Israeli Academia Is Directly Complicit in the Crimes of the State
Somdeep Sen | 10 September 2024 | Al Jazeera
“Politics should be kept out of academia!” This is how many in Western academia respond to calls from fellow professors and students for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions over their complicity in the country’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, oppression of Palestinian people, and the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza.
They claim that universities are sites of “civil discourse”, “free speech” and “open inquiry”. And that participating in an academic boycott, especially over an issue as divisive as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is simply not acceptable for any higher education institution that needs to be politically “neutral” to fulfil its function. Further, many outright deny Israeli academia’s complicity in the state’s crimes, saying it is unfair and unproductive to punish “independent” institutions of learning for the war crimes and violations of international law committed by their government…