The current Israeli genocide is the most striking demonstration to date of the refusal by the majority of global institutions, including universities, to put up even a flimsy obstacle to the wanton slaughter of Palestinian lives. For Western academics working at universities which have largely facilitated, excused or ignored the genocide in a diversity of creative ways, the ongoing devastation of Gaza should constitute an especially powerful rebuke. This, it should tell us, is what, for Gazans, your rationality, your commitment to ‘education’, your fetish of ‘impact’, your relentless self-talk about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘civility’ and ‘progress’ and ‘knowledge’ and ‘safety’, amount to — assent to the devastation of an entire territory, including the total ruination of its higher education system and the deaths of countless academics and students, many of whose bodies still lie waiting to be discovered under the rubble.

It would be hard to find a better object lesson in the bankruptcy of the normal hierarchies than in the Gaza solidarity encampments that students have established on university campuses internationally. Political insight, determination, and moral lucidity are, very clearly, on the students’ side, not on that of the university leaders who are supposedly the custodians of exactly those principles.

Now, when the teachers are being given a lesson, their most characteristic response, apparently, is to call in the police.

That reaction is only to be expected. Throughout the West, institutions of higher learning are intimately invested in support for Israel. They conduct weapons and other research that normalises militarism in general and boosts Israel’s armed forces’ ability to track and kill Palestinians; maintain close bilateral relationships with Israeli higher education, thereby offering a highly-valued form of international legitimation to central institutions of Israeli apartheid; and, as the responses to the encampments in the United States or France have illustrated again, doggedly suppress, both structurally and through the deliberate choices of their leaders, Palestine solidarity in their own institutions, often in collaboration with the repressive instruments of their home states. In all these things, they mimic the activities of universities in Israel itself – just one of the reasons for which, as I have suggested elsewhere, it makes sense to speak of the progressive ‘Israelisation’ of Western higher education, increasingly characterised by norms of physical and ideological coercion and supported by increasingly authoritarian and repressive practices.

There have, of course, been occasional glimmers of institutional resistance to Israel in the West: refusals to adopt the prescriptive IHRA anti-Semitism definition by universities like Aberdeen, Toronto or several major Australian institutions; the partial cutting of ties with Israel, as recently implemented by the University of Turin, four Norwegian universities, or Pitzer College in the US; Australian universities’ refusal, so far, to close the Gaza solidarity encampments, in contrast to the decisions made by administrators at Columbia and other US campuses. But these are dwarfed by the magnitude of repression of pro-Palestinian campus solidarity since October 7, 2023, and the ideological validation consistently offered to Israeli apartheid by Western Vice-Chancellors, rectors and presidents.

If some (many?) of these university leaders are Zionists by conviction, many others clearly view the suppression of Palestine solidarity simply as one of the numerous occasionally distasteful obligations imposed on them by the serious work of institutional custodianship. Their silencing of Palestine protesters is rationalised via notions of organisational stability, the desirability of not alienating Zionist donors, or civility – justifications which allow senior academic administrators to ignore any flickering pangs of conscience they might otherwise experience and obediently register themselves as present and correct on the wrong side of history, even as police manhandle their staff.

Safety in a genocide

University leaders are helped in this task by the discourse of safety that now constitutes the made-for-measure justification for any degree of violence against the Palestine solidarity movement. The demand that protest against genocide be repressed in order to secure Zionists’ ‘safety’ is an example of the same reasoning that justifies the flattening of Gaza through the need for Israeli ‘security’. This logic is ubiquitous. In Israeli universities, Palestinians are persecuted and discriminated against in the name of the security of Jewish students. When Columbia University president Minouche Shafik called the NYPD against her students, she notoriously did so in the name of safety. In Australia, Zionist organisations are mounting a concerted campaign on the basis that campuses are unsafe for Jewish students, in the same breath as they justify a second Nakba against Palestinians. One of the most frequent talking-points used by Zionists and their sympathisers on social media is to invite Western Palestine supporters, especially LGBTQ+ ones, to go to Gaza, where, they imagine, they would be rapidly dispatched by Hamas (as opposed to Israeli bombs).

The conception of safety at work in these claims should be examined. In defending the Israeli genocide, Zionists and their allies in the neoliberal university want to impose an individualised and subjectivised conception of safety: the idea of safety as a feeling — an emotion or experience that the individual student-client is entitled to get from the educational product they’re buying. Safety, on this conception, becomes another selling point for the university brand, something to gratify the atomised student-consumer-client as it is handed out in a showbag on the campus open day with free ice cream and coffee.

Identities are only sustained by their holders’ membership of communities with objective conditions of ongoing viability. As a result, safety cannot mainly be a matter of individual feeling: fundamentally, it has to be about the conditions in which people can be safe collectively — the conditions in which their communities can survive and prosper. Political repression, demonisation, slander and wrongful arrest are self-evidently incompatible with safety. A community can’t thrive when it’s hounded, slurred, or persecuted for nothing other than daring to assert that genocide is wrong.

