside of the apartheid system. They are implicated and embedded within it. But also, particularly, you know, we see that the ways in which. Palestinian student organizing, uh, and political work on campus, uh, is very violently suppressed and, and, you know, this has all been, uh, severely escalated over the last 16 months when we see Palestinian scholars and students, uh, speak out and mobilize against the genocide and for Palestinian liberation on Israeli campuses.
Alex Usher: we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.
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Alex Usher: And we're back. Um, so my, obviously, you've, you've talked about things going on in a number of institutions around Israel, and you've singled out, uh, you know, maybe Ariel University for its role in normalizing, um. The Occupation, Hebrew University for its failure to protect academic freedom.
Are there any institutions that stand out to you as having a better record than others? Like, is there, is there one that you would say that you wouldn't want to boycott, maybe?
Maya Wind: Uh, so, uh, again, you know, the, the call for boycott, uh, as it was, uh, laid out by Palestinian civil society, by Palestinian scholars. And I should also note that just in 2020, uh, three, the call was reiterated by not only the, the Palestinian, the union of Palestinian faculty and employees, but also every single Palestinian student union at every Palestinian university reiterated the call to us just this last year in 2023. Um, uh, to, to, to enact the academic boycott. And so, this is a call coming from Palestinian Civil Society, and the call is, as it is worded, is a boycott for all complicit Israeli universities. Uh, and in the course of my research, I found that every single one of Israeli universities, uh, are, in fact, deeply implicated.
Not one, uh, is not. And so, uh, at this, at this time, the call is for a boycott for all of them, and I hope that my book helps to substantiate the case for why that is.
Alex Usher: yeah, so I mean, it sounds to me like, in a sense, the Palestinian call is a, is a call about Israel and not necessarily Israeli universities, right? And, and I have to say, when I read, particularly the chapter on the, on the relationship uh, between universities and the military, I read it and I said to myself, I can't imagine a university in any country, let alone one which is as highly militized as Israel, saying no to, uh, you know, providing academic training for military officers.
Universities are instrumental state. Right? So, so when we're talking about disapproving of university policies, aren't we really talking about disapproving of Israeli state priorities? Is there any way that any individual Israeli institution could change this if they wanted to?
Maya Wind: I think that's a really critical question, and I think we have to understand and to take seriously that settler states, systems of violence, indeed genocide. These are systems of violence that do not reproduce themselves, right? These are systems of violence held up by a myriad of institutions, including many in civil society.
It is not just the military, it is not just the security state, it is not just military industries. There is a whole host of Of what we, what we often consider civil society institutions, public institutions in settler states that lend themselves to this violence of elimination and these really cases no different. But what we really have to understand is that. It is not just these institutions, it is the people who reproduce these institutions themselves, right? And so of course there is, um, uh, uh, the active labor of many thousands of Israelis across many hundreds of institutions, including the universities that are making this violence possible. And I think what I, what I want to say to this too, is that the Israeli academics have tried very hard to have it both ways, right? Because the boycott, the call for boycott and academic boycott campaigns have been underway for over. Two decades, right? Um, and it, one of the, the major, uh, arguments used by Israeli university administrators, by academics who are mobilizing against this boycott is you cannot possibly hold us accountable for the crimes of the Israeli state if indeed such crimes exist, right?
That's even debatable in the halls of the Israeli university system. But they say you cannot hold us accountable. It is unjust, in fact, to hold us accountable. For what the state is doing, but at the same time, when they are confronted with the fact that in fact, especially they have been confronted in particular the last year by thousands of students, staff and faculty who have in fact participated in the boycott, confronting them with the fact that they are directly participating in apartheid and now in genocide, the same university administrators, the same Israeli academics say precisely what you say, which is Well, of course we are embedded in the state and we are many of our soldiers, many of our students are soldiers, uh, and you know what, you know, why wouldn't we cooperate with the state of which we are a part, right? And they often also offer justifications in fact for, uh, for the genocide and for apartheid. So you cannot have it both ways, either they are defending themselves by saying they are Uh, not at all. They cannot be held to account and they cannot be implicated in what the state is doing, or they say, yes, we are in fact a part of the state.
Alex Usher: know, one argument that emerged in Canada over the last few months during the, it was the end of the encampment, uh, University of Windsor, if I'm not mistaken, where the, in order to end the encampment, the university agreed to boycott, uh, Israeli universities and it was raised, and I can't remember if it was Michael Geist or, or Anthony House, House Father in the House Commons, they argued that, um, if, if you boycott Israeli institutions, You know, and you don't boycott other universities in other countries guilty of similar things, then that's anti semitic.
