The Association for Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA) held its annual gathering on May 29–31, 2026, at the University of Edinburgh.
The ASA was founded in 1946 to “promote the study and teaching of anthropology and to uphold the interests and status of the discipline, primarily in the UK, but also extending to the Commonwealth, where it works collaboratively with fellow anthropology associations. The ASA’s major role is to assist its members in planning and conducting research, and to represent social anthropology and anthropologists in the academy, and in relation to policy and funding.”
During its conference, an exhibition titled “Killing the Messenger” of all the “Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel” was shown. As stated in the invitation, this exhibit “stands as a site of remembrance for those who have been murdered and a site to resist the genocidal narratives that frame these victims as something other.”
Accompanying the exhibition, a film was screened, titled “Gaza Fixer: A chronicle of survival,” by George Azar and Mariam Shahin. The film talks about “Raed Athamneh is a six-time war survivor, patriarch and trusted news fixer to foreign reporters covering Gaza. As he gives aid workers and journalists tours, he is the one who actually talks to the people, and translates the story of their fate to the foreigners eagerly recoding, writing, filming, the tragedy that Gaza has become.” After the screening, a discussion took place with director Mariam Shahin that covers the last 20 years of journalism in Gaza.
In December 2025, the ASA voted to support the Palestinian call to boycott “complicit” Israeli academic and cultural institutions. According to the official announcement, following a member ballot, the Association voted to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Forty-seven percent of members voted in favor of a boycott (171 votes in favor, 37 against, and 11 abstentions). The organization now “advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights stipulated in international law.”
The ASA announcement added, “To be clear, this is a boycott of complicit institutions, and the ASA remain committed to freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and, as such, rejects on principle boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity.”
It was also decided that “As part of our role as a professional and educational association, we are offering materials to contribute to broader understanding about what has occurred, and continues to occur, in Palestine from the perspectives of international law, history, anthropology, critical theory, journalism and forensic architecture.”
The Association issues a Resource Pack on its website to justify the boycott, intended to be a “living document’ to be “continually updated.” The Pack includes a long list of items such as “United Nations (UN), International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other Reports: Gaza Genocide, A Collective Crime by the Special Rapporteur about human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” (A/80/492). 20 October 2025.
The section on Accountability reads: “The architecture of genocidal starvation. This report published by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London shows the strategy and tactics of the Israeli government and the IDF since October 2023, mapping out the details of what it describes as a systematic genocidal intent.” Among other items.
The Videos section featured “‘In Search of Palestine,’ a short video by Edward Said who shows the house where his grandparents once lived, now occupied by Israeli settlers. Said asks, how did this happen and how does it relate to what is happening in Palestine today?”
“Our Genocide: The Guardian series of interviews published by The Guardian, that explores the views of ordinary residents of Tel Aviv—often considered Israel’s liberal capital—on the war on Gaza.”
“The IDF: This video explores the origins of the IDF and challenges its claim to be the ‘most moral army in the world’. It focuses on early actions to expel Arabs from the Palestinian territory.”
“Inside Israeli apartheid: The video explains why the concept of ‘apartheid’ is relevant to understanding the Israeli government’s policies toward, and treatment of, Palestinians.”
Another section is “The Role of Universities and Academia,” which showcases the work of Dr. Maya Wind (whom Israel Academia Monitor discussed previously). The Resource Pack states, “Through ethnographic research on university campuses in Israeli and analysis of government documents, Wind outlines the role universities have played in settler-colonialism and in the persecution of Palestinians within all occupied territories.” Usher, Alex and Wind, Maya. 2025. “Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities,” 6 March.
The last section, Higher Education Strategy Associations: “Palestinian-led Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel Established in 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the West Bank as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, PACBI aims to isolate Israel in order to force change in its actions towards Palestinians including the oppressing the academic freedom of Palestinians (as evidenced by Maya Wind’s 2024 ethnography).”
Clearly, the materials in the Pack follow the propaganda line of the Palestinian anti-Israel campaigns. It is totally decontextualized to present the Palestinians as totally lacking in agency: none of their decisions, including the rejection of the 1947 UN Partition proposal, the effort by Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to destroy the Oslo Accords, have been mentioned. Hamas’s violent attack on Israeli communities in which civilians were murdered was omitted as well. Instead, the Pack includes materials that purport to demonstrate Israel’s “genocidal” assault on the Gaza population using the report by Forensic Architecture. Nowhere does the Pack explain that Prof. Eyal Weizman, the head of Forensic Architecture, is a well-known Israeli anti-Israel activist whose lifelong expertise is fabricating materials to show “systematic genocidal intent.”
As an academic organization, the ASA should be condemned for all its falsifications and distortions.
Following a ballot of members the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA) has voted to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). With a strong rate of return of 47.8%, members voted overwhelmingly in favour of a boycott (171 votes in favour, 37 against and 11 abstentions). Alongside PACBI, the ASA therefore advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions for their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights stipulated in international law. Details of the campaign, and its precise objectives and terms of reference, can be found on the BDS Freedom Justice Equality PACBI page.
To be clear, this is a boycott of complicit institutions, and the ASA remain committed to freedom of expression as stipulated in the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and, as such, rejects on principle boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity. As part of our role as a professional and educational association, we are offering materials to contribute to broader understanding about what has occurred, and continues to occur, in Palestine from the perspectives of international law, history, anthropology, critical theory, journalism and forensic architecture. The Resource pack which accompanies this announcement of a boycott is intended as a ‘living document’ that will be continually updated and changed as new information becomes available or as circumstances change.
As part of our role as a professional and educational association, we are offering materials to contribute to broader understanding about what has occurred, and continues to occur, in Palestine from the perspectives of international law, history, anthropology, critical theory, journalism and forensic architecture. This is by no means an exhaustive resource list, but rather a selected range of writings and media representations for understanding the historical and political background and context to the current conflict and atrocities we have witnessed in Palestine.
We also see this as a ‘living document’ that will be continually updated and changed as new information becomes available or as circumstances change.
United Nations: The Question of Palestine. Commission of Inquiry: Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – Conference room paper (A/HRC/60/CRP.3). 16 September 2025.
Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel (A/HRC/59/26). 16 June–11 July 2025
In this report, submitted following Human Rights Council resolution S-30/1, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel examines violations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and possible international crimes relating to attacks against educational facilities and religious and cultural sites.
Human Rights Council Sixtieth session.Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 16 September 2025
This report published by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London shows the strategy and tactics of the Israeli government and the IDF since October 2023, mapping out the details of what it describes as a systematic genocidal intent.
Hind Rajab (named after a 5-year-old girl murdered by an IDF tank) is a Legal organisation based in Belgium that is filing cases against individuals serving in the IDF who it believes have committed genocide. The individual cases offer insight into what types of law have been broken by Israel and its IDF soldiers, often evidenced through their own social media accounts.
3: Audio-Visual Sources: Videos
‘In Search of Palestine’
In this short video Edward Said shows the house where his grandparents once lived, now occupied by Israeli settlers. Said asks, how did this happen and how does it relate to what is happening in Palestine today?
Our Genocide The Guardian
A series of interviews published by The Guardian, that explores the views of ordinary residents of Tel Aviv—often considered Israel’s liberal capital—on the war on Gaza.
The IDF
This video explores the origins of the IDF and challenges its claim to be the ‘most moral army in the world’. It focuses on early actions to expel Arabs from the Palestinian territory.
Secret Hebron: the school run
This video focuses on the everyday dynamics of occupation and segregation in the West Bank town of Hebron showing the dangers to which children going to school are exposed to as a result.
Inside Israeli apartheid
The video explains why the concept of ‘apartheid’ is relevant to understanding the Israeli government’s policies toward, and treatment of, Palestinians.
Gaza: Dying for Food
This is a BBC documentary focusing on starvation in Gaza, exploring how people were murdered while trying to access sites where food was being distributed.
How three terrorist groups formed the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) | The Big Picture
This Middle East Eye documentary outlines how the Israeli Defense Force has its origins and history in three terrorist groups that displaced Palestinians and British colonial forces in the 20th century despite being portrayed as the “most moral army in the world”.
4: Important texts/novels providing historical context to the Israeli-Palestine conflict
Khalidi, Rashid. (2020) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest & Resistance, 1917–2017. Henry Holt and Company: New York.
Makdisi, Saree. (2022) Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture ofDenial. University of California Press: California.
Kanafi, Ghassan. (2022) On Zionist Literature. Translated into English in 2022. Ebb Books: Oxford.
Albulhawa, Susan. (2006) Mornings in Jenin. Bloomsbury: London.
A moving account of Palestinian displacements set over three generations and 60 years of settler colonialism.
Pappe, I. (2024) A Very Short History of the Israel Palestine Conflict. Oneworld Publications: London.
In this short and accessible handbook written Ilan Pappé shows how villages evacuated by Palestinian during the 1948 Nakba were flattened, covered over with grass and turned into golf courses to eliminate any remnant of the previous society
(17 articles) in the Journal of Palestinian Studies, October 2023.
Ivasiuc, Ana. ‘Palestine as Method: A Public Anthropology against Empire.’ Public Anthropologist 7.2 (2025): 345-371 (included in Open Access).
6: Useful Theoretical Texts
Césaire, Aimé. (2023) ‘Discourse on colonialism.’ In Postcolonialism. pp310-339. London: Routledge.
Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism. Pantheon Books: New York.
Wolf, Patrick (2006). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of genocide research 8(4), 387-409.
7: Prominent Palestinian Journalists and Voices
People in Palestine have continuously tried to make their voices heard, for example, here on the Voices of Gaza website of the Palestinian Anthropology Network Insanniyat. And also through their journalists:
Wind, Maya. (2024) Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Verso books: London.
Through ethnographic research on university campuses in Israeli and analysis of government documents, Wind outlines the role universities have played in settler-colonialism and in the persecution of Palestinians within all occupied territories.
PACBI – Palestinian-led Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Established in 2004 by a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals in the West Bank as part of the boycott, diverstment and sanctions campaign, PACBI aims to isolate Israel in order to force change in its actions towards Palestinians including the oppressing the academic freedom of Palestinians (as evidenced by Maya Wind’s 2024 ethnography).
The University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa has debated the issue of academic boycotts of Israel on numerous occasions. For example, in 2014, the UCT responded to calls to support anti-Israel measures and stated that “while UCT as an institution is unable to support the call to take a stand on the specific issues condemning Israel, we uphold the rights of individual academics and students to do so and will facilitate the promotion of all views and serious debate.” Likewise, in 2017, a proposal was put forward by the Palestine Solidarity Forum, which has called on UCT to implement an academic boycott of Israeli universities, and the University debated it.
However, on June 24, 2024, UCT published a notice online titled “UCT Council adopts two Senate resolutions on Gaza conflict,” during its plenary meeting. Two resolutions were passed by a majority vote regarding the Gaza conflict, originally passed by the Senate at a meeting held on April 19, 2024. The first resolution, on the destruction of scholarship and education in Gaza, the Senate resolved, among other things, to: 1. “express concern and opposition to any attempts to curtail academic freedom by labeling criticism of Israel or Zionist policies as antisemitism.” 2. “reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s conflation of critique of Zionism and Israel’s policies as antisemitism in favor of the Jerusalem Declaration’s dynamic understanding of what constitutes antisemitism.” 3. “express support for academic colleagues in Gaza who are surviving under appalling conditions and our intention to assist in the rebuilding of the academic sector after the war.” 4. “express solidarity with academic colleagues victimized for their willingness to speak out against the educaracide in Gaza.”
The second resolution concerned research collaborations with members of the Israeli Defense Force and the wider Israeli military establishment. In terms of this resolution, no UCT academic may enter into relations, or continue relations with, any research group and/or network whose author affiliations are with the Israeli Defense Force, and/or the broader Israeli military establishment.
As a result, the UTC faces consequences. On June 10, 2026, the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education of the Parliament of South Africa convened in order to engage with UCT. The Portfolio Committee is a group of members of Parliament from the National Assembly assigned to oversee and process legislation. The meeting engaged with UCT stakeholders and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) on institutional matters.
According to the transcript of the meeting published online, Karabo Khakhau MP asked the Chair of the UCT Council to explain the resolution to boycott Israel.
Adv Norman Arendse, Chair of Council, UCT, said that “the resolution had its origins in a resolution adopted in the Senate. He noted that he was not sure the resolution explicitly spoke to a boycott of Israel… the resolution spoke to collaborating with Israeli tertiary institutions that were either actively supporting or complicit in supporting the IDF in its war on Gaza. He added that, to the extent that some academics might also have a relationship with those institutions, that too fell within the scope of the resolution. He stated that “the resolution had in fact not been implemented.” He added that, “while Council adopted resolutions, implementation was left to the executive, and a committee in the Senate had been appointed to look into the implementation.” He said “the issue was debated by Council, and all relevant factors were considered, including a loss or potential loss of donor funding. The resolution was adopted on the 22nd of June 2024, following a debate and a vote conducted by a secret ballot.”
Ms Khakhau said she was satisfied “that implementation was nowhere near commencement.” However, “her concern was that students had raised that the university had lost funding from particular donors and that students had been disadvantaged as a result. She said where she was stuck was in understanding the relationship between the resolution, its inaction, and the loss of donor funding… Her problem, however, was with an institution making decisions that would have a negative, direct impact on students’ ability to access academic freedom and to exit an academic institution without impediment.”
Prof Musa Moshabela, VC, UCT, confirmed that “there had indeed been an impact on student funding, as some donors held strong views regarding the position the university had taken… As a result, funding for students had been lost, and the impact had been real.” He said those were matters that had been discussed at the time the resolutions were debated, “but the impact had been severe.” He said “the university had lost approximately R200 million [approx. $12 million] that was designated for an institute for neuroscience at UCT, and a further R50 million [approx. $3 million] in total from various donors.”
Ms Khakhau confirmed that “the figures were R200 million for the neuroscience institute and a further R50 million.”
Prof Moshabela added that “a large portion of that, approximately R15 million [approx. $900 thousand] annually, had been for student bursaries.” He said, “all of that had been lost in terms of new funding… affected donors had continued to fund students already in committed cohorts but had chosen to do so directly rather than through the institution, and had not taken on new students.”
Ms Khakhau said “that was a problem for her. She said the primary responsibility of the institution was to ensure that students entered, studied, graduated… that was the institution’s job and that no decision could sideline that fact. The institution had a greater responsibility to advance the academic project of South African students than to take a position on what was happening in Gaza.” She acknowledged that “academic reflection was part of the institutional mandate and that individuals had the right to protest but said none of that could stand between a South African child, particularly a poor South African child dependent on funding, and their ability to access education.”
Mr S Lonzi (EFF) rose on a point of order. He said, “with the greatest respect, that what had been presented was a total distortion of global solidarity. He pointed to the history of South Africa and noted that part of what had assisted in defeating apartheid was global solidarity, including from universities in America, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It would be unfair to the university to suggest that by demonstrating global solidarity it was reducing its mandate of serving students. He said that was incorrect and a distortion and felt he had to make that point.”
The Chairperson said that “to be fair to the university, it had not been management that had taken the decision but the Council.” He noted that “the university’s statement, for those who had read it, had been mostly about the destruction of institutions of higher learning in Gaza and the killing of teachers and lecturers.” He said, “that was what the institution had been responding to, and the statement was publicly available.” He said “he did not think it was appropriate for Parliament, which had itself gone to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against genocide, to then vilify the Council’s resolution as an act of international solidarity.” He said that “the posture was not correct for Parliament to adopt, and while different political views could be expressed in political forums, Members should be mindful of what message was being sent to South Africans in a democratic house.” He suggested “the Committee refrain from entering that space, noting it was a dangerous one,” and said “it was not fair to imply the university had neglected its academic mandate simply because it had taken a position on international solidarity.”
Ms Khakhau said “the bottom line was that she fully respected UCT as an academic institution with the African and global intellectual standing it commanded, and she had no problem with that. She equally respected the human rights of each and every individual student and staff member. Her problem, however, was that under no circumstance could solidarity with any cause cost a South African child their ability to study.” She said “the primary mandate of UCT was not the production of papers or alignment with any discourse but ensuring that a South African student could present themselves at the institution, study, and that everything in the institution’s power was done to protect that student’s ability to do so.” She said that “where a decision threatened the funders of a student, the institution had a responsibility as the responsible adult to balance the political equation with its core mandate of funding students, and that was the area in which she believed the Chair of Council could have done more work.”
To understand the nuances of the boycott debate, it is imperative to note that South Africa is struggling with severe economic and social challenges.
The university authorities understand that higher education can help break the cycle of violence and poverty in the country and therefore did not implement the boycott. It is also clear that donors who provided students with grants declined to continue their charitable donations.
Ultimately, South African universities should ask whether boycotting Israeli universities advances the welfare of South Africans. In a nation that suffers from so many endemic problems, it is the duty of universities to devote their resources to their own society.
There is always the worry that Iran and Qatar might fill in the void.
Donors pulled millions from UCT over Gaza resolutions, MPs told
By Linda Nordling
Revelation prompts parliamentary debate over whether global solidarity should ever trump funding for education
The University of Cape Town in South Africa lost around 250 million rand (US$15m) in funding after its council adopted resolutions critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, according to the university’s vice-chancellor.
The first resolution denounces the destruction of Palestinian academic institutions and rejects a widely used definition of antisemitism in favour of one that allows for broader criticism of Israel and Zionism. The second prohibits UCT academics from engaging with research groups affiliated with the Israeli military. A UCT professor has challenged in court whether the council was adequately informed of potential consequences before adopting the resolutions. Judgement is still pending.
“UCT is a place where historically there are people who support Israel and people who support Palestine, and our donors and alumni community is also sometimes aligned like that. So, as a result, we have lost funding for students, and it has had an impact,” Moshabela told MPs.
He said the losses include around R200 million that had been pledged to a neuroscience institution at UCT, as well as R50 million from other donors. This includes a R15 million annual hit for student funding, he said.
‘Global solidarity’
The revelation sparked sharp disagreement among committee members about whether a university should take positions on international conflicts.
Democratic Alliance MP Karabo Khakhau argued that UCT’s obligations to students should take precedence over geopolitical solidarity. “Human beings have the right to associate with whomever they want, and if they want to protest, they must protest,” she said. “But none of that must stand between a South African child and funding to access education.”
But Sihle Lonzi from the Economic Freedom Fighters argued that condemning the resolutions missed a deeper historical point. “If someone were to look at the history of South Africa, part of what assisted us to defeat apartheid was global solidarity. It will be unfair to the university to say that by demonstrating global solidarity they are reducing their mandate,” he said.
Committee chair Tebogo Letsie from the African National Congress urged colleagues to be careful about the precedent they were setting. Noting that South Africa’s own government had taken the matter further than any university—filing genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice in December 2023— he called on MPs to refrain from criticising UCT’s council for following a similar moral impulse.
Khaukau was unmoved by the appeal for consensus. “I don’t know where this culture comes from. We don’t have to agree on everything,” she said.
Researchers clash
The debate mirrored one that took place on the pages of the March/April issue of the South African Journal of Science last year.
In one commentary, Nithaya Chetty, the dean of science at the University of the Witwatersrand, wrote that universities should refrain from taking official standpoints in polarising debates such as the Israel-Gaza conflict to “preserve academic integrity”.
However, other academics vehemently opposed Chetty’s argument. Jonathan Jansen, former president of the Academy of Science of South Africa, argued that universities are “by their very nature, political and not neutral”.
Another paper, authored by researchers from the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Pretoria and Stellenbosch, said neutrality in the face of human rights violations can undermine moral authority. “Public universities in South Africa have an obligation to serve the public good,” it argued.
The Portfolio Committee convened in Parliament to engage with the University of Cape Town (UCT), its stakeholders, and the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) on governance, financial sustainability, student funding, transformation, and related institutional matters. The Ministry opened by confirming that the University of Cape Town remained a functional and stable institution from a governance perspective, having received an unqualified audit opinion with findings relating primarily to conflict of interest non-compliance. It noted UCT’s strong financial recovery in 2025, with a net surplus of R1 35 billion against R852 million in 2024, while cautioning that mounting student debt and the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) accommodation cap continued to exert structural pressure on the institution.
The NSFAS (NSFAS) accommodation cap emerged as the dominant and most contested issue of the engagement. UCT management reported that the cumulative net debt arising directly from the cap shortfall had reached R537 4 million between 2023 and 2026, with 3 465 NSFAS-funded students carrying accommodation balances in 2026 alone. It further noted that NSFAS first-time entering students had declined sharply from 1 431 in 2025 to 834 in 2026, with no confirmed funding policy at the start of the academic year.
The Student Representative Council (SRC) called on the Committee to exempt university-owned residences from the cap and to introduce regional differentiation, citing the Cape Town private market, where comparable accommodation reached R16 773 per month. UCT management rejected the characterisation that it made a profit on residences, maintaining that all costs went directly into services, including insourced staff, student life programming, and residence administration, and that the institution could not absorb the gap between what the NSFAS paid and the actual cost of delivery. Members disagreed with the institution’s management, questioning why UCT, when advertising and accrediting private leases after the cap was introduced, did not restrict those leases to NSFAS-rated pricing, given that NSFAS-funded students had been placed in accommodation above the cap and thereby put into debt.
Management acknowledged the structural tension but argued that placing NSFAS-funded students exclusively in lower-cost residences carried transformation and inclusion risks, and called for a collective multi-stakeholder solution rather than unilateral institutional concessions. The Ministry added that national expenditure on accommodation within the NSFAS budget now exceeded spending on academics, describing the imbalance as unsustainable and calling for accelerated infrastructure investment and a comprehensive review of the funding model.
UCT’s Council resolution on Israeli academic institutions was raised by Members. The Chair of Council clarified that the resolution was directed specifically at Israeli tertiary institutions actively supporting or complicit in the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) operations in Gaza and confirmed that implementation had not commenced. Donor funding had consequently declined, with approximately R200 million in earmarked neuroscience funding and a further R50 million from various donors lost, of which around R15 million annually had been directed at student bursaries. Management confirmed the impact on student funding was real but noted that overall donor funding had increased by over 11% since 2024, despite a reduction in the number of donors. Divergent positions on the resolution and its consequences were held by Members.
Transformation across the academic pipeline was examined in detail. Members noted that at the Prof level, foreign national academics outnumbered Black African, Coloured, and Indian academics combined, which Human Resources confirmed and characterised as unacceptable. UCT outlined a range of programmes aimed at accelerating black academic progression, including the Next Generation Profiate, the Accelerated Transformation Academic Programme, an Emerging Research Programme, and targeted use of the Employment Equity Fund to recruit at senior academic levels. It acknowledged a persistent gap in undergraduate success rates for African students relative to other racial groups, attributed in part to legacy curriculum structures, and described interventions including curriculum reform, self-assessment tools, and pedagogically enriched first-year courses. Members challenged the framing, arguing that the gap reflected a systemic failure that should not be analysed through the lens of student preparedness, and requested written detail on causes and corrective measures.
Public and Administrative Support Staff (PASS) unions presented a picture of a chronically dysfunctional labour relations environment, citing a collective agreement concluded in February 2026 that was reversed on two key provisions shortly after signing, the absence of a promotion policy for Public and Administrative Support staff despite the gap being formally identified in UCT’s own Employment Equity Plan in 2022, mandatory quarterly consultation meetings that had not taken place once in 2026, and a structural pay disparity between Public and Administrative Support staff benchmarked at the 60th percentile of the general market and academic staff benchmarked at the 75th percentile of their specific labour market. Unions requested direct representation on Council. Members noted that this request was not grounded in the Higher Education Act as currently constituted and proposed that unions instead seek more meaningful recognition through expanded bargaining forum arrangements, observer status, or consultation mechanisms comparable to those at other institutions.
Members raised the issue of withheld academic certificates, with the Chairperson reiterating the Committee’s proposal that the approximately 13 000 certificates withheld by UCT be released through a mechanism involving memoranda of understanding between the DHET, National Treasury, and the South African Revenue Service (SARS), so that graduates entering employment could be identified and reminded of their debt obligations. UCT management indicated qualified support for the proposal but noted that it could not absorb the associated financial risk without a credible repayment undertaking from the state. The Committee requested that UCT consider allowing affected graduates to attend graduation ceremonies while the certificate remained retained, given the generational and social significance of that milestone for first-generation graduates.
The Committee closed with a commitment to convene a dedicated second engagement on student accommodation in the following term, bringing together the Department, the NSFAS, the Competition Commission, Infrastructure South Africa (ISA), Universities South Africa (USAf)), relevant Chapter Nine institutions, and other stakeholders to address the regulatory, pricing, and infrastructure dimensions of the crisis comprehensively. It warned that without intervention, the NSFAS budget, which currently funded approximately 800 000 students at R53 billion, would fund significantly fewer students within five years despite real-term increases in appropriations, as accommodation costs continued to absorb a disproportionate share of available funding. Written questions would be submitted to UCT on accommodation cost breakdowns, academic success rates, transformation pipeline data, and the foreign national workforce, with a response period of more than fourteen days.
Meeting report
Opening Remarks by the Chairperson
The Chairperson welcomed everyone present and announced that the purpose of the meeting was to engage with the University of Cape Town (UCT) and its stakeholders regarding governance, administration, financial matters, and other related issues. He noted that there was a social cluster engagement at the National Assembly from 3 p.m. and therefore emphasised that the day’s engagement needed to be succinct, efficient, and direct in both questions and responses.
The Committee also welcomed representatives from the Russian Consulate responsible for Education. The Chairperson noted that he had met with the Consul-General and representatives of the Consulate the previous day, during which they had discussed a number of progressive views. He therefore invited them to attend the engagement as observers.
He explained that the importance of bringing all stakeholders together in a single engagement was to ensure that the Committee obtained a comprehensive picture and overall perspective of the functioning of the institution. He stated that the Committee wanted to see the Post-School Education and Training (PSET) system remain stable and universities continue to progress effectively. He further noted that he had submitted a motion in Parliament the previous day, recognising Wits University’s achievement of being ranked number one on the Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR). While Wits had often acknowledged that UCT held an advantage and was ranked among the top 1% of universities globally and first in Africa, he felt it was equally important to highlight Wits University’s accomplishment. He added that, as Parliament had previously celebrated UCT’s achievements in other rankings, it was appropriate to recognise this achievement as well.
The Chairperson expressed the hope that the engagement would be fruitful and urged all parties to work together wherever gaps existed. He noted that UCT’s Vice-Chancellor (VC) had recently appeared before Parliament through USAf. He cautioned that no university would be able to survive for more than five years if the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) were to collapse and stressed that it was the collective responsibility of all stakeholders to work with NSFAS to ensure that its governance instability was resolved. He explained that NSFAS beneficiaries often complained that they were unable to register because of outstanding NSFAS payments. However, when Members followed up on such cases, NSFAS would sometimes indicate that UCT had not provided the necessary registration data, preventing NSFAS from confirming which students were eligible for payment. He further warned that if NSFAS were to collapse in July, universities would be unable by September to pay salaries or employ staff to administer examinations. For this reason, he emphasised the need for all parties to work together to find solutions for the sector.
Referring to a statement issued the previous day, the Chairperson noted that the Services Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) had confirmed bursary funding amounting to R520 million in partnership with USAf. He stated that this was the type of initiative the Committee wished to see, as it represented a progressive development which the Committee welcomed. He also appealed to USAf to ensure that the funds were administered effectively so that affected students, particularly those on the verge of writing examinations, would not be disadvantaged.
Apologies and introductions
The Chairperson acknowledged apologies and allowed everyone present to introduce themselves. He then invited the Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training, Ms Nomusa Dube-Ncube, to deliver her introductory remarks.
Opening remarks by the Deputy Minister
Deputy Minister Dube-Ncube opened by noting that UCT remained one of South Africa’s leading institutions of higher education, ranked first in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Sub-Saharan Africa rankings for 2026, with continued strength in academic reputation, employer reputation and sustainability. She indicated that the Department monitored governance, financial sustainability, compliance and transformation across the post-school education and training sector, including at UCT.
She described UCT as a functional and stable institution from a governance perspective. Prof Mosa Moshabela was appointed Vice-Chancellor and Principal with effect from October 2024, following due institutional process, contributing to continuity in leadership. UCT had five ministerial appointees serving on its Council for the period 2024 to 2028, reflecting the required demographic diversity and representativity across race and gender. The Department had received no reports of significant governance instability during the 2025 academic year to date.
On compliance, UCT had submitted its 2024 annual report and financial statements within prescribed timeframes. The institution received an unqualified audit opinion with findings, those findings relating primarily to instances where staff members had failed to declare conflicts of interest prior to the university procuring goods or services from entities in which they held an interest. The Deputy Minister noted that this constituted non-compliance with section 34 of the Higher Education Act and reflected weaknesses in internal controls and in the implementation of the university’s own conflict of interest policies.
On finances, UCT had generated a total surplus of R852 million in 2024, compared to R1.39 billion in 2020, with the decline partly attributable to fair value losses on financial instruments. Key pressures included lower-than-expected tuition fee increases, declining government appropriations, rising personnel costs, increased expected credit losses, and broader inflationary conditions. Personnel expenditure accounted for approximately 50% of total income, and student debt stood at R836 million in 2024, with impaired debt having increased substantially. UCT nonetheless continued to maintain substantial income from state subsidies, tuition and accommodation fees, and third-stream activities.
The Deputy Minister noted that the Institutional Forum (IF) continued to play an important advisory and oversight role, including over senior executive appointments and structures focused on transformation, inclusion, diversity and employment equity. She identified transformation as a strategic imperative and indicated that the Department expected UCT to demonstrate rigorous and sustained attention in this regard.
She advised that the Department was aware of disputes arising from the decommissioning of the Philip Kgosana residence and subsequent eviction proceedings involving former students, which had evolved into court proceedings raising concerns about compliance with the Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act. She encouraged all institutional bodies to handle student accommodation matters with the sensitivity and fairness the law required.
The Deputy Minister also raised the issue of students being withheld from graduating on account of outstanding debt. She recalled that at a prior engagement convened by the Minister, VCs and Registrars had committed, including through USAf, that institutions would not prevent students from graduating where debt was owed, but would withhold the certificate only. She noted that UCT’s reported practice appeared inconsistent with that commitment and indicated that the Department intended to pursue the matter with all relevant stakeholders.
In conclusion, the Deputy Minister stated that while compliance and financial pressures required ongoing attention, the Department regarded UCT as a functional institution with generally stable governance structures, and would continue to engage with the institution to strengthen its compliance, governance, financial sustainability and transformation.
Briefing: UCT Management
UCT’s unaudited financial results for the year ended 31 December 2025 showed that total revenue amounted to R9.15 billion, representing an increase of 5.4% compared with 2024, while the net surplus stood at R1.35 billion, reflecting a 59% improvement on the R852 million recorded in 2024. Total assets were reported at R19.34 billion, including investments valued at R11.79 billion and a bank balance of R2.20 billion. Despite this apparent financial recovery, student debt remained a significant structural concern. Gross student fees receivable reached R1.007 billion at year-end, with an expected credit loss provision of R465.9 million, representing 46% of gross receivables. More than 13,000 student accounts carried debit balances. It was further reported that the NSFAS accommodation cap had materially exacerbated the situation. Between 2023 and 2026, the cumulative net debt arising directly from the cap shortfall amounted to R537.4 million, while 3,465 NSFAS-funded students owed UCT accommodation balances in 2026 alone.
On student funding, UCT highlighted a critical structural risk. The number of NSFAS first-time entering students (FTENS) declined significantly from 1 431 in 2025 to 834 in 2026, with no confirmed NSFAS funding policy in place at the start of the academic year. The total number of funded students was 237 below budget. UCT reported that it accommodated more than a third of its student population across 8 765 managed beds, with monthly rates in university residences ranging from R6 199 to R10 217, substantially above the NSFAS accommodation cap. By comparison, private accommodation providers in the Cape Town market charged up to R16 773 per month, further illustrating the inadequacy of a nationally averaged cap applied within a city characterised by a broad-market rental environment.
UCT reported that its research output remained globally competitive. Total external research income in 2025 amounted to R2.33 billion, while 1,843 contracts were signed with a combined value of R2.752 billion. The institution filed 47 patents during 2025 and held equity in spin-off companies valued at approximately R445.8 million. UCT was ranked 150th globally in the QS rankings, 164th in the Times Higher Education rankings, and first in Africa across all major ranking systems. International research collaboration had increased by 75.9% since 2014 and accounted for 63.1% of publication output. However, the institution identified a significant risk arising from its heavy reliance on international funders, particularly the concentration of funding from the United States, alongside declining support from national agencies and industry.
On gender-based violence (GBV), UCT reported 94 incidents through trauma-informed informal pathways in 2024 and 87 in 2025, while on-campus incidents increased from 41 to 51 over the same period. Formal complaints referred to the Special Tribunal totalled 13 in 2024 and 15 in 2025, covering allegations of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. UCT indicated that it operated a 24-hour GBV hotline, implemented a survivor-centred Sexual Misconduct Policy, maintained a dedicated Special Tribunal aligned with the DHET National Policy Framework, and supported a network of 3 000 Gender Marshals and 400 First Responders. Concerning broader campus security, the institution reported that total incidents declined from 295 in 2024 to 205 in 2025, although theft remained the most prevalent category, accounting for 132 incidents.
See attached for full presentation
Student Representative Council
The SRC stated that its presentation focused primarily on the NSFAS accommodation cap, which it described as the most significant challenge facing UCT students. It traced the origins of the crisis to the 2017 presidential announcement of fully subsidised free higher education, under which accommodation was intended to be covered through government grants rather than loans. The SRC explained that, in 2023, NSFAS introduced a cap on accommodation allowances based on a World Bank study, applying a national average of approximately R5,500 per month without taking into account regional variations, the Cape Town private housing market in which UCT students competed, or the reality that existing accommodation providers could not reduce rates to cap levels without experiencing reductions of up to 50% in per-student revenue. It noted that neither universities nor private landlords had reduced their prices as a result of the cap and that accommodation costs had continued to increase.
The SRC stated that the consequences had been severe. It reported that NSFAS-funded students were unable to attend graduation ceremonies because of outstanding debt arising from the shortfall between the accommodation cap and actual accommodation costs. It further noted that registration concessions during the year had been restricted to NSFAS-funded, NSFAS loan-funded, and bursary-funded students, while the broader concessions previously extended to self-funded students and those whose debt had been partially reduced were no longer available. As evidence of the growing hardship experienced by students, the SRC submitted a series of Back-a-Buddy crowdfunding campaigns, which it said demonstrated that students were being compelled to publicly advertise their financial difficulties in order to remain enrolled.
On transformation, the SRC noted that no persons living with disabilities occupied any of UCT’s 22 senior management positions and that none of the 18 staff members with disabilities classified as professionally qualified or middle management were Black. It argued that this highlighted the intersectional nature of the transformation challenges that remained. The SRC further noted that UCT’s position on Gaza had resulted in the withdrawal of certain donors and bursary providers, which had negatively affected student funding. It also indicated that GBV remained a persistent threat to student safety.
The SRC called on the Committee to exempt all university-owned residences from the accommodation cap, review the cap to better reflect regional market rates, and introduce alternative regulatory mechanisms that would prevent students from accumulating debt as a result of disputes between NSFAS and accommodation providers.
See attached for full presentation
Institutional Forum
The IF presented an overview of its mandate and current activities, drawing on its statutory foundation under section 31 of the Higher Education Act and the UCT Institutional Statute of 2022. It explained that its role was proactive rather than reactive, requiring it to identify policy gaps and concerns relating to institutional culture on its own initiative. The Forum further noted that Council was obliged to provide written reasons within seven days whenever it rejected the Forum’s advice. It reported that, in 2025, Council approved revised Terms of Reference which strengthened the Forum’s proactive mandate, tightened reporting lines, and made provision for the removal of inactive members.
With regard to senior management, the Forum noted that eight significant leadership positions had been filled over the previous two years, including those of the VC and two Deputy VCs, which contributed to greater leadership stability. It highlighted ongoing work undertaken through its Employment Equity Forum substructure, including oversight of the Employment Equity Plan and the incorporation of a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) into recruitment and selection policies. The Forum further reported that the Transformation Forum had endorsed the Gender Equity Policy and initiated a review of the Anti-Racism Policy, which was expected to lead to the development of a broader framework for discrimination and harassment.
The Forum identified a number of persistent institutional culture concerns, including the recurring pattern of fee-related student protests at the beginning of each academic year, growing concerns regarding GBV among students, and inadequate accessibility and support for staff and students living with disabilities. It acknowledged that a Culture Change Programme was underway, incorporating unconscious bias training, peer support initiatives for racial trauma, and anti-racism education.
