Israeli Universities and Serving the Killing Machine: An Old Style of Repression.
According to Al Jazeera, “Shima Akram Saidam” was one of the elite Palestinian students who scored 99 out of 100 in her high school exam in 2023, winning the title of first place in the literary branch in Palestine, and then enrolled in the English language department at the university.
The silent death of Palestinian elites at the hands of the occupiers
Amidst the chaos of the market and news about the Zionist genocide against Gaza, the news of the martyrdom of Shima and her family in the Nuseirat area in the center of the Gaza Strip was lost; as if nothing had happened, and Shima was added to the list of other victims of the occupiers’ crimes in this strip.
Who martyred Shima? With what weapon and with what justification? Perhaps these questions lead us to a place that many overlook: Israeli universities, where the image of the Zionist military is polished, and these universities are places where many of the security and military apparatuses that exist there are trained; They massacre and torture Palestinians.
Universities or centers of crime and oppression?
Zionist universities are places where weapons are produced to kill Palestinians and the means to justify these crimes are prepared. Sheema was one of the elite Palestinian students who was deprived of the right to study and live by the Zionist regime’s academic structure, which is based on genocide, apartheid, and the destruction of the Palestinian people.
Zionist universities and research centers are among the most important pillars of the Zionist movement and the Jewish state, carrying out Zionist propaganda, producing weapons, justifying apartheid, aggression, and the violation of Palestinian rights, legitimizing illegal Zionist settlements in Palestinian lands, marginalizing Palestinian identity, and training Israeli military forces in various specialties.
In light of these issues, a Palestinian campaign was established in 2004 to boycott the Zionist regime’s academic and cultural institutions, because the so-called cultural centers and academic institutions of Israel are the main actors in the suppression and violation of the rights of Palestinians.
Maya Wind, a researcher and author at the University of California, raised questions to this end by writing a book entitled: Are Israeli universities complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights?
Maya Wind, a white Jewish American-Zionist citizen, has easy access to the archives and military libraries of the Zionist regime and has been able to read official documents, memoirs and political reports, as well as unpublished studies of the regime. She has also conducted interviews with Palestinian and Jewish students and academics working in the universities of the regime.
Nadia Abu Al-Hajj, from Columbia University in the United States, introduces this book and reminds the reader that Israel is a fake and apartheid regime that was established in this occupied territory by expelling Palestinians from their land, and all its institutions are racist and anti-democratic to the core.
Here we are going to give a brief description of this book, which is as follows?
Universities of the Zionist regime in the service of this regime’s killing machine
Universities of the Zionist regime cooperate with this regime’s arms companies to research and develop technology used by the army and security services in the occupied Palestinian territories, and then these technologies are sold to foreign countries as technologies that have passed their test.
For example, in the field of archaeology, which is considered a completely cultural field, all universities of the Zionist regime conduct excavations in ancient Palestinian sites, and in fact, this field in Israeli universities is focused on erasing the history of Arabs and Muslims and is dedicated to the expansion of Jewish settlements and the confiscation of Palestinian lands.
In this context, for example, the universities of the Zionist regime excavate the southern West Bank, where there are many ancient sites, and directly occupy these areas, and these actions are carried out with the support of the army and military institutions.
The field of legal studies in the universities of the Zionist regime is a field for legitimizing the military and illegal occupation of Palestinian lands over the past decades, and these universities have developed a set of laws and legal interpretations to justify the occupation of Palestinian land.
The universities of the Zionist regime are also considered bases for the settlement construction of this regime and have been designed as strategic bases for the “State of Israel” project, such as the Hebrew University in East Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, Ben Gurion University, and Ariel University. For example, in the period leading up to the Nakba in 1948, students, professors, and administrators of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem actively supported the terrorist organization Haganah, and the university was a military base and even had weapons stored on its premises.
Israeli universities are also associated with the rise of the regime’s military industries, and after the establishment of this fake regime in the occupied Palestinian territories, academic centers were used to support the military’s war machine.
Israeli universities and research centers act as the academic arm of the regime’s security services, and they operate through research and policy advice that not only serves to maintain the Tel Aviv military rule, but also to weaken the Palestinian rights movement on the international stage.
A large portion of the special forces, especially the spy and intelligence units of the Zionist regime, graduate from the most prominent universities of this regime and are trained to become militarists and use their skills in line with the goals of the Zionist movement to suppress the rights of Palestinians.