Campus Outpost: Israeli Universities and Palestinian Dispossession

• In Event: Why Gaza Matters: Toward a Politics of Educational Repair

Abstract

While the latest war on Gaza has been deemed genocidal by legal experts, scholars of settler colonialism have understood genocide as structural to the project of the settler state itself, wherein settlers aim to eliminate the Native inhabitants so as to establish a settler nation on Native land. Rather than a historical event, the project of Indigenous dispossession and replacement is ongoing (Simpson 2018; Wolfe 2006). This paper will examine the role of Israeli universities in “Judaization”: The Israeli state program to expand Jewish settlement across historic Palestine, while shrinking Palestinian land ownership and territorial contiguity (Cohen and Gordon 2018). Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, this paper will
advance an understanding of Israeli universities as settler universities: universities in service of the reproduction of the 76-year Israeli state project of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

It takes four universities as case studies through which to examine the relationship between the Israeli campus and local Palestinian communities. The first university of the Zionist movement, Hebrew University, was strategically built in 1918 at the apex of Mt. Scopus to stake symbolic and political claim to the entire city of Jerusalem. Post 1967, Hebrew University expanded its campus into the Palestinian community of Al-Issawiyeh, and remains a force of illegal settlement expansion and annexation of occupied East Jerusalem. In the largest city of the Galilee—the only region within 1948 borders with a Palestinian majority—the University of Haifa serves to develop and grow strategically placed Jewish settlements, while legitimizing the policing of Palestinian land use. In the Naqab—the region most sparsely populated by Jewish-Israelis—Ben-Gurion University facilitates the move of Jewish Israelis from central cities to replace Palestinian Bedouins, including through the construction of student villages. In 2013, Ariel University became the latest accredited Israel university, explicitly built to expand the illegal settlement of Ariel in the heart of the occupied West Bank and with it Israeli sovereignty. For over a century, this paper shows, Israeli universities were planned and built as pillars of regional demographic engineering and remain critical infrastructure of continued Palestinian dispossession.

Author

• Maya Wind, University of British Columbia