The Forum’s recommendations to the Department included the development of a sustainable NSFAS funding model and a review of the accommodation cap. Its recommendations to university management included expanding disability inclusion initiatives, increasing mental health support, and strengthening mechanisms for monitoring transformation.
See attached for full presentation
Organised Labour Unions
The three PASS staff unions presented what they described as a picture of a fundamentally broken relationship with UCT management, characterised by a consistent pattern of agreements being concluded and subsequently disregarded. They stated that a collective agreement signed on 27 February 2026 had been reversed on two key provisions shortly thereafter: that executive-level participation in bargaining had occurred only once and was never repeated, and that more than 15 issues raised during a post-bargaining review meeting had not received any feedback. The unions further noted that the mandatory quarterly consultation meetings required under the Collective Bargaining Agreement had not taken place at any point during 2026.
The unions identified the absence of a promotion policy for PASS staff as a critical equity concern. They explained that, while academic staff benefited from a structured Ad Hominem promotion pathway that allowed advancement without requiring them to vacate their existing posts, PASS staff had no equivalent mechanism. They noted that UCT’s Employment Equity Plan, dated October 2022, had identified this gap as an employment equity barrier, yet no policy had been developed four years later. The unions further stated that a formal six-month ultimatum issued in August 2025, warning that continued inaction would amount to an unfair labour practice, had been ignored.
The unions also raised concerns regarding the exclusion of union representatives from UCT Council. They noted that, despite a previous directive from the Portfolio Committee requiring management to engage with unions on the matter, the Chairperson of Council had not taken any action. On remuneration, they argued that PASS staff were benchmarked against the national all-jobs market at the 60th percentile, whereas academic staff were benchmarked against their specific labour market at the 75th percentile, thereby entrenching a two-tier compensation structure within the same institution.
The unions called on management to include the Executive Director of Human Resources as a permanent member of the bargaining team, reinstate biannual information sessions with the university executive, and resolve outstanding Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) referrals internally. They further called on the Committee to urgently address the NSFAS funding crisis, which they described as posing a direct threat to the stability of students, staff, and public institutions.
[See presentations for full details]
Consideration and adoption of minutes and UWC Oversight Visit Report
Consideration and adoption of outstanding committee minutes and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) Oversight Report
Mr S Lonzi (EFF) noted that on 30 April, when they were engaging on vacancies in the sector, they spoke about the National Skills Fund (NSF), and the DG’s response was that they had asked for more material and that he would revert to the Committee. This was not reflected in the minutes.
At the 29 May meeting with the Minister, it was correct that a meeting would be held to discuss the conflicting versions of the Board members and the Minister’s versions. The Committee had not had time for that engagement.
For the 27 May meeting, with USaF and the South African College Principals Organisation (SAPCO), Members had asked for additional information from the remaining 30 TVET colleges that had not submitted statistics about their student debt. Disaggregated information was also requested to break the student debt information down accordingly.
With the note of these issues, he would happily move for adoption.
Dr D Christians (DA) also commented on the 29th of May meeting, indicating that she had submitted her corrections via the WhatsApp group, with the following amendments: NSFAS CEO position, concerns about NSFAS being placed under administration for the third term, and issues related to governance disputes. She had no issues with the adoption of the minutes granted the minor grammatical errors were also rectified.
Ms K Khakhau (DA) stated that she did not appreciate looking clumsy in front of visitors and had asked previously that the Committee deal with housekeeping matters privately to avoid these minor issues being discussed in front of guests. She noted that there was one thing missing, which was the inputs made by Members on the NSFAS comprehensive funding model and what it must look like. She acknowledged that the Committee had not yet agreed as a collective on the final model, but each party’s input must be recorded accordingly. Their inputs could be tagged under each Member’s inputs as separate inputs from resolutions. She felt this part was missing, especially the part relating to the decentralisation of administrative functions to institutions and National Treasury to disburse the NSFAS funds.
The minutes were adopted, with the corrections noted.
The Chairperson noted the draft oversight report of the Committee to the University of Western Cape, tabling it before Members to correct and adopt it.
Ms Khakhau extended her deepest condolences to the university community, the family, loved ones, and friends of the late Mlingani ‘Mli’ Matiwane. She spoke warmly of Mli, recalling him as a very vibrant “shutdownist”. She said she was saddened when she spoke to his husband and had shared her last memories at the same time. She recalled that after the elections, where she had been dubbed president, they could not believe it, having spent two years shutting down the institutional mandate. She remembered a conversation she had had with Mli, noting that while he had been clear about his politics, he had always been a warm person, committed to self-identification at all costs and an advocate of simply being a human being and being the best one could be. She expressed the hope that Mli’s soul would rest in peace and that comfort would be found in knowing that, at least at UCT, there was much that could be pointed to as Mli’s contribution, not only at UCT but in his communities.
She then proposed that the Committee deal first with the matter before it. She asked the Chair of Council to take the Committee through the Council resolution to boycott Israel, what had informed it, and how it had come about.
Adv Norman Arendse, Chair of Council, UCT, said that the resolution had its origins in a resolution adopted in the Senate. He noted that he was not sure the resolution explicitly spoke to a boycott of Israel.
Ms Khakhau asked what his understanding of the resolution was.
Adv Arendse said the resolution spoke to collaborating with Israeli tertiary institutions that were either actively supporting or complicit in supporting the IDF in its war on Gaza. He added that, to the extent that some academics might also have a relationship with those institutions, that too fell within the scope of the resolution. He stated for the record that, as he understood it, the resolution had in fact not been implemented. He noted that the VC was present and that, while Council adopted resolutions, implementation was left to the executive, and a committee in the Senate had been appointed to look into the implementation. He said that was how the resolution had come to the Council. The issue was debated by Council, and all relevant factors were considered, including a loss or potential loss of donor funding. The resolution was adopted on the 22nd of June 2024, following a debate and a vote conducted by a secret ballot.
Ms Khakhau said she was satisfied with the response to the effect that implementation was nowhere near commencement. However, her concern was that students had raised that the university had lost funding from particular donors and that students had been disadvantaged as a result. She said where she was stuck was in understanding the relationship between the resolution, its inaction, and the loss of donor funding. She noted that she respected fully and without question the rights of individuals to associate as they wished, and that she appreciated the intellectual contribution of UCT and its academics to domestic and international discourses. Her problem, however, was with an institution making decisions that would have a negative, direct impact on students’ ability to access academic freedom and to exit an academic institution without impediment. She directed her question to the VC and asked for a full account.
Prof Musa Moshabela, VC, UCT, confirmed that there had indeed been an impact on student funding, as some donors held strong views regarding the position the university had taken. He noted that UCT was historically a place of contestation, with its donor and alumni community sometimes aligned with opposing sides of the Israel-Palestine question. As a result, funding for students had been lost, and the impact had been real. He said those were matters that, as the Chairperson of Council had indicated, had been discussed at the time the resolutions were debated, but the impact had been severe. Council had mandated management to assess the impact, which management had done and reported back to Council. The task given to management was to indicate what the impact had been on student funding. He said the university had lost approximately R200 million that was designated for an institute for neuroscience at UCT, and a further R50 million in total from various donors.
Ms Khakhau called a member of the public in the gallery to order in the absence of the Chairperson, noting that it was not the gallery’s meeting and that anyone requiring more information needed to conduct themselves in an orderly manner.
She confirmed that the figures cited were R200 million for the neuroscience institute and a further R50 million and asked the VC to continue.
Prof Moshabela confirmed that the R50 million had come from various donors, and that a large portion of that, approximately R15 million annually, had been for student bursaries. He said all of that had been lost in terms of new funding. He noted that affected donors had continued to fund students already in committed cohorts but had chosen to do so directly rather than through the institution, and had not taken on new students.
Ms Khakhau asked how many students had been affected by the loss of those funds.
Prof Moshabela said he did not have the exact number at hand but undertook to provide it. He noted that the calculation would need to account not only for those funded by the particular donor in question but for others as well.
Ms Khakhau said that was a problem for her. She said the primary responsibility of the institution was to ensure that students entered, studied, graduated, obtained employment, grew the economy, and lived their best lives, including being able to afford cars, pay lobola, and buy homes. She said that was the institution’s job and that no decision could sideline that fact. The institution had a greater responsibility to advance the academic project of South African students than to take a position on what was happening in Gaza. She acknowledged that academic reflection was part of the institutional mandate and that individuals had the right to protest but said none of that could stand between a South African child, particularly a poor South African child dependent on funding, and their ability to access education.
Mr S Lonzi (EFF) rose on a point of order. He said, with the greatest respect, that what had been presented was a total distortion of global solidarity. He pointed to the history of South Africa and noted that part of what had assisted in defeating apartheid was global solidarity, including from universities in America, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It would be unfair to the university to suggest that by demonstrating global solidarity it was reducing its mandate of serving students. He said that was incorrect and a distortion and felt he had to make that point.
The Chairperson said that to be fair to the university, it had not been management that had taken the decision but the Council. He noted that the university’s statement, for those who had read it, had been mostly about the destruction of institutions of higher learning in Gaza and the killing of teachers and lecturers. He said that was what the institution had been responding to, and the statement was publicly available. He said he did not think it was appropriate for Parliament, which had itself gone to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against genocide, to then vilify the Council’s resolution as an act of international solidarity. He said that the posture was not correct for Parliament to adopt, and while different political views could be expressed in political forums, Members should be mindful of what message was being sent to South Africans in a democratic house. He suggested the Committee refrain from entering that space, noting it was a dangerous one, and said it was not fair to imply the university had neglected its academic mandate simply because it had taken a position on international solidarity.
Ms Khakhau said she did not know where the culture of requiring all Members to agree had come from. She said Members did not generally agree, and it would not start today, that a point of order was raised simply because a Member held and presented a different view, because the same could just as easily be done in return.
She said the bottom line was that she fully respected UCT as an academic institution with the African and global intellectual standing it commanded, and she had no problem with that. She equally respected the human rights of each and every individual student and staff member. Her problem, however, was that under no circumstance could solidarity with any cause cost a South African child their ability to study. She said the primary mandate of UCT was not the production of papers or alignment with any discourse but ensuring that a South African student could present themselves at the institution, study, and that everything in the institution’s power was done to protect that student’s ability to do so. She said that where a decision threatened the funders of a student, the institution had a responsibility as the responsible adult to balance the political equation with its core mandate of funding students, and that was the area in which she believed the Chair of Council could have done more work.
She then moved to the issue of the student accommodation cap, noting that she had only two minutes remaining, and that was the reason she had asked for more time. She said she and the Deputy Minister disagreed on the matter, as did she and the ANC. She said since the previous administration had used the example of the university she had studied at, making the point that accommodation in Rondebosch, Claremont, and the CBD could never be equivalent to accommodation in Bloemfontein because of the cost of living in different metros, it made no sense for the Department to force property owners to service bonds at a rate lower than what they were being charged. She said when a property owner approached ABSA for a home loan, ABSA determined the repayment amount, and rental pricing was necessarily based on that repayment obligation. She noted that was only one factor, leaving aside municipal rates and other considerations, and said there were further points she had wished to raise, but time did not allow.
The Chairperson said the issue of the accommodation cap would enter that path. He said that even when comparing Cape Town to Cape Town, the cap did not make sense. He said that in 2023, when he was part of the Committee, they had raised the matter of the UCT student accommodation in Observatory and the student accommodation of CPUT at the time, which were in literally the same suburb. He said that the Committee had gone there and did not speak from reading things in newspapers, and noted that Mr Lonzi had made the same example two weeks prior, and hoped the university would obtain those names. He said the point was valid: if one was paying the same rate, one could not have a UCT residence charging R9 000 when the one opposite was charging R6 000.
The Chairperson referred to a slide presented by UCT and noted that less than 2.5% of the total budget was allocated to student life, amounting to R21 million out of approximately R900 million. He stated that the argument being advanced was that residences might appear similar, be located in the same area, and charge comparable rates, but that the distinguishing factor was student life. He said he had waited to hear the presentation on this issue and noted that the information presented showed that only R21 million, or 2.5% of the budget, was allocated to student life. He questioned the source of that allocation.
He stated that Members of the Committee met with students in their communities, churches, and other establishments, and that some Members even conducted observations at night as part of their research into the behaviour of young people, including patterns of behaviour following alcohol consumption. He argued that prices in those environments had become excessive because some of the university’s representatives required establishments to stock energy drinks and cold drinks in order to obtain accreditation, which in turn had financial implications.
The Chairperson expressed disappointment that the students present had not raised the issue that, according to UCT’s presentation, approximately R2 billion was received from government subsidies. He noted that the government was subsidising education at UCT to the value of more than R2 billion, yet no one had questioned why such subsidies were being provided while certain individuals within the system were simultaneously arguing that accommodation should not be subject to a cap and that rates of R16 000 per bed should be charged. He maintained that even accommodation charges of R7 000 or R9 000 per month were unacceptable because education, as a social good, was being treated as a commodity.
He stated that he could personally take the university to some of its accommodation facilities and demonstrate that the cost per square metre was lower for individuals working in nearby commercial premises than for students occupying university accommodation. He said that the rationale for student accommodation was well established, as statistics consistently showed that students residing in student accommodation completed their studies more successfully and within shorter timeframes than those who did not. He explained that a student from Gugulethu who slept in a dining room because of overcrowding at home did not have a conducive environment for studying, whereas student accommodation was intended to provide such an environment. Instead, he argued, accommodation costs had become excessively high.
He further stated that UCT-owned buildings listed under Public Works and government ownership, which he would have expected to be among the least expensive accommodation options. However, he argued that this was not the case because the institution sought to treat accommodation as a commodity. He contended that, while the prevailing argument was that the NSFAS accommodation cap was harming the sector, the reality was that accommodation was increasingly becoming accessible only to wealthier students, resulting in the effective exclusion of poor students. He noted that the government was willing to fund tuition and accommodation at a specified level while continuing to subsidise higher education, yet UCT appeared to be arguing that although the government could provide subsidies, it could not influence accommodation pricing. He questioned what exactly the government was subsidising under such circumstances. He indicated that the Committee would engage the university frankly on the matter, as it appeared that the Committee and the institution were approaching the issue from fundamentally different perspectives.
He concluded by stating that the issue of the accommodation cap remained unresolved and that he still had questions for Prof Ramugondo.
Mr M Msezane (MKP) apologised for his late arrival, attributing the delay to Cape Town traffic. He stated that he would endeavour to be concise given the limited time available.
His first question was directed to the Deputy VC: Academic and the VC. He noted that, in UCT’s presentation, the success rate of undergraduate students, particularly African students, was substantially lower than that of all other racial groups. He further observed that there had been a marked decline in 2021, followed by a slight improvement in 2022, although performance levels remained relatively low. He asked what factors accounted for the lower success rate among African students and what measures had been implemented to address the issue, particularly within the context of the university’s transformation agenda.
Prof Brandon Collier-Reed, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Teaching and Learning, responded by acknowledging the decline identified by the Member and explained that UCT had referred to it as the “post-COVID dip”. He stated that in 2021 the difference in overall undergraduate course pass rates between the combined African, Coloured and Indian student grouping and white students had been 15%, whereas by 2025 the gap had narrowed to 7%, reflecting a significant improvement. He added that pass rates within the African, Coloured and Indian grouping had increased by 12% between 2021 and 2025, reaching 89%.
Mr Msezane interjected, stating that his question had been specific and that the response had moved beyond the issue he had raised. He noted that his concern was not with broader trends but with the reasons for the lower performance of African students and the measures taken to address that challenge. He stated that the graph clearly showed African students performing below all other groups and questioned whether the university’s transformation agenda adequately addressed that reality. He requested a more direct response so that he could proceed to his remaining questions.
Prof Collier-Reed explained that, following the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall protests, UCT had established a curriculum change working group between 2017 and 2018 and developed a deliberate strategy aimed at addressing the very issues raised by the Member. As part of UCT’s Vision 2030 agenda, substantial funding had been allocated to faculties to identify and implement interventions that would improve student success, particularly among African students. He requested the Member’s indulgence to provide examples of initiatives that had proved effective.
He cited the Commerce Faculty, where one of the challenges had been students entering quantitative courses without adequate preparation. To address this, UCT had developed a self-assessment tool to assist students in determining whether they possessed the necessary foundations to succeed. He also referred to the Civil Engineering programme, where a comprehensive curriculum redesign had introduced locally relevant examples and project-based learning to improve student outcomes.
Prof Collier-Reed further highlighted two initiatives within the Humanities Faculty. The first involved the integration of pedagogically enriched and decolonial first-year courses directly into departmental curricula. These courses were designed to engage students’ diverse life experiences, foreground African contexts, strengthen academic literacies, and incorporate multilingual and digital pedagogies. He stated that such interventions were intended to improve the success rates of all students, particularly African students who had historically experienced lower success rates than their white counterparts. He nevertheless reiterated that the performance gap had narrowed significantly between 2021 and 2024, as reflected in the data presented.
Mr Msezane stated that he remained unconvinced by the explanation provided. He observed that the Deputy VC had referred to curriculum design and questioned whether this implied that African students were less able to comprehend the curriculum than their white counterparts. He reiterated that he wished to understand the root causes of the lower performance levels and the interventions implemented to address them. He maintained that the explanation had not sufficiently answered his question and stated that, given more time, he would have explored the issue further.
He further noted that while reference had been made to a post-COVID dip in 2021, the graph appeared to show an improvement in the success rate of African students in 2020. He emphasised that, despite the explanations provided, African students continued to perform below all other racial groups at the institution. He placed on record that he was not persuaded by the response and suggested that the university submit a written explanation to the Portfolio Committee outlining both the causes of the lower success rates and the measures taken to address them. He stated that he was particularly interested in understanding why African students were not progressing beyond a certain point and observed that lower success rates implied that students were either not graduating or not graduating within the expected timeframe. He added that the discussion on curriculum had diverted attention from his central concern and requested, through the Chairperson, that the university provide a written response detailing the causes of the challenge and the interventions implemented to ensure that African students successfully completed their studies.
Mr Msezane then turned to the issue of foreign nationals, which he described as a topical and significant matter. Referring to the presentation on foreign national professionals, he stated that it had been indicated that foreign nationals employed by the university were providing scarce skills in accordance with legislative requirements. He requested that the presenter, or another appropriate official, place on record that all foreign national academic staff employed by UCT were providing scarce skills. He further stated that the Committee would subsequently require a detailed breakdown of the work being performed by those individuals, confirmation that such work constituted scarce skills, and verification that the individuals concerned held valid work visas.
Prof Moshabela responded that UCT would place the requested information on record and provide the necessary details. He confirmed that his understanding of the request was that the university should formally confirm that the foreign national academics employed by UCT were providing scarce skills.
Mr Msezane confirmed that he wanted all such staff members to be accounted for.
The Chairperson observed that the issue was not only whether foreign nationals employed by UCT were providing scarce skills, but also whether all of them appeared on the critical skills list and possessed valid work visas. He noted that there were nearly 900 foreign nationals employed at the institution.
Prof Moshabela stated that he would request the Executive Director of Human Resources to address the matter, although he had initially understood the Member’s question to be a request for confirmation of what had been presented, with supporting details to follow.
Ms Juliet Mhango, Executive Director: Human Resources (EDHR), UCT, acknowledged the request for further information regarding academic staff. She explained that the majority of PASS staff were South African citizens. Concerning foreign nationals, she stated that UCT maintained its own scarce and critical skills list and confirmed that some PASS staff members fell within those categories. She acknowledged, however, that historical issues existed and that a small proportion of staff members did not appear on the scarce and critical skills list. She added that a plan was in place to address the matter.
Mr Msezane responded that he had listened carefully to the presentation and recalled that Ms Mhango had stated that foreign national academic staff were providing scarce skills. He explained that this was why he had directed his question to the VC, seeking confirmation on record that the academic staff concerned were indeed providing scarce skills. He further stated that the university should then provide the Committee with a breakdown of the number of such staff members, the nature of the work they performed, the basis upon which that work was classified as scarce skills, and confirmation of their verified work visas. He argued that the Executive Director was now presenting a different position from that contained in the original presentation and maintained that her response did not reflect what had previously been conveyed to the Committee.
The Chairperson stated that the VC had indicated that all academic staff who were foreign nationals were providing scarce skills and that he had subsequently broadened the question to encompass all foreign nationals employed by the university. He noted that the EDHR had responded to that broader question and had indicated at the outset of her response that all academic staff were on the critical skills list. He added that he had then sought clarification as to whether this also applied to PASS staff, to which the EDHR had responded that only a small proportion were not on the list and that this was a legacy or historical matter rather than a recent development. He therefore considered the question regarding academic staff to have been answered. What remained outstanding, however, was whether those individuals on the critical skills list held legitimate work visas and valid documentation. He invited either the EDHR or the VC to address that issue.
Ms Mhango responded that, with regard to the legitimacy of employment in South Africa, UCT ensured that all employees held valid documentation and work permits permitting them to work legally in the country. She explained that where a work visa expired, the matter was managed on an individual basis. She emphasised that the institution’s policy required all employees to possess valid documentation and reiterated that any expired permits were dealt with through established processes. She noted that such cases were very limited in number, currently amounting to approximately two instances, and maintained that, overall, all employees at the institution held valid work permits.
Mr Msezane thanked the EDHR for the response. He explained that the clarification he had been seeking related specifically to the information originally presented and not to the broader question raised by the Chairperson. He noted that the issue of legacy cases had not been mentioned during the presentation and stated that he was now satisfied that he had the necessary clarity. He added that the Committee would await the written report.
Mr Msezane further expressed concern that the SRC had not addressed a number of sensitive and topical issues affecting the university, particularly the success rate of African undergraduate students. He requested a response from the SRC Secretary-General regarding what he regarded as a contentious issue, namely why the SRC was advocating for university-owned residences to be exempted from the NSFAS accommodation cap.
Mr Percival Mabuza, SRC Secretary-General, explained that the position stemmed from considerations relating to residences such as St Peter’s and, possibly, Rochester. He stated that the SRC had examined these matters and noted that accommodation at St. Peter’s currently cost in excess of R70 000 despite consisting of shared rooms, unlike Observatory Square, which provided single-room accommodation. He said the SRC had taken these factors into account and had concluded that an approach was needed that would not disadvantage students. For that reason, it maintained that university-owned residences should be exempted from the cap. He added that where accommodation providers were inflating prices, the Department, the Portfolio Committee, or NSFAS should hold them accountable. He noted that NSFAS had previously threatened to refer certain providers to the Competition Commission in 2023, a stance supported by the SRC. He stated that the SRC’s objective was to ensure that students did not incur accommodation-related shortfalls, were able to register, and could proceed to postgraduate studies without financial impediments.
Mr Msezane indicated that, given the time constraints, he would confine himself to one final point. He asked the official responsible for accommodation whether the university, when leasing accommodation, determined the contractual terms and pricing conditions applicable to private providers. He questioned why the university did not require providers, through its contracts and invitations to tender, to ensure that accommodation costs remained within the NSFAS cap. He stated that the Committee should not be told that accommodation would not be available under such conditions, as there were numerous vacant buildings seeking student tenants. He argued that the university was in a position to shape the conditions of its contracts and expressions of interest to ensure compliance with the NSFAS accommodation cap.
Prof Elelwani Ramugondo, Deputy VC: People, Culture and Society, began by apologising for having shaken her head during the discussion.
The Chairperson remarked that he had noticed the gesture but had not heard the accompanying comment.
Prof Ramugondo explained that the discussion had been passionate, particularly the suggestion that UCT was responsible for manufacturing accommodation costs, which she regarded as a serious allegation. She stated that she had also heard suggestions that UCT charged students solely for a bed, whereas her presentation had sought to demonstrate that student success could not be supported if student accommodation was viewed merely as sleeping space. She stressed that UCT fully agreed with the SRC that accommodation providers who inflated prices should be held accountable.
She stated that comparisons between residences needed to be made on a like-for-like basis and noted that not all universities offered what UCT provided through its all-inclusive residence fee structure. She explained that students at other institutions sometimes only became aware of additional costs, such as Wi-Fi charges, after arriving at their residences. She further noted that UCT had become aware that some universities cross-subsidised their residences and that it was therefore insufficient to compare residences located solely within the same suburb. Universities with residences concentrated in a single area, she argued, could not cross-subsidise costs from residences located in more affordable areas.
Addressing the R21 million allocation for student life, Prof Ramugondo explained that this amount was managed directly by students and reflected UCT’s commitment to student leadership and budget management. She noted that UCT’s residence culture differed from institutions where social events were centred on extended entertainment activities, as students and residence committees deliberately curated activities that balanced social engagement with academic and residential objectives. She stated that the student life allocation would effectively amount to nothing without staff support and that a substantial proportion of residence expenditure was directed towards staff who assisted students with budgeting, mentorship, and related support. She added that UCT’s insourcing model also required investment in staff development and argued that proposals to reduce costs to the bare minimum would, in practice, require the removal of staff who played a critical role in supporting students and advancing the academic project.
Turning to leased accommodation, Prof Ramugondo stated that such accommodation represented only a small proportion of UCT’s overall accommodation portfolio and that, if it were possible, the university would prefer not to lease accommodation at all. She noted that UCT operated two residences under Public Works and three within leased private accommodation. Private providers, she explained, necessarily considered prevailing market conditions and the pricing structures of other providers in order to remain commercially viable. She further noted that one leased residence was currently operating below full occupancy because students retained the freedom to choose their accommodation, and UCT would not interfere with that choice. She stated that the university was required to enter into commercially viable agreements with private providers and that its primary concern during the contracting process was to ensure that minimum standards, including Wi-Fi access, were maintained.
The Chairperson responded that the Deputy VC appeared to be suggesting that other institutions did not provide the services UCT considered exceptional. He observed that student accommodation providers were generally required to provide security, Wi-Fi, and other basic services and that these were standard features across the sector. Drawing on his own experience in student residences, including at UKZN’s Pius Langa Residence, he noted that residence assistants, security personnel, and similar support structures had long been standard features. He therefore stated that he had not heard any justification for the significantly higher costs associated with UCT accommodation.
He further argued that the Deputy VC appeared to be suggesting that UCT advertised accommodation but did not determine pricing, and that accommodation costs had to remain competitive with the broader market. Referring back to Mr Msezane’s question, he asked why UCT did not specify in its accreditation advertisements and calls for accommodation providers that accommodation intended for NSFAS-funded students had to comply with the NSFAS accommodation rate. He argued that if the university genuinely cared about the financial burden faced by NSFAS students, it could have imposed such a requirement.
The Chairperson emphasised that NSFAS-funded students were individuals whom government had identified as requiring support because their families lacked the financial means to cover higher education costs. He noted that government funded their tuition, accommodation, personal care allowances, and living expenses. He stated that many such students arrived from places such as Bloemfontein, the Northern Cape, Soweto, and other parts of the country with no alternative accommodation options and therefore occupied expensive accommodation out of necessity rather than choice. He argued that it was unfair to attribute responsibility for those circumstances to the students themselves.
He reiterated that the key issue was why UCT, when advertising leased accommodation opportunities, did not stipulate that accommodation costs must remain within the NSFAS cap while the dispute between NSFAS, the Department, and the university remained unresolved. He stated that this was the central argument being advanced. Since 2023, UCT had entered into new lease agreements at rates above the cap despite knowing that NSFAS-funded students placed in those residences would be unable to cover the resulting shortfalls and would therefore incur debt.
Prof Ramugondo responded that UCT’s preference was for students to reside in university-owned accommodation and noted that NSFAS policy similarly identified on-campus accommodation as the preferred option. She stated that UCT would prefer not to rely on leased accommodation.
The Chairperson replied that the fact remained that UCT had entered into lease agreements after the accommodation cap was introduced. He noted that those leases exceeded the NSFAS cap and that NSFAS-funded students had been placed in the accommodation concerned. He argued that whether the university preferred students to live in university-owned residences was irrelevant to the issue under discussion.
Prof Ramugondo then asked what would prevent UCT from considering residences located within safe communities and accessible by shuttle services as an alternative, even if not a preferred option.
The Chairperson responded that the discussion was becoming frustrating. He reiterated that UCT had signed lease agreements after the introduction of the accommodation cap and had advertised those accommodation opportunities itself. He repeated the central question: if the institution was genuinely concerned about the welfare of students and the financial shortfalls they faced, why had it not stipulated that it would not lease accommodation above the NSFAS cap? He noted that UCT had previously argued that, without these agreements, private providers would simply accommodate privately funded students. He questioned that assumption and suggested that the market would ultimately determine whether such providers remained viable. He maintained that UCT had knowingly entered into lease agreements above the cap, placed NSFAS-funded students in those residences, and thereby contributed to the indebtedness of those students. He stated that this was the essence of Mr Msezane’s question: if UCT genuinely cared about the issue, why had it not exercised its influence over pricing? He argued that the university could have engaged with the SRC, reviewed the approximately 2 400 leased and accredited accommodation units, and stipulated that accommodation designated for NSFAS-funded students should be capped at the NSFAS rate. In his view, UCT had the capacity to do so but had chosen not to.
Prof Moshabela stated that he wished to respond to the point raised by Mr Msezane regarding the negotiation of terms with private accommodation providers. He acknowledged that the Chairperson was correct in stating that UCT selected its service providers and determined the standards they were required to meet. He explained that UCT maintained a high standard within its own residences at the cost previously presented to the Committee. While recognising that the Committee might disagree with UCT’s position that the cost of its university-owned accommodation exceeded that of institutions such as CPUT, he maintained that UCT could demonstrate that it generated no profit from its residences and that all revenue was reinvested into services provided to students. He urged that UCT not be placed in competition with other universities, emphasising that the institution’s objective was to contribute to a strong PSET sector and to ensure that students had a conducive learning environment. He argued that UCT should be allowed to determine the standard of accommodation it provided because it believed that the standard supported student success. He added that if UCT failed to maintain those standards, it would later be questioned about poor student performance and outcomes.
He stated that UCT was asking the Committee to work with the institution to determine an appropriate standard of residential living, establish the costs associated with that standard, and verify that no profit element was involved. Where leased accommodation was concerned, UCT sought to ensure that the same standards were maintained. He acknowledged that achieving those standards in privately leased accommodation inevitably resulted in costs that were somewhat higher than those associated with university-owned residences. He added that this was one of the reasons student leaders had argued that university-owned residences should receive preferential treatment, recognising that UCT did not exercise full control over privately owned residences but nevertheless required the same standards to be upheld. He stated that UCT could not allow students in university-owned residences to experience a different standard of living from those placed in privately owned accommodation.
Prof Moshabela further stated that it was easy to suggest that UCT could simply dictate accommodation prices but argued that this was not how markets operated. He urged the Committee to exercise caution in how it approached the matter and requested that no impression be created that other universities were offering lower standards. He reiterated that UCT sought to provide students with a comprehensive package of services.
Addressing the accommodation cap directly, he stated that UCT disagreed with aspects of the NSFAS accommodation cap and maintained that NSFAS owed the university approximately R540 million, a liability which NSFAS did not recognise. He remarked that, should the matter ultimately require resolution through the courts, so be it. However, he emphasised that UCT’s primary concern was that students should remain at the centre of the discussion and that attention should remain focused on the challenges students faced as a result of mounting debt. He noted that the previous engagement had concluded with an agreement to seek a collective solution and stated that UCT was attempting to act reasonably while preserving the standards of service it wished to provide.
The Chairperson indicated that the Committee did not agree with the position being advanced.
Mr Msezane requested an opportunity to make a brief final point. He stated that the Committee had raised a crucial issue and noted that some Members had themselves studied under difficult financial circumstances without family support. He said there were now students experiencing severe distress because of additional accommodation costs, with some accumulating debts so substantial that they were unable to access their academic results. Referring to the VC’s earlier remarks, he stated that Members of Parliament were indeed placing students at the centre of the discussion, particularly poor students, regardless of whether UCT generated a profit from its residences. He reiterated that UCT determined the conditions applicable to leased accommodation and that NSFAS operated within a fixed funding framework. He argued that any shortfall should not be borne by poor students who lacked the means to pay it. He stated that figures covering the period from 2023 to 2026 would likely demonstrate the extent to which accommodation debt had accumulated, increasing from approximately R3 000 to between R16 000 and R18 000. He questioned how many affected students had ultimately graduated, given that accumulated debt could prevent them from registering in subsequent years. He concluded by stating that the Committee was prioritising the interests of poor students and could not accept the argument that UCT’s accommodation services justified imposing financial burdens that those students could not afford.
The Chairperson stated that he wished to make it clear that he disagreed with the VC’s suggestion that comparisons between universities should not be made. He argued that accommodation procurement processes were broadly similar across institutions and that UCT could not claim exemption from scrutiny simply because it believed it offered superior services. He stated that he would be failing in his responsibilities as a Member of Parliament if he accepted the proposition that accommodation charges of R16 000 should not be questioned. He also clarified that he was not defending NSFAS, noting that such a perception would be incorrect. He argued that accepting UCT’s reasoning would imply that any provider could set any price without accountability. While the Committee wanted students to benefit from high-quality accommodation, it could not accept the suggestion that questions regarding pricing or comparisons with neighbouring institutions were inappropriate. He maintained that accommodation in Cape Town itself demonstrated that UCT’s charges exceeded those of comparable providers in the same area.
Deputy Minister Dube-Ncube stated that she wished to offer a different perspective to both the Committee and the university. She observed that, nationally, more money was currently being spent through NSFAS on accommodation than on academic costs. She explained that this reality had informed the President’s call for universities to construct their own accommodation because the existing situation was unsustainable. She further stated that there now appeared to be instances of “double dipping”, whereby universities constructed their own residences and still charged rates exceeding those funded by the state, even where the state had supported the development of the accommodation. She argued that this was an issue that required serious discussion.
The Deputy Minister also sought clarity regarding the presentation, noting that she had initially welcomed the reference to accommodation having been insourced. However, she said that she became concerned when she heard that insourcing had created additional administrative issues which raised questions regarding how the model was being managed.
She further urged the university to recognise the necessity of comparisons with other institutions and accommodation providers. She stated that she had previously shown examples to the Director-General, including Campus Key, Rise Student, DigsConnect, and other providers, all of which charged lower rates than those presented by UCT. She encouraged the Committee to examine the standards offered by those providers as well. She added that it was unfair to imply that Members were advocating for lower standards or lacked an understanding of the issues. In her view, the standards were broadly comparable, but the Committee’s concern was rooted in the reality that the fiscus could only stretch so far and that NSFAS funding was specifically intended for poor students.
She noted that the Committee had previously discussed the matter with USAf, during which the University of Pretoria had indicated that, where accommodation costs exceeded the NSFAS cap, the university itself absorbed the difference. She argued that the real problem arose when universities transferred those shortfalls onto students who had been funded precisely because they lacked financial means. She stated that this was a discussion from which none of the parties could retreat and which the country would ultimately have to confront. She questioned whether it was reasonable that institutional leadership could not provide clear answers to these concerns.
The Chairperson thanked the Deputy Minister and invited the VC to respond.
Prof Moshabela stated that he did not wish it to be interpreted that UCT opposed the existence of an accommodation cap. He explained that, while the university had responsibilities towards its students, it also had responsibilities regarding its own financial sustainability. He argued that if the expectation was that universities should absorb any difference between the NSFAS cap and actual accommodation costs, then such expectations should have been incorporated into the funding model from the outset. He noted that while the University of Pretoria might be able to absorb those costs, UCT could not do so.
He stated that he did not wish to begin criticising the NSFAS funding model but believed that all parties needed to acknowledge that a problem existed and required resolution. He warned that UCT faced the risk of reversing the gains made through transformation if the current situation persisted. Referring to earlier comments made by the Deputy VC, he stated that if institutions were compelled to make decisions solely on financial considerations, the consequences for transformation would be severe. He cautioned that if each institution focused only on its own interests, the outcome would ultimately be detrimental to students and the country as a whole. This, he explained, was why he had earlier described the discussion as potentially leading down a dangerous path.
Prof Moshabela also addressed the suggestion that NSFAS-funded students should simply be allocated to lower-cost residences. He explained that UCT had considered this option and that, shortly after his arrival at the university in 2024, he had participated in budget discussions where precisely that proposal had been examined. However, he noted that UCT had a highly diverse student population and that concentrating students from similar socio-economic backgrounds within particular residences raised broader concerns regarding inclusion, non-discrimination, and transformation. He stated that these considerations had to be balanced carefully.
He added that, from a purely financial perspective, it would be easier for UCT if all students were housed in residences costing approximately R60,000 per year, requiring the university to cover only a relatively small shortfall. However, he argued that such an approach would not serve students’ long-term interests or support the kind of institutional environment UCT sought to foster. He maintained that UCT wanted students to graduate having interacted with peers from a broad range of socio-economic backgrounds.