So, for instance, You know, I think most of the kinds of sins that you hold against Israeli institutions for failing to uphold free debate, cooperation with the military, you could probably make most of those arguments about Chinese universities, right? And their government's policies in Xinjiang or possibly Tibet.
What do you make of that argument? Should we also be boycotting Chinese universities? And if not, why not?
Maya Wind: So again, boycotts, whether they're in the context of unions or any other kind of boycott, boycotts are always organized in response to a call. It is not up to us to call to boycott any university system. It is up to the communities directly impacted by the violence of any university system to call for a boycott, and then it is up to all of us in the international community to, uh, assess the case for a boycott.
Are these universities, in fact, complicit? And then to decide whether or not, uh, to participate and comply. To my knowledge There is no such call from other Indigenous communities. There could be, and I would certainly, I think many of us, of course, would, uh, would participate in a boycott were that, were such a boycott called. But that to me is a distraction, and it is a distraction that is led by Israel and its Zionist supporters around the world, um, to detract from, to distract us from the main conversation, which is Palestinians have called for a boycott, and now it is up to us to assess whether or not such a boycott is warranted.
Alex Usher: You wrote this book prior to October 7th. 2023. What's changed since that time, both in terms of how Israeli universities behave and in terms of the boycott movement?
Maya Wind: Well, so I think, you know, 16 months, what we have seen is a devastating acceleration, right? Of a project that has spanned over a hundred years. Um, you know, genocide, you know, uh, genocide is structural to the Israeli state, just like it is structural to settler states, uh, elsewhere, right? What Palestinian civil society has been telling us for, for two decades now, um, is that there are many types of institutions in Israeli society that have for decades been serving the infrastructure. Um, and I have laid the groundwork for the genocide that we have seen unfold over the last 16 months and the long term project of the Israeli state to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the Palestinian people. And I think, you know, my book that I, that I submitted to the press shortly before this, this last acceleration of the genocide began, you know, details many of the ways that universities are implicated, but it should come really as no surprise then that this is a structural problem.
And so, you know. Israeli universities over the last 16 months have continued to work, uh, in service of the state. This has been uninterrupted and continuous, um, from, you know, before the state was even founded, uh, until the present moment, um, and including this phase of the genocide. So what we have seen in the last 16 months is Israeli universities continue to develop weapons and technologies used against Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, continue to train soldiers, uh, producing Hasbara, which is Israeli state propaganda. To shield Israel from, uh, criticism, uh, by the international community. In fact, in, in fact, Israeli universities have directly intervened, repeatedly, to prevent academic boycott from being implemented on Western campuses, smearing students and faculty and staff organizers, um, and calling, uh, calling for them to be dispersed with force in some cases, right? So, uh, and, and of course producing and cultivating legal scholarship to aid the Israeli state in thwarting the case brought by South Africa to the International Court of Justice. Uh, to hold Israel to account for the crime of genocide. So we're seeing that really, uh, and, and, and also, um, in fact, even offering course credit and scholarships and special benefits for soldiers returning from Gaza to their classrooms. In, in countless ways, Israeli universities have remained embedded in the infrastructure of violence of the Israeli state, uh, and have continued to do so despite the fact that that the state is now on trial in the highest courts of the world for genocide. And so I think, if you're asking what has changed, I think what has changed is mostly that many more people now, over the last year, have come to recognize what Palestinians have called on us to do for 20 years, which is the urgency. The need to recognize the urgency. To intervene, uh, as international civil society, uh, and to stand with the Palestinian people as they wage their liberation struggle, um, and to, and to, and to, uh, participate in the project of, of decolonization. And so I think, uh, that that is a, that is a very important development, uh, in the global movement for Palestinian liberation and we will continue to build on that.
There is no going back.
Alex Usher: Maya, thanks so much for joining us today.
Maya Wind: Thank you.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany McLennan and Sam Pufek, and to you, our viewers, listeners and readers, for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us at Podcast at higher ed strategy. com folks. Please subscribe to our YouTube page.
Never miss an episode of the world of higher education. Join us next week when my guests will be Baruch Dendev of the Mongolian university of science and technology in Ulaanbaatar. We'll be speaking with the challenges and prospects of higher education on the edge of the Gobi desert. Bye for now.