Exactly this persecution is the daily reality of Palestine advocates in the global North. But, as they cheer on the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Zionists are asking us to believe that it is their community that isn’t safe, and that the Palestine solidarity movement is the reason. Against the universalism of the pro-Palestinian camp, which is working for equality and justice for everyone between the Mediterranean and Jordan, Zionists want us to believe that we’re in a zero-sum game: their safety depends on our silencing.

Whatever rhetorical support it might offer their position, Zionists’ appeal to safety shows the real ideological and political progress the Palestine solidarity movement has made in the last decade. Supporters of Palestine liberation used to be discredited by being branded as antisemites and terrorist-supporters. Those slurs are still being thrown, but with the increasing recognition that they no longer work as well as they once did. So instead of attacking Palestine solidarity politics directly, Zionists have retreated from the terrain of publicly accountable argument, and pivoted to a focus on how this politics makes them feel. Since no one can argue with feelings, they expect that accusing Palestine defenders of making them emotionally ‘unsafe’ will render their political position easier to defend.

An identity whose safety is threated by opposition to a genocide cannot be legitimated by anyone with even a passing commitment to justice. The adoption of safety as its trump card in its fight against Palestinians is the latest evidence that Zionism isn’t just a violently racist and eliminationist ideology, but also, intellectually, a brazenly mediocre one.

Credible arguments it may lack, but Zionism has no shortage of falsifications: it shouts that we’re antisemites, Gaza isn’t genocide, and Israel doesn’t practise apartheid. When we disagree, it tries to get us arrested, sacked, or suspended from our studies. Macquarie’s courageous and powerful Palestinian advocate Randa Abdel-Fattah, and the University of Sydney’s distinguished Professor of Politics John Keane, are currently under intense attack on exactly those grounds. How safe is the campus for them?

Boycotting as self-preservation

Western universities’ façade of sober, independent rationality, liberal progressivism and pluralist dialogue, which they perform while simultaneously collaborating hand over fist with weapons manufacturers, Israel-lobby power-brokers and two-bit experts in anti-Palestinianism, plays a not inconsiderable role in sustaining public confidence in the West’s blinkered support for Israel. It should be a banal observation that the West’s historical record — apocalyptic colonial and domestic wars, genocides, concentration camps, torture, unbridled ecocide and exploitation — is one of disfigurement, over and over again, of any just or reasonable conception of relations between people. But it is partly thanks to the ideological work performed by universities, in the West and Israel alike, that the phoenix of a Western-supervised ‘rules-based order’ is continually reborn, over its own ashes, in liberal society’s persistent ideological fantasies.

Among other things, resisting the Israelisation of Western universities means distancing our institutions from universities that are key components of a system of violent occupation, apartheid and genocide. For many years now, the best way to do this has been by joining the institutional academic boycott of Israeli universities, as called for since 2004 by the Palestinian Committee for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), and an array of civil-society associations and academic trade unions. A recent feature in Haaretz detailed the mounting panic in Israeli academia over boycott actions, and provides further strong evidence that boycotts of many kinds are placing real pressure on Israeli higher education.

Faced with the full obscenity of Israel’s violence in Gaza, the call to boycott Israeli universities might seem ineffectual and beside the point. Emphasising the need for an academic boycott while Gaza lies in ruins might appear to be an over-investment in the relevance of higher education to current affairs — a half-measure whose main effect would be to rub academics’ noses in our own political impotence. When a genocide is underway, more concrete resistance is, surely, called for.

Nevertheless, there is no more urgent obligation on Western academics than to implement and promote the institutional academic boycott, as Palestinian universities and unions have not stopped asking us to do. Despite its increasing acceptability, this is still a distinctly minority position among the vast majority of Western academics. Academics’ refusal to embrace the boycott can reasonably be seen as just one result of the many-splendoured temptations of middle-class professionalism: over-cautiousness; political quietism; conformism. Sometimes, however, it is also a consequence of the cynicism provoked by the underlying conditions of academics’ professional context, characterised by an accelerating proletarianisation and loss of institutional autonomy and respect. With academics in the contemporary university increasingly treated as dispensable teaching or research drones, it is hardly surprising that they regularly underestimate their own potential to exert any political influence over their own institutions. The present razing of Gaza highlights the tragic consequence: the precondition for a modest increase in meaningful support for Palestine among staff in Western universities has been nothing less than tens of thousands of Palestinians dead.

The academic boycott is not just a necessary mechanism of pressure on Israeli higher education and hence society. It is also an opportunity to resist the Israelisation of Western universities themselves, and to challenge the complacent assumption that continuing academic work is always and necessarily the most important political priority – even during a genocide. There is something indecent in prioritising academic analysis while starvation, disease, homelessness and terror of the next bombs are preventing Gazans from even properly mourning their dead. This is even more the case when the academic work in question is undertaken under the sponsorship of, or jointly with, Israeli universities.

If nothing else, the suspension of ties with Israeli higher education, in line with the terms of the academic boycott, is a way to challenge the pretence that the wrongs of the world can be settled by the officially sanctioned project of liberal reason to which university leaders, in the West and Israel alike, are institutionally beholden. More than an expression of solidarity with Palestinians, it is a necessary act of self-preservation for anyone in the West committed to the ideal of universities as centres of real political critique, independent of the violence of the state.

Header image by Aman Kapoor