The VC further stated that UCT had conducted a survey in 2024 which revealed that many students did not wish to move into the relatively cheaper residences available within the UCT system. He noted that it was only in 2026 that students had, of their own accord, begun to choose such residences in greater numbers. He stated that the university now had to consider the implications of that trend, particularly if students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds became concentrated in specific residences. He emphasised that these were among the many factors the university had to consider and that UCT’s approach extended beyond financial considerations to encompass the holistic development of students.
He concluded by appealing for moderation in the discussion and cautioning against overly simplistic or absolute positions. He stated that balancing the competing interests involved was complex and that no aspect of the issue could be regarded as straightforward. He urged all parties to work collectively towards a reasonable solution that balanced the interests of NSFAS, universities, students, the higher education sector, and the broader public.
Mr T Louw (ANC) rose on a point of order. He stated that, while he appreciated the VC’s call for collaboration, he was concerned that he had directed significant criticism towards NSFAS and its shortcomings. He appealed to the VC to maintain consistency in his submissions. While acknowledging that NSFAS had weaknesses, he stressed that the scheme existed to support the poorest students and argued that discussions should remain focused on that central objective
.
Mr Lonzi stated that he did not intend to spend much time on the accommodation issue, noting that the Committee had previously discussed it with the VC in his capacity as a representative of USAf. He emphasised that the matter was not unique to UCT but affected the higher education sector as a whole. In his view, the DHET ultimately bore responsibility for addressing the issue because it was responsible for ensuring equitable access to education across the country. He argued that students should be treated consistently regardless of whether they attended Walter Sisulu University, UCT, the University of Pretoria, or the University of Fort Hare. He therefore urged the Department to work closely with NSFAS and USAf to develop a long-term solution. He noted that universities such as the University of Pretoria and Stellenbosch University faced similar challenges, as did many other institutions.
He further stated that all parties should agree on a fundamental principle: once a student had been identified as eligible for NSFAS funding, particularly where eligibility arose through receipt of a SASSA grant, that student’s educational journey should not be undermined by circumstances beyond their control. He argued that it was unacceptable for a student to complete their studies successfully yet be unable to graduate because of financial disputes arising between institutions and funding bodies. He noted that if a student had failed academically, the situation would be different, but where students had excelled academically and still faced barriers to graduation because of debt, responsibility lay with the Department, NSFAS, universities, Parliament, and all stakeholders collectively. He therefore urged the Department to prioritise resolving the issue.
Turning to another matter, Mr Lonzi referred to audit findings previously mentioned by the Deputy Minister. He requested that the Chief Financial Officer provide a written response, given the limited time available, indicating what steps had been taken to address the findings and how far the process had progressed. He added that, apart from the issue in question, the university’s audit outcomes had generally been positive.
Mr Vincent Motholo, CFO, UCT, explained that the audit finding in question related to a conflict of interest involving transactions entered into between the university and members of staff who were required to declare their interests. He stated that the university took comfort from the fact that those transactions had not resulted in any instances of fraud. However, from a legislative compliance perspective, the required declarations should have been made. He indicated that the university was actively working to improve staff compliance with disclosure requirements and that the matter remained an ongoing area of focus.
Mr Lonzi stated that he wished to raise the issue of student debt, noting that it was highly contentious and that the Committee had previously discussed it with USAf when the VC had appeared before the Committee in that capacity. He remarked that he frequently had this debate with chief financial officers, including the CFO of Nelson Mandela University. He observed that when debts were classified as effectively irrecoverable, institutions were implicitly acknowledging that significant efforts had been made to recover the funds without success. He questioned what benefit accrued to universities from continuing to withhold the qualifications of affected students, or whether the rationale was that withholding qualifications would place sufficient pressure on graduates to return and settle their debts. He asked whether universities could not adopt alternative debt recovery measures that were less punitive and did not centre on withholding qualifications and degrees. While acknowledging that the VC might disagree with him, he maintained that the practice was punitive in nature.
Mr Motholo responded that Mr Lonzi was correct in observing that the practice had originally been introduced as a debt collection mechanism and had served that purpose for a period of time. He acknowledged that the Member’s concerns regarding students’ ability to access the labour market raised legitimate questions about whether the approach remained sustainable. He explained that the university had processes in place that enabled students to obtain employment both within the institution and in the broader labour market where qualifications could be made available. However, he stated that the discussion had created an opportunity to reconsider the existing process and explore alternative mitigation measures, including potential collaboration with SARS as a partner in debt collection. He added that this was an area the university was actively examining.
Mr Lonzi thanked the CFO and stated that he had advanced similar arguments during previous engagements with USAf when the VC had represented the organisation. He argued that universities across South Africa should consider less punitive methods of recovering outstanding debt. He noted that all parties could agree that qualifications and degrees were the primary means through which young people gained access to employment opportunities. He questioned how a graduate was expected to secure employment and earn an income if the institution withheld the very qualification required to enter the labour market until payment had been made. He stated that the discussion was long overdue but welcomed USAf’s willingness to engage with the issue.
Mr Lonzi indicated that his penultimate point related to the Gaza and Israel resolution. He explained that he had not originally intended to raise the matter, but comments made earlier by Honourable Khakhau had prompted him to do so to ensure that the Committee did not inadvertently convey an incorrect message to the public. He stated that his understanding was that the resolution related specifically to the IDF and the military activities forming part of the matter before the ICJ, rather than constituting a blanket boycott of all individuals or institutions in Israel. He requested that the Chairperson of Council clarify the matter so that the meeting would not conclude with a misunderstanding of the institution’s position.
Adv Arendse responded that the resolution was entirely linked to and concerned with the activities of the IDF, the war in Gaza, and what had been described as genocide taking place there. He stated that the resolution was grounded in the values of the university. While acknowledging the importance of financial considerations, he took the opportunity to provide context regarding donor funding. He explained that the R200 million figure referred to funding spread over ten years, amounting to approximately R20 million per annum. He noted that the first tranche of R20 million had been spent in accordance with the agreement between the donor and the university, entirely on the Neuroscience Institute, and had not involved student funding. To the best of his recollection, the donation as a whole had not been directed towards student funding.
He further stated, for the record, that donor funding had increased by more than 11% since 2024, although the number of donors had declined. He noted that it could reasonably be assumed that some of those who had withdrawn support or ceased donating had done so because they disagreed with the Gaza resolution. He reiterated that this was the relevant context. He confirmed that the resolution related specifically to the activities of the IDF and did not concern academic freedom. Rather, it reflected the view that academics should not engage in or associate themselves with activities that directly or indirectly contributed to the conflict and thereby rendered them complicit.
Mr Lonzi stated that the clarification was important.
Mr Arendse then requested to be excused, noting that he had submitted a request the previous day because he needed to attend a disciplinary hearing of considerable importance, one aspect of which could potentially affect a participant in the proceedings. Turning to the issue of union representation, he indicated that he would address the matter in his capacity as Chairperson of Council. He stated that UCT had prepared a formal response which could be submitted for the record. In summary, however, the Council was scheduled to meet on Saturday. He explained that the university’s position had always been that employees, rather than unions, were represented on Council, with academic staff and two PASS staff representatives serving as Council members. He noted that Council was not a constituency-based body and that its members did not represent constituencies in the same manner as Members of Parliament. He explained that ministerial appointees to Council, including himself and four others, were required to act in the best interests of the university.
Returning briefly to the donor funding issue, Mr Arendse stated that the state remained by far the largest funder of tertiary institutions. He noted that, when the Gaza resolution had been under consideration, he had not received a single telephone call, email, or message from government, a Minister, or any representative of the state suggesting that the university should take into account South Africa’s case before the International Court of Justice. He explained that the decision had been left entirely to Council members, who had been required to determine what they believed to be in the best interests of the institution. Through a process of majority decision-making, Council had resolved to adopt the resolution. He emphasised that this aspect of university governance should be respected across the higher education sector.
He added that a formal response could be submitted for the record and reiterated that, in summary, UCT complied with the Higher Education Act and its Statute regarding employee representation. He stated that any move to introduce direct union representation on Council would require amendments to both the institutional statute and the university’s own governance instruments. Such a process would necessarily involve consultation with a range of constituencies, including the Institutional Forum, Convocation, Senate, and other relevant structures.
Mr Lonzi remarked that the Chairperson had already utilised some of his allocated time but requested some leniency. He explained that he had intended to advise the unions that, in his view, their proposal was not grounded in the Higher Education Act, which referred specifically to academic and non-academic staff rather than unions. He observed that the Act did not expressly require student representative councils to deploy members to Council, as it referred only to student representatives. Consequently, he suggested that a university could theoretically hold separate elections for student representatives independent of the SRC while remaining compliant with the Act.
He stated that a more viable request would be for unions to seek forms of recognition similar to those adopted at institutions such as Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University and the University of Pretoria, where unions participated as observers or were afforded more meaningful engagement within bargaining structures. He suggested that such demands would be more realistic. He warned that requiring every union to be directly represented on university councils could prove disruptive, particularly at institutions with six or seven unions holding divergent ideological positions. While he did not disagree with the concerns raised by the unions, he maintained that their proposals should be reframed in a manner consistent with the relevant legislative framework.
Adv Arendse sought clarification as to whether the unions intended presenting their proposal at the Council meeting scheduled for Saturday.
The Chairperson responded that the matter was internal to the institution and suggested that those concerned engage directly with the Chairperson of Council outside the Committee proceedings. He stated that such internal matters were not issues in which the Committee should become involved.
Mr Arendse noted that the Registrar had already been engaging with the unions on the matter.
The Chairperson reiterated that it was an internal matter that would be dealt with through the appropriate institutional processes. He indicated that he intended to give the Director-General an opportunity to speak before the meeting concluded but first needed to release Members who had questions to pose to Ministers during the social cluster sitting, some of which already appeared on the order paper.
Prof Moshabela indicated that he had wished to make a contribution earlier on the accommodation issue, before the Deputy Minister’s intervention.
The Chairperson confirmed that he would allow the VC to speak but requested that Dr Christians proceed with her questions first, given that some Members needed to be excused to attend the social cluster session.
Dr D Christians (DA) stated that she wished briefly to return to the accommodation debate and observed that the Director-General might also wish to comment on the issue when allowed speaking. She noted that the Committee had heard that NSFAS allegedly owed UCT R540 million and that the VC had made it clear that numerous factors complicated direct comparisons between institutions. She acknowledged that the Committee understood this complexity and recognised that similar debates occurred internationally, where universities with differing rankings charged varying fees and where funding and quality considerations formed part of the broader discussion.
She expressed the view that the accommodation crisis was not unique to UCT but was recurring across the sector. Student debt continued to grow, universities were carrying increasing financial burdens, and pressures on the system were intensifying. She observed that both the SRC and the Institutional Forum had argued that the funding model required reform. In her view, the Committee was becoming distracted by secondary issues rather than addressing what she regarded as the core problem, namely the NSFAS funding model itself.
Directing a question to the university, Dr Christians asked whether UCT believed that the current funding model was suitable for a city such as Cape Town. She further asked whether the university was proposing that the model be adapted to accommodate its particular circumstances and, if so, what changes it would recommend.
Prof Moshabela responded that, in the interests of time, he would be direct. He stated that UCT currently had approximately 5 000 NSFAS-funded students and that the institution did not wish to see that number decline, particularly given existing concerns in that regard. On the contrary, UCT wished to increase the number of NSFAS-funded students as far as possible. He explained that if the university was bringing students from provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape to Cape Town, it wanted to ensure that they were housed appropriately and did not have to worry about accommodation. Consequently, UCT’s position was that funding should cover all student costs, including accommodation.
He acknowledged concerns regarding rising accommodation costs and the resulting pressure on NSFAS. However, he argued that if accommodation was accepted as an essential component of transformation and student support, then the associated costs should be fully funded. He stated that he was willing to engage on how NSFAS could pay the actual costs incurred in university-owned residences in order to ensure that students were adequately supported. He added that, from UCT’s perspective, the central issue was ensuring that the funding model covered the full cost of study and that, where possible, intermediary costs should be reduced so that a greater proportion of funding reached students directly.
Prof Moshabela further acknowledged broader structural challenges, including the fact that the R350 000 household income threshold had remained unchanged for an extended period and had not kept pace with inflation. He noted that increasing demand for higher education had placed additional pressure on families earning above both the R350 000 and R600 000 thresholds. Such families frequently approached the university questioning why the thresholds had not been adjusted. He recognised that NSFAS itself faced budgetary constraints and that any move towards a more comprehensive funding model could reduce the total number of students who could be funded. Nevertheless, he maintained that for students residing in university accommodation, the priority should be ensuring that they were fully funded.
Dr Christians responded that it had become clear throughout the engagement that the existing NSFAS funding model was no longer functioning effectively for universities. She suggested that some degree of decentralisation might allow institutions to adapt funding arrangements to their particular circumstances and needs. In her view, the model was no longer serving students adequately. She indicated that she would leave further explanation to the Director-General and noted that investment in student accommodation infrastructure represented another significant challenge facing the sector, a point that had also been raised by the Deputy Minister.
Turning to transformation, Dr Christians stated that Parliament continued to grapple with the issue of transformation throughout the academic pipeline. Referring to slide 31 of the university’s presentation, she noted that UCT had provided a detailed racial breakdown of employees by category, including African, Coloured, Indian, and White staff. However, she observed that the level of detail diminished in later sections dealing with academic progression, senior academic appointments, Profships, and senior lecturer positions. She expressed concern that aggregated figures could conceal important trends within the academic pipeline and requested that the university provide a detailed racial breakdown of senior lecturers, associate Profs, and Profs across the African, Coloured, Indian, and White categories.
Prof Collier-Reed asked whether the university should provide the information immediately or submit it in writing.
Ms Mhango thanked the Member for the question and stated that the university did possess the data. However, she suggested that it would be more useful to provide the information in writing because the figures had been aggregated and a more detailed breakdown could then be supplied.
Dr Christians indicated that this would be acceptable but asked Ms Mhango, based on the figures available to her, to identify the point within the academic pipeline at which transformation began to slow.
Ms Mhango responded that transformation began to slow at the senior academic levels, particularly at the level of associate Prof and Prof, where the most significant gaps remained. She noted that the university had introduced a number of transformation initiatives, including its Academic Transformation Programme, specifically aimed at addressing those disparities. While there had been some progress at lecturer level, she acknowledged the Member’s concern regarding the need for more detailed disaggregated data. She added that, within the broad black category, substantial work remained necessary at Prof and associate Prof level from a transformation perspective.
Dr Christians stated that her concern related to the age profile of the academic workforce and the sustainability of the university’s future academic pipeline. Given the demographic profile of current Profs across faculties, she asked whether the university believed that its existing pipeline of African, Coloured, and Indian academics was sufficiently strong to replace those academics who would be leaving the institution in the coming years.
Prof Ramugondo stated that this was a very important question which UCT was taking seriously and that a number of initiatives had been introduced to address that concern precisely. She explained that one initiative which had been particularly important in helping to close the gap identified by the Executive Director of Human Resources, was what UCT referred to as the Next Generation Profiate. These were colleagues already employed by UCT at senior lecturer and associate Prof level, and the programme focused on addressing the structural barriers that impeded promotion. She stated that it had been important for UCT to recognise that the problem did not usually lie with individuals themselves, and that if the institution was successful in attracting talented academics, it should be concerned when those individuals were not progressing as expected. She explained that the initiative worked specifically with colleagues who should be progressing and assisted them in preparing applications for promotion.
She added that UCT also participated in the New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP), a national initiative for which the university was grateful, as it brought new academics into the sector. She explained that one structural barrier identified over the years was that entry-level lecturers often became overwhelmed by heavy undergraduate teaching loads. At universities of high standing, it was common for newly qualified doctoral graduates to be afforded time to publish from their doctoral research, something which was difficult to achieve when they were fully occupied with undergraduate teaching responsibilities. She said the nGAP had provided an important indication of the structural barriers that needed to be addressed.
Prof Ramugondo further stated that UCT also operated an Emerging Research Programme, which was available to all staff because everyone required support. She noted that signalling that only people of colour or Black staff required support conveyed the wrong message. She said there were two additional initiatives she wished to highlight. The first was the Employment Equity Fund, through which heads of department or deans could approach the executive to motivate for the appointment of exceptionally talented candidates from historically disadvantaged groups at associate Prof or Prof level. This effectively enabled targeted recruitment where necessary. The second, and particularly exciting, initiative was the Accelerated Transformation Academic Programme, which addressed concerns regarding the ageing professoriate. She explained that it was no longer sufficient to focus solely on existing academic staff and that the institution also needed to pay attention to postgraduate students, particularly Black African and Coloured students who had a passion for academia. Through this initiative, UCT sought to encourage such students to remain within the academic system and pursue academic careers.
Mr A Sauls (PA) stated that he wished to begin by emphasising that his commitment to racial transformation was not focused on a single race but rather on a balanced approach. He explained that he wanted to change the way racial transformation was conceptualised. He said that when he heard that 20% of students were Coloured, many expected him to celebrate the increase. However, what interested him was the movement towards a balanced approach in which all students were regarded as Africans and represented proportionately. He stated that this was his central concern and that he wanted it to be understood that he was equally encouraged by figures showing 20% Coloured students, 23% White students, 44% Black African students, and a slight increase to 7% among Indian South Africans. In his view, all of these groups should be regarded as Africans.
He asked whether it was correct that applications from Coloured students had increased by 5% and requested confirmation from the Deputy VC (Academic) that he had interpreted the presentation correctly.
Prof Collier-Reed confirmed, through the Chairperson, that applications from Coloured students had indeed increased for the 2026 academic year.
Mr Sauls stated that he needed matters explained in very simple terms and asked whether the figures showed that more Coloured students had applied to study at UCT compared with previous years. He further asked whether it was correct that Coloured students had accepted firm offers from the university at a higher rate than Black African and White students.
Prof Collier-Reed confirmed that, for 2026, Coloured students had the highest take-up rate, which he believed was approximately 53%.
Mr Sauls then asked whether it was true that UCT had made fewer offers to Coloured students than to White and Black students.
Prof Collier-Reed explained that the university followed a rigorous admissions process in which offers were made to eligible students who met the admission requirements. He stated that every student who met those requirements received an offer. He added that the university did not make judgements about applicants beyond assessing whether they met the established thresholds.
Mr Sauls responded that the presentation itself contained the relevant figures and asked the Deputy VC to answer directly and transparently rather than assuming he had not studied the presentation. He stated that the figures showed that the university made fewer offers to Coloured students and more offers to Black and White students.
Prof Collier-Reed confirmed that this was correct and explained that it reflected the pattern of applications received.
Mr Sauls stated that this was the fact he wished to explore and asked whether the university understood the implications. He argued that Coloured students were demonstrating increasing interest in studying at UCT, that the university was making more offers to Black and White students than to Coloured students, and that Coloured students were accepting offers at a higher rate than either Black African or White students, despite receiving fewer offers. He asked whether that situation was fair.
Prof Collier-Reed reiterated that offers were made to every student who met the admission requirements and that every eligible student received an offer. He stated that fewer offers were made to Coloured students because there were fewer Coloured applicants overall.
Prof Moshabela added that the figures reflected a pattern rather than a deliberate institutional action. He explained that one could have a large applicant pool within which relatively few individuals met the required criteria, while another group with a smaller applicant pool could have a higher proportion of applicants who met the criteria, resulting in more offers being made. He stressed that this did not necessarily indicate any systematic form of segregation but reflected the outcome of the admissions process. He characterised it as a pattern rather than an action.
Mr Sauls responded by acknowledging that the VC was a highly intelligent individual, considerably more so than himself, but stated that he wished to challenge that reasoning. He argued that the issue was indeed systematic and said he had anticipated such a response based on his previous experiences with Stellenbosch University. He explained that he had identified a case study which, in his view, illustrated the systematic nature of the problem and asked the VC to consider it carefully rather than dismissing it.
He referred to a Grade 12 learner named Cameron Reid, whom he described as a Coloured student with outstanding academic results, including distinctions in Mathematics and Physical Science. He stated that she was the country’s leading school debater and remained the national champion. He explained that she had applied to UCT, UKZN, the University of Pretoria, VUT and other institutions, selecting Medicine as her first choice and Dentistry as her second. According to Mr Sauls, all of the universities, including UCT, had declined her application for Medicine and instead offered her a place in Accounting. He described her as a brilliant learner from a disadvantaged community who had excelled academically, in leadership, and in debating, and asked whether it was fair that she was not admitted to study Medicine.
Prof Moshabela responded by recounting that UCT had rejected his own application to study Medicine approximately thirty years earlier. He explained that he had subsequently studied Medicine at UKZN, completed further qualifications at the Medical University of South Africa (Medunsa), Wits, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and had eventually been approached by UCT on several occasions when the institution was searching for its next VC. He remarked that he had long felt aggrieved by that rejection and had considered it unfair at the time, although he had since forgiven the institution. He stated that he could therefore understand why the situation described did not feel fair.
Mr Sauls replied that his respect for the VC had increased as a result of that response and that it resonated deeply with him. He stated that Cameron Reid was not an isolated case and that many similar examples existed. Given that the VC understood the concern being raised, he asked whether the institution would examine more closely the systemic limitations affecting students such as her. He argued that students who had devoted themselves entirely to academic achievement should not be pushed out of the system when their aspiration was to study professions such as Medicine. While acknowledging that the intention might not be discriminatory, he maintained that the framework nonetheless produced exclusionary outcomes. He therefore requested the VC’s commitment to investigate the matter.
Prof Moshabela confirmed that he gave the Member that commitment.
Mr Sauls then asked one final question. He stated that he accepted the undertaking from Human Resources that a detailed demographic breakdown would be provided to the Committee and sought confirmation that the category “Black” included Coloured and Indian South Africans alongside Black Africans. He then asked whether it was correct that, at UCT, foreign national Profs outnumbered Black African, Coloured, and Indian South African Profs combined.
Ms Mhango confirmed that this was correct at Prof level, as reflected on her presentation slide.
Mr Sauls then asked whether she considered that situation to be appropriate.
Ms Mhango replied that she did not. She stated that, as Prof Ramugondo had outlined, the institution remained committed to transformation and was seeking to change that picture through the various programmes that had been implemented.
Mr Sauls thanked Ms Mhango.
Responses by the DHET
The DG stated that he could not remain silent when presented with an opportunity to engage on the issue of student accommodation. He remarked that, when the Chairperson had opened the meeting, he had assumed the discussion would be guided towards a dedicated engagement on student accommodation. However, as proceedings progressed, the discussion had broadened and certain assertions had been made that could not be fully substantiated within the limited time available.
He stated that the Department’s position was that a report already existed from the Ministerial Committee on the Review of the Provisioning of Student Housing and that, on the basis of that report, the Department had also developed a policy on minimum norms and standards for student housing in public investments. He explained that the system had therefore been guided by clear policy directives, which should make it difficult for non-compliant practices to emerge. However, he argued that it was reasonable to ask institutions whether they experienced difficulties in implementing those policies and what support might be required to facilitate implementation. Given that a significant period had passed since the publication of the policy directives, new challenges may have emerged during implementation which institutions wished to raise. He noted that the guidelines were comprehensive and addressed issues such as costs and services rendered, which were central to the current discussion.
The DG expressed support for the Chairperson’s earlier remarks and request, noting that Honourable Lonzi had also raised the matter and had implicated the Department in efforts to find solutions. He observed that Dr Christians had highlighted the importance of infrastructure and stated that the Department continued to experience slow progress in the rollout of infrastructure projects across universities. Given the imperative of expanding access to higher education, infrastructure resources needed to be utilised strategically to support system growth.
He further noted that the Department had begun engaging on a range of policy matters, including the overall structure of the system. He explained that a key challenge was ensuring that infrastructure investments were supported by robust feasibility studies. Without such studies, there was a risk of repeating mistakes observed in the basic education sector, where schools had been built in response to perceived demand but later stood empty because proper feasibility assessments had not been conducted. He suggested that any future approach would need to involve entities such as the construction sector, Infrastructure South Africa, and relevant housing departments, and should not be limited solely to the post-school education sector. He remarked that one only had to travel around South Africa to observe large quantities of underutilised infrastructure in industrial and other areas to appreciate that the country was not necessarily short of infrastructure resources, despite the accommodation difficulties faced by young people.
He stated that the Department wished to make it clear that student accommodation was a priority. The Department intended to work with USAf and the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector to determine what infrastructure interventions could be pursued. He noted that discussions had already taken place with the Department of Public Works, although those engagements had not progressed as constructively as hoped due to misunderstandings regarding the Department’s objectives. Nevertheless, he believed those engagements had been valuable and stated that the Department was prepared to take responsibility for facilitating cooperation and engagement among all stakeholders. He emphasised that addressing student accommodation remained the Department’s foremost priority and that it fully appreciated the hardships students were experiencing as a result of unresolved accommodation challenges.
Further discussion
Mr Lonzi stated that he wished to place several matters on record. He reminded the Chairperson of his commitment to circulate a report to the Committee and requested that the university also provide written responses to questions which had not been fully addressed during the meeting due to time constraints. He further requested that the VC and CFO provide details supporting the university’s claim that no profit was generated from university-owned accommodation, including a breakdown of costs and income.
He added that he had refrained from interrupting Mr Sauls’ earlier engagement but wished to note that, in his understanding, where ten places were available and twenty applicants met the minimum requirements, admission decisions would ultimately be determined by the competitiveness of the applicants’ results. Thus, a student could satisfy the minimum criteria but still not secure admission. He stressed that the shortage of spaces within post-school education was not solely a university problem. While he was not suggesting that Cameron Reid’s academic results lacked competitiveness and indeed believed they were likely to be highly competitive, he wished to afford the university the benefit of the doubt and suggested that this was the point Prof Collier-Reed had been attempting to make.
Mr Sauls responded that the issue raised by Mr Lonzi was not the matter under discussion. He explained that this had initially been the university’s response, but that he and the VC had subsequently reached a shared understanding regarding the systemic limitation he had sought to highlight. He noted that the VC had himself acknowledged having been disadvantaged by UCT in the past and had since forgiven the institution.
The Chairperson indicated that he had intended to ask the Chief Financial Officer who audited the institution.
Mr Motholo responded that the university had recently concluded a five-year audit term with PricewaterhouseCoopers and that Ernst & Young had now been appointed as the new external auditor.
The Chairperson stated that the Committee had an arrangement with the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) whereby, when detailed information was required, the Committee could engage with the Auditor-General, who would in turn engage with the institution’s auditors. He indicated that he was particularly interested in obtaining a detailed breakdown of student accommodation figures. He explained that he had reviewed the university’s annual report but had not found the level of detail he sought within the financial statements. Consequently, he intended to write to the Auditor-General, as suggested by Mr Lonzi, to request that the relevant information be obtained from the auditors. He stated that he required an independent assessment of the accommodation figures, which appeared to involve expenditure approaching R900 million and potentially more.
The Chairperson further stated that the Committee would write to the institution with a number of specific questions requiring responses from the VC. He recalled having previously discussed with the DG a proposal that had also been shared with the VC when he appeared before the Committee as a representative of USAf. The proposal envisaged the release of approximately 13,000 withheld certificates following the conclusion of memoranda of understanding between the Departments of Higher Education and National Treasury. Under such an arrangement, if a graduate subsequently secured employment, the system would identify that employment, and the graduate would be reminded to repay the outstanding debt owed to the institution.
He noted that USAf had responded that, in the case of financially distressed universities, National Treasury might need to provide upfront financial support before certificates could be released. Nevertheless, the Committee remained of the view that there was a direct relationship between the number of unemployed graduates and the number of graduates whose certificates were being withheld, as many individuals had completed their studies but lacked documentary proof of their qualifications.
The Chairperson stated that the Committee possessed correspondence showing that Parliament, together with the Department of Higher Education and Training, advertised positions on the basis that applications would be considered incomplete if they did not include all required certificates. He argued that this created a significant obstacle for graduates whose certificates had been withheld. The Committee therefore wished to see those certificates released. He acknowledged that the proposal would require further development, consultation with USAf, engagement with the Department, and subsequent consideration by National Treasury. In the interim, he argued that greater recognition should be afforded to letters of completion and that the DHET, together with the National Treasury, should engage with the South African business sector to ensure that such letters were recognised as carrying the same weight as formal degree certificates. Academic transcripts and records remained available should employers require additional verification. He concluded that poor students who lacked the means to settle outstanding debts should not be punished but should instead be afforded an opportunity to participate fully in the labour market.
He said the second part of the proposal was that the public service, all government departments, municipalities, state-owned entities, and Parliament itself had to accept letters of completion as equivalent to degrees, because a number of graduates had been punished because of the format requirement.
The DG said he supported what the Chairperson had said, noting that even within the department itself, the recruitment and selection policies indicated that a certificate was required.
Remarks by the Chairperson
The Chairperson stated that the Committee would hold a second dedicated engagement on the issue of student accommodation, which he anticipated would also include students, student housing stakeholders, and relevant state agencies. He said he held a different view from the position that institutions could determine accommodation fees without scrutiny, and indicated that the Committee would revisit the matter during the next parliamentary term once Parliament reconvened, as the current term was due to end at the close of the month. He explained that the Committee intended to bring together the ministerial report, USAf, NSFAS, the Competition Commission, relevant Chapter 9 institutions, Infrastructure South Africa, and other stakeholders for a comprehensive discussion on the matter. He noted that the Deputy Minister had indicated that the country was spending more through NSFAS on accommodation than on academic costs and warned that, if left unchecked, NSFAS risked becoming primarily a student accommodation funding entity rather than a student funding institution. He said this was the direction in which matters were heading in the absence of proper regulation of accommodation costs.
He stated that he did not believe education, as a social good, should be commodified, and argued that student accommodation had become a significant commercial commodity sold at the highest possible price. He said all parties present had a responsibility to address the issue because the ultimate victims would be students, not necessarily the current generation, but those currently in lower grades who might be unable to access higher education if the matter was not regulated. He remarked that he could demonstrate the difference between accommodation expenditure in 2022 and current expenditure for a similar number of beneficiaries and argued that the trend was moving in the wrong direction. He warned that this trajectory would undermine the transformation objectives consistently advocated by stakeholders. He noted that NSFAS was currently funding approximately 800 000 students with a budget of R53 billion and suggested that, even with an increase to R55 billion, the number of funded students could decline to 500 000 if the issue remained unresolved. He argued that, within three to four years, the number of funded students could be reduced by half despite a substantial increase in funding. He further cautioned that NSFAS could eventually have a budget of R60 billion while supporting only half the number of students it funded at present. He emphasised that this required a collective response and should not be dismissed as solely a government responsibility.
He further stated that, should the situation remain unresolved, the government might eventually be compelled to divert funding from university subsidies to NSFAS. In that context, he noted that the approximately R2 billion in government subsidies currently received by UCT could ultimately be placed at risk.
The Chairperson explained that his questions regarding foreign nationals would have taken a different form and that he would therefore submit them in writing. He said his interest related specifically to compliance with the Employment Services Act, the Immigration Act, and the policy framework on internationalisation, which the Committee fully supported. He acknowledged that the institution relied on international investment and needed to attract international talent but stressed that the applicable legislative framework had to be followed. He indicated that his questions would focus on whether the institution had complied with those legal requirements and policy frameworks. He further advised that he would write to the institution with additional questions on behalf of Members who had not had an opportunity to raise them during the meeting and that the institution would be afforded more than fourteen days to provide comprehensive responses.
He noted that a number of proposals had emerged during the engagement and observed that the students had approached the matter strategically by ensuring that the SRC’s presentation and recommendations had also been channelled through the Institutional Forum via the Deputy President, effectively resulting in two presentations from the same structure. He indicated that he would also direct further questions to the institution to assist the Committee in gaining a clearer understanding of certain matters.
The Chairperson stated that UCT was an extremely important academic institution and that while the Committee would not always agree with the university, such agreement was not necessary. He said the Committee nevertheless had a responsibility to acknowledge areas in which the institution was performing well, noting that UCT had demonstrated strong performance in a number of respects despite disagreements on certain issues. He reiterated his personal view that the accommodation pricing model was inappropriate, while acknowledging that the university believed its pricing was justified. He noted that this remained a point of disagreement. He added that the Committee had agreed with the VC that the proposal under consideration would at least help unlock opportunities for graduates whose qualifications had been withheld.
He suggested that, going forward, the Committee’s correspondence to Council might request consideration of a proposal whereby students who had completed their studies but still owed money would be permitted to participate in graduation ceremonies, even if their certificates remained temporarily withheld. He observed that if certificates were only released several years later, affected graduates might lose the opportunity to participate in a formal graduation ceremony altogether. He said the Committee would ask Council to consider holding graduation ceremonies on Saturdays and allowing such students to graduate while retaining the certificates pending the finalisation of the legislative proposal. He argued that, for many students, particularly first-generation graduates, being denied the opportunity to graduate formally could cause lasting harm.
The Chairperson thanked the students for exercising restraint and refraining from further interventions and apologised for the limitations imposed by time constraints. He remarked that, in recognition of their cooperation, when the institution invited Members to attend elections or campaigns, the Committee would participate collectively as supportive partners rather than as individuals. He thanked all participants for attending and for contributing to a robust engagement, including worker representatives, student leaders, members of the Institutional Forum and its advisers, and NSFAS representatives. He noted that NSFAS had been required to attend the meeting but would not form part of the next engagement the Committee intended to convene, despite being central to many of the issues under discussion. He added that he did not understand why UCT had not referred accommodation providers to the Competition Commission and remarked that he would have done so himself.
He stated that the Committee would now need to conclude proceedings and proceed to the social cluster sitting, where Members had questions directed to Ministers, including questions from Honourable Lonzi and himself. He wished students well in their examinations and in the upcoming SRC elections during the second semester. In a light-hearted remark, he observed that online elections occasionally appeared to produce results influenced by algorithmic interference and commented that, although the preferred candidates had been successful the previous year, he was aware of a rotation practice. He jokingly suggested that if anyone intended programming the algorithm, they should programme it to maintain the same outcome for the next five years.
The University of Cape Town (UCT) Council held an ordinary plenary meeting on Saturday, 22 June 2024.
Among the items on the agenda were two resolutions regarding the Gaza conflict, which were passed by Senate at a meeting held on Friday, 19 April 2024 and then tabled for consideration by Council.
Council debated the two resolutions and following this debate, adopted each by majority decision.
In terms of the first resolution, on the destruction of scholarship and education in Gaza, Senate resolved to:
call, again, for an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid and the return of all captives as contained in the Senate’s resolution of 17 November 2023 condemn the destruction of the education sector in Gaza and the massive scale of killing of teachers and university staff in the current war urge the international community to ensure that the provision of humanitarian aid includes the restoration of the education sector in Gaza express concern and opposition to any attempts to curtail academic freedom by labelling criticism of Israel or Zionist policies as antisemitism reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s conflation of critique of Zionism and Israel’s policies as antisemitism in favour of the Jerusalem Declaration’s dynamic understanding of what constitutes antisemitism express support for academic colleagues in Gaza who are surviving under appalling conditions and our intention to assist in the rebuilding of the academic sector after the war express solidarity with academic colleagues victimised for their willingness to speak out against the educaracide in Gaza.
The second resolution was in regard to research collaborations with members of the Israeli Defence Force and the wider Israeli military establishment. In terms of this resolution, no UCT academic may enter into relations, or continue relations with, any research group and/or network whose author affiliations are with the Israeli Defence Force, and/or the broader Israeli military establishment.
Council will in due course provide further updates through the usual communication channels on some of the other key items discussed at the June 2024 meeting.
SEPTEMBER 29, 2017 11:06Updated: OCTOBER 1, 2017 16:12
Africa’s top university, the University of Cape Town, is debating a proposed academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The proposal was put forward by the Palestine Solidarity Forum, which has called on UCT to implement an academic boycott of Israeli universities. “This academic boycott would require that UCT reject forming any institutional ties with Israeli universities,” the PSF wrote.“The rationale for this call is clear – Palestinian human rights are violated by Israel on a daily basis with the direct and indirect support from Israeli universities… By implementing an academic boycott, UCT takes a principled position in the defense of human rights and academic freedom,” The group claimed.
The matter has been raised for discussion at the UCT Academic Freedom Committee. The committee, however, is only able to make recommendations to the university for consideration by the UCT senate and council, it does not have the authority to make binding decisions on behalf of the school.Klaas Mokgomole, a member of Africans for Peace, said the idea of boycott is taking the focus away from real issues.“First of all, we have very important issues in South Africa that are burning and need urgent attention,” he told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.“For example, we are busy fighting for free, quality and decolonized education. That is why we had the ‘#FeesMustFall’ movement in the past two years. We need the government to work together with institutions of higher learning. The boycott is trying to sway the black students’ focus from real issues that affect them in South Africa.
“This will lead to a cut in funding, and more and more black and underprivileged students will suffer the consequence. It is actually very selfish to suggest such a boycott. This kind of a suggested motion is very anti-black and it cannot be allowed to carry on,” Mokgomole said.“Africans for Peace is about bring two parties to the table and have a dialogue. We need to be promoting peace in the Middle East, not boycotts. Boycotts have not helped so far, however, promoting dialogue will help,” he stressed.Asked how a boycott might affect relations between Israel and South Africa, Mokgomole said ties between the two countries “are very strong.”
“However, a boycott like these would lead to unnecessary consequences, and as a result, the South African black community will suffer at the end,” he said.
Concerned UCT students, parents and alumni have banded together to create an online petition that, once it reaches 2500 signatures, will be handed over to UCT management, which includes the university’s senate and council. “We believe that the implementation of a wholesale academic boycott against Israel violates the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech, guaranteed in Section 16 of the South African Constitution and which are fundamental to the undertaking of education and research,” said the group, which calls itself Concerned Citizens for Academic Freedom at UCT. “Research, teaching and scholarship flourish through robust exchange of ideas across borders and among institutions in different parts of the world, including the Middle East. The true essence of a university is to foster dialogue and develop solutions to problems without regard to political, racial and cultural differences. UCT has always shown these qualities, leading us to celebrate our association with UCT,” it said. “Student groups are well-known for their efforts to isolate the Jewish state’s universities, students and academics. And all too often, student groups like the Palestine Solidarity Forum at UCT do not make the profound distinction between antisemitism, anti-Zionism and criticism of the policies of a particular Israeli government.“It is these blurred lines and misunderstandings that create a negative impact on campus for Jewish students, making them one of the most targeted minority groups at university,” the group added.In an interview with South African Jewish Report, UCT vice-chancellor Max Price, who himself is Jewish, said his “personal position is that there should never be an academic boycott anywhere, and this coincides with the position of UCT up till now.”“Things can change depending on the debate. We should be concerned about academic freedom globally. This year we have been called upon to re-think our position as a university,” he said. He made it clear that the debate was an institutional issue, not a personal one.
Earlier this month, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) said they were working closely with the South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS). Representatives of SAUJS will make a presentation this week to the AFC and have been in communication with university management, and other concerned organizations. “We are concerned both about the nature of this campaign by anti-Israel groups on Campus, as well as the antisemitic rhetoric that may evolve from this debate and its implications for Jewish students who support the values of academic freedom.“The SAJBD and SAZF unequivocally reject academic boycotts, whether aimed at Israeli institutions or those of any other country. Such initiatives are discriminatory and inconsistent with universal academic standards,” the organizations said in a statement.
Both the SAUJS and the Palestine Solidarity Forum have made lengthy presentations to the Academic Freedom Committee, which the body is still considering.
UCT response to calls to support anti-Israel measures
The Palestinian Solidarity Forum (PSF) and the Student Representative Council (SRC) at the University of Cape Town have called upon the University’s management to make a statement on behalf of UCT in solidarity with the Palestinians around the Gaza conflict. In particular there has been a demand for the university to: declare unconditionally that Israel is an apartheid state; support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign; not renew UCT’s contract with the security company G4S; and call for the South African government to cut diplomatic ties with Israel. The University community is distressed by the loss of life as a result of the conflict and we offer our deepest condolences to all the families affected. However, after extensive discussion, UCT management has concluded that we cannot support the statement and demands of the PSF and SRC. The reasons are as follows. Firstly, while as individuals in the management team we all have views on the conflict between Palestine and Israel, and there is significant overlap in our views, when UCT management speaks, it is necessarily a position that it takes on behalf of the institution; it is read by the members of staff, students and the public as an institutional position. So the call to management to support the above is therefore a call to the institution to take a position. UCT is not reluctant to take such a position when there is sufficient clarity on the essential issues, and especially when there is a clear moral imperative. But given how controversial and highly contested the interpretation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is, including disputes over the facts and interpretations of motives, we do not think at this stage that there is a shared or even dominant view on these issues. Does this mean we can do no more than maintain silence? The answer is no. The evidence, from on-campus marches, to Israel Apartheid Week, to the stream of speakers visiting UCT to address related topics, is that a large number of our students and staff feel involved in or affected by the Israel-Palestine issue and would like their UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN iYunivesithi YaseKapa Universiteit van Kaapstad Dr Max Price: Vice-Chancellor Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa Room 101, Bremner Building, Lower Campus, Lovers’ Walk, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700 Tel: +27 (0) 21 650-2105/6 Fax: +27 (0) 21 650-5100 E-mail: vc@uct.ac.za Website: www.uct.ac.za “Our Mission is to be an outstanding teaching and research university, educating for life and addressing the challenges facing our society.” university to show some moral and intellectual leadership on the issue. That, it seems to us, is good enough reason to engage. The University’s role is to create and protect safe spaces for controversial and competing views, and to nurture rational debate on difficult issues in accordance with the principle of academic freedom. We also have a duty to provide thought leadership. We will initiate a project inviting essays from members of the university offering analyses of, arguments about and possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Gaza war. In producing an anthology of position papers from across the university, we hope to re-emphasise the point that on the one hand the university as an institution does not have a single view, and on the other, that the university is a place where ideas, argument and reason matter. Implicit in creating the space for debate is a position on the academic boycott. While there are many in our community who may support divestment, sanctions and other boycotts, UCT (through its Academic Freedom Committee) takes the view that academic boycotts are in a category of their own and should almost never be supported by universities. The day we ban people from speaking on our campus because we do not agree with their politics is the day we sacrifice our commitment to academic freedom and the ability to protect different, unpopular, and dissident views, and set ourselves up to repeat the errors of the Galileo affair. Finally, the PSF and SRC specifically called on UCT management not to renew its contract with G4S. The information about G4S activities and an alleged record of abuses, both in Israel and elsewhere, is disputed, but UCT will conduct its own assessment prior to making a decision on renewing the contract. As is the case with all contracts, when this one becomes due for renewal it will be put out to tender and many factors will be considered, including the findings of this assessment. In summary, while UCT as an institution is unable to support the call to take a stand on the specific issues condemning Israel, we uphold the rights of individual academics and students to do so and will facilitate the promotion of all views and serious debate.
Dr Max Price Vice-Chancellor University of Cape Town
“Our Mission is to be an outstanding teaching and research university, educating for life and addressing the challenges facing our society.”
The American Political Science Association (APSA) selected Profs. Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir to receive the 2026 Heinz I. Eulau Award for their co-authored article titled “Torture’s Bureaucracy and the ‘Legitimacy Effect’,” as it was announced on July 15, 2026.
The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually to honor the best article published in the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics.
The Award Committee explained their decision by stating that “Israel’s Ministry of Justice has a small department in Tel Aviv called ‘The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service Interrogators’ that handles complaints against the Israeli General Security Service regarding the use of torture and other extreme methods of interrogation. Although it has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints, there have been no criminal charges. Despite this, the authors of this paper argue that this unit serves an extremely legitimate purpose.”
The committee added it was “impressed with the paper’s breadth, scope and multi-method approach, including archival research, ethnography, and interviews on the ground. The authors offer both new empirical insights and deep theoretical engagement on a topic that is widely relevant not only to the discipline, but also to society at large. Not only is the topic of wide interest to a range of readers in (and beyond) the discipline, it is also incredibly well-written and deeply engaging. From a methodological perspective, this paper was also a breath of fresh air. As survey experiments and ‘big data’ studies dominate (the mainstream of) the discipline, it was refreshing to see researchers go into the field and do human-facing research, particularly in a very difficult and often dangerous context.”
Kotef and Amir begin their article by citing Lisa Hajjar, a pro-Palestinian scholar from UC Santa Barbara, who wrote, “What distinguishes torture by liberal regimes from illiberal regimes is the energy devoted to frame government policies as ‘legal’.”
The article discusses MAVTAN (the Hebrew acronym for the department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice, the Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators). MAVTAN is tasked with examining complaints of torture in the GSS interrogations and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation. However, Kotef and Amir claim that since “Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By analyzing this failure, we tell a segment of the story of torture in Israel.”
Kotef and Amir claim the Israeli state provides legitimacy to torture “on two levels: internationally, to cordon off external interventions, and domestically, to defuse the internal tension between torture and democracy. It hence allows torture to emerge as a problem that may be addressed procedurally, without ever contending with the violence and the violations of international law.”
The co-authors states, “Our analysis draws on exclusive access to the archive of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), granted to us as part of a three-year collaborative research project conducted between 2021 and 2024. The archive houses more than 6,000 cases documenting the legal support PCATI had provided to torture victims since 1991.”
PCATI is an Israeli non-governmental organization that monitors the use of torture and ill-treatment by Israeli security services against those under detention.
NGO Monitor, which scrutinizes political NGOs, reviewed PCATI and stated: “PCATI regularly circulates unverifiable allegations of Israeli torture, using them as the basis for campaigns of demonization in international forums.” Looking at the figures provided by NGO Monitor, Israel Academia Monitor notes that PCATI is a business with turnover of millions a year.
Kotef and Amir conclude their paper “by arguing that these apparatuses rest on, and are positioned to produce, a specific concept of justice. By obstinately exonerating the GSS of wrongdoing, and by completely disregarding the harms inflicted on the Palestinian plaintiffs, Mavtan presents allegations of torture as falsehoods. Consequently, plaintiffs are presented as fabricators and exaggerators—if not outright malicious—in their search for justice. It is hence a system that does not only deflect allegations pertaining to Israel’s violations of human rights, but also equates justice with invalidating such allegations.”
Kotef and Amir have been profiled by Israel Academia Monitor before. In 2019, IAM reported on BDS activists working at Israeli universities, and Merav Amir was among them. IAM noted she is a long-time supporter of BDS. She was a contributor to the 2012 book The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. In 2015, Amir was described by a Dutch-Palestinian initiative as “an activist in the BDS movement.” She is also one of the initiators of a 2016 petition “Jews Across Northern Ireland Support Sanctions Against Israel,” stating clearly, “We support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, as called for by Palestinian civil society.” The petition also claims that “The State of Israel does not represent the Jewish people” and protests against those who “conflated Jews with Zionists, which is frankly offensive.”
In 2021, in an IAM post titled “Radical Left-Wing Polemics: Hagar Kotef as a Case in Point,” IAM stated we often report on radical scholars who have recruited political-activist students, nurtured them, and provided them with academic positions, either in their own departments or helped them to move abroad. As IAM made clear, there is a flourishing market for Israeli pro-Palestinian academics in the West who provide a cover for BDS and other forms of delegitimization of Israel. IAM noted that Kotef, a former student of Profs. Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki at Tel Aviv University, was recruited by SOAS. As well known, SOAS is a hotbed of anti-Israel activity. At the time, Kotef was the subject of an article that Haaretz published about Israeli left-wing academics who moved abroad because of alleged difficulties of working in Israel. Haaretz wrote that Kotef “was active in Machsom Watch and other left-wing movements.” IAM also discussed Kotef’s book, titled The Colonizing Self Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel, stating that the book was full of left-wing polemics. The acknowledgment in her book reads like a who’s who of anti-Israel radicals. She wrote, “At Soas, my new home, Laleh Khalili, Ruba Salih, Rahul Rao, Charles Tripp, Rafeef Ziadah, and Carlo Bonura have read the manuscript or significant parts of it. The insights and thoughts they provided, their critique and their questions, have been essential to the process of writing it and thinking through its many predicaments.”
To be clear, Israel Academia Monitor doesn’t have the tools to determine whether MAVTAN made the right decision not to press charges against its interrogators. But one thing is certain: Kotef and Amir are not neutral examiners, not least because of their long-time anti-Israel political activism.
More to the point, the APSA Award should ring bells among all those who are concerned about the delegitimization of Israel in the international arena.
By highlighting Hajjar’s statement on liberal regimes using torture as a legal means, Kotef and Amir signal their support for the illiberal regimes.
The Heinz I. Eulau Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best article published in the APSA journal Perspectives on Politics.
Citation from the Award Committee:
Israel’s Ministry of Justice has a small department in Tel Aviv called “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service Interrogators” that handles complaints against the Israeli General Security Service regarding the use of torture and other extreme methods of interrogation. Although it has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints, there have been no criminal charges. Despite this, the authors of this paper argue that this unit serves an extremely legitimate purpose. The committee was impressed with the paper’s breadth, scope and multi-method approach, including archival research, ethnography, and interviews on the ground. The authors offer both new empirical insights and deep theoretical engagement on a topic that is widely relevant not only to the discipline, but also to society at large. Not only is the topic of wide interest to a range of readers in (and beyond) the discipline, it is also incredibly well-written and deeply engaging. From a methodological perspective, this paper was also a breath of fresh air. As survey experiments and “big data” studies dominate (the mainstream of) the discipline, it was refreshing to see researchers go into the field and do human-facing research, particularly in a very difficult and often dangerous context.
Hagar Kotef is a Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Spitz Prize, the C.B. Macpherson Award, and the Yale H. Ferguson Award. Her next book, The Civil Infrastructure of Torture: Administrating Violence in Israel/Palestine, is forthcoming with Oxford UP. Kotef is the co-editor of Theory&Event.
Merav Amir is a Reader of Human Geography at the School of Natural and Built Environment and a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the 2021 recipient of the Emma Goldman Award of the FLAX Foundation for her contributions to feminist research and knowledge in Europe, the 2023 Emma Goldman Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, and a member of the Geography and Geosciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. Her research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Environment and Planning D, International Political Sociology, and Antipode.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service:Sharon Austin (Chair) of the University of Florida, Rebecca Thorpe of the University of Washington, and Samantha Majic of John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Corresponding author: Hagar Kotef is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London (hk11@soas.ac.uk, UK), and serves as the co-editor of Theory & Event. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Colonizing Self: Home and Homelessness in Israel Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020; winner of the 2022 Spitz Prize, C.B. Macpherson Award, and the Yale H. Ferguson Award).
Merav Amir is a Reader of Human Geography in Queen’s University Belfast (m.amir@qub.ac.uk, UK). She is the 2021 recipient of the Emma Goldman Award for outstanding feminist scholarship and a member of the Committee for Geographical Sciences of the Royal Irish Academy. Her research has been published in Environment and Planning D, Antipode, International Political Sociology, Environment and Planning F, and Geografiska Annaler.
This article tells the story of one small department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice: “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators” (in Hebrew: Mavtan). Tasked with examining complaints of torture in GSS interrogations, and determining whether they merit launching a criminal investigation, Mavtan has reviewed more than 1,450 complaints to date. None of these, however, had ever led to criminal charges. By analysing this failure, we tell a segment of the story of torture in Israel and, more broadly, of the legal bureaucracy that makes state and colonial violence possible. Despite the failure to produce concrete outcomes, Mavtan is a very industrious unit. We argue that this extensive bureaucratic labor creates a semblance of the rule of law by performing an adherence to hallmarks of good governance, such as transparency and accountability. Paraphrasing Mitchell (1999), we call this semblance the “legitimacy effect,” as it works to produce state legitimacy on two levels: internationally, to cordon off external interventions, and domestically, to defuse the internal tension between torture and democracy. It hence allows torture to emerge as a problem that may be addressed procedurally, without ever contending with the violence and the violations of international law it necessarily entails.
Torture needs a bureaucracy.
—Henry Shue 2006, 236
What distinguishes torture by liberal regimes from illiberal regimes is the energy devoted to frame government policies as “legal.”
—Lissa Hajjar 2011, 202
In a plain office building in Tel Aviv, home to Israel’s Ministry of Justice (MoJ), sits a small department called “The Inspector for Complaints Against General Security Service (GSS) Interrogators (in Hebrew, Mavtan ). So small a department indeed, that in its first twenty years it only had a single member of staff (Turkel 2010). The department is tasked with handling complaints against the Israeli General Security Service (GSS) regarding the use of torture and other illicit interrogation methods. That is, it is tasked with rendering GSS interrogators accountable for any violations of the categorical prohibition of torture dictated by the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, of which Israel is a signatory. This is by no means a trivial task. It is estimated that many of the hundreds of Palestinians arrested by the Israeli security forces every year are subjected to interrogation methods that constitute torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment (TIDT) according to International Law (Addameer 2022; Al Haq 2011). This scale alone, which has been documented before October 7th, 2023 and since then has only mounted, renders such internal examinations crucial. And yet despite the extensive evidence of the systematic use of TIDT against Palestinian interrogees and despite receiving more than 1,450 complaints of torture from its establishment in 1992 to date, Mavtan has recommended opening a criminal investigation in only three cases, and even those failed to yield indictments.
Other scholars have called us to account for the violence embedded in what Akhil Gupta (2012, 23) identifies as “the very procedures of bureaucracy”; violence that is embedded into rigid procedures, into bureaucracy’s facelessness, its routinized practices and structures, and which often remains hidden or at any rate is rarely thematized as violence. Our task here, however, extends beyond exploring how Mavtan, as an example of bureaucratic structures that are designed to mitigate or address forms of violence, fails due to the nature of bureaucracy itself, or due to what Nick Cheesman (2019, 179) identifies in the case of Myanmar as the brutality concealed behind “the banality of paperwork.” Mavtan’s failure to deliver justice to torture victims is evident to the extent that it need not be our conclusion (Kretzmer and Ronen 2021; PCATI 2022; Weill and Ballas 2013). This failure rather serves as our point of departure. Examining the establishment of this unit and its mode of operation reveals that Mavtan has little to do with preventing torture or securing human rights, and more with shielding Israel from interventions by external judiciaries.
The structural and procedural robustness of the Israeli judicial system has long been instrumental in fending Israel against international interventions concerning its treatment of Palestinians (due to the complementarity principle, which limits the jurisdiction of international courts over cases which are adjudicated domestically). This became most evident in January 2024, when Israel stood in front of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to defend itself against the accusation of genocide brought by South Africa. Alongside the claim that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, the merits of Israel’s legal system played a key role in the arguments presented by Israel’s legal representatives. Addressing the court, Gilad Noam, Israel’s Deputy Attorney General for International Law, urged the ICJ to dismiss South Africa’s case by claiming that the Israeli judiciary is “effective, independent and impartial.” He argued that as it enjoys “full institutional independence” and “ensures accountability,” the court can rely on Israel’s legal system to prosecute any breaches of international law (ICJ CR 2024/2, 72-3).1 Mavtan is one example of such an “effective, independent and impartial” judicial unit that presumably “ensures accountability.” In this sense, it serves as an emblem for the entire Israeli judicio-bureaucracy on which Israel relies to cordon off international interventions.
As we will argue, Mavtan plays this role through extensive bureaucratic work that performatively abides by the principles of transparency, accountability, and proper relations of governance and oversight, which, in turn, adheres to a particular language of procedural democracy. Our stakes here therefore go beyond the operation of Mavtan as a specific unit, and also beyond the cases of both torture (as a particular form of state violence) and Israel (as a specific context). The story of Mavtan shows how bureaucratic apparatuses can mitigate the tensions between the rule of law and the practices and structures of state violence.
Our analysis draws on exclusive access to the archive of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), granted to us as part of a three-year collaborative research project conducted between 2021 and 2024. The archive houses more than 6,000 cases documenting the legal support PCATI had provided to torture victims since 1991. For this analysis, we focused on cases filed between 2012 and 2022 (125 cases in total). Available documents included the plaintiffs’ depositions, the formal complaints submitted to Mavtan on their behalf by PCATI, transcripts of Mavtan’s examinations (the questionings of GSS interrogators),2 dismissal decisions by the Mavtan Comptroller, and appeals against these decisions.3
The analysis is also based on 24 responses to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests PCATI received between 2006 and 2023, and on transcripts of other communications between the organization and officials in the MoJ during this period.
Our findings were further informed by our ethnographic research with the PCATI team, carried out between 2021 and 2024, and on countless conversations with the organization’s current and former staff, who shared with us their vast experience, insights, and observations. Additional data were gathered through interviews with human rights experts who have decades of experience representing torture victims: Sahar Fransis, Lea Tzemel and Avigdor Feldman; with three former GSS interrogators, with the Mavtan Comptroller, Shlomo Abramzon, and with Mavtan’s prior and current directors, Jana Mudzgurishvilly and Guy Asher.4
Developing the wider argument by focusing on Mavtan’s work and through these specific resources continues a tradition of thinking about bureaucracies shaped under and after colonial rule by way of their materiality: the circulation of documents, correspondences, affidavits, appeals, requests for information, opaque procedural mazes, delayed responses, lengthy waits, evaluating official and informal communications. As such research has shown, these are the praxes of the everyday that configure political relations, structures, and values (cf. Auyero 2012; Gupta 2012; Hull 2012).
In what follows we first situate our analysis within a brief history of the relationship between the GSS and the Israeli judiciary (in the first section), and then explicate our theoretical argument more systematically (in the second section). We propose seeing Mavtan as part of a system geared to establish state legitimacy, which is oriented both “outwards” (to shield Israel from international interventions) and “inwards” (to produce its selfimage as a democracy). We continue by reviewing Mavtan’s history and structure and presenting the idea of bureaucratic laboriousness which emerged through the institutional transformations the unit has undergone (third and fourth sections; “Mavtan: Structure and History” and “Bureaucratic Industriousness”). The notion of bureaucratic laboriousness is empirically explored in the next two sections where we show how a system that has been assigned to deliver justice and is predicated on transparency and accountability, is in fact constituted to fail: the fifth section (“Accountability: Meticulous Examinations”) focuses on accountability by analyzing how Mavtan examines complaints of torture and ill-treatment. We show that these examinations are not merely ineffective, but are weaponized to counteract allegations of torture. Turning to transparency, the following section (“Transparency: The Non-Recording Cameras”) examines a system of close-circuit cameras introduced into GSS interrogation rooms and shows how, despite bringing an unprecedented level of transparency, this system was configured to conceal, rather than reveal, the fact of torture. Both sections thus complete a similar trajectory: both examine the principles of good governance underpinning the establishment of Mavtan, expound on how they were implemented to ensure they fail, and analyse the effects of this continuous failure and the impunity it effectively grants GSS interrogators. As Moyukh Chatterjee (2019, 22) identifies, such impunity is not the result of democracies’ “breakdown, a state of exception, corruption, and illegality,” but also what ultimately constitutes legality itself. We conclude by arguing that these apparatuses rest on, and are positioned to produce, a specific concept of justice. By obstinately exonerating the GSS of wrongdoing, and by completely disregarding the harms inflicted on the Palestinian plaintiffs, Mavtan presents allegations of torture as falsehoods. Consequently, plaintiffs are presented as fabricators and exaggerators—if not outright malicious—in their search for justice. It is hence a system that does not only deflect allegations pertaining to Israel’s violations of human rights, but also equates justice with invalidating such allegations.
A Brief History of Torture in Israel
The working of Mavtan we review in this paper is to be situated within a longer history of the use of torture in Israel (or more accurately, a history of the relations between GSS’s torture practices and the Israeli judiciary) for which we cannot do justice here. The first chapter in this history would begin in the early state years and end roughly in 1987. During this period, the executive and judiciary branches preferred to turn a blind eye to how the GSS conducted itself, allowing the GSS to effectively operate with full impunity (Al Haq 1990; Cohen and Golan 1992; Langer and Bishara 1984).5
In 1987, following a series of high-profile scandals which exposed the GSS’s unruliness, the Landau Commission was established and marked the beginning of a new era. Formally, this was the era in which Israel introduced judicial oversight over the GSS interrogation methods, also in light of the coming into force of the UN Convention Against Torture in that same year ( marking the potential problematics torture would pose for Israel in the international arena henceforth). Effectively, however, this era marked the introduction of torture into the Israeli legal system; torture became an ordered and sanctioned form of state violence (Hajjar 2004). Indeed, the Landau Commission justified the resort to what it euphemistically called “moderate measures of physical pressure” during interrogations as long as these measures were not too “excessive”, and most famously introduced a classified list of authorized torture methods (Landau Commission 1987, 72).6 In so doing, it constituted a seminal change in the relationship between torture and the law that would later be adopted by the United States (Hajjar 2006; Khalili 2013; Yoo 2012). For the sake of our argument here, it should be noted that this commission was mainly troubled by the fact that the GSS evaded judicial oversight, that whenever allegations of torture were raised in court, the interrogators involved would simply lie under oath,7 and that these jeopardized “the image of the State as a lawabiding polity” (Landau Commission 1987, 49, emphasis added). The Commission therefore took upon itself the task of mending the relationship between the GSS and the Israeli judicial system, including, among other measures, recommending the establishment of Mavtan ( Kremnitzer 1989).
The next significant milestone in that history was the 1999 landmark ruling of the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) in Public Committee Against Torture in Israel vs. State of Israel. The ruling, which was interpreted at the time as “a bold prohibition” of the use of TIDT, introduced, in effect, “a torture policy” (Mann and Shatz 2010, 60-62). What has been “truly new” following this decision, Mann and Shatz argue, “is the administrative structure in which torture is managed” (63). While it outlawed torture and made way for holding interrogators criminally responsible for using TIDT, the ruling also introduced the “necessity defense.” Adopted from the French-Algerian context (Macmaster 2004), the “necessity defense” could shield interrogators from criminal liability, post-factum, if during an interrogation they believe that they had to use illegal interrogation methods to thwart an imminent threat. Shafir (2007) thus claims that rather than forbidding torture altogether, this was a doctrine of restraint. The assumption was that if interrogators knew that they might be indited for using TIDT after the fact, they would be deterred from resorting to such methods in all but the very rare exceptions. And yet, as Smadar Ben Natan (2019) demonstrates, the ruling allowed the creation of a mechanism—that was soon thereafter formalized and widened by the Attorney General—for a-priori authorization, enabling a de-facto procedural licensing of torture (see also Mann and Shatz 2010). The doctrine of restraint nevertheless remained the system’s implicit rationale. Mavtan, which is tasked with determining whether a criminal investigation should be conducted against GSS agents who allegedly used illicit interrogation methods, is hence a key node in this doctrine. Our intervention belongs here, in what can be seen as the latter days of the second chapter of the longer history of torture in Israel.
At the time of writing this article, in the winter of 2023– 2024, there are strong indications that following Hamas’s attack on October 7, torture by the GSS has entered a new era. In response to what was the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in the history of the conflict, Israel significantly relaxed, if not completely abandoned, its rules of engagement in the war it conducts on Gaza and, differently so, against Palestinians more generally. In many respects, its adherence to International Law has all but disappeared in both practice and rhetoric (Abraham 2023). At the same time, Palestinians in Israeli prisons and in a newly established IDF detention camp for detainees from Gaza, have been subjected to torture, with little to no restraint. Testimonies tell of unprecedented levels of wardens’ and soldiers’ violence, including sexual violence (Abraham 2024). These were met by a clear unwillingness of the Israeli authorities to intervene, let alone investigate and hold responsible those involved (PCATI 2024). While testimonies from people interrogated by the GSS during that period have yet to emerge, it would come as little surprise if such interrogations have also intensified, and that after October 7, new levels of violence have been practiced also by the GSS.
Nevertheless, as the Israeli defense in the ICJ clearly shows, the rationalities which brought Mavtan into being, and which are at the heart of our analysis here, are still at play even in this post-October 7 era.
Democracy, Legitimacy, Violence: The Argument
In her analysis of torture in India and the United States, Jinee Lokaneeta (2011, 5) shows that torture makes “a particularly paradoxical proposition” for liberal states. This is because “the standard narratives on the history of torture have created a discourse of impermissibility of torture in modernliberaldemocracies”(8;seealsoLuban2005).Thus, to sustain its image as a liberal democracy, Israel needs to contend with its systematic deployment of torture. This, we argue,iswhatMavtandoes.Mavtan(asanemblemformany other judicio-bureucratic systems) bestows democratic semblance on Israel as it continues to torture Palestinians. Our argument, then, joins a large body of work that has shown how various mechanisms and discourses designed to restrain state violence have not merely failed to protect disenfranchised individuals and groups, but, further, often serve to enable the propagation of violence (Gordon and Perugini 2020; Kolsky 2019; Sanders 2018). Within such mechanisms, we focus on the routine practices of judicial bureaucracy, thus contributing also to the analysis of violence and bureaucracy, particularly in (post-)colonial settings (Berda 2017 2022; Gupta 2012; Mathur 2016).
In the case at hand, the mechanics of legal bureaucracy produce what we call, as a shorthand and as a paraphrase of Timothy Mitchell (1999), “the legitimacy effect”. “Legitimacy” operates here both internationally and internally (as an investment in a certain self-image) and corresponds to the notion of a liberal democracy. In this context it is enacted through a cluster of principles, including the rule of law, legal accountability, and a specific concept of good governance, to legitimize a state of affairs that is essentially non-democratic. If for Mitchell “the State arises from techniques that enable mundane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial form,” (77; see also Gupta 1995, 378) here we argue such practices can sometimes make way not just for the state as such to emerge, but further allow the state to assume a particular form or identity. Drawing on Butler’s (1993) notion of performativity, Cynthia Weber (1998) has already argued that much like individuals, states should be seen as subjects-in-process whose identities are shaped through reiterated material practices (see also Edensor 2020; Visoka 2018).
At play here is what Elif Babül (2017, 14) identifies in her research on Turkey as an “identity crisis,” in which “the desire to belong” (to the EU, and to a certain notion of Europe or the family of liberal democracies more generally) drives introducing principles of good governance and a language committed to human rights, while other national interests and dynamics undermine the actualization of these principles. Eventually, bureaucratic attentiveness to the protection of individual rights and liberties (demonstrated through increasing “markers of accountability and openness to scrutiny,” “improving bureaucratic performance,” a language of professionalism) works in tandem with (and even facilitates) the violation of those very principles (Babül 2017, 63, 9).8
Much like Turkey, Israel has both internal and external motivations to identify itself as a democracy ( emerging both from a similar “desire to belong” to the category of liberal democracies and from its susceptibility to international pressure), yet its ongoing control over the occupied Palestinian territory and over the occupied Palestinian population means it cannot align itself with the dictations of international laws and norms in full. And similarly to Babül’s findings, attempts to bridge this unbridgeable gap often take place through “democratic performativity” that emphasizes what Vivien Schmidt (2013) termed
“throughputs”: processes pertaining to procedural competence which allow states to gain their legitimacy.
What we show in our analysis of Mavtan should accordingly be seen as a dual act. First, much like Mitchell, Bigo (2012) and others, we claim that abstract and normative concepts must be understood as emerging from the tangible, from the operations of concrete institutions, agencies and organizations, their structures, procedures and regulations, and from the workings of bureaucracy. Interlinking the abstract and the empirical, we can see how specific conceptual clusters emerge through the work of Mavtan and other judicial bureaus. Second, this cluster amounts to an act of substitution in which procedural competence come to stand for that which they presumably deliver, such as, most evidently in this case, the rule of law. That is, by going through the motions of proper governance, professionalism, efficacy, accountability, or transparency—which, in turn, underwrite a more abstract language: “the rule of law,” “democracy,” and potentially even “justice”—Mavtan puts into operation an apparatus of legitimacy, whilst allowing torture to persist. In this process, what we identify below as “lapses” (Grinberg 2018; Stein 2021), performative failures (Butler 1990, Kotef and Amir 2007) or “glitches” (Lisle 2021), have a structural role: they mitigate, if not fuse, a notion of democracy (constricted to its procedural meaning) with Israel’s nondemocratic rule.
The effort to bridge this gap—between a language of democracy and a prolonged military occupation—appears in many of the discussions pertaining to Mavtan. While it is never articulated as such, and is always coded through talking about Israel’s “security challenges” or “unique circumstances”, these “circumstances” are, for the most part, Israel’s colonial control over the Palestinians. For instance, when asked to rule on the legality of Mavtan following an appeal by PCATI and others who argued Mavtan’s very existence obstructs justice, Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein quoted himself declaring that “Israel is an abnormal normal country.” He continues by explaining:
it is normal, because it is a vibrant democracy in which fundamental rights, including free choice, freedom of expression, and the independence of the judiciary and the Attorney General, are upheld …. It is abnormal, because the threats to its existence have yet to be removed … . The challenge is to shape a legal system, on this subject as well, which faces both the normal and the abnormal at the same time. In these circumstances, I am of the opinion that the mechanism for reviewing complaints filed by ISA [GSS] interrogatees [i.e., Mavtan] meets legal standards and that it is reasonable on its merits”. (HCJ 1265/11 2012, para.35, emphasis added).
Responding to the June 2024 ICJ ruling in the SA vs Israel case, Dina Zilber (2024), a former Deputy to the Attorney General, explicitly articulates what is at stake, and why it is so crucial to insist on presenting Israel as a democratic state, “abnormal” as it may be. According to her, the hearing has shown that “the professionalism, independence and autonomy of the public legal counsel and of the judiciary system,” which attest to Israel’s “democratic character,” protect Israel from extensive international intervention. As such, she argues, this system is “part of the national security of the state,” (emphasis added) and is even “necessary to secure its survival”. Note how Israel’s “democratic character,” which amounts to the “legal standards” Rubinstein required, appears as protecting the state rather than protecting human rights. By producing what we termed above “the legitimacy effect,” it works to shield Israel from interventions, interventions which are perceived as a threat to its security.9
The role of this democracy, or the image thereof, became most evident as the sixth Netanyahu government attempted to curb the independence of the Israeli judicial system as of the winter of 2023. Many of the Israelis who objected to the government’s plans explicitly vocalized what has long been a latent perception: the independence of the judiciary—which was explicitly identified as the core of Israel’s democracy—serves as a “body armour” that protects the state’s security interests (Kotef and Amir 2023). The former Attorney General, Avichai Mendelblit, for instance, warned that “the moment that the justice system in Israel isn’t perceived as [independent], Israel will lose international legitimacy for its military operations and will no longer be shielded from accusations of war crimes.” (again, note the importance of “perceptions”) ( Weitz 2023; see also AGI 2023). Many in the streets and on countless written interventions vocalized a similar understanding: that democracy is equitable to the independence of the judiciary system, and that this independence is key to cordoning off persecutions in international courts or other courts internationally.
Our analysis of the link between “democracy” and torture is thus tangential to Darius Rejali’s (2007) work on the particularities of torture techniques in democratic contexts. Both projects show how a particular adherence to some form of democratic principles or language allows torture to persist, even if it requires some adjustments. As Rejali shows, in the case of Israel, as in many other contexts, adhering to the principles of democracy had not ended torture, but had rather led to the modification of torture techniques ( Ben-Natan 2019). We, however, focus on how the problem that torture poses for the perception of Israel as a democracy (in and of itself, but also as an example of colonial violence more generally) is allegedly resolved by introducing bureaucratic solutions. It should go without saying that such solutions are conditioned on, and reproduce, the complete side-lining of the question of torture itself and the rights of its victims. In this sense too, we look here at torture not only as one element within the problematics at the core of Israel’s concept of democracy, but also as an emblem of this problematics as a whole: it is only by discounting its human rights violations, by completely disregarding the rights of Palestinians, and only by utterly side-lining the political question of Palestine, that Israel can call itself a democracy at all.
Mavtan: Structure and History
Individuals who wish to take legal action for being subjected to torture or ill-treatment by the GSS are required to first file a complaint with Mavtan. Mavtan then conducts a preliminary examination of their complaint and submits its findings and recommendations to the Mavtan Comptroller.10 The Mavtan Comptroller, who is a deputy of Israel’s Attorney General, decides whether or not to refer the case to the police for a criminal investigation. The first conclusion can be stated already here: Mavtan is predicated on a contradiction. It is simultaneously the conduit for providing legal remedy for victims of torture, and an obstacle to their ability to see justice. The requirement that complaints must first go through Mavtan, and that victims do not have direct access to criminal proceedings, is what constitutes it as an obstacle (HCJ 1265/11 2012).
The very existence of Mavtan can be seen as an example of what Nasser Hussain (2007) referred to as “hyperlegality” which, he argued, characterizes the aftermath of British colonial rule—a mode of governance that creates complex, fragmented bureaucratic units and authorities. The fragmentation of the bureaucratic system then “fractures the process of action” into semi-judicial bodies, that accomplish the role of doing very little while reassuring the public that a responsible course of action has taken place (523; see also Raman 2017). Yael Berda (2017) similarly shows that far from the Weberian principle of rationality, (post)colonial bureaucracies are convoluted, self-contradictory, and often nonsensical systems, which ultimately perpetuate the racially differential logic of colonial rule, forming a system the colonized can never successfully navigate.
Yet Mavtan does more than mounting additional hurdles and delays or fragmenting the complaint process. The preliminary examination necessarily impairs the integrity of the future investigations by delaying them, tampering with evidence and allowing the accused to better prepare, if not coordinate their testimonies. The institutional requirement for conducting a preliminary examination therefore means that any criminal investigation would already be compromised well before it is launched (if ever). It should therefore come as little surprise that Mavtan has proven to be an insurmountable institutional obstacle for torture victims.
Mavtan was established in 1992 as an internal unit within the GSS. As to be expected, and as highlighted repeatedly in both internal and external reviews, during this period Mavtan’s ability to effectively examine GSS’s conduct was curtailed by its positioning within GSS, and the unit was largely ineffectual (HCJ 5722/12 2017; Turkel 2010; UNCAT 2009). Moreover, the employee assigned to run Mavtan did not have the competence to fulfil this role. A 2007 MoJ review found that he “is very limited in his skills as an investigator” and “does not know how to confront GSS interrogators with diverse findings and conflicting testimonies” (quoted in Turkel 2010, 415). Mudzgurishvilly (who would later head Mavtan), insisted that the unit was completely useless at that time, if it could be said that it existed at all.11 Indeed, despite reviewing close to 800 complaints between 2001 and the end of 2013 Mavtan failed to find even a single case warranting a criminal investigation (PCATI and FIDH 2022).
This impotence, however, served a purpose: it resolved the inherent tension between the requirement to fully investigate torture and the need to prevent the exposure of GSS’s interrogation methods to judicial review. Mavtan allowed Israel to exhibit that its judiciary has the capacity to scrutinize the security agency, while shielding the bench from contending with GSS interrogators who were evidently violating not only international law, but also Israel’s own legislation.
While Mavtan’s ineptitude allowed Israel to cover up its use of torture for many years, this solution did not withstand increasing external pressures. With Israel facing growing criticism for its (mis-)handling of allegations of torture,12 Mavtan’s evident inactivity and, more critically, its lack of independence, became more difficult to justify, and in 2014 the unit was transferred to the MoJ.
Bureaucratic Industriousness
—Just look at the numbers; the numbers speak for themselves.
—Guy Asher
The transfer of Mavtan to the MoJ was accompanied by several operational changes. Most visibly, the unit has expanded significantly: between 2014 and 2022, it grew from a single person to a staff of ten, including four investigators.13 Its volume of activity similarly increased: slowly but surely, it started to conduct lengthier examinations and to issue more detailed reports. It also digitized its data collection and filing systems, and began to operate with a greater level of transparency: information is now shared more freely with human rights organizations, and Mavtan’s examination reports (albeit redacted) are made available to plaintiffs and their lawyers. Yet the final outcome changed very little: the absolute majority of all complaints are still dismissed. Out of close to 600 complaints filed from 2014 to 2023, Mavtan Comptroller recommended launching a criminal investigation in three cases alone, and these, too, were eventually closed.
In its present incarnation Mavtan hence became a highly industrious unit; an industrious unit whose work still amounts to nothing. Mavtan’s industriousness manifests through elaborate examinations that come up empty handed; modes of narration that evade blunt deception but do not reveal the truth; ways for producing accountability that lead away from disclosure; and institutional mechanisms for sustaining the object of knowledge in an indeterminate realm—not fully concealed, yet never out in the open. Despite ample evidence that illegal interrogation measures are prevalent, Mavtan’s examinations repeatedly fail to lead to criminal investigations in all but the extremely rare occasions. Yet even though it does not produce the outcomes it is formally tasked with delivering, Mavtan’s work does have a significant effect: It is precisely through Mavtan’s heightened activity, its diligence, its productiveness, that Israel can demonstrate that allegations are examined, thus deflecting accusations of collusion. The unit’s operational intensity thus lends itself to the claim that Israel’s juridical system offers justice to GSS interrogees, despite all evidence to the contrary.
In our interview, Asher, the current head of Mavtan, kept referring to himself as “a man of numbers” and returning to “the numbers” which—he insisted —“speak for themselves.” The sheer weight of numbers, he seemed to imply, proved that Mavtan was performing its work efficiently. While he predominantly referred to the volume of processed complaints, he also referred to other numbers: of investigators employed, the number of days it took to launch an examination, months spent processing each complaint. But when we tried to ask about one number, the number of criminal investigations that had been opened thus far, and whether this number—three—was too low, he got agitated and reprimanded us for insisting on asking the wrong questions (Asher 9/22). Mudzgurishvilly, the first head of Mavtan following its move to the MoJ, similarly stated that judging Mavtan through this figure is simply wrong. When it comes to legal cases, she said, statistics are irrelevant, and one has to look at each case individually (Mudzgurishvilly 10/22; see also Grinberg 2016). This number, arguably the most important number since it could have proven that Mavtan secures access to justice for torture victims, is the one number they both discounted. Those other numbers, that “speak for themselves,” that testify for nothing but Mavtan’s vigorousness, have thus come to stand for the meaningful indicators of Mavtan’s effectiveness. Devoid of content, these numbers are what Mavtan is there to produce: a mode of enumeration that is used, according to Ken MacLean, as a practice establishing credibility and authority by creating “evidentiary weight through the repetition of numbered sources” (2022, 198). Indeed numbers, Diane Nelson noted, can do “magical things”, such as creating something “out of, quite literally, nothing” (2015, 27).
Mavtan’s effectiveness, we should note, is not simply produced through vigorousness. As Asher stressed, it is also demonstrated by Mavtan’s compliance with the principles of good governance and a well-operating bureaucracy, which, he said, are key to any democratic society, such as accountability, transparency, and maintaining the appropriate relations between state institutions. In the next two sections we look more closely at how accountability and transparency are manufactured.
Accountability: Meticulous Examinations
As noted earlier, Mavtan’s transfer to the MoJ in 2014 revamped its operation—and above all, its examinations. Since then, the examination team has been expanded to include more staff; more examinations are opened each year; the examinations are more extensive; more of the involved parties are interviewed in each examination; these interviews are more detailed; and the protocols of these examinations are much more elaborate.
To better understand how this dynamism fails to translate into meaningful results, let us look briefly at one example. In a recent complaint, a Palestinian woman stated that on the thirty-fifth day of her interrogation, exhausted from incessant sleep deprivation and in a deteriorated physical state,she was taken to a room which the interrogators called the “VIP room” and the wardens called “Room 220”. The room was pitch dark. One may begin to imagine what it means to be placed in a dark room amid a violent interrogation, particularly when a woman is interrogated by men; not being able to tell who was in the room or where they were; being shouted at by people one cannot see, not knowing how close the interrogators are; suddenly feeling someone up close; constantly being scared of being attacked. Being in that room was so intimidating that the female soldier who was there to accompany the interrogation14 felt too distressed herself, and very quickly left the room.
The decision letter notifying that her complaint had been dismissed revealed that as part of the preliminary examination, an investigator was sent to find whether the interrogation facility indeed had such a room. After verifying that Room 220 exists, the investigator reported that “The examination I conducted revealed that the room has two lighting options: dimmed lights and full lights.” “When using the dimmed light option,” the report continued, “I was still able to see all objects in the room. In fact, from each position within the room I was able to see the entire room … without any difficulties.”15 He then called his supervisor on a video call, placed the phone in several areas of the room, and made sure the supervisor could clearly see him. These “findings” then served to disqualify the complaint.
The absurdity of this “finding” is obvious. Light switches can be used to switch the light off. One may further question why a “dim light” option is installed in an interrogation room. But what is significant for us here is the lengths to which Mavtan went in order to repudiate the complaint: an investigator travelled to a remote interrogation facility (roughly a 90-minute drive in each direction); searched for the room; checked the different options of the light switches; examined the room from different angles; repeated this examination on a video call with his supervisor, and then composed a report detailing these findings. It is through this kind of exuberant activity that Mavtan can argue that its examinations are thorough and demonstrate the seriousness with which it treats complaints. Yet such an examination can only be understood as a parody; a mimicry of an “exhaustive” enquiry, a show of industriousness tactically deployed to fabricate “accountability.” And much like Butler’s (1990) understanding of parody, through this mimicking of an “examination,” or perhaps a “rigorous examination” (alongside other procedures, some of which we reviewed earlier and some we identify later), clusters of bureaucratic principles emerge: “oversight”, “due process” and, by extension, also “the rule of law” or even “justice-making”, while rendering them all void of substance—a façade. Yet since this parody of an examination supplants an earnest one, it undermines the very possibility of the latter, and hence has a very material effect: it shields torture from justice-making.
The issue of the examination’s content (or lack thereof) becomes particularly pertinent in Mavtan’s questioning of GSS agents. Mavtan takes great care in these questionings, making sure that all the interrogators involved are summoned and that every single detail of the complaint is addressed. This seriousness, however, only serves to obscure the fact that nothing of any significance ever emerges in these conversations.
In many respects, Mavtan’s questioning of GSS interrogators adheres to a well-rehearsed structure. Drawing on Foucault (1978, 18), it can be seen as an “institutional incitement to discourse”, in which the subject is probed and solicited to provide the minutest of details. But it is not the truth that GSS agents are prompted to disclose; neither—technically speaking—are they asked to lie. Imitating the confessional act, what we have here is the art of profession that says nothing; the institutionalization, in a way, of the mechanism of a meaningless disclosure when silence is no longer an option.
Still, these questionings provide an abundance of irrelevant information. Asked about a particular interrogation, interrogators can recall the finest details. One remembered bringing a particular type of chocolate to an interrogee or recalled that the latter asked for a newspaper in Arabic, which the interrogator was able to find at a nearby corner shop. Another remembered that his fellow interrogator brought to an interrogee fresh clothes and falafel.16 Interrogators seemed to have accurate recollection of the exact chair on which the interrogee sat (of a normal height, in a comfortable position), or that the interrogee was always allowed to go to the toilet whenever they needed. They could recall the number of times the interrogee had asked to pray and that they were always allowed to do so, or how many hours of sleep they got (again, always enough hours). This level of detail serves both GSS and Mavtan. It allows the GSS interrogators to demonstrate that they are fully cooperative while substantiating their account as both accurate and full. Concurrently, by extracting a wealth of information (albeit completely irrelevant), Mavtan’s investigators can show that an exhaustive examination had taken place and that due process had been followed. No less importantly, this wealth of detail is geared to divert attention from the fact of torture. Both Mavtan and GSS thus seem to share the same desire: that Mavtan incites the GSS interrogator to talk and yet say very little, together performatively producing a mirage of accountability.
Importantly, while some (irrelevant) information is provided in detail, questions which pertain to criminal conduct are evaded. When asked about the use of physical or verbal violence, or about other acts which could implicate them in torture or illicit interrogation methods, interrogators respond laconically and often claim that they remember nothing.
The intensive work that goes into the lengthy questioning, and then to the composition of lengthy reports (demonstrating the lengthy questioning), is accompanied by a third layer of bureaucratic labor: censorship. Significant sections of the reports are redacted by the GSS before complainants’ lawyers get to see them. Importantly, the laborious censorship is no less integral to the performativity of bureaucratic industriousness. The long black lines serve to substantiate Mavtan’s competence, testifying to its diligence, implying that investigators did not shy away from asking difficult questions and were exposed to highly classified information (sensitive enough to merit censorship), while conferring an air of esteem on Mavtan for being privy to state secrets (Bigo 2006; Weber 1958). The censored information, we must presume, still failed to reach a criminal threshold (otherwise—theoretically—it would have warranted a criminal investigation). Moreover, the practice of redaction works to counteract accusations that the GSS covers-up illicit acts since all information, including highly sensitive details, was ostensibly shared with Mavtan. This semiotics of classified revelation is, in a sense, saying: trust us, we have left no stone unturned, and still, we did not find a shred of evidence that torture took place. By the time it reaches the complainants’ lawyers, Mavtan’s examination reports often entail formulations such as:
I do not remember that the subject complained to me or in my presence concerning [a medical problem, often as a result of a violent interrogation]. Had he, as he claims, complained to me, I would have documented this in [redacted]. According to the [redacted], it is evident that when the subject complained about [a named medical problem], he was sent to a medical examination [redacted] … . Had the subject raised a medical complaint [redacted], I would have sent him to see a physician
immediately.”17 (emphasis added)
Note the somewhat dazzling dance around the fact of torture in this formula. It starts with a lapse of memory (“I do not remember”); then a turn to the hypothetical form (“had it happened, I would have…”) that turns a fact into a hypothesis; then an admission that something indeed took place (“when…”), which is almost fully redacted; concluding with a return to the hypothetical, to undermine the status of the previous statements.
The legalistic conditionality which appears in the responses of GSS interrogators may come as no surprise and adheres to the structure of incitement into meaningless discourse with which we started this discussion. However, these evasions are never contested by Mavtan’s investigators. The inexplicable and all too convenient memory gaps, the evident implausibility in which violence is explained away, the obvious inconsistencies in interrogators’ recollection, and any discrepancies, no matter how glaring, between versions of the events including in a single testimonial: none are ever challenged.
Indeed, as explained to us by A.R., a former GSS interrogator, even though having to answer to Mavtan may be unpleasant for GSS agents, these exchanges should not really be seen as “questionings” but as “interviews”. Going in, he further stated, it is clear to the Mavtan investigator who is trustworthy and who is not: “the Mavtan investigator knows that they need to take the Palestinian’s accusations with a grain of salt.” And whereas Mavtan has indeed become more thorough in its examinations, “when I enter the room, I start with a score of one hundred and the Palestinian has a score of zero.”18 This score may shift a little, but A.R. insisted that the likelihood of Mavtan investigators completely changing their mind is close to nil. The dynamic of the examination thus serves to justify the presupposition that GSS interrogators are in the right and that the Palestinian victims are in the wrong. And yet, even though—or, more accurately, precisely because—the outcome is preordained from the onset, the act of simulation is crucial.
In the setting of an interrogation, Elaine Scarry (1987) argues, the dynamic between causing pain and generating information is essential. Whereas pain is not necessarily inflicted to reveal the truth (Barela et al. 2020), the interrogation serves to both structure and justify torture. The information the tortured discloses is less important in this context, Scarry suggests; what is crucial is that an answer is provided. Extracting an answer from the tortured converts pain into power: the mere fact of an answer not only reflects the torturers’ ascendency, it is also the very form of a political betrayal, a disavowing of resistance. It is hence the victory of the torturer and the breaking point of the tortured (Scarry 1987, 28-9). What we see in Mavtan’s questionings is an inversion of this dynamic: at stake is the mere existence of an examination, the questioning and the answering, and not the content of the answer. Yet instead of a forced betrayal, these reciprocal dynamics are structured to reaffirm existing political relations. This laboured incitement into (meaningless) speech harbors the coverup of torture in an intermediate discursive realm, which is neither a blatant lie nor the truth, thus protecting the integrity of the Israeli legal-security system, as an apparatus in which torture and legality coexist.
Transparency: The Non-Recording Cameras
In 2011, a petition challenging the existence of Mavtan was filed on behalf of ten Palestinian plaintiffs by six human rights organizations. The HCJ ruling, delivered by Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, dismissed the petition, expressing full confidence in Mavtan despite all evidence to the contrary. Rubinstein’s professed confidence in Mavtan notwithstanding, his ruling deemed the moving of Mavtan to the MoJ essential. Mavtan’s “new institutional position,” he reasoned, would allow “such monitoring [of GSS to] be as transparent as possible,” ( HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.21) reflecting Israel’s security agencies’ exposure to “the sunlight and judicial review in a new era of transparency” (para.19). Transparency, from then on, becomes the leitmotif of the ruling, echoing the prevailing supposition that increased visibility serves to eradicate political violence (cf. Linfield 2012, 151-62).19 This emphasis on transparency was carried into the ethos of the reformed Mavtan: when we met with Asher ( the head of Mavtan), he took great pride in the increased transparency introduced under his management, and repeatedly equated it with the very essence of democracy and justice-making.
The story of Mavtan and the changes it has undergone is accordingly also a story of this enhanced transparency. And much like in the story concerning accountability, transparency was from the onset very much a question of “appearances.” Indeed, as long as Israel appears to seriously treat allegations of illicit interrogation techniques, it can fend off international pressure. In a way at least, the story of the ICC and ICJ decisions and preliminary decisions is a story of these systems’ inability or lack of interest to continue even playing this performative role. Rubinstein accordingly argued, somewhat frankly, that Mavtan’s relocation to the MoJ was necessary not only for good governance, but also “for the sake of appearances” (HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.21). The cameras installed in GSS interrogation rooms best illustrate the unique form this transparency has taken. We turn to them now.
GSS’s refusal to allow recordings of its interrogations has been a consistent issue of contention. Israel’s State Comptroller determined that GSS interrogations should be recorded already in 1995 (State Comptroller 2000) , and the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) has raised the lack of such recordings as a grave concern in all
its reports since 2009 (UNCAT 2009). In 2010, this necessity was reiterated by the Turkel Commission which was tasked with determining whether Israel’s investigation mechanism complied with international law (Turkel 2010). The implementation of the Turkel Report was then relegated to the Ciechanover Team. The latter concurred with the Turkel Commission’s findings, yet raised several objections to the full recording of interrogation. Echoing what has long been GSS’s justification for protecting its interrogations from external scrutiny,20 the Turkel Report claimed that exposing GSS interrogation techniques might impede their efficacy, deter suspects from cooperating with the authorities, and “substantially [impair] the ability to frustrate terrorist threats” (Ciechanover Report 2015, para.135). It hence devised an “alternative” solution: installing cameras in all interrogation rooms—but insisting that what they capture would not be recorded. Instead, the cameras would broadcast in real-time to a separate location which would “be accessible and available to a supervising entity on behalf of the Ministry of Justice at any time without giving prior notice”, thus ensuring that “the interrogators will have no indication of when the supervising entity is watching them.” The supervising entity will be tasked with composing “a concise memorandum on what he [sic] saw”; and if he “believes that illegal means have been used during the interrogation, an immediate obligation to report the matter to the Mavtan will arise” (para.139).
Installed in 2018, the CCTV cameras have subjected GSS interrogations to an unprecedented level of transparency. And yet, much like the lengthy examinations which fail to deliver any meaningful information—and part of the same structure—what we have here is a mechanism for producing transparency that does not allow for torture to be seen. Since what the cameras capture is never recorded and stored, and is only transmitted in real-time to the control room, this system replaces solid evidence (the audio-visual recordings) with selective and subjective reports. Moreover, these CCTV cameras also constitute, quite literally, an institutionally closed-circuit system which is hermetically sealed: the inspectors, selected and assigned by Mavtan, report only to Mavtan, and only on what Mavtan instructs them to report. And all of this is assuming that anyone is watching at all: according to Israel’s own admission, only a small fraction of the interrogation hours is monitored.21
Analyzing the efforts of human rights organizations to visually document human rights violations, Rebecca Stein (2021) identifies the material conditions leading to partial, unclear, and sometimes unusable visual products. Whereas Stein talks about different circumstances altogether (dropping one’s phone camera while running away from soldiers or settlers, for example), similar “glitches and lapses” (16) occur here: blind zones in interrogation rooms, or, more evidently, a video stream broadcasting to an empty monitoring room. In this respect, if Stein shows how visions of transparency and accountability in cases of human rights violations were met with “broken camera hopes and dreams” (4), in our case, the system’s breakdown is, in some sense at least, embedded into its design. Our analysis thus draws closer to Omri Grinberg’s (2018, 267) suggestion that we should not assume that such lapses “are (micro) failures.” Rather, “we can also view them as an instigated, or at least uninterrupted” lacunas, that are “constitutive elements in colonial domination” (see also Kotef and Amir 2007). At any rate, as Stein shows, and as Hedi Viterbo (2014) warns us following the cases of Abu Ghraib and the Syrian civil war, even when cameras provide clear visual evidence, it often makes little difference, retaining, in the words of Chatterjee (2023, 8), “violence visible yet unaccountable”.
Perhaps trying to prove the cameras’ efficacy, and contra their official purpose of capturing violations as they occur, Asher emphasized the power of the cameras to prevent future violations, regardless of the actual number of monitoring hours. In a proto-Panoptical fashion (Foucault 1979), he argued that the knowledge that someone may be watching deters GSS agents from resorting to illegal interrogation methods. However, in our interview, one interrogator disclosed that it is not only that GSS interrogators know that the inspectors are rarely there; crucially, and despite Ciechanover’s recommendations, cameras are not installed in all interrogation rooms. Interrogators hence know how to evade this presumed panoptical effect.
Moreover, the very activity of watching is veiled under additional layers of opacity since Mavtan releases very little information regarding the inspectors and what they do. Even more so, the little that it provides is diluted to the extent that nothing of significance can be concluded from it. For instance, when asked for the number of inspectors’ reports submitted in a given year (that is, how many “abnormal events” the inspectors witnessed), Mavtan offers a number, but immediately adds a disclaimer: “abnormal events” that merit a report, Mavtan’s standard reply states, are based on “a wide definition. Reports may pertain to a wide range of instances, including instances wherein very minimal deviations from interrogation procedures are suspected of having taken place.” Mavtan responses further stressed that “there may be cases wherein after an examination it is found that there was no inappropriate conduct or any deviation from interrogation procedures.” Thus, whereas Mavtan provides a number indicating what seems to be an objective measure of the fact some violations have taken place, the meaning of the number and what may be concluded from it is immediately undermined. Curiously, as if to further diminish any conclusion that could be drawn from the figures provided, and in a stark deviation from the MoJ policy concerning what may count as an “abnormal event”, Mavtan also states that in some instances, reports indicate not a violation by interrogators, but rather of an “unusual behavior of an interrogatee towards his interrogators” (SoI 2019). In our conversation, Asher gave another example of an “abnormal event”: Palestinians who hurt themselves in order to complain against the GSS. We will return to this example in the last section, but for now, we can note that this disclaimer pulls the grounds from under what would have been an indicative number: the number of times the inspectors observed the use of unlawful methods. Thus, the transparency Asher highlighted as an indicator of adherence to democratic principles, as evidencing Mavtan’s accountability to the public, reveals itself as a mimicry of compliance. Accordingly, the cameras, the very devices of transparency, do little to expose the interrogations, and themselves remain completely opaque. In this sense, the CCTV system is both an example and an emblem of a much wider tendency: a constant increase in transparency that in fact reveals very little, if anything at all.
Partly, what is crucial here is that this system flounders on its own terms, a point that becomes clear if one considers the logic guiding these terms. As we show later, the rationale for the necessity of Mavtan is predicated on the presupposition that violations by GSS agents rarely occur and that when they do occur, they are the aberration. As described on the MoJ website: “The purpose of the Department is to examine exceptional incidents or complaints of misconduct by members of the Israel Security Agency [GSS]” (MoJ 2024, emphasis added). By this logic, the CCTV monitoring is not fit for purpose: Since the inspectors only sample a small percentage of the interrogations, they are statistically unlikely to capture such (presumably) rare transgressions. But in its failure to provide actual transparency, this mechanism nevertheless produces at least three important effects. First, despite it being inadequate to expose the interrogations to external scrutiny, the CCTV system is the very institutionalization of transparency: cameras are installed, inspectors are hired, training is conducted, monitoring hours are logged, reports are issued and reviewed. All this amounts to an apparatus of transparency: an idea that is so often linked to the ethos of due process and even justice-making, that is aligned with their form, or, as we saw in Rubinstein’s quote above, their image. The mere existence of this system can then serve to demonstrate that Israel properly monitors its own security forces, that international bodies should therefore not intervene, that the entire legal apparatus is independent and well-functioning, and the sovereignty attached to it should therefore be respected. “Transparency”, then, shifts from being a means to secure good governance, to what “good governance” means; accordingly, it no longer matters what such transparency reveals, or whether it reveals anything at all.
Second, the failure to expose transgressions is itself deployed to undermine the possibility of delivering justice: the failure to see serves to prove that there is nothing to see. Indeed, since 2018, Mavtan’s justifications for rejecting complaints increasingly refer to inspectors’ reports that allegedly do not support the complainant’s version of events. A complaint filed by a Palestinian man who was arrested in 2019 for suspected involvement in terror attacks illustrates this point. His interrogation by the GSS was conducted over more than 600 hours in total, with many sessions lasting up to 48 consecutive hours. In his complaint, he described that he was shackled to a chair the entire time and that the inability to move for so many hours caused him severe pain. He further complained of being subjected to threats, curses, severe sleep deprivation, humiliation, and psychological torture. Mavtan Comptroller dismissed the complaint and turned to the inspectors’ reports to justify his decision. He acknowledges that “the inspection did not cover the complainant’s entire interrogation, and some [elements of] his complaint may have occurred at times which were not monitored”. Indeed, the dismissal letter states that the inspectors only watched two of the 14 interrogation sessions, and that they only monitored a few hours of each. The Comptroller nevertheless drew on the monitoring of this fraction of the interrogation to conclude that the complaint was unreliable. “The inspectors’ reports,” the letter states, “do not appear to support the complainant’s claims,” since “the inspectors did not report any abnormal events.” He adds that according to one inspector’s account, the interrogation was “conducted in an amiable atmosphere.” These few hours of monitoring hence sufficed for the Comptroller to conclude that the reports “confirm that the GSS interrogators operated legally” (ibid). Demands for increased transparency can thus prove to be double-edged. In a state-controlled “representational economy” of torture (Viterbo 2014), the assumed superiority of visual evidence means that such evidence is often used by state authorities to refute the reliability of victim testimony. We return to this point in the next section.
Third and finally, the CCTV system serves another purpose beyond demonstrating transparency and justifying the dismissal of complaints (even if it does so inadvertently): it helps Israel substantiate its position that torture, if it happens at all, is an aberration rather than the rule. For had torture been systematically used against Palestinian detainees, one could argue, even a selective sampling of interrogations would have detected it. Buying into this argument, however, requires considerable leaps of faith: we would need to assume that the inspectors monitor a sufficient sample of interrogations, that this sample is representative of all interrogations, that the inspectors perform their duties diligently, that they are proficient with the letter of the law, that they would know to identify an infringement when seeing it, that had they witnessed such incidents, they would have reported them to Mavtan, that Mavtan would then recommend a criminal investigation, and that the Mavtan Comptroller will indeed follow up on this recommendation in his decision. The fact that this system fails to identify torture is hence what renders it effective—not in combatting torture, but in contradicting allegations that torture is prevalent in GSS interrogations.
Final Analysis: What Is Justice?
Thus far we proposed that Mavtan’s heightened activity should be understood primarily as addressing the international legal system. Since appeals to international courts are conditioned on the inability to attain legal remedy domestically (“the complementary principle”), this performativity of justice-making works to protect Israel from appeals to external judiciaries. The unit’s mechanisms and practices can thus be seen as merely meant to create a mirage, empty gestures of justice-making. Indeed, some of the HCJ reviews we quote earlier allude to such an interpretation (cf. HCJ 5722/12 2017, HCJ 9018/17 2018).
While this is, no doubt, part of the story, we proposed that there is more at stake. Performativity, as Butler (1993) shows, is never simply an empty gesture, and always does something or produces something in the world, even when it merely affirms power structures. Shielding Israel from international interventions—what we termed “the legitimacy effect”—is a crucial aspect of this performativity that must be understood as emerging through the bureaucratic performativity of accountability, transparency, and due process we reviewed here. Through its thorough examinations, the expansive reports, the detailed decisions issued by the Mavtan Comptroller, its elaborate responses to FOI requests, Mavtan creates a material reality that, as Mitchell (1999, 77) identified in relation to the state, is indistinguishable from the appearance of “the abstract or ideal.” The work of governmental departments, the activities of bureaucrats, the paperwork, the tactics of management, and above all, the appropriate relations between state institutions or different organs of government (institutional independence, appropriate subordinance, oversight mechanisms, legal compliance, and demonstrable transparency and accountability), all these end up producing, we argued, the shielding effect of legitimacy.
Thus, documents are composed, data are generated and accumulated, reports are extracted, new positions are created, expertise are established, training is provided, data-protection mechanisms are introduced, and so on. This bureaucratic laboriousness builds a world, and a way of seeing the world—or, at least, a material image of the world. And this material image comes to stand for “transparency”, “accountability”, or “good governance” more generally, which then become the ground through which Israel substantiates itself as a legitimate player when facing international jurisprudence. But this performativity of justice-making has another effect: it is geared to reshape the discourse of justice.
As we briefly showed earlier, this apparatus serves to provide “proof” that Israel does not torture, and that Palestinian complaints are groundless. In our interviews with MoJ officials and several former GSS interrogators, we were repeatedly reminded that despite having a dedicated unit which laboriously scrutinizes the many thousands of complaints filed by Palestinians, no evidence of torture had ever been found. For our interviewees, this fact did not attest to Mavtan’s failures; rather, they argued, it persuasively showed that the allegations are all false, or wild exaggerations at best. Having such an industrious system conducting lengthy examinations, monitoring interrogations in real-time through a CCTV system, compiling detailed reports and rationalizing data, while being fully transparent and sharing this information with human rights lawyers and advocates, seems to give credence to the claim that Mavtan finds nothing because there is nothing to be found.
But it is not merely the complaints that are deemed fraudulent here; the Palestinian plaintiffs—and even more so, the Palestinians as a collective—are similarly portrayed as deceitful. One GSS interrogator even went as far as pinning the volume of discarded complaints on Palestinian “culture”, prone—so he said—to fabrication and hyperbole. The presumption that Palestinians are untrustworthy, or, at the very least, have ulterior motives for claiming that they have been tortured is so thoroughly embedded in Mavtan’s structure that it can be found already in the documents that led to its establishment. The very reasoning for conducting preliminary examinations was premised, inter alia, on the notion of Palestinian deceptiveness. The guiding thread from the onset presupposed that Palestinians would wrongfully accuse Israel of torturing, not only as individuals but as a collective; as part of an organized campaign against Israel. In the words of the 1987 Landau Report:
False complaints of interrogees that they have been supposedly subjected to harsh torture during their interrogations by the GSS … are common as part of a systematic campaign by terrorist organizations against the GSS with the explicit aim of weakening it in its war against terror, and to discredit it. (Landau Commission 1987, para.4.18, authors’ translation, emphasis added)
The assumption that almost all such allegations are fictitious has led Landau to conclude that it is paramount that prior to launching a criminal investigation, “the examination of complaints should first distinguish between those which are false, and those which are genuine” (para.4.18). And it is this mission with which Mavtan was tasked.
Rubinstein’s 2012 HCJ ruling similarly explained Mavtan’s “necessity” by the need to protect GSS from idle complaints: “Let us not feign innocence”, he argued; there are valid “concerns regarding politically and ideologically motivated false complaints given the nature of the subject at hand” (HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.21). In their justification of Mavtan’s structure, Landau and Rubinstein therefore propose that the prevalence of complaints of torture does not reflect the pervasiveness of illicit interrogation methods by GSS, but rather the dubious motivations of complainants. Such a presumption adheres to, and indeed is part of the production of a wider logic we find in colonial and post-colonial settings: the classification of racialized groups along what Berda (2022) terms “the axis of suspicion.” This classification is “founded on the colonial assumption that native witnesses and their statements were not to be believed” since natives, generally so, “could not distinguish fact from fiction” (Kolsky 2019, 24). As Chatterjee (2023, 21) argues in his work on antiMuslim violence in India, in such settings, the law has a role in creating particular subjects “whose very existence … precludes them from witnessing,” and whose testimonies thus can never provide creditable legal evidence.
In reality, however, the volume of complaints underrepresents the actual number of torture cases: most Palestinians do not trust the Israeli legal system enough to file complaints, do not want to validate the system by filing complaints, or drop their complaints due to the hurdles that this system mounts. This is, of course, a selfreinforcing feedback loop: because plaintiffs are presumed to be liars, the elaborated mechanism of examinations which dismisses complaints ends up “proving” that Palestinians are indeed deceitful. Mavtan’s diligent production of what seems to be nothing therefore works to change the meaning of justice itself: justice stands for protecting Israel from Palestinian deceitfulness.
The effects of this heightened performativity range beyond obstructing torture victims’ access to justice. By articulating Palestinians’ search for justice as fraudulence, Mavtan’s work feeds Israel’s broader narration of the Palestinian search for justice as “warfare”: a politically motivated attack by legal means on the Israeli state (cf. Gilboa 2021). In other words, it is not merely that the system both presupposes and then “proves” that each Palestinian complaint is fraudulent; using the power of state institutions, it can further argue that collectively, these complaints are part of an orchestrated Palestinian campaign to undermine Israel’s very existence, and is hence terror by other means.
And once the Palestinian search for justice is re-defined as terror, the concept of justice itself shifts its meaning. As one reads through the documents involving Mavtan’s establishment and operation, what is striking is the degree to which justice has come to note the vindication of the GSS. The Ciechanover Report, for instance, deemed the introduction of the CCTV cameras necessary since ultimately it would “assist in combating false claims regarding the use of improper measures during interrogations” (Ciechanover Report 2015, para.138, emphasis added). In our interview, Asher made a similar claim, which was illustrated by providing the conjectural example we mentioned earlier—of an inspector seeing Palestinians injuring themselves and then complaining that they were beaten up by an interrogator. Such a scenario, not only serves to draw a picture—speculative as it may be—of Palestinians as unreliable and of violence in the interrogations as a complete fabrication, it further has the power of taking the most tangible proof that violence had occurred ( injury ) and rendering it meaningless.22 In this inverted system, the transparency Mavtan assumes to provide is geared towards demonstrating the absence of torture.
The current Mavtan’s Comptroller, Shlomo ( Shlomi ) Abramzon, summarized this attitude best: in some of the cases, he told the PCATI legal team, Mavtan dismisses complaints after finding what he referred to as indications that help expose the truth, or at least, he added, expose that the version provided by the complainant is unreliable.23 By equating the truth with disqualifying the complaint, Abramzon once again reveals, perhaps inadvertently, that ultimately, disproving torture allegations is the justice that Mavtan is striving to produce. Mavtan then does not merely fail to provide justice to torture victims; rather, it labors to rearticulate what justice stands for: the vindication of Israel from Palestinian “conspiracies”.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful first and foremost to the four anonymous reviewers and to the editorial team of Perspectives on Politics. We received invaluable insights and helpful suggestions from all four reviewers, and we are extremely thankful for their careful, generous, and attentive reading. Sarah El Kazaz, the cohort of the Radical Critical Theory Circle (Nisyros, Greece in June 2023), the attendees of the launch event of the London Political Theory Network, Sahar Francis and Yael Berda all provided us with vital feedback. Finally, our special thanks goes to Tal Steinar, Rachel Stroumsa, Alona Korman, and the rest of the team of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) past and present, who were extremely generous with their time and thoughts, and gave attentive comments on several drafts.
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number: ES/V012622/1).
Notes
1 Such rhetoric is to be found in Israel’s few responses to international bodies (cf. SoI 2020).
2 Access to transcripts of Mavtan investigations was confined to 2012–2018 due to legal restrictions. References to the content of these transcripts from later years is based on our interviews with PCATI’s legal team. Moreover, to protect the identities of complainants we paraphrased the transcripts’ wordings.
3 We do not provide precise references to individual cases, except where explicit consent from the interrogee was granted.
4 Mudzgurishvilly was the head of Mavtan between 2014 and 2018, and oversaw its re-establishment in the Ministry of Justice. At the time of writing in 2024, Abramzon is the Mavtan Comptroller and Asher is the head of Mavtan. They both have been in these roles since 2019.
5 Lack of regard to violence carried out by security forces has typified colonial regimes, particularly British colonialism (Duffy 2015; Kolsky 2019).
6 The full report is only available in Hebrew. Translation of some sections is available in Amnesty International (1991). For a discussion of the calibration of the permissible amount of pain by the Landau Commission, see Asad (1996, 1095).
7 In our interview, A.F. insisted that, contra to the Landau Commission’s findings, this practice was an open secret known by everyone, including all Prime Ministers and judges (AF 06/22).
8 For a similar claim concerning India and the United
States see Lokaneeta (2011), and in relation to Northern Ireland prior to 1998 see Lowry (1973).
9 The request for arrest warrants submitted by the ICC prosecutor on May 20, 2024, demonstrate that the Israeli judiciary no longer provides such a shielding effect. Arguably this is because, in the weeks and months after October 7, it stopped going through the motions we discuss here. As these events take place at the very final stages of publishing this article, we will not be able to address them here.
10 Ministerial Committee for General Security Service Affairs (1992); last revised on February 1, 2006 (Turkel 2010, n150).
11 Interview conducted with Jana Mudzgurishvilly, October 2022, herein Mudzgurishvilly 10/22.
12 Most significantly, in its 2009 Annual Report, the UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT)
unequivocally concluded that Israel had failed to investigate GSS’s violations of the Torture Convention, and that it should establish “a fully independent and impartial mechanism outside the GSS” for investigating allegations of ill treatment and torture (UNCAT 2009, para.21). 13 Interview conducted with Guy Asher, September 2022, herein Asher 09/22.
14 Interrogations of women must be accompanied by a female agent or soldier.
15 Response from Mavtan Comptroller, taken from the PCATI archive; all identifying details have been removed to preserve confidentiality.
16 Examples compiled from decisions issued by the Mavtan Comptroller and from protocols of the investigations as conveyed to us in our interviews with the PCATI legal team.
17 As noted, this is a paraphrase.
18 Interview with A.R., a GSS interrogator, June 2022. Herein AR 06/22. On the structural deeming of
Palestinian plaintiffs as unreliable see Shammas 2017. 19 For critiques of this supposition see, for instance,
Kotef (2020) and Chatterjee (2023). See also Timothy Pachirat’s (2011, 14) critique of “the fantasy of total transparency”.
20 Rubinstein’s pronounced commitment to transparency, for example, quickly emerges as diluted by other “weighty considerations”, specifically security ones, which require thatit be curtailedandlimited. Despite his aforementioned praise of transparency as the best route to justice, he reassured the appellants that the limitations set on transparency in the name of security are “not, God forbid, in order to allow ISA [GSS] interrogators to break the law” (HCJ 5722/12 2017, para.34).
21 According to Israel’s response to CAT, an average of 80-100 supervision hours were conducted in 2019– 2020 (SOI 2020).
22 It should be noted that similar arguments were used by the British government to counter accusations of torture in Northern Ireland during the Troubles (White 2017).
23 As recorded in the minutes of a meeting held on August 4, 2020.
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Israel Academia Monitor has reported numerous times on Professor Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Israeli-born academic is a Professor of Spatial and Virtual Culture and the founder of Forensic Architecture. This group researches human rights violations using architectural, visual, and aerial techniques.
Forensic Architecture is internationally recognized, and its work has been widely used by journalists, courts, human rights NGOs, and museums, among others. Weizman received many honors. In 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2020, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). In addition, his work received prestigious awards, including the Peabody Award.
However, Weizman is a highly polarizing figure. Critics accuse him of a disproportionate focus on Israel and the production of material that blurs the lines between legitimate forensic investigation and political advocacy.
In April 2026, Weizman published a book titled Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. In a recent interview, he explained that the book is “looking at the environmental dimension of this genocide.” So, the book “is really what connects the continuity of settler-colonial violence from the Nakba to the genocide. And that is the attempt to expel [Palestinians] and then transform the environment by all sorts of soil practices. So, you know, if in the post-1948 part of the Nakba, the way in which the soil is transformed is through the plows that actually are not only used for cultivation, but to completely erase Palestinian presence from the ground, after the genocide, these are the bulldozers that are stabbing the front loader into the ground and basically flipping everything, desertifying the alluvial part, the agricultural part of the Gaza Strip. Ungrounding is unlike any wartime destruction, so we’re not talking here about war, we’re talking about ecocide and genocide.”
He added that the “Forensic Architecture, the organization that I run, when we work on war zones and aerial wars and bombardment… but ungrounding is basically the erasure of all of that. It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction. It’s the erasure of erasure, if you like. The rubbing out of any trace of existence. And that comes out of the same kind of move by which both the Nakba and the genocide and periods in between to a lesser intensity sought to expel Palestinian. But expulsion, ethnic cleansing, if you like, of people from the land require both, you know, enormous amounts of violence or pogroms, massacres and bombardment or what have you, and then the denial of return.”
Also in April 2026, he published an article in the London Review of Books, on the demolition in Gaza titled “All they will find is Sand.” Weizman related that on October 13, 2023, six days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel ordered the evacuation of Gaza City, sending Palestinians in northern Gaza towards the southern border with Egypt. For Weizman, Israel was actively seeking to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza by lobbying Egypt to accept large numbers of refugees. Instead of supporting the idea of saving the lives of Gazans, Weizman described it as an opportunity for Israel to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. His article was also picked up by the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
As Israel Academia Monitor repeatedly reported, the Goldsmiths professor exemplifies the formula used by activist scholars who also support BDS: double standards, decontextualization, denying Palestinian agency, and blaming Israel for all problems. For instance, an IAM post, “Weizman’s Double Standards: Ignores Human Rights Abuse by the Palestinians” in 2021, summed up the theme he has used. Decontextualization is evident in his discussion of the refugee camps. In his opinion, “Camps are established with the intention of being demolished. They are meant to have no history and no future; they are meant to be forgotten. The history of refugee camps is constantly erased, dismissed by states, humanitarian organizations, international agencies, and even by refugee communities themselves in the fear that any acknowledgment of the present undermines their right of return.” Conveniently, Weizman forgot to mention that in 1948, authorities in what is now the Jordanian part of the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, were mostly set up by the authorities that did not grant the Palestinian the right to permanent status. More to the point, the temporary camps were transformed into permanent instruments for condemning Israel.
Evasion of Palestinian agency is also evident in Weizman’s discussion of the much-debated Gaza Tunnel complex. His argument is essentially that tunnels represent a form of “subterranean warfare”—a way for a weaker actor to challenge a militarily dominant state. He examines tunnels as part of what he calls the “politics of verticality,” where control of airspace, ground, and underground spaces becomes central to modern conflict. The fact that Hamas chose to construct the tunnels in densely populated parts of Gaza, rather than the agricultural part of the Strip, has not been mentioned. He also omitted the fact that Hamas housed an elaborate command and control system while using civilians who lived above the tunnels as human shields. Surely, Weizman, who specialized in forensic architecture and aerial surveillance, should have noticed that Hamas deliberately avoided placing the tunnel in agricultural spaces where harm to civilians would have been, by and large, avoided.
Weizman, who has stated that his group employs a variety of materials, including written documents, in its investigations, could have consulted the doctrine of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that informed Hamas’s military strategy. According to this doctrine, members of the Axis of Resistance militias were encouraged, whenever possible, to embed themselves within civilian populations and operate from public spaces, including mosques, schools, and hospitals. Such practices transformed civilian environments into military arenas, placing noncombatants at heightened risk and complicating Israel’s ability to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Weizman ranks among the most prominent critics of Israel, not least because of the extensive list of personal and professional honors as well as the considerable influence and visibility afforded by his academic position, publications, and international networks. Unfortunately, he chose his credentials to delegitimize Israel and contribute to the increase in antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
PODCAST: Why ‘ungrounding’ is the defining feature of Israel’s genocide
Discussing his new book, Eyal Weizman explains how the systematic erasure of Gaza’s built environment is aimed at extinguishing Palestinian life in the Strip.
There can be no disputing the extent of Israel’s obliteration of the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Its military forces have damaged or destroyed at least 92 percent of housing units, 95 percent of university buildings, 94 percent of hospitals — and the list goes on and on.
But as Eyal Weizman writes in his new book “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” Gaza is not only a demolition zone; it is also a construction site. Almost nine months into a so-called “ceasefire,” Israeli bulldozers roam freely through two-thirds of Gaza’s pre-war territory, tearing up everything that once was and carving out an unrecognizable landscape of military roads, fortifications, and vast expanses of nothingness.
Weizman is well placed to analyze this process. Over the past two and half years, Forensic Architecture — the research agency he founded and directs, based at Goldsmiths, University of London — has catalogued thousands of incidents of violence in Gaza; conducted audio-visual investigations challenging Israel’s official narrative on severalhigh-profileincidents; and contributed a bank of evidence to the International Court of Justice to support South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention.
Whereas in traditional warfare, Weizman tells The +972 Podcast, “you tend to see a kind of haphazard, almost random distribution of ruination,” Gaza has witnessed something very different. “Ungrounding is basically the erasure of all that,” he explains. “It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction … The rubbing out of any trace of existence.”
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Why ‘ungrounding’ is the defining feature of Israel’s genocide
[music]
Ben Reiff
Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Ben Reiff, Deputy Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
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Ben Reiff
There can be no disputing the extent of Israel’s obliteration of the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The statistics leave no room for doubt, testifying to the damage or destruction of at least 92 percent of housing units, 95 percent of university buildings, 94 percent of hospitals — and the list goes on and on.
But as Eyal Weizman writes in his new book “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” Gaza is not only a demolition zone; it is also a construction site. Almost nine months into a so-called “ceasefire,” Israeli bulldozers roam freely through two-thirds of Gaza’s pre-war territory, tearing up everything that once was and carving out an unrecognizable landscape of military roads, fortifications, and vast expanses of nothingness.
Weizman is well placed to analyze this process, which he describes as “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” Over the past two and a half years, Forensic Architecture — the research agency he directs, based at Goldsmiths, University of London — has catalogued thousands of incidents of violence in Gaza; conducted audio-visual investigations challenging Israel’s official narrative on several high-profile incidents; and contributed a bank of evidence to the International Court of Justice to support South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention.
I’m delighted to be joined by Eyal Weizman today to discuss all this and much more, so let’s dive right in.
The book provides a huge amount of historical context for understanding what we’ve seen over the past two and a half years, but it also introduces an analytical framework for making sense of Israel’s actions in Gaza. So tell us what you mean by ungrounding and why it’s so distinctively characteristic of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza?
Eyal Weizman
So firstly, I’d say that the book really is looking at the environmental dimension of this genocide. When it looks at the environment, it is particularly concentrated on soil and ground, which is the kind of resource that settler colonialism is so interested in.
So, ungrounding is really what connects the continuity of settler-colonial violence from the Nakba to the genocide. And that is the attempt to expel [Palestinians] and then transform the environment by all sorts of soil practices. So, you know, if in the post-1948 part of the Nakba, the way in which the soil is transformed is through the plows that actually are not only used for cultivation, but to completely erase Palestinian presence from the ground, after the genocide, these are the bulldozers that are stabbing the front loader into the ground and basically flipping everything, desertifying the alluvial part, the agricultural part of the Gaza Strip.
Ungrounding is unlike any wartime destruction, so we’re not talking here about war, we’re talking about ecocide and genocide. When Forensic Architecture, the organization that I run, when we work on war zones and aerial wars and bombardment, you tend to see a kind of a haphazard, almost kind of like random distribution of ruination. You tend to see buildings collapsing onto the ruins. You see piles of rubble. You know where the buildings stood. You can see roughly the organization of the urban surface, but ungrounding is basically the erasure of all of that. It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction. It’s the erasure of erasure, if you like. The rubbing out of any trace of existence.
And that comes out of the same kind of move by which both the Nakba and the genocide and periods in between to a lesser intensity sought to expel Palestinian. But expulsion, ethnic cleansing, if you like, of people from the land require both, you know, enormous amounts of violence or pogroms, massacres and bombardment or what have you, and then the denial of return. And the denial of return works through the erasure of everything that exists. So there will be nothing to return to. There will be a kind of an unrecognized area.
This is what we see very much, particularly in the 60% that Israel controls in the east of the so-called “Yellow Line,” where without now active conflict in those parts, there is a systematic demolition that could not be justified by any sort of international legal principles of distinction — proportionality, or necessity — so to speak. It’s just a simple, continuous act of erasure, almost like a national project of erasure that is happening in these parts.
Ben Reiff
You connect this practice of ungrounding very directly to one of the prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention. Can you explain how you see the relationship between ungrounding and genocide?
Eyal Weizman
Forensic Architecture, we look at the built and natural environment. There is a particular environmental, or architectural clause, in the genocide convention. So under, after this, you know, special intent, the intent to destroy, and all are in part that defines a genocide, there’s various prohibitions on killing, on reproduction of a society. But one that is very environmental and architectural is what’s called Article 2C that prohibits the calculated destruction of conditions of life.
So, what are the conditions of life? They are effectively a basic kind of question for an architect or geographer to say, “What is the relation between the environment and life?” The way in which the environment is conceived as an infrastructure for life and in a traditional settler colonial context — 18th century settler colonialism, 19th century settler colonialism — the environment that buttresses life is the natural environment. It’s the soil, it’s water, it’s multiple other forms of, you know, the kind of the flora and fauna that exist within that, that provides a people’s conditions of life. In the modern era, these are cities and bits of infrastructure and homes and hospitals, and the systematic, calculated destruction of those are not a direct act of killing, but deny the possibility of society to survive through its being anchored in space.
So it is a kind of genocide by attrition, a kind of a slow motion genocide. In fact, when Lemkin writes his book in 1944 that comes up with the term genocide and later elements of that are incorporated into the 1948 Genocide Convention. But when Lemkin conceptualizes it, he thinks about the settler colonization of the Americas. And he notes that genocide can take place over decades, if not centuries. And that indigenous people displaced off their land are displaced off the means of survival, displaced onto a much less favorable natural environment with less rain, or soil or less water, and would slowly start a process of decline. Indeed, most casualties from the settler colonial projects occur not through direct kinetic violence, although this always occurred as part of displacement of people, but through that intergenerational effects of the degradation of conditions of life.
But there is obviously also a cultural life that is grounded in other types of infrastructure: universities, schools, mosques, cemeteries, archaeological sites, that actually bind people culturally to a place. And so there is cultural political life and there is biological life. And somehow those are related because when the cultural infrastructure for life is destroyed, as it has been during the Gaza genocide — we’re talking about all universities and majority of mosques and cemeteries and archaeological sites systematically destroyed — it breaks the resilience of society that can also mitigate the threat of a biological existence. So those cultural and biological life with us as a human species are kind of entangled and cannot be seen as totally separate. Although, of course, in the Genocide Convention as ratified in 1948, Lemkin’s idea of cultural life was actually ignored.
Ben Reiff
I want to dig into this a little bit more because you’re very clear that this constitutes genocide. But you also write in the book that expulsion was the strategic aim of the war. So do you see genocide and expulsion as kind of two sides of the same coin here?
Eyal Weizman
Yeah, I mean, it is sometimes misunderstood to think that if the continuous aim of Israeli and Zionist settler colonization is the expulsion of Palestinians, that that is not genocide, because they could live somewhere else. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are very related concepts. I think that what was happening in Gaza since, if we just speak about that, since October 2023, is an attempt to kill enough Palestinians, destroy Palestinian life in part, so that they move away. There is no expulsion that is simply the kind of voluntary transfer that Israeli politicians are actually fantasizing about. You need to create that volition and you create that volition through enormous amounts of violence, loss, and destruction. So that is ethnic cleansing and genocide are not opposing concept. You cannot defend yourself and say, “Well, I’m not committing genocide, I’m just committing ethnic cleansing.” The way to expel a population from its place is really through an enormous amount of violence that is indistinct, that is aimed at the foundations of life that has Palestinian society as its target.
I think that the metaphor that I give in a book that is, I think, it’s most apt to understand that principle is the one that I encountered while helping litigate the genocide in Guatemala in 1982. And the Ríos Montt, the dictator of the military, dictator of Guatemala at the time, has a quote that was absolutely foregrounded in his conviction for genocide. And that is when he said, “You need to drain the river to kill the fish.” So in his conception, the fish are the guerrillas, and that he builds on Mao Zedong’s quote, the guerrilla moves amongst the people like fish in the sea or in a river. And the river is the built environment, the river is the natural environment, it’s everything that enables life in a particular location.
That is the definition of genocide and the way that it might interact with counterinsurgency. So the minute that the aim of the military is targeting the foundation of life, including society itself, and it’s built a natural environment, you’re in the genocidal territory. The bombing of the north, which is the kind of those first three, four weeks after October 7th, where you have the most intense bombing of an urban environment in a history of aerial bombardment and history of urban environments is a means for displacement, it’s a kind of a curtain of fire — it’s an enormous amount of fire, distinct or indistinct — that just washed out, or was trying to wash out Palestinians from the north towards the south.
I don’t think Israel and the Israeli military was intending for that campaign to last so long. They thought that with the shock of October 7th on Israeli society, with the enormous amount of support that Israel has achieved internationally in the immediate aftermath of that, that they could change the facts on the ground in a really fast way, like the ‘67 war, and in a few days, just like force all Palestinians out into Egypt, the border would collapse under the weight of Palestinians seeking refuge, and that the door would be locked behind them.
And then a new reality would be created and would be used strategically by Israel to effectively change forever the reality. In that respect, the genocide has failed to achieve its aim, like each and every one of Israel’s campaigns post-October 7 2023, Palestinians held on to Gaza City despite the most intense bombing they held with the fingernails to to that area. Hundreds of thousands of people remain in Gaza City. Of course, there were people that left into Egypt, but Egypt did not allow more people and used various mechanisms to stop and to hold the border. And effectively what happened is that simply the Gaza Strip has shrunk.
Ben Reiff
You also touch in the book on ungrounding that’s taken place over the last year or so in refugee camps in the West Bank. I think we’re seeing something very similar happening in southern Lebanon now as well over the last few months. So clearly, this is about more than Gaza.
Eyal Weizman
Yeah. War on refugees, and the kind of developments with which Israel was kind of flattening and leveling refugee camps, particularly north of the West Bank, most famously the Jenin refugee camp with it, is more than just a way that Israel claims it seeks to contain Palestinian resistance that comes from these places. Israel, now since October 7th, seeks to undo the political category of refugee-ness. And the political category is also, like anything, grounded in environments, in the environment of the refugee camp, which testifies itself for the unresolvability of living, the kind of the complicated part by which Palestinians negotiate the temporariness of the camp as the maintenance of the right of return by the institutions that support refugee-hood, refugee-ness, like UNRWA, for example. So all those things.
The refugee camps are being leveled and that has history in Israeli, in the history of Israeli violence towards Palestinians, say, in Sharon’s 1970 attack on Jabalia, and Al-Shati, and other refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, with a clear and testified intent to undo refugee-ness. Sharon was saying, “If we destroy the refugee camp and we build, ‘decent housing,’ resistance would disappear.” It’s only the presence of refugee-ness that puts into question the very essence and the further existence of a Zionist Israeli state. So this is why it’s a war on refugees, so this is why Jenin and Nur-Shams and other camps are being completely uprooted.
What is happening in Lebanon is also part of that because Israel has kind of used the sort of Gaza doctrine, so to speak — the ungrounding idea — also in Lebanon. The river is Shia rural life in the south of Lebanon, [it] is what put Israel under threat. And therefore, in order to kill the fish, that is, I don’t know, Hezbollah operatives in this part, they need to drain the river. And what they’re doing now is draining that river, destroying conditions of life in that part, so that Lebanese farmers could not return south into that area. Ungrounding is now everywhere and ungrounding is happening in the buffer zone and further buffer zone. I mean the entire Golan Heights is a buffer zone, and then there is a buffering of the buffer, which in 2024 is where they’re taking another piece of Syria to buffer the Golan Heights and you know again leveling of building an infrastructure within that.
Ben Reiff
Ungrounding is a process that takes place on the surface of the land, but there’s a large section of your book that deals with what’s happening below the surface. You talk about the early Zionists’ fixation with soil, including prominent figures in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Yosef Weitz, who led the land department of the Jewish National Fund in the 1930s and 40s. Why did the Zionist movement view soil as being so central to their colonization efforts?
Eyal Weizman
All settler colonial projects, or most of them, are agrarian in their nature, no? So obviously, Weitz was completely obsessed with soil. He was taking soil samples after, you know, there’s a diary entry I think I reproduced in the book, that after the July 1948 expulsion of Lydda and Ramle, he goes and he marvels at the treasure soil they leave behind, this hamra soil, this like red-brown soil that could be used for agrarian production. You can have oil, or diamonds as resources for other forms of colonialism, agrarian settler colonialism needs soil and water. That’s the kind of magnets for its expansion. Soil is a kind of a subterranean or terranean, if you like, kind of infrastructure along which settler colonization kind of progresses and moves.
Ben Reiff
You write in a lot of detail about the origins and development of Gaza’s subterranean tunnel network, which has become synonymous with Hamas, but which as you show actually long predates the establishment of Hamas and has been used for decades both in the smuggling of goods and in armed resistance against Israel by various Palestinian groups. I found it quite evocative the way you describe Gaza’s subsoil as the only part of Palestine still unoccupied. Can you give us a bit of history about how and why this tunnel system developed?
Eyal Weizman
Firstly, as a spatial researcher also born and raised in Haifa, I had to take on several restrictions while writing about the subsurface. So the first chapter about soil and the last about the genocide are full of testimonies that I solicited, original reconstruction mappings, photographs. In that part, I consciously did not use any of those. It is more about telling the story through a conceptual framework of soil rather than mapping out anything that Palestinians are seeking to hide. Because the nature of the subsoil, that move from the surface with its overexposed photographic, top of the soil exposed to satellite images, drones, social media, everything is kind of overtly photography. You cross that threshold and you’re like, all that is shut off.
You’re in a space that is both imaginary and operates as an imaginary space because everyone can project different things onto it and use it rhetorically for different things. So saying that caveat, Palestinians retreat into the subsoil immediately with the beginning of the occupation in 1967 of the Gaza Strip. Many Palestinian dig holes, but later become more complex, into the surface. The surface is occupied, the subsoil is that part of Palestine, which is kind of beyond the omnipresent optics and policing of the colonizer, of the occupier on the surface.
So there is an indigenous knowledge — some people call it the Tarabin well, some people call it Bedouin well, for some people it’s the wells of the region — that Palestinians left landless in 1948 use that technique in order to dive into the subsoil, retreat into that part of Palestine left unoccupied, initially in order to undo those restrictions on conditions of life. If you think about the engineering and calculation of conditions of life, from the Genocide Convention, this is basically siege warfare. Siege warfare does, and this is what Gaza has been undergoing between the two catastrophes — the genocide and the Nakba — is siege, meaning, the land envelope is controlled and things are modulated coming from Israelis. It’s restricting the water coming into Gaza. It’s damming the water of Wadi Gaza before it crosses under the boundary of the Gaza Strip. And later on, after the occupation, it’s allowing more or less labor to come out always as a means of control.
And then during the blockade of the past 20 years, even calories, megawatt electricity, you know, liters of benzene and and diesel are kind of being regulated in a way that calculates and creates conditions of life as a means of control, or degrade conditions of life as a means of control. In order to alleviate those conditions of life, the subsoil was the medium through which Palestinians connected to Egypt, to allow petrol, allow food around, all sorts of goods to come in and alleviate the effect of that blockade. There’s never been an unrestricted flow of goods and people.
So this is one of the origins in like finding the alleviation of conditions of life through the subsoil, just like the soil is the conditions of life during the kind of agrarian existence of people in the Wadi Gaza and the sort of northern Naqab area before the Nakba, the subsoil becomes the conditions of life after that through the smuggling tunnels of Rafah. Those farmers that are pushed into the refugee camps of this part, also have family members on the other side. And then the tunnel network becomes something like a social network, kind of like an internet of things, if you like, because the way it connects, it connects to people that you trust, people with familial or organizational affiliation, so that the network itself is a kind of a diagram of social relations on the top of the surface.
Then there is the origins of the tunnels as tactical tools for warfare. I’m particularly interested in one, as I would, Palestinian architect or architectural student His name is Mohammed Al-Aswad, but starts inventing tunnels and all sorts of contraptions, spatial contraptions to resist and escape the Israeli occupation forces in Al-Shati refugee camp, where he comes from. He builds double walls where he can walk through the house between the walls, and then from the double wall, there’s a tunnel towards the outside, and then all sort of movement along roofs and between walls, and kind of rewire the architecture of the camp as a porous medium where him and his forces could actually move across that area. Then, that kind of expands from there into a kind of a tactical defense and movement system within camps. Somewhere in between the interaction of the kind of landless farmers and the sort of the architecture of resistance, a tunnel network emerges.
But there’s no dispute that there are tunnels under Gaza, but Israel is using the imaginary of the tunnels to do several things. First, to actually create an image of Palestinian as less than humans, as a kind of infestation out of control, beast-like, demonic figures that inhabit the subsoil, as a kind of justification to unground the entire surface. The fact that there are tunnels in Israel’s conception is like what allows it to sort of total desertification of Gaza on top of the surface.
Ben Reiff
There’s a great quote in the book that you include from the recollections of an Israeli military officer in the early 1970s who described finding entry shafts in courtyards, in destroyed buildings, in orchards, in homes, under stairwells, in wells, in clay ovens, and disused toilets. He said they were hidden and camouflaged by weeds, hay, sacks, barrels, or crates. Some of the entrances led to dead-end bunkers used for hiding, while others were used by units of two to three fighters to facilitate hidden movement. Why do you think Gaza’s tunnels have been so perplexing for Israel for almost 60 years? And why, even after two and a half years of ungrounding, have many of these tunnels continued to evade Israel’s attempts to destroy them?
Eyal Weizman
Israel is trying to detect tunnels through ground penetrating radar and ground penetrating radars require a certain kind of silence on the surface. But during a war when bombing is raining in, and also Israel’s own destruction — Israel’s own carpet of destruction that they’ve created — the top soil of Gaza now is full of rubble and all sorts of metal bars, etc., that the ground penetrating radars are distorted by. They’re distorted by all sorts of electrical signals.
It is also structurally extremely difficult to blow up a tunnel. A tunnel is not a thing, like in a sense of architecture, there’s an object that is self-supportive. It’s an absence of a thing. The structural forces of the earth are actually moving and protecting it in multiple other ways.
And the third thing is that tunnels are a process rather than a form. They’re an operation principle, and they could grow relatively easy in the particular soil of Gaza. You have an entire landscape under the soil — multiple layers of sand, sandstone, clay, and water. You have the shoreline, you have underground rivers, you have underground lakes, you have an entire landscape that is invisible to the eye and can only be experienced by texture and moisture and viscosity. You know, the very experienced tunnel diggers know when they cross into clay and how to follow a clay ridge that goes up and down in the subsoil. That is a kind of a very specific, very unique form of knowledge.
Ben Reiff
I want to talk a little bit about Forensic Architecture’s work over the past two and a half years, which has been incredibly vast. I mean, as well as verifying and cataloging and archiving thousands of videos from Gaza, you’ve also carried out a number of high profile investigations into specific incidents, such as the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in October 2023, and also the killing of 15 paramedics and NGO workers and the subsequent cover-up of those killings by the Israeli army in March 2025.
You’ve also contributed extensively to legal cases seeking to bring some kind of accountability and justice, perhaps most notably by supporting the South African application to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. There are so many crimes you could have investigated or legal cases you could have joined. I’m curious how you’ve envisioned your role as an organization during this period and how you made those decisions.
Eyal Weizman
Yeah, this is a very good question, because indeed, when people think about Forensic Architecture, they think about a kind of like scene of reconstruction — we would spend a year, sometimes more than a year, on a few split seconds — and reconstruct what happened by modeling and building in the social media-circulated videos and testimonies of place and doing those really very, very careful, minute reconstructions. We’ve done several that you’ve mentioned here, and also including the killing of Hind Rajab and others.
But particularly the challenge of a genocide case is not so much the clear construction of the question of who’s done it, and there’s a question of intent, of genocidal intent, the special intent, the intent to destroy all or in part. From a legal perspective, it is actually understood by pattern of conduct, pattern of military conduct. So if you analyze an incident, a bombing of a hospital, you’re within, usually within the range of international humanitarian law, war crime. Is it proportionate? Was it a military necessity? Genocide is really about the simultaneous application of a huge multiplicity of actions.
So, we have taken in and analyzed and catalog thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of incidents. Some of them are attacks on hospitals, some of them are attacks on schools, some of them are destruction of agriculture, some of them are attacks on aid, some of them are shooting and killing of civilians, etc. Some of them are expulsion, acts of expulsion, etc. And we want to see the relation between them.
When you see that attacks on the hospital occur at the moment that Israel wants to expel a particular area, and when you see that attack on agriculture, on the food sovereignty of Palestinian in Gaza, or an attack that was simultaneously to attack to the sinking of all fishing boats, and then Israel at the same time attacks aid coming in, there is a compounded effect of different and separate action that lead to and support the declaration of genocidal intent articulated by Israeli politicians and military figures at the beginning of the of that campaign and later throughout it. So that is really where our work was mainly articulated in and that is collected in a piece of work called “A Cartography of Genocide” that includes those thousands of verified incidents and time-space relation between them showing that they add up to a particular, or fulfilling, a particular intent.
Ben Reiff
The verification part of your work, as you mentioned in the book, usually relies on kind of identifiable urban markers. But Israel’s ungrounding of Gaza has flattened much of the landscape. So what techniques has your team developed in order to overcome that challenge?
Eyal Weizman
The whole art of what’s called geolocation that we started back in early 2010s, and with also partner organizations like Bellingcat and Syrian Archive and others, is really about, “Okay, you see videos from the ground, here’s an antenna, here’s a minaret of a mosque, here’s a particular roof of a building, here, this is the angle, this is when and where it happened, etc.” But Gaza is not only a demolition zone, it’s also a construction site. So the demolition of Gaza has transformed the topography of the Strip completely because the way that the Israeli army is actually kind of invading an area, it’s collecting all the rubble of neighborhoods it has destroyed, piling them up into an artificial landscape — it loves hilltops, the Israeli army — and then from the top of those landscapes, they put snipers or tanks and then moves on.
So effectively, you have a kind of what I call the earth storm, a kind of a changing topography that is continuously like a gelatinous kind of medium. The earth is turned into this gelatin thing. In this way, memory of a place is really what you have. Sometimes a means of torture was taking Palestinians, I don’t know, from Jabalia, and putting them where their home was and allowing them to see and then telling them this is where you are. The panic that ensues by the old contours of your existence are kind of anchored in space and that ungrounding erases the memory in that way.
Re-grounding initially begins with acts of historical and memory recollections. We were using what we call situated testimony, particularly with the two survivors of the medic massacres of March 2025, where we reconstructed with them the massacre as as a transformation in the landscape and built a model with them from memory of this landscape anchoring the recollection, making them understand what has happened, because after the massacre, those survivors were interrogated and tortured, and they were blindfolded. And then when they saw the site, they couldn’t understand what happened and where they were. Slowly through the reconstruction of the soil and its transformation, we were able to reground memory in place.
Ben Reiff
I think we’ve spoken quite abstractly about the horrors of the last few years, but a lot of the story of this genocide has also been personal to you and your team at Forensic Architecture. You write about how several of your friends and colleagues at Ain Media were killed in Gaza, along with at least 14 members of your colleague Nour’s family, and the search for answers about what happened to them really fused the professional with the personal. I wondered if you’d feel comfortable telling us about some of these friends and colleagues and the work they were doing before they were killed.
Eyal Weizman
Yeah, so the connection with Ain Media, like many other connections with Palestinian organizations, was formed by a former colleague of mine called Shourideh Molavi, who was actually often in Gaza and established that relation with Ain Media and conducted various collective investigations with them. She was a close personal friend of Roshdi Al-Sarraj, who’s the son of the legendary mayor of Gaza City, Yahya Al-Sarraj, and we were in touch. We were doing investigations together. I mean, I never met him in person, but he was on team calls and we were partnering on investigations. To a certain extent, they were the closest colleagues, our sort of sister organization in Gaza.
As immediately after October 7, 2023, Roshdi was asking us to help him find his colleagues or our colleagues in Gaza whose traces were lost. There’s so many Palestinians whose bodies have still not been found or buried under rubble, etc. We don’t know what happened to them. We know that there was bombing in the area where they were on October 7th itself, and the traces disappeared. So while, you know, Roshdi and his colleagues were looking for them on the ground. We were looking for them amongst the social media, the storm of videos that was coming out of Gaza. On the 22nd of October, Roshdi himself was killed in a targeted strike, covering his wife and daughter. It’s an incredibly heartbreaking set of actions and we were so involved and in there.
Then day after day, Nour and other colleagues and friends, Palestinians from Gaza and elsewhere, who had members of the family there come in and report about family members caught under…I remember in April 2025 Nour’s family was caught under a pile of rubble in Khan Younis. Her aunt and children, Nour’s cousins, were alive, under the rubble. They were knocking from under the pile.
Members of Nour’s family who knew that she was out asked for help. We were trying to call everybody that we knew and their sister, as you say. And we’re trying to alert the Red Cross, I mean, the Red Crescent said, you know, “We cannot approach. Israelis wouldn’t allow us to get near that place.” Every breath is painful in a situation like that, because you know people are still alive, crushed by buildings, and you experience it live.
So people think that, of course, we weren’t in Gaza, we didn’t experience anything directly, like what Palestinian experience there, but I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life. In that instance, the slow extinguishing of life of that family there was horrific. We were just seeing Nour at the time, dealing with that, continuing to work, doing everything that she could to try and rescue her family, who obviously perished, was enormously painful.
Ben Reiff
Wow, yeah, I can’t imagine, thank you for sharing that with us. The book closes by touching on the various reconstruction plans proposed for Gaza’s future by the American government, the Egyptian government, and also by Gazan civil society, none of which look anywhere close to becoming reality. But you also end by looking further into the future where you envision a process of what you call re-grounding through the return of Palestinian refugees, not only I think to their destroyed homes inside Gaza, but also to the communities that were destroyed during and after the Nakba 80 years ago.
I wondered if, to finish, you could tell us kind of what you see as the first step that’s necessary for that process of regrounding to take place?
Eyal Weizman
I think this is the relation between the finding of evidence — photographic material — to existence, that resists the logic of grounding, resists the logic of erasure. There’s always a trace, there’s always a weak signal, there’s always something remaining, even that survives the bulldozers and survives the plows of the 1950s. These are often anchors for return. We see it, I don’t know, still in the Wadi Gaza basin with Al-Araqib, no? I mean, it was a community that returned and the buildings were demolished 200 times, more than 200 times now..
They returned to a cemetery that exists there. So those traces are really important, they are anchors. If you learn how to see, and how to amplify weak traces and really through the combined force of testimony and critical analysis of images and cartography and whatever you have in order to reconstruct those or to find and map those traces, those become the anchors for return. And the resistance to the ungrounding logic of settler colonialism is indeed insisting on those weak traces and maintaining them as acts and anchors of return.
Ben Reiff
I think that’s a great place to end. Thank you so, so much, Eyal, for joining us and for your time. I would urge all of our listeners to go and read the book. It’s really an incredible piece of work. Thank you for joining us.
Eyal Weizman
Thank you, Ben.
Ben Reiff
[music]
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The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems, power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower and more tortuous form of annihilation.
The idea that the built environment determines a group’s conditions of life recalls the modernist conception of architecture, prevalent when the word ‘genocide’ was first conceived and defined by the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Modern architecture offered to calculate and improve the conditions of life. Cities were to be laid out in accordance with public health principles, and homes, in Le Corbusier’s famous definition, were to be ‘machines for living in’, calibrated to maximise the supply of biological necessities – heat, hygiene, air circulation, food and even sexual reproduction.
Architects’ Data (1936) by the German modernist architect Ernst Neufert is still used by architects looking for the most efficient dimensions for kitchens, bedrooms or even park benches. In the 1920s Neufert was an assistant to Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Later, on behalf of the Nazi Party, he oversaw the standardisation of Germany’s building industry, which was largely powered by enslaved labour. Several Bauhaus graduates designed concentration camps. The deliberate degradation of living conditions inverted the task of modern architecture from the enhancement of life to the production of death.
Lemkin defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement.
Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide of destruction flowed inwards from Gaza’s perimeter fences, pushing Palestinians into enclaves referred to by the Israeli army as ‘safe areas’ and ‘humanitarian zones’, though they were never safe or humane. These overcrowded coastal sites, such as al-Mawasi, with its barren sand dunes, were without housing, healthcare or other services, and were continuously bombed from the air and attacked on the ground. The bulldozers turned the agriculturally rich land of eastern Gaza into a monochrome desert of crushed grey cement mixed with the area’s yellowish soil. Entire cities such as Rafah, towns such as Beit Hanoun and refugee camps such as Jabalia were erased. When buildings are bombed or bulldozed, their remains – plastics, wiring, solvents, insulation, asbestos – release toxic chemicals into the soil. Some bombs penetrate the ground before exploding and release heavy metals or metalloids – such as uranium, lead and arsenic – deep underground. Many of these substances are slow to decay and will affect the composition of the soil for decades. A lived-in landscape has been turned into what a former Israeli general, Giora Eiland, described as a place ‘where no human being can exist’.
Lemkin understood conditions of life to include not only the infrastructure that enables biological existence but social and cultural continuity too: religious buildings, schools, libraries, heritage sites. In Gaza most of these have also been systematically demolished. The Genocide Convention ratified in 1948 did not mention the ‘cultural genocide’ that Lemkin argued should be included. Entire sections were left out of the convention. Imperial powers such as Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which were then attempting to suppress anti-colonial uprisings, wanted genocide to be defined in a way that would not restrict their activities. Settler-colonial states – Australia, the United States and Canada – that had destroyed the physical heritage, culture and language of Indigenous peoples also objected. But cultural and biological life are not separate domains when it comes to national survival. In Gaza the systematic devastation of the environment – fields, water sources and the fishing industry – destroyed the ability of the society to feed itself. Attacks on schools and mosques reduced its capacity to organise and offer mutual care to mitigate the worst effects of scarcity, thus aggravating famine. The simultaneous destruction of one domain amplifies the harm caused by the other.
On 13 October 2023, six days after the Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and bases around Gaza, Israel ordered the evacuation of Gaza City, sending Palestinians in northern Gaza towards the southern border with Egypt. A document prepared by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence and leaked to the online journal +972 explained the reason for this: it recommended the full-scale expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip into the Egyptian Sinai, arguing that this would ‘yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel’. The destruction of conditions of life was intended to hasten the Gazans’ departure. The biggest campaign in the history of aerial bombardment rolled like a carpet of fire from north to south.
The mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt has been an aim of Israeli governments since December 1948, when the army first tried and failed to cleanse this last remaining enclave along Palestine’s Mediterranean coast. It tried again during the 1950s and intensified its effort after the 1967 War, when Israel occupied both the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert. Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 gave Israel another opportunity. Expulsion plans were trumpeted by Israeli politicians and media spokespeople. Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that he was actively seeking to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. Israeli and some US officials started lobbying Egypt to accept large numbers of refugees. For eight months the Israeli army refrained from occupying the border area near Rafah, leaving the exit to Egypt open.
Many Palestinians, remembering the consequences of the mass displacement of 1948, refused to leave their homes. They remained in the ruins of Gaza City despite the bombing, and despite the denial of aid. Egypt policed the border closely and refused to let in Palestinians en masse, allowing entry only to those who could pay extortionate sums. Unable to achieve its goal, Israel sought instead to concentrate Palestinians into an ever smaller area of the Strip until the next opportunity for displacement arrived. Outside these zones, total destruction was meant to prevent their return to the areas from which they had been expelled.
The destruction was most complete close to Gaza’s fences. The IDF calls the area bordering Israel a ‘buffer zone’. It is a no-go area for Palestinians, a shetah hashmada, Hebrew for ‘annihilation zone’: any Palestinian entering it, or sometimes even approaching it, is shot on sight. The victims included Palestinians, many of them children, who wanted to see what could be salvaged from the ruins of their homes, to retrieve food aid that had been parachuted in, or who simply lost their way in a newly unfamiliar landscape. The flattening of all structures in the buffer zone was intended, among other things, to remove any hiding places and expose Palestinians to snipers. Before October the zone was between 300 and 500 metres wide. Two weeks into the war it was extended to a kilometre. By the spring of 2025 it was two kilometres wide; soon after it was three kilometres, with everything inside systematically bulldozed. Because the buffer zone now covered such a large area, snipers couldn’t be used everywhere and Palestinians were murdered instead by quadcopter drones equipped with grenade launchers. During the day people were easy to see against the monochrome backdrop; at night the drones’ thermal sensors registered their body heat.
Throughout military history, buffer zones – the Rhineland after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, the strip between Kuwait and Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War, the DMZ between North and South Korea, or the land between Turkish and Greek Cyprus – have been means of maintaining ceasefires by keeping armies apart. In the eight decades since the establishment of Israel, buffer zones have instead been used as a means of occupation, displacement and erasure. Under the terms of the armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel that ended the 1948 war, Israeli forward positions were drawn roughly three kilometres east of where the present border of Gaza now lies, as the Palestinian historian and cartographer Salman Abu Sitta has shown. The line crosses al-Ma’in, the village where he was born and from which he was expelled with the rest of his family on 14 May 1948. Al-Ma’in and other Palestinian villages were soon cleared and replaced by the agrarian kibbutz settlements that were attacked on 7 October 2023. The settlers expanded Israeli territory through cultivation, removing the remnants of Palestinian homes, roads and fields. They ploughed over cemeteries because these were often places Palestinians returned to. Soldiers and settlers were instructed to shoot anyone, armed or unarmed, who crossed into the zone.
Before the 1967 War King Hussein of Jordan secretly offered to keep the West Bank as a buffer area if Israel promised not to invade. Israel occupied the territory nevertheless. After the war, a security masterplan drawn up by the former military commander Yigal Allon called for a strip of the Jordan Valley ten to fifteen kilometres wide (covering roughly a third of the West Bank) to be annexed and settled to become Israel’s eastern buffer zone. Ethnic cleansing of Palestinian farming communities in the area started shortly after this, and has continued on and off ever since. Expulsions have accelerated radically since October 2023, and have increased even more since the start of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran, with the Israeli army promoting and participating in settlers’ pogroms throughout the remaining Palestinian communities. Bezalel Smotrich, a West Bank settler and the Israeli minister of finance, had already promised early in 2025 that Palestinian villages and cities in the West Bank would come to ‘resemble Rafah and Khan Younis. They will also be turned into uninhabitable ruins, and their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries.’
A similar process took place in the north of the country. During the 1967 War Israel occupied the Golan Heights with the explicit aim of creating a buffer zone between the Syrian army and Israel’s agrarian settlements in the upper Jordan Valley. Further settlements were built across the occupied area and in 1981 Israel formally annexed it. In December 2024, after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the IDF extended a ‘sterile defence zone’ further into Syrian territory, expelling Syrian residents, destroying military and civilian buildings including the al-Golan hospital and the al-Andalus cinema in Quneitra, and bulldozing orchards, forests and fields, piling the soil to construct military outposts, trenches and earth berms.
Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon has involved the expulsion of 600,000 Lebanese from a new buffer zone. Israel has bombed all the bridges across the Litani River, thirty kilometres away from the border, in order to cut off the area from the rest of Lebanon and has started systematically demolishing the villages closest to the border. The return of Lebanese inhabitants to these villages will be prohibited, Israel Katz, Israel’s minister of defence, said, ‘until the safety and security of the residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured’ – an impossible demand. An Israeli settler organisation has published plans for the ‘settlement of southern Lebanon’, producing maps that give Lebanese villages Hebrew names and provocatively advertising plots of land for sale.
This exemplifies the circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’.
Throughout the past two and a half years, Gaza has not only been a demolition zone but a construction site, reshaped according to Israel’s blueprint. The bulldozed remains of buildings were piled into a landscape of earth berms, which were then shaped into barriers, detention facilities and military outposts from which Israeli tanks and snipers commanded the area where survivors were concentrated. The scale of the earthworks was so great that Israel’s two hundred bulldozers were not nearly enough – many were damaged by the Palestinian resistance – and Israel urgently needed two hundred more. In late 2024 the Biden administration delayed their export and they weren’t sent until Trump took office. In the meantime the IDF hired private bulldozer operators, many of them West Bank settlers.
If Palestinians ever tried to return to the demolished zones, an Israeli bulldozer operator called Abraham Zarbiv said, they ‘will be returning to nowhere. Tens of thousands of families are left without papers, without childhood photos, without ID cards, they remain with nothing. If they return, they will not know where their home is. All they will find is sand.’ The erasure of the built environment was mirrored by the destruction of records of it. Municipal plans, historical maps and property deeds were destroyed when Israel bombed Gaza City’s Central Archives in November 2023.
The army ‘changed the Strip’s topography beyond recognition’, the Palestinian poet Omar Moussa wrote that month. ‘If we survive this war,’ he quoted a friend as asking, ‘what would be our meeting point?’ After the First World War the unprecedented facial injuries caused by high-explosive shells destroyed soldiers’ sense of identity. The territorial equivalent of this is the disorientation that Palestinians feel when exposed to the places that used to be their homes. A new form of psychological torture emerged. Blindfolded Palestinian captives were taken back to their old neighbourhoods, now a sea of rubble. ‘When we took the cloth off their eyes,’ Zarbiv reported, ‘they were completely disoriented, they did not understand where they were.’ Zarbiv, who is also a rabbinical court judge, has been chosen to light a torch at Israel’s Independence Day celebrations.
On the night of 23 March 2025 Israeli troops murdered fifteen first responders and buried their bodies under high earthworks near Rafah. Asaad al-Nasasra, a medic with the Palestinian Red Crescent, one of two survivors of the attack, was interrogated and tortured inside a hole dug nearby by bulldozers. He described his ordeal to researchers from Forensic Architecture, who were using his descriptions to try to model the changes to the landscape. When his blindfold was removed, he realised that ‘they had changed the place completely. When I saw the place, it made me feel hysterical. I couldn’t understand anything.’ In order to reconstruct the incident, the researchers worked with Earshot, an open-source audio investigative unit, which analysed the sound of gunfire recorded on the phone of one of the murdered medics. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who founded Earshot, told me that the demolition had also radically transformed the acoustic landscape. Usually, he said, audio recordings of gunshots in urban areas reveal sound echoing from many different directions. Here all that remained were three walls that had somehow survived the demolition. The new landscape enabled clear echoes, making it possible to reconstruct incidents from their sound signatures.
In the weeks that followed the massacre, earth and rubble in this area were piled up in a series of structures next to the site. They surrounded an open space, which soon became one of the compounds operated by the newly conceived Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organisation funded by US and Israeli entrepreneurs that supposedly took on the role of distributing food aid, bypassing the UN. Its feeding stations concentrated starving Palestinians in four specific locations, all near Israeli military sites, three of them close to the border with Egypt. Hundreds were massacred by Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries when they were forced to compete for rations.
The present ‘ceasefire’ came into effect on 10 October 2025. Under its terms Gaza was divided into two zones by a Yellow Line that ran roughly along the edge of the buffer zone, leaving the Israeli army in control of 54 per cent of Gaza. By December, Israel had unilaterally shifted the line west, bringing the area under its control up to 58 per cent. Eyal Zamir, Israel’s chief of staff, described the Yellow Line as Israel’s ‘new border’ with Gaza.
The line was drawn along a sandstone ridge that runs parallel to the coast, around three kilometres inland. At about seventy metres above sea level, it offers Israeli forces control of the Palestinians forced into the area near the sea. The ridge has organised life in the region since antiquity. Every year millions of cubic metres of granite from the Ethiopian plateau erode into sand that is carried down the Nile into the Mediterranean. Tides deposit large quantities of this sand along the Palestinian shoreline. Millennia ago one of these ancient dunes petrified into the sandstone ridge – a formidable barrier that dams the eastward drift of other sand dunes along the coast. West of the ridge the area is primarily sand; east of it, the soil is fertile. For many generations most of Palestine’s wheat and barley fields were cultivated by Bedouin tribes in the fertile plains of the Beersheba region. These farmers were among the two hundred thousand Palestinians expelled from their land and incarcerated in a beachside enclave between the towns of Rafah and Gaza in the final months of 1948. A sliver of this soil between three and four kilometres wide remained within the borders of Gaza. In recent decades this fertile land was Gaza’s bread basket. Now all of it is on the Israeli-controlled side of the Yellow Line.
At Forensic Architecture we identified a new earth berm that has been built along much of the path of the Yellow Line, as well as seven new military outposts. One of them was constructed on the site of a cemetery. Altogether there are 48 outposts east of the Yellow Line. Zamir has said they are the bases from which further incursions into the coastal area will be launched if necessary. At first the new outposts were no more than piles of earth and rubble, organised into variously shaped enclosures. But in recent months the enclosed areas and the roads leading to them have been asphalted. Electricity poles have been erected and the roads lit. Closely packed prefabricated buildings have been erected inside the bases, and tall towers on the perimeter carry communications and surveillance equipment. The bases no longer appear to be the provisional arrangements that Trump’s ceasefire plan claims them to be, but permanent instruments of occupation. The newly paved roads connect the bases to a matrix of control that is linked to Israel’s road network and communications grid.
West of the Yellow Line, Hamas is the governing body. Survivors live in and between the ruins or in massive tent encampments. The winter cold – the temperature can drop as low as five degrees – has led to deaths from hypothermia, particularly among infants. The summer, bringing heat of more than forty degrees, is fast approaching. In past summers children have suffocated in enclosures made from plastic sheeting or with improvised tin roofs: permanent structures are not allowed. Puddles are breeding grounds for mosquitoes; rubbish dumps are piled high; wastewater runs free and there are rodents everywhere. Israel does not allow the chemicals and pesticides that could help treat these problems into Gaza. While some medical services have been partially restored thanks to the effort of Palestinian medics and international NGOs, the health system barely functions. The scarcity of medicines and degraded hygiene mean that even minor injuries lead to infection. More than 40 per cent of dialysis patients in Gaza have died due to lack of treatment. The surviving population of Gaza has been reduced to a condition of bare existence, subject to unrelenting hunger and thirst under the ever present hum of killer drones and bomber jets. By keeping control of how much aid can enter – it was temporarily shut off in March after the US-Israeli attack on Iran began – Israel can continue to calibrate the conditions of life. It wants Palestinians to leave or to die slowly. Still, videos recording Gazan life under genocide show people cooking over communal fires, running open-air schools and submitting theses to universities whose buildings no longer exist.
The settler movement is lobbying hard for the Israeli government to start constructing settlements within the vastly expanded buffer zone. In December Katz said that Israel ‘will never leave Gaza’, and will turn the military outposts into what are known as ‘Nahal outposts’, which are designed to evolve into civilian settlements. Some of the settlements around Gaza began as Nahal outposts in the early 1950s, as did many of the settlements in the West Bank.
Since even Donald Trump officially opposes the building of Jewish settlements in Gaza, Netanyahu forced Katz to retract his statement. The Israeli government decided to adopt a position of ambiguity and buy time by delaying the army’s withdrawal and building up its positions and infrastructure east of the Yellow Line. The transformation of these military outposts into civilian settlements will have to wait for the world’s attention to shift elsewhere.
In the meantime, fanciful development plans are being floated to cover up the reality of the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, which has become a feeding ground for real-estate sharks cum politicians. On 4 February 2025, during the two-month ceasefire that followed Trump’s second inauguration, the president unexpectedly announced that the US would ‘take over the Gaza Strip’. Gaza, Trump said, had ‘a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather’ and would be a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. While the US had previously downplayed the destruction, Trump’s administration started to talk it up. This was not born of humanitarian concern. Referring to Gaza as a ‘demolition zone’, the administration said that development would require complete evacuation. Palestinians in the beachfront concentration zone would be encouraged to move to a ‘nice place’ elsewhere. Development would bring about the population displacement that the Israeli army had failed to achieve during the war.
To pre-empt Trump’s Riviera plan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE proposed their own masterplan. This was not born of humanitarian concern either, but designed to ensure Palestinians remained in the Strip rather than being expelled into their territories. ‘A green and smart city powered by renewable energy’ was proposed. It was evidently designed to please the Israelis. The buffer zone was integrated into the plan, represented as an ‘open green area’ where no structures were to be built.
In the summer of 2025, a group of Israeli entrepreneurs presented another initiative, the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT. The people behind it – the venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, the tech entrepreneur Liran Tancman et al – also proposed and oversaw the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which established militarised feeding stations in southern Gaza. GREAT continued where Trump’s Riviera vision left off. It proposed a ‘world-class’ beachside resort, with a series of ‘AI-powered’ cities further inland. An ‘MBZ Central Highway’ named after the president of the UAE, an ‘MBS Ring’ named after the Saudi crown prince and an ‘Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone’ were meant to induce those individuals to foot some of the bill. Some Palestinians could remain; others would receive meagre financial assistance towards moving elsewhere.
The ceasefire of October 2025 created an opportunity for this plan to be updated. The Board of Peace is a who’s who of populist authoritarianism: Trump as chairman for life was joined by Benjamin Netanyahu, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and others were put in charge of forming a committee to oversee the Palestinian technocrats who would manage day-to-day affairs in Gaza. A new military body known as the International Stabilisation Force would take over security control. As Shawan Jabarin, director of the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, said to me, the proposal involved only a semantic change in the logic of occupation: the ISF would simply replace the IDF as an occupying power.
Kushner presented the Board of Peace’s architectural vision at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Project Sunrise added detail to the hallucinatory vision of a riviera with renderings of 180 luxury high-rises, behind which seven clusters of urban and industrial developments were separated by wide roads that traced the route of the military roads constructed by Israel since October 2023 to slice Gaza into controllable sections. East of them was the buffer zone camouflaged as an agricultural area. The proposed architecture of control reached into cyberspace. Tancman, a graduate of Israel’s elite cyber-intelligence Unit 8200, was brought in by Trump to draft a Digital Overhaul Plan. This included the declaration that by July this year a free high-speed internet service would push all social interaction and financial exchange online. The aim was not to help the Palestinian economy but rather to make all financial and bureaucratic transactions subject to Israeli surveillance.
For the Israeli government, reconstruction provides leverage. Large-scale development takes years to complete. With its full control of checkpoints and terminals and every truck of cement and building material crossing into Gaza, Israel can ensure that reconstruction remains a perpetual ‘project’. The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21st-century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will be done by market forces’. The erasure of Palestinian life in Gaza could, counterintuitively, be achieved by architectural means.
In January, Forensic Architecture researchers identified site-work taking place in an area of one square kilometre, surrounded by several military outposts, on the Israeli-controlled side of the Yellow Line, just east of the ruins of Rafah. A leaked US military document revealed that this was a pilot for a programme called Alternative Safe Communities, which will offer accommodation to tens of thousands of Palestinians, vetted for their willingness to renounce Hamas, in communities of modular homes supplied with water, sanitation and electricity; mosques and schools will promote normalisation with Israel in line with the curriculum used by the UAE. An indicative illustration of what is referred to as the Emirati Compound shows the layout of a new type of refugee camp. In the plan, two-storey prefabricated units – not tall enough to ‘threaten’ Israeli forces – are laid out along wide streets that allow Israeli armour to patrol. At the centre is a large park surrounding a single-storey mosque. This, rather than luxury housing and a riviera, is the most that Palestinians can hope for from the reconstruction plans. Residents would enter and exit the fenced-in camp through checkpoints equipped with biometric sensors. The plan also offers help to ‘residents wishing to travel abroad’.
All these initiatives ignored Palestinian planners and architects, although several Palestinian reconstruction plans have been proposed. One of them, the Phoenix Gaza Initiative, was prepared by the Union of Gaza Strip Municipalities, working with Palestinian architects in Palestine and the diaspora, and is grounded in the ‘social and spatial relationships that persist in Gaza’. Erased neighbourhoods and refugee camps – some of which, like Rafah and the Jabalia, are historic centres of Palestinian national identity – are to be replaced, home by home, after carefully re-establishing the land ownership of the erased surface. During the process of reconstruction, each family would be housed near the site of their demolished home, and communities would be involved in the reconstruction.
Reconstruction plans imposed on Palestinians with the implicit aim of destroying Palestinian life in Gaza demonstrate the reason Lemkin reserved a place for architecture in his conception of the crime of genocide. He knew that the way a people organises its space is a manifestation of its history and social structure. ‘Genocide has two phases,’ Lemkin wrote in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The first involves the ‘destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group’ – this was achieved in Gaza by Israel’s devastating bombing. The second involves the imposition of a design by the oppressor, like these reconstruction plans for Gaza. ‘This imposition, in turn,’ he wrote, ‘may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.’
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan has been teaching Language Education at the Hebrew University and the David Yellin School of Education. Israel Academia Monitor reported about her many times before.
She comes from a prominent leftist family and has been a political activist for decades, but in 2010 she attracted broad public attention with her book, Palestine in Israeli. School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. The work claimed that the Israeli educational system, reflecting society at large, is deeply racist. Her comments on Holocaust education in schools were equally harsh. She claimed that Holocaust education creates a siege mentality and hatred toward the “other” that justifies military actions.
Several Israeli academics criticized the book on epistemological and methodological grounds, with some going so far as to allege that the study reflects a deep ideological bias. Despite this criticism, the book increased her international stature.
In 1997, her thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a terror attack in Jerusalem. To cope with the loss, Peled-Elhanan became a prominent peace activist with the Parents Circle – Families Forum, an organization of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families. She also pivoted to more general issues of human rights. To recognize her contribution, the European Parliament bestowed the Sakharov Freedom of Thought Prize on her in 2001. She subsequently spoke at World Children’s Day and Women’s Day, which are observed by the European Parliament. “I was invited. They spoke about children who suffer all over the world. They haven’t touched Palestine. And when I asked, ‘Why don’t you speak about Palestine?’ They said, ‘This is another matter.’ They are stricken with fear of antisemitism. They are so afraid to be called antisemites. I told them then, I said, ‘Nobody has ever died of being called antisemitic. Nobody has ever died of being anti-Semite, but so many people and children and newborn babies die because they are called Palestinians. So what are you afraid of?'”
Peled-Elhanan used the 2011 invitations to speak at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, at a conference on “Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Conflict,” to raise the Palestinian issue. In a talk titled “The Educational Stakes,” she explained how “the killing of Palestinians is legitimated as long as you can find some consequences that retrospectively can justify it, by the way, during the raids on Gaza.” She asked, “who would ever blame Judaism or Christianity for the oppression and massive killing of Palestinian, Iraqi, and Afghan children? who would blame the people who support American, European and Israeli crimes against Muslims all over the world who send their children to fight these ruthless, useless wars in the name of democracy and freedom and excuse themselves with some imaginary Clash of Civilization, the Western world today is infected with fear of Islam.” She continued, “the Jewish democratic state of Israel holds millions of Palestinians hostages because they are not Jewish, however as we know neither Judaism nor Islam nor any other religion for that matter is the cause for the aggression of armies, and the act of Terror committed by those who have no armies although all those killers use religion, and the words of fundamentalist priests and rabbis to justify their crime, the cause for aggression is racism and greed, racist education, imperialism and ruthless regimes of occupation. I know it is a terrible task, terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel and in the USA or in any other Western Democratic country to admit we were raised on heterophobia, on fear of the other, fear that is enhanced by ignorance and lack of communication.”
Closer to home, she kept attacking the IDF soldiers. She used a 2007 address to the radical group Mothers in Black to describe the soldiers as “the murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olive [trees] and poisoners of wells… who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. These children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger.” As for their mothers, “they have dedicated their wombs to the apartheid state… and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders.”
Even the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, did not compel Peled-Elhanan to change her position. She never equivocally denounced Hamas and, soon after, continued to assail Israel. More recently, she returned to criticizing Israeli education. In a recent interview with the radical-leftist 972 Magazine, she told the interviewer that “Israeli education has always been very racist towards Palestinians… They were never depicted as human beings or as a society — their culture, their habits, their customs, their history, their civilization is never taught. They have always been depicted as a problem to be solved, even in the books of what was called “new historians,” where they were mentioned, but mentioned in a racist way.”
Answering a question about Holocaust education, she stated: “From my research, I can say that the purpose of Holocaust teaching in Israel is to traumatize every year, again and again and again, and to create a terrible fear of another Holocaust. We can see it: During the Gulf War, everybody was talking of another Shoah, you know, the book ‘Shoah and the Syndrome.’ And 7th of October, Shoah, everything is Shoah… The Ministry of Education thought of a plan to keep young people inside Israel. That’s what they came up with: to traumatize them and frighten them so much of the outside world that they would stay and be ready to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others, of course. My conclusion is this is the main function of Holocaust education.”
She added that “I think that state schools and other schools that educate the pilots and all the elite units in the army, who are not less criminal than those little soldiers, pogromists, only differently. Even if you ask people who define themselves as Zionist left, they all admire the army, still. Okay? Even today. Even today. This is the education they got: The army is above judgment.”
For more than two decades, Israel Academia Monitor has documented how a group of Israeli activist academics contributed to the delegitimization of the Jewish state, undoubtedly contributing to the dramatic rise in antisemitism and antizionism. Nurit Peled-Elhanan exemplifies this phenomenon.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: How Israeli classrooms indoctrinate Jewish supremacy
Amos Brison
Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Amos Brison, Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host of today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the river and the sea.
Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of 972 or make a one-off contribution.
[music]
Amos Brison
If Palestinians appear in Israeli textbooks at all, they never appear as Palestinians. They appear as “Arabs,” as enemies, as a “demographic threat” — always, in the words of today’s guest, education and language scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan, as “a problem to be solved.”
Peled-Elhanan’s research into Israeli textbooks has traced how Palestinians, as well as Israel’s internal “others” — Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews — are represented inside the education system, and how those portrayals shape the moral and political imagination of Israeli society.
These questions have become especially urgent since October 7, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza has exposed what happens when children brought up in an evironment that systematically dehumanizes Palestinians become soldiers, voters, and political leaders.
For Peled-Elhanan, the issue has become personal as well. In the crackdown on dissent that followed the war, she experienced firsthand how the system treats those who challenge its official narratives.
Welcome Nurit.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Hi.
Amos Brison
I’d like to start with the present. In your view, what role has the Israeli education system played in bringing us to this moment in which Israel is under the leadership of an ultra right-wing, Khanist government that has committed genocide in Gaza?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Well, Israeli education has always been very racist towards Palestinians and, as you said, non-Ashkenazi Jews. Although it’s also racist towards East European Jews, everything that’s “Eastern” is treated in a racist way. We don’t know anything about them, just as we don’t know anything about Mizrahi Jews, Arab Jews, or we don’t know anything about Ethiopians, or we don’t know anything about East European Jews, really, except for the fact that they were exterminated. You cannot find anywhere, any material about these communities — nothing. In the books, they are represented as the problem that the state had to cope with. If you think that today, more than 60% of students are of Mizrahi and Ethiopian origin, how do they feel reading these things?
But especially Palestinians, of course, this is the most important thing. They were never depicted as human beings or as a society — their culture, their habits, their customs, their history, their civilization is never taught. They have always been depicted as a problem to be solved, even in the books of what was called “new historians,” where they were mentioned, but mentioned in a racist way, Elie Barnavi and so on.
So I think this is the general attitude that the Palestinians, or they’re never called Palestinians, they’re called Israel’s Arabs or Arabs, are a problem to be solved and we have to solve it. I think a few weeks ago, some of these pogromists said, “You educated us that they are a problem to be solved. So we’re solving it.” He actually said that. I don’t think there is much difference. Of course, today it’s more extreme, it’s more vulgar, it’s more blatant, but the attitude has always been there.
Amos Brison
In your research, I’ve noticed you pointed to history and geography as two fields that are particularly important for this type of indoctrination.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
And civic studies, yeah.
Amos Brison
And civic studies. Can you explain why these fields are so important? Most interestingly, for me, is geography. It’s less intuitive, maybe, and maybe give us some examples.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Geography is meant in Israel to reproduce or propagate or teach territorial identity. Israeli identity is a territorial identity. The maps and the books are called “The land of Israel,” never the state of Israel. And this is on purpose. All the maps depict the greater land of Israel, not the state of Israel. Even on a map called “The Arabs of Israel,” you don’t have one Arab city on the map. So the feeling is that they live among us, on top of us, which is horrible for Israelis. Not even Nazareth, not even Akko. They are depicted as a burden, as people who refuse modernity, as people who refuse to give anything for the general good. This is a quote from “The Geography of the Land of Israel.” And this is all we know about them, that they are primitive, that they are parasites, and that they don’t live anywhere because we don’t see on the map the places where they live.
And of course, the settlements, the illegal Jewish settlements in Palestine are presented as part of Israel, part of the state of Israel. There is one map that shows you them. They say that the borders of Israel are temporary borders, and on the map, you see two soldiers that point their guns towards Lebanon and Syria, for example. So all this is geography. You have those graphs, for example, graphs of progress. Progress is being expressed by lesser number of children, by a higher age of marriage.
Reproduction is an obsession in Israel, as you know, the demography is. So they give you all these graphs and tables of demography. In one graph that was accepted by Human Development — it’s an organization that produces graphs every year — they say that they managed to put Israel as the last one on the list of developed countries, as contrary to non-developed countries. But you have an asterisk telling you that the graph of Israel does not represent the non-Jewish population. It was accepted by this American organization of Human Development.
Amos Brison
And of course, history education plays a crucial part. I want to quote one thing from one of your papers, “As in other nation states, the main task of Israeli school books is to construct a continuous national narrative in order to construe and consolidate the national identity for all Jewish citizens.”
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Yeah, I mean other countries did the same, like Germany did the same thing, France and so on. We are directly connected to a biblical past. The life of Jews in what is called diaspora was minimized to almost nothing. This ancient past took its place, and we are directly connected to this ancient past and of course to the heroes — Masada, Joshua, biblical Joshua, and so on and so forth. So this creates what Pierre Nora calls the “cult of continuity.”
Amos Brison
I remember growing up in the Israeli education system that like Bible studies was kind of this in-between place of, is it history, or is it literature, or mythology? I think this confusion may not have been so accidental.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Of course not. For the secular schools, it is history, yes.
Amos Brison
What role would you say the Holocaust plays in Israeli education?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Israeli children are educated to “a Holocaust.” Eyal Naveh, in his book, “Past in a Storm,” says that The Holocaust is the main element of Israeli identity, much more than Zionism, for example, or the establishment of an Israeli state. From my research, I can say that the purpose of Holocaust teaching in Israel is to traumatize every year, again and again and again, and to create a terrible fear of another Holocaust. We can see it: During the Gulf War, everybody was talking of another Shoah, you know, the book “Shoah and the Syndrome.” And 7th of October, Shoah, everything is Shoah.
The sociologist, Julia Resnik, explains that until the 70s, Holocaust studies were not so important. But after the ‘73 war, you know, there was a huge wave of emigration from Israel. People said, “Excuse me, this is not for me.” The Ministry of Education thought of a plan to keep young people inside Israel. That’s what they came up with: to traumatize them and frighten them so much of the outside world that they would stay and be ready to sacrifice their own lives and the lives of others, of course. My conclusion is this is the main function of Holocaust education, because we don’t learn anything about the people.
The people — except for a few like Anne Frank or Annick Lever — are never presented by their name. They have no biography. They’re completely dehumanized. They are presented as samples of categories. And sometimes you have someone with a story of another or a killing in one place, and if you take seven books, every book tells you it’s another place. It doesn’t matter. As Shmuel Krakowski wrote, “We know so much about the extermination, but we know nothing about the exterminated.” So it is not meant for us to feel or for the children to feel any empathy or mourning. No, it is meant to traumatize them, to make them post-traumatic people who are afraid of anything that is not themselves. This is the main thing.
Amos Brison
Yeah. I mean, do you see a connection between how Holocaust education shapes Israeli classrooms and how Israeli students are taught to see Palestinians?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Yes, first of all, Palestinians replaced the Germans as the potential exterminators. Ben-Gurion said that he accepts the compensation from Germany in order to defend ourselves against the Nazi Arabs. So they became Nazi, and this is it. Okay, we all want to live in Berlin. But we must have an exterminator in order to justify ourselves. So they became the potential exterminators. This is it.
There’s a chapter in history books and also in the final exam, the Bagrut, the matriculation, that is called “The Formation of Holocaust Remembrance.” This chapter includes all the terrorist attacks of the Palestinians — decontextualized completely, out of context, as presented in the media always, “suddenly they got up and killed us.” This chapter, after every terrorist attack, there’s the same sentence. “This event proved to the Israelis their vulnerability and their weakness and made them identified with Holocaust survivors.” After every terrorist attack. Then, in the matriculation, you have questions. “Please choose one terrorist attack and tell us how it affected Holocaust remembrance.” So all the time they are conflated.
Sometimes it’s very blatant, like [Menachem] Begin saw Arafat as the new Hitler. The invasion into Lebanon saved us from another Auschwitz. In one book of Ketzia Tabibian, the terrorist attack of Entebbe, she says that some of the terrorists were Germans and they divided the passengers into Jews and non-Jews, so this is [Joseph] Mengele. All the time you have this conflation between Palestinians and the Nazis.
Amos Brison
Do you see any space in Israeli classrooms to connect Holocaust memory to any kind of universal ideals of anti-racism or anything like that.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
The only school that ever did it was Kedma, Kedma School in Shchunat HaTikva, a poverty neighborhood in Tel Aviv. They had a program for Holocaust Day that was called “The Seventh Candle.” So six candles for the six million and seventh candle for all other genocides, for all other sufferers from racism in the world.
This enraged the authorities. Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. He was furious. He called [Ron] Huldai, [mayor of Tel Aviv] to, I don’t know, to close the school. All kinds of people, I don’t know — [former Education Minister] Limor Livnat is mentioned — told them, “You will not steal our Holocaust with your Moroccan belly dancing.” Ah, because they also played a Hannah Szenes song, “Eli Eli,” as it is sung by a HaBrera HaTiv’it, you know, to a Moroccan rhythm. It’s beautiful what they did. But they said, “You will not steal our Holocaust with the belly dancers.”
I mean, the whole country was furious. Although some people, especially Holocaust survivors, congratulated them. Yad Vashem adopted the program, but I don’t know if any other school ever adopted it from Yad Vashem. I don’t see any other school doing this.
Amos Brison
I want to go back a bit to the broader education system in Israel, like the Jewish education system. It’s divided into several streams, right? There’s the state secular, Mamlakhti, state religious, Mamlakhti Dati, and the ultra-Orthodox. I’m not sure if you research all of them, but could you maybe talk about the meaningful differences between them and how Palestinians and others are portrayed?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Today, they’re not portrayed at all. My study ends in 2021, and already in the last few years, you have this very abstract idea of terror and enemy, but they have no name; you don’t know who they are. They become very abstract. I didn’t study Orthodox, although I read the book. I mean, there’s nothing to study there because it is so blatant. You see what I mean? You cannot do any analysis. But I think that state schools and other schools that educate the pilots and all the elite units in the army, who are not less criminal than those little soldiers, pogromists, only differently. Even if you ask people who define themselves as Zionist left, they all admire the army, still. Okay? Even today. Even today.
This is the education they got: The army is above judgment, the army is above criticism, the army is always right, and so on and so forth, doesn’t matter. And if the army does something wrong, it has a good reason. This is how for example, in the 90s, when books did mention massacres like Deir Yassin, like Kfar Qasim, like Qibya, at the end of the chapter, they would always tell you that the far-reaching consequences were good for the Jews. So they wouldn’t tell you, “We went to kill all the people in Qibya because we wanted security.”
No. But at the end of the chapter, they would say reprisals such as, “That in Qibya brought some confidence to Israeli Jews.” You see? And this, even in books of leftist writers like A.L. Naveh.
Some confidence, okay? So this is called, in discourse analysis, “consequential explanation.” You take the consequences and you turn them into cause. You don’t have to say explicitly, “We went to kill them.” No. But since we did kill them already, the result is good for us.
For Deir Yassin, for example, they said that the Deir Yassin massacre caused a panic, panicked flight of Israel’s Arabs. Even a moderate person like Weizmann said it was a “miracle.” So this is how the chapter ends. You see?
Amos Brison
Yeah.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
So even if they describe massacres, at the end of the chapter, you know, it was good for us. And today they don’t describe massacres, they don’t describe anything. But this is very important to know because people always say, “Do they mention the Nakba? They don’t mention the Nakba.” Yes, they do mention the Nakba in the 90s, in the beginning of 2000. But what do they say about the Nakba? They say it was for “the best.”
Amos Brison
I mean, how do you compare from your research on the Israeli textbooks and the education system more broadly? Do you recognize similar dynamics in other societies and other periods of history?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
I don’t think it’s very different. You know, I lecture all over the world, and whenever I lecture in schools, people start thinking about their own narratives and their own school books, okay? Whether it’s in Italy, where the massacre in Croatia is not mentioned, or in other places. I was in Luxembourg, they started talking about the French. It’s very similar because this is the “raison d’être” [reason for existing] of school books. Why do we need school books? The state needs school books in order to legitimate its controversial acts and to create this myth of continuity. Otherwise, you don’t need school books. So it’s very much alike in other places.
I think that in Israel, because it has immediate practical consequences of killing people — what you don’t have in other places — I mean, not in Europe. It is so crucial to know what’s going on there, but it’s not very different from other places. No, this patriotism and the fabricated national narrative and the fabricated nationality, the nation, okay? They never mention those who live on the margins of the nation. I have school books from Uzbekistan, where they really depict the Armenians in a horrible way. I know in India now, they changed all school books; they changed them. In Turkey.
All these school books, they have their pariah, they have what is called their “chosen trauma” from past generations of something horrible that happened and that they impose on present day enemies. I was in Spain now and they said that they don’t learn anything about the Franco era. So also they have this myth of continuity from before. This is the nature of school books. It is the nature of school books. But again, we have very immediate consequences when children say they are a problem to be solved and they go and kill them.
Amos Brison
Do you think there are maybe warning signs that people can look for if they see an education system or school books that are preparing children to accept things like domination or ethnic hierarchy or even mass violence?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
First of all, I think parents should read what their children study. You should be more involved in this way, okay? Read. Read what they read, read their assignments — read. You have to know what’s going on. Because children, you know, everybody asks me when I lecture in other places, “Why don’t they go to the Internet to verify the truth?” Nobody at the age of 14 or 15 goes to the Internet to verify school material. Couldn’t care less, they want to pass the exam. But because they want to pass the exam, these are the only things they read. They don’t hear anything else. And that’s a point. So I think, really educate parents to do that. Because after that, suddenly you come up with this, you know, these ideas of there are no innocent people in Jenin, there are no innocent babies in Gaza. Where does it come from?
Amos Brison
Are there examples of societies that successfully reformed curriculum of this kind?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Yes. In Ireland, they did it very nicely. And there are joint books in Korea and Japan, and also in France and Germany. But teachers are not very satisfied because the Holocaust is all but gone from these books, you know. Something like Germany was not so nice to France and France was not so nice to Germany and the economy suffered terribly, something like that. When I was in Luxembourg, the teachers said that it was “unacceptable: and they would take the children on their own to Auschwitz and so on and teach them the Holocaust.
But yes, there are, there are times all the time. There’s also here, you know, learning the narrative of the other. This was written by teachers themselves, with the guidance of a Palestinian professor and Israeli professor. You have on one side the Palestinian narrative, on one side the Israeli narrative. Needless to say, in Israel, they don’t allow this into schools. The Palestinian Ministry of Education allowed it as a project, you know, for two or three weeks. There’s one school in Israel that taught it, Sha’ar Negev, but then they felt an urge to tell the whole world, and it was banned.
My students, even, I used to give it to them as exercise, you know? They said, “No, no, no, we’re not touching it. We’re not touching it.” So there was this. Van Leer has a series of the two narratives, and it’s very, very telling what happens there. For example, in the Van Leer series, the attitude of the Palestinian historian who writes to Israeli casualties and the attitude of the Israeli historian to Palestinian casualties are the same. They practically don’t mention them. They mentioned their own, and then they say, “On the other side, there were some casualties and so on.”
I think that for research purposes, to give it to teachers and to see how these things work is very important.
Amos Brison
So you mentioned the Palestinian education system. Well, For decades, it’s been demonized by Israeli officials, supposedly perpetuating rejection of Israel’s right to exist, supporting Palestinian refugees’ right of return, preparing children for war against Israel. Want to ask how you view this position and what do these critics leave out?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
First of all, this is not my specialty. The main expert on this is Dr. Samira Elayan, who studies the Palestinian educational system for years now, wrote a very important book about education in East Jerusalem. What I know I know from her study and then all the books of the Palestinian Authority are on the internet. You can read them in English.
The Palestinian textbooks are monitored and censored constantly, directly by Israel and indirectly by people who work for Israel, like the European Parliament and World Bank and all this. So even if they wanted to write what you said, they couldn’t. So it’s a lie. It’s a sheer lie. The first edition of Palestinian textbooks was in the beginning of the 2000s, and it was after Oslo, and they wanted very much to write it in the spirit of Oslo. So there is a map of Israel, and there is a whole chapter about Jewish scholars and Jewish heroes and so on and so forth.
What we don’t have. Since nothing happened, you know, in 2018, they published a new version, and this new version is much more nationalistic. They’re out about the colonies, they say the word occupation, and so on, but there’s nothing which is not true. Now, there is this terrible organization called IMPACT, that disguises itself as an academic organization because they rented a room in the university, but they are not an academic organization. No journal ever publishes anything they do, but they have a lot of money and a lot of influence. I don’t know why.
All these years, because I have the Sakharov Prize, I visit the European parliament a lot. And every time I come, I speak to people, “You have to monitor the Israeli system, not only the Palestinian one,” and this is the first time that I have an invitation to come to UNESCO and speak about it. But once, after this impacted people, I don’t know what they said, the parliament wanted to stop the budget, the educational budget for the Palestinian Authority. Samira and I were summoned urgently and we saved it.
I mean, we saved the budget because we proved that they’re lying. They’re just lying. Everything they say is a sheer lie, because as I told you, even if they wanted to, they cannot. Now in East Jerusalem, for example, they study the books of the Palestinian Authority, but with the monitoring and censorship of the Israeli Ministry of Education. So the children receive books with blank pages, like you have a title, Palestinian nationality, and then three blank pages. They also erased the symbol of the Palestinian Authority from the cover and many, many paragraphs inside.
For example, when they speak of nationality, they put something about Zionism and, I mean, they intervene with the content of the books. There is no way Palestinians can do anything against it, because otherwise they will not receive the budget. Of course, there is written material that comes not from the Ministry of Education, you know, just like we have. We have this horrible book called Derech HaMelech that says…
Amos Brison
Torat HaMelech.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Yeah, “You can kill enemy babies and rape enemy women,” but it doesn’t come from the Ministry of Education. It comes from all kinds of rabbis who maybe have more influence, but it’s not the Ministry of Education. So we studied, Samira studied, and I studied, only the authorized books, those who go to schools.
Amos Brison
The European Union published a major study in 2021 about the textbooks, the official textbooks of the Palestinian Authority.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Right.
Amos Brison
And whether they adhere to standards of peace, tolerance, and nonviolence. Why have there not been any comparable studies of Israeli textbooks?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
I cannot answer you that. I know that one day there was a “the child’s day,” “day of the child,” something in the European Parliament, I was invited. They spoke about children who suffer all over the world. They haven’t touched Palestine. And when I asked, “Why don’t you speak about Palestine?” They said, “This is another matter.” They are stricken with fear of antisemitism. They are so afraid to be called antisemites. I told them then, I said, “Nobody has ever died of being called antisemitic. Nobody has ever died of being anti-Semite, but so many people and children and newborn babies die because they are called Palestinians. So what are you afraid of?”
But of course, there are other things. I mean, I’m not that naive. There are all these countries that are implicated in the occupation and have all kinds of agreements with Israel and so on and so forth. It’s economical. But they don’t touch the subject. I told you, this invitation that I have from UNESCO is the first time ever. It’s much easier to slander Palestinians than to really criticize Israeli education.
Amos Brison
Yeah. So recently, our education minister, Yael Kish, reportedly tried to bury poor test results by Israeli students in English, Hebrew, and science. He ordered the Authority for Measurement and Evaluation in Education to stop publishing reports pending review. What does this reveal about the state of the education system, and do you see a link between this and the political indoctrination that you research?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Of course, of course, of course, of course. I mean, these people, they are all, you know, they lie. They have this ideology — fascist ideology — at any cost. About 10 years ago, we were the last in the OECD tests in every measure except poverty. Ok? It’s not new. Israel has been at the bottom of the ladder for years. It’s getting worse all the time, of course, because they are busy with heritage and nationalism and all these things. They encourage, if you have ignorant youngsters, they would do whatever. I mean, they’ll be good soldiers, let’s say. Okay. They’ll obey anything.
You can infect their minds with any virus you want if they know nothing, especially if they don’t know any other language. This is very, very encouraging. A lot of programs are being written by teachers, they don’t use the books anymore. But it’s a long and very hard battle.
Amos Brison
Haaretz recently reported on a secretive unit tied to the Education Ministry that monitors teachers who criticize the government or the war. I want to tie in a bit your story here because you yourself were suspended in 2023, not long after October 7th, from David Yellin College, for comments you made in a faculty WhatsApp group. You later resigned, citing political persecution. How do you understand this campaign against teachers and academics? How do you view it impacting education in Israel going forward?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
First of all, I was not suspended. I resigned. The president of the college wanted to suspend me, but there are procedures which he didn’t want to follow, and the management told him, the administration told him, “You cannot do it.” I believe that his lawyers also told him you cannot do it. What happened was that there is a sociologist in the Hebrew University called Gad Yair, and after the 7th of October, he published two videos. One explained why Hamas are Nazis, and one with an explicit plan of “Nakba Two.” There was this WhatsApp group where I have never participated in my life, but I read what they say. And a lot of teachers said, “Yes, they are Nazis,” and so on and so forth.
I decided to react, but I didn’t know it would be so, you know, scandalous. I explained why Hamas are not Nazis, because Nazis were a state with an army that dominated helpless minorities and exterminated them, and this is not the relationship between us and Hamas — thank god. They don’t dominate us and we are not helpless minorities, and so on. Then I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre, from an introduction that he wrote to Franz Fanon, “The Wretched of the Earth,” where he says, “After years and years that your heel was pressing his neck and you released your leg, your foot from his neck and allow him to look at you, what kind of look do you think you’d find in his eyes?” And I said, this is the look we saw on the 7th of October.
Now this group is closed. The administration has no right to go in, but there were two teachers, I know who they are, who rushed and told the president. He wrote me a letter immediately, saying that he wants to suspend me until the hearing. As I told you, other administration people told him, “This is not the way to do it. You don’t decide on your own. There is a procedure and so on.” And his lawyer says the same, so he let it go. I said, “I’m not coming to any hearing.” He said, “Ok, instead of suspension, I will put a letter in your file saying that you justify the massacre and you support terrorism.” I said, “Ok, if you put this finally in this letter in my file, then I quit.” And I quit. The good thing was that the teachers were appalled, and so they decided to write an ethic code for the college that will specify the rights of the administrations and the rights of the teachers. So something good came out of it. For me, it was a way to say goodbye.
Amos Brison
And enjoy retirement.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
And enjoy my retirement, yeah.
Amos Brison
Do you think there’s like any room inside Israeli education institutions for dissenting voices at this point?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Yeah, there are many private schools, democratic schools and dialogic schools, and all these schools where they can do that, yeah.
Amos Brison
Yeah. How much of an impact do they have at this point?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Nothing. But I don’t think you should judge people’s actions by their impact on the system. Because we know that all the good organizations starting from Breaking the Silence and Yesh Din and the Families Forum and Standing Together, all these wonderful organizations, have no political representation. So what? They are creating a certain alternative world where these things are happening. This is all we can do. We can live in our small alternative world.
Amos Brison
And maybe to close, after everything you’ve studied and lived through, what would a truly different education system look like between the River and the Sea, as we say? And what would it take to reach there, if it’s possible?
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Today it’s not possible, but again, it can be a private one. I think a joint narrative should be written. A narrative of the 100-200 years in this place. Yes, of everybody who lives here. I think it should include literature and poetry and architecture and agriculture and joint initiatives and really tell the children the story of the place. Because in Israel, we have this complex that we belong in Europe and not in the Middle East. So we don’t know anything about the Middle East. We don’t study anything about the Middle East. Turn the Middle East into the cradle of civilization instead of a place that should be feared and conquered.
I’ll tell you that in 2009, I had this idea with a Palestinian professor, Sami Adwan, and we asked for volunteers to come and start writing this joint narrative. People came from all over the country — there was such a response, I couldn’t believe it. I think there is a chance to do something like that. To know where you live and to like where you live, because today nobody likes the place. I mean, they all declare, “we love, we love, we love.” They don’t love anything. They’re scared. So this can be a very nice, you know, solution.
It will not be in an instant, but if you have something to offer, maybe someone will take it up. But of course you cannot expect something out of the blue to affect the whole country. Education takes time, a long time. You see, the education Israel is giving — racist, belligerent, aggressive, and so on — also took time and sophistication. So counter-education, of course, will take time, a lot of time.
Israeli Mother Addresses the European Parliament By Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Dear Friends Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit’s speech made on International Women’s Day in Strasbourg on March 2005. Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honor and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament). However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R`aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family’s strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder. When I asked the people who invited me here why didn’t they invite a Palestinian woman, the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized. I don’t know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars. It is true, unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli army, has expanded around the globe, In fact, state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence, are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA. This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb. Great France of “la liberte egalite et la fraternite” is scared of little girls with head scarves. Great Jewish Israel is afraid of the Muslim womb which its ministers call a demographic threat. Almighty America and Great Britain are infecting their respective citizens with blind fear of the Muslims, who are depicted as vile, primitive and blood-thirsty, apart from their being non-democratic, chauvinistic and mass producers of future terrorists. This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew. I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour; I don’t know the kind of violence that turns a woman’s life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal. But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children. Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses, though they may have various illustrious names-such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland-are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful. We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homorganic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers… Western mothers who are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: `I gave him birth, I breast fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land.` All of us are terrorized by mind-infecting education to believe all we can do is either pray for our sons to come back home or be proud of their dead bodies. And all of us were brought up to bear all this silently, to contain our fear and frustration, to take Prozac for anxiety, but never hail Mama Courage in public. Never be real Jewish or Italian or Irish mothers. I am a victim of state violence. My natural and civil rights as a mother have been violated and are violated because I have to fear the day my son would reach his 18th birthday and be taken away from me to be the game tool of criminals such as Sharon, Bush, Blair and their clan of blood-thirsty, oil-thirsty, land thirsty generals.. Living in the world I live in, in the state I live in, in the regime I live in, I don’t dare to offer Muslim women any ideas how to change their lives. I don’t want them to take off their scarves, or educate their children differently, and I will not urge them to constitute Democracies in the image of Western democracies that despise them and their kind. I just want to ask them humbly to be my sisters, to express my admiration for their perseverance and for their courage to carry on, to have children and to maintain a dignified family life in spite of the impossible conditions my world in putting them in. I want to tell them we are all bonded by the same pain, we all the victims of the same sort of violence even though they suffer much more, for they are the ones who are mistreated by my government and its army, sponsored by my taxes. Islam in itself, like Judaism in itself and Christianity in itself, is not a threat to me or to anyone. American imperialism is, European indifference and co-operation is and Israeli racism and its cruel regime of occupation is. It is racism, educational propaganda and inculcated xenophobia that convince Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women at gun-point, to strip in front of their children for security reasons, it is the deepest disrespect for the other that allow American soldiers to rape Iraqi women, that give license to Israeli jailers to keep young women in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without electricity in the winter, without clean water or clean mattresses and to separate them from their breast-fed babies and toddlers. To bar their way to hospitals, to block their way to education, to confiscate their lands, to uproot their trees and prevent them from cultivating their fields. I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers` cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race and religion dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova – another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children – asked: Why does that streak of blood, rip the petal of your cheek?
In the State of Israel, the Jewish Mother is Disappearing
By Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Address at the 20th anniversary of Women in Black, Jerusalem, 28 December 2007Nurit Peled Elhanan
I thank Women in Black for inviting me to speak here today. At this moment, I would like to dedicate my words to the children of the Gaza Strip, who are withering slowly from hunger and disease, and to their mothers, who continue to bring children into the world, to feed and to educate them wonderfully. The rate of literacy in the Gaza Strip today stands at 92% – among the highest in the world, and all that in the most terrible concentration camp on earth, the residents of which are being strangled as the civilized world looks on in silence.
I wish we could celebrate today the conclusion of the activities of Women in Black. But the truth is that their activities are becoming harder every day. In a state in which the gods of death and money rule, in a state where the economy is flourishing while the children are hungry, where the mythological heroes are fearless murderers, where the leaders openly and publicly admit that human life is not worth a fig in their eyes, in a state that sends its sons to be killed without even bothering to invent a reason for it, in a state that imprisons millions of human beings in ghettoes and enclosures and kills them slowly, the persistent quiet voice of Women in Black is the strongest conscientious voice of refusal. Women in Black are an example and paragon of refusal to worship the god of death, refusal to obey the racist laws of the State of Israel. The activity of Women in Black is itself a rejection of racist education and the routine, systematic poisoning of minds that sustain the schools, the media, and the speeches of the nation’s elected representatives.
In the state of Israel, the Jewish mother is facing extinction. The Jewish mother of today is closed off in neighborhoods like Mea Shearim[1], where the mothers protect their children from the army, but outside those neighborhoods the voice of the Jewish mother is not heard except in organizations like Women in Black, which society at large condemns and vilifies. The state of Israel condemns and vilifies the voice of the Jewish mother, which is the voice of compassion, tolerance, and dialogue. The state of Israel does all it can to ensure that this voice will be muted and silenced forever.
Outside the peace organizations, which are considered by the public to be marginal sleepwalkers and extreme leftists, the voice of the Jewish mother ceased long ago to be a maternal voice. The Israeli mother as she exists today embodies a motherhood that is distorted, lost, confused, and sick. The Jewish mothers like Yocheved, the mother of Moses; like Rachel, who wept for her children and refused to be comforted; like Mother Courage; the mother who cannot find solace and healing in the death of the children of another mother, have been replaced by mothers who are nothing but golems that have turned on their creators and are more terrible and cruel than they, who dedicate their wombs to the apartheid state and the occupation army, who educate their children in unmitigated racism and are prepared to sacrifice the fruits of their bellies on the altar of their leaders’ megalomania, greed, and bloodthirstiness. These mothers are also to be found among the teachers and the educators of our day. And only the women who stand here week after week, in the rain and the sun, they are the one and only reminder that the voice of the other motherhood, the natural one, has not completely disappeared from the face of this wasteland that had once been the Holy Land..
Few are the parents in Israel who admit to themselves that the murderers of children, destroyers of houses, uprooters of olives, and poisoners of wells are none other than their own beautiful sons and daughters, their children who have been educated in this place over the years in the school of hatred and racism. The children who have learned for 18 years to fear and despise the stranger, to always fear the neighbors, the gentiles, children who were brought up in the fear of Islam – a fear that prepares them to be brutal soldiers and disciples of mass murderers. And not only do those boys and girls kill and torment; they do so with the full support of Mom, with the full appreciation of Dad, encouraged by this entire nation, which does not so much as raise an eyebrow at the death of children, of the old and disabled. A nation that rallies around pilots who do not feel a thing except a bump on the wing when they drop bombs on entire families and crush them to death.[2]
In this hell in which we live, in the daily inferno under which stirs and grows the underground kingdom of dead children, the role of Women in Black, the mothers and grandmothers who stand at this square and in similar squares all over the world, is to be the guardian of sane, natural motherhood, and to ensure that its voice is not silenced and does not disappear from the face of the earth. To remind a world that has lost its humanity that we were all made in the image of God; consistently and tirelessly to say that still, despite the apartheid wall, despite the cruel siege of Gaza, despite the wars without cause, and in the face of the fury of the rulers of this country, all of whom down to the last one are criminals against humanity, the voice of women and mothers – the voice of compassion, justice and hope – will not be silenced. More power to you.
________________________________
[1] An ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, most of whose residents do not recognize the State of Israel and most of whom do not serve in the Israeli armed forces.
[2] The reference is to Israeli air force pilot and former IDF Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz, who, when asked by a journalist – shortly after the Israeli air force dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in the Gaza Strip killing fifteen civilians – what he felt as a pilot when he dropped a bomb, replied, “I feel a slight bump on the wing when the bomb is released.”
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education at Hebrew University, lost her daughter in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Nurit turned her grief into a quest for justice – the end of the Israeli occupation, which she considers the reason for her daughter’s death, and the uprooting of racism from Israeli schools.
Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks against Israel, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) experienced a significant rise in reported antisemitic incidents, protests, and ideological polarization. The campus has since become a focal point for major civil rights lawsuits, congressional investigations, and debates over academic freedom, free speech, and the boundaries between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs both filed federal lawsuits and complaints accusing MIT of allowing a “hostile environment.” The suits claim that the administration, including President Sally Kornbluth, failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from severe harassment, such as classroom disruptions, targeted doxxing of IDF veterans by faculty, and the distribution of maps marking Jewish and Israeli-affiliated buildings.
In its ruling, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by StandWithUs against MIT. The court ruled that much of the protest activity was legally protected expression and that MIT’s response to the peer harassment was not “deliberately indifferent” under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Civil rights groups appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to review this landmark case.
MIT has maintained that it seeks to balance the enforcement of conduct and anti-harassment rules with the protection of free speech. The administration has launched initiatives such as “Standing Together Against Hate,” deployed enhanced campus security measures, and implemented disciplinary and non-contact protocols to address misconduct and targeting.
MIT has been repeatedly investigated by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding the nature and handling of antisemitic incidents on campus. This has included demands for the school to adopt stricter definitions of antisemitism and provide public accounts of how it addresses discrimination.
However, Yossi Sheffi, an MIT Professor of Engineering Systems, described the MIT administration as failing to protect Jews. In his upcoming book, titled Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews, he details how, for Jewish and Israeli students at MIT, following October 7, the campus became “an echo chamber of hostility and intimidation. Based on dozens of interviews and drawing on administration correspondence, social media posts, and television footage, this book tells the story of that transformation through the voices of those who lived it. Some of these events made national headlines, while others unfolded quietly in classrooms, residence halls, and student spaces… This oral history chronicles the multiple fronts that Jewish and Israeli students faced, including the fight for the truth, the fight against delegitimization, the fight against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and the fight against the erosion of law and order on campus. Their stories illuminate a broader institutional failure: the erosion of MIT’s commitment to prioritizing innovation above dogma and the consequences that follow when a university abandons the standards that define it. Offering a firsthand account of a pivotal chapter in MIT’s history, the book also explores the responsibilities institutions bear when the conditions necessary for learning, inquiry, and intellectual freedom are undermined.”
So much so that the New York Timesreported on Sheffi’s upcoming book, which it titled “M.I.T. ‘Embarrassed’ by New Book on Campus Antisemitism, Professor Says.”
The issue of antisemitism at MIT has kept Sheffi busy. He published articles, including “Where Are You? On Selective Outrage and Moral Credibility” in the MIT Faculty Newsletter of November/December 2025, arguing on selective outrage regarding Hamas’s reign of terror.
Michel DeGraff, a professor at MIT focusing on Creole Studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation, penned a response to Sheffi’s accusations, titled “Where is Your Memory? On Historical Amnesia, Selective Moral Disengagement, and Reality-Bending,” in the MIT Faculty Newsletter of January/February 2026. DeGraff accused Sheffi’s case study of being a “textbook case of genocide denial and selective moral disengagement.” DeGraff also accused Sheffi of “selective outrage,” because Prof. Sheffi might be unaware of the voluminous “horrifying reports – including videos – spanning over one hundred years of settler-colonial Zionist war on Palestine. These reports have painstakingly documented acts by Zionist terrorists, ranging from Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang of the 1920s to the 1940s in Historic Palestine, to today’s Israel’s Defense Force – which, in reality, is mostly an occupation force. These acts involve the mass murder, bombing, execution, maiming and pulverization of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children and women, in villages, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and so on. Such actions are part of a sustained campaign of genocide, scholasticide, domicide.”
DeGraff is also “puzzled that the name “Hamas” occurs 14 times in a 700-word piece while “Israel” occurs six times, and genocide occurs …. nowhere!”
For DeGraff, Sheffi’s use of “anti-Israel” and “anti-Zionism” is noteworthy as “a rhetorical maneuver,” because Shaffi is “creating fog around a genocide: these phrases seek to condemn any legitimate critique of Israel as ‘antisemitism,’ thereby conveniently diverting attention from Israel’s genocidal actions by labeling its critics as bigots.” DeGraff added that recent rulings in Federal courts in Stand With Us. v. MIT, Sussman v. MIT, and against Homeland Security have “consistently protected our First Amendment rights, including what Judge Richard G. Stearns calls ‘anti-Israel sentiment,’ against the weaponization of accusations of ‘antisemitism’.”
DeGraff observes the linguistic pattern, when Sheffi consistently uses “active-voice predicates and a dehumanizing and highly emotive lexicon – such as ‘executing,’ ‘murdered, raped, and tortured,’ and ‘reign of terror’ – only when referring to Hamas,” and not Israel. DeGraff adds, “dehumanization is a prerequisite for the atrocities committed by Israelis, which Sheffi conveniently omits”
DeGraff states, “In Prof. Sheffi’s narrative, and in contradistinction with powerless Israelis who are tortured, denounced and condemned, it’s Hamas, and Hamas alone, that has the exclusive power to execute, murder, rape, torture, filter information, and commit crimes, atrocities and terror. From the River to the Sea?”
For DeGraff, it is not surprising it was Yossi Sheffi who, during a public lecture by an Israeli reservist hosted by the MIT Israel Alliance on September 18, 2024, “accused anti-genocide students, including two women of color in the room, of ‘making up lies’ not only about Israel military’s sexual assaults against Palestinians, but about the widespread nature of sexual assault in general. This unfounded and insulting accusation came after one of these students had questioned the speaker about well-documented instances of sexual violence in Israeli prisons.”
DeGraff also noted that one of the main objectives of the students’ movement on campus has been to contribute to a “Free Palestine” by demanding accountability from “our own MIT and from MIT faculty, like Yossi Sheffi, whose work contributes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, since October 2023, the students have been asking for an end to MIT’s complicity… The MIT C4P students have alerted us to ‘MIT’s complicity with merchants of death’.”
For those who are not familiar, DeGraff is known for his harsh stand against Israel, often aligned with Noam Chomsky’s long-time egregious attacks on Israel along the line that the Palestinians can do no wrong and Israelis can do no right. Another commonality among the two scholars is their critique of American foreign policy. DeGraff blames the United States for the ills in Haiti, a notoriously mismanaged country, the same way that Chomsky accuses Washington of all the misfortunes of the Palestinians. This approach deprives the Palestinians (and Haitians) of agency, that is, the notion that they are responsible for their own acts, including the horrific massacre of October 7.
The other point is that the criticism of Israel at MIT has developed into antisemitic abuses, harassment, and intimidation, to which the authorities did not provide an adequate response. This is what Sheffi’s book is about.
For Jewish and Israeli students at MIT, the days and months following October 7 profoundly changed campus life. Campus corridors, which once reverberated with the voices of researchers discussing problems and sharing solutions, became an echo chamber of hostility and intimidation. For many students, the experience reshaped not only their education but also their sense of belonging at one of the world’s leading universities.
Based on dozens of interviews and drawing on administration correspondence, social media posts, and television footage, this book tells the story of that transformation through the voices of those who lived it. Some of these events made national headlines, while others unfolded quietly in classrooms, residence halls, and student spaces. Together, they reveal how a global conflict reverberated through a campus community.
This oral history chronicles the multiple fronts that Jewish and Israeli students faced, including the fight for the truth, the fight against delegitimization, the fight against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and the fight against the erosion of law and order on campus. Their stories illuminate a broader institutional failure: the erosion of MIT’s commitment to prioritizing innovation above dogma and the consequences that follow when a university abandons the standards that define it. Offering a firsthand account of a pivotal chapter in MIT’s history, the book also explores the responsibilities institutions bear when the conditions necessary for learning, inquiry, and intellectual freedom are undermined.
After months of student protests related to the Gaza war in 2023 and 2024, some prominent schools, such as Harvard and Columbia, appointed select committees to interview students and write painful public reports about bias on campus.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some Jews on campus said protests created a hostile environment, did not publish a lengthy committee report on antisemitism. So a professor began his own.
Yossi Sheffi, an M.I.T. faculty member for the past 48 years, said he became so angry about how Jews and Israelis were treated on campus after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that he wrote a book about antisemitism at M.I.T.
“For M.I.T., this book is the report,” said Dr. Sheffi, 78, the director of the university’s Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Now that his manuscript is ready to be published, Dr. Sheffi says M.I.T. administrators are trying to minimize its impact by denying him access to money to promote the book.
“I think they are embarrassed by what will come out in the book and worried the Trump administration will use it to cut research funding to M.I.T.,” Dr. Sheffi said of administrators.
A spokeswoman for M.I.T., Kimberly Allen, declined to comment on Dr. Sheffi’s book, but said that “M.I.T. encourages and expects independent thinking from all members of its community.” In a statement, she said that “M.I.T. leadership has in the strongest terms rejected antisemitism and taken thoughtful and steadfast action to prevent it.”
Dr. Sheffi’s center at M.I.T. is funded through research contracts as well as agreements for building academic institutions around the world, he said. He said he has used leftover money from these projects to promote previous books. After he submitted the expenses for his antisemitism project, he said M.I.T. administrators ultimately approved expenses toward producing the book but declined expenses to promote it.
“The only difference is that this book is about antisemitism,” he said.
The Trump administration has seized on reports of campus antisemitism to pressure colleges with the loss of federal research grants. In antisemitism lawsuits filed this year against Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, the Trump administration used those schools’ antisemitism reports against them in its lawsuits.
Dr. Sheffi, a professor of engineering, acknowledged that he could bring new scrutiny from the federal government, but said colleagues still urged him to publish his book, titled “Unsafe at M.I.T.: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.” The book will be self-published on July 7, he said.
In it, he is sharply critical of M.I.T. leadership, chronicling reports of harassment and neglect toward Jews on campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
“I wanted to create a historical record of what happened, so people later could not say that it was not so bad,” said Dr. Sheffi, who was born in Jerusalem.
Like many U.S. universities, M.I.T. saw intense student protests around the war in Gaza, including a pro-Palestinian tent encampment.
Protesters demanded that the university sever ties with Israel. M.I.T. asked the students to leave voluntarily but permitted the encampment protest to continue for about three weeks. M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, warned protesters that they would be suspended if they did not leave, and then had the encampment cleared by the police. Dr. Kornbluth was one of three prominent college presidents who were called to testify about campus antisemitism before Congress in December 2023.
While M.I.T. did not publish a lengthy formal report, the school has noted that it responded to complaints of antisemitism with a number of measures, including more security and training, updated policies on demonstrations, and disciplinary proceedings against rule breakers. It also established a team to address reports of antisemitism and other forms of bias relating to the conflict in the Middle East, according to a statement on the M.I.T. website.
Ms. Allen, the university spokeswoman, cited a 2026 M.I.T. quality of life survey, in which 96 percent of Jewish undergraduates who responded and 93 percent of Jewish graduate students reported feeling satisfied at M.I.T., up from 84 percent of Jewish undergrads and 75 percent of Jewish graduate students in 2024.
Or Hen, an M.I.T. professor of physics who is from Israel, said the climate for Jews and Israelis on campus “is very different from a few years back, when it was very vocal and in-your-face.” But he is seeing a push at M.I.T. and across the nation to avoid controversy by not collaborating with Israel, which he rejects.
A big change since late 2023, he said, is that the Jewish community on campus has become far more cohesive, which he credited to faculty-led efforts, such as ongoing weekly lunches.
Susan Silbey, a professor of sociology and anthropology, said that in all her years at M.I.T., “being Jewish was just not something relevant” to her experience there. The Gaza protests were infused with “a great deal of energy,” she said, but “once the protests were over, it went away, with one or two exceptions here and there from people who like to make noise. It’s quieter than usual.”
Dr. Sheffi used interviews with M.I.T. students and faculty to fashion a version of recent campus history. The book includes accounts from roughly 40 people, he said, as well as his own observations.
He will pay some $20,000 from his own pocket for a marketing firm to help promote the book, he said. He expects there will be additional expenses, such as travel to give book talks.
President Sally Kornbluth’s testimony at the widely viewed congressional hearing on campus antisemitism prompted an outcry, including bipartisan condemnation. Responding to this, MIT’s Associate Chair of the Faculty was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education as saying: “We all understand that there are problems that have to be worked out, and I think everybody’s ready to roll up their sleeves and work them out [. . .] I don’t think we’re the kind of community where we will just hand responsibility off to the administration.” Unfortunately, the MIT faculty have not worked out the problem of antisemitism plaguing the MIT community, and too many of the faculty have rolled up their sleeves to perpetuateantisemitism.
Jewish and Israeli members of the MIT community have tried to help, but they and their efforts have largely been ignored. The anti-Zionist authors who dominate the MIT Faculty Newsletter have disregarded the articles published in its pages by Professor Yossi Sheffi and by the MIT Israel Alliance. They have averted their eyes from the resignation statement of Professor Mauricio Karchmer. They have discounted the multiple open letters signed by alumni. They have taken no notice of the material compiled by Professor Lionel Kimerling. They have not listened to the voice of graduate student Liyam Chitayat, or the testimony to Congress by graduate student Talia Khan. They have brushed aside thenumeroussocialmediapostsbyProfessorRetsefLevi.
The October 7 attack on Israel was perpetrated by Hamas pursuant to their genocidal antisemitic ideology. Shani Louk’s mangled body was seen being hauled away in a pickup truck and paraded around to jubilant crowds in Gaza; her decapitated skull was later found. Captured terrorists, who confessed to necrophilia, said their Hamas commanders ordered decapitations and offered bounties for kidnapping. With this as context, the MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program announced a reading group on the writings of a Palestinian who has said, “we will slaughter you and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke, we will drink your blood and eat your skulls.”
Professor Daniel Jackson has explained that “[a]ntisemitic attitudes have practical consequences.” MIT faculty and staff have, together with students, fostered a climate of Jew-hatred on campus that has led to the eruption of antisemitic activity on campus following the October 7 massacre in Israel. Starting with a statement blaming Israel for the attack against it by Hamas, and with photos glorifying Hamas’ attack used in social media posts against Israel, faculty have supported the rallies on October 13 and November 9; respectively, the “day of action” called for by Hamas, and the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass).
Vandalism of a Holocaust memorial and the Hillel center at MIT are not only acts of hatred against Zionists, they are acts of hatred against all Jews. Given MIT’s Values Statement, it should be unacceptable to bully or intimidate anybody for their views on Zionism, however unfashionable they may presently be on campus; just as it should be unacceptable to discriminate against anybody for their religious beliefs, ethnicity, or ancestry. But it has been observed that MIT adopts a completely different standard for groups other than Jews, Israelis, and Zionists, when those other groups are treated in ways they deem hostile, or when their members are portrayed in a disparaging manner.
The MIT Faculty Newsletter Editorial Subcommittee ignore all the pro-Hamas and pro-Nazi messages and symbolism, and instead blame the victims for this antisemitic abuse. The same Editorial Subcommittee have inquired why MIT is not working toward peace. As Daniel Jackson and David Dolev have replied, the MIT MISTI program aims to promote peace through cross-cultural understanding. However, the office of the MIT MISTI program was targeted by a contingent of anti-Israel protestors, who rattled doors and accosted the program director.
The antisemitic disruptions of the MIT campus do not occur in a vacuum. At UC Berkeley, rioters broke through a glass door at an event with an Israeli speaker, physically assaulting students while shouting “Jew.” (Coincidentally, this happened on the same day that the Berkeley law school Dean was at MIT speaking on campus free expression in the Dialogue Across Difference program.) As argued by FIRE, a leading organization for campus free speech, rioters must be expelled in order for campuses to be environments where all may speak freely.
Although a group of faculty and staff are critical of the administration’s token efforts to address the campus disruptions, there is one point where they agree with MIT leadership and with the MIT Corporation: the antisemitic activity is protected free speech. Indeed, the recent Report of the MIT Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression (FEWG) paved the way for the current antisemitic climate, by highlighting Nazi marches in a Jewish community as an example of acceptable hate speech. But MIT is no Harvey Silverglate, as demonstrated by that same FEWG report giving priority to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) over free speech, especially when it comes to requiring DEI loyalty oaths from administrators.
The Chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has exposed the hypocrisy of MIT’s “free speech” excuse for antisemitism, as revealed by the cancelled speeches by Professor Dorian Abbot and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Additionally, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has noted publicly the bias of the MIT leadership in its selection of invited speakers for Standing Together Against Hate. This double standard reflects institutional antisemitism.
How can MIT claim free speech for interruptions of multiple MIT classes, while forbidding the display of the Israeli flag and attempting to block the screening of video footage of the horrific October 7 attack on Israel? Even libertarians recognize that MIT staff cannot espouse antisemitic or anti-Zionist bias while engaging in their professional work as an interfaith chaplain. A fortiori, such biases should be forbidden for staff responding to complaints of discrimination and harassment; MIT DEI or IDHR staff who refuse to acknowledge that antisemitism is covered under Title VI have failed in their responsibilities under the law.
In order for MIT to clarify the murky understanding of antisemitism in its community, the Institute can avail itself of the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This definition is a simple one, whose interpretation is guided by a set of examples which “could, taking into account the overall context,” be antisemitic. As the standard employed by both the Federal government and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the IHRA definition of antisemitism could provide guidance to MIT for matters such as the Title VI Federal Civil Rights lawsuit the Institute now faces from some of its Jewish students.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism might even assist the Institute in incorporating Jews into MIT’s Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition. MIT’s failure to grasp the problem of “Antisemitism and Jewish Inclusion on Campus” is exhibited in this blurb from a DEI event held during Independent Activities Period: “Jewish students, as a minority group, are encountering much of the same discomfort that other minorities face on campus and in the world, in that they don’t feel heard or acknowledged.”
No, the discomfort Jews are facing is unlike anything faced by anybody else on campus or in the world. Nobody but the Jews are facing regular calls for “intifada” and genocide “from the river to the sea”, whether on the streets, on the campus, or within the pages of the MIT Faculty Newsletter. MIT needs to do better if it wants to build a better world.
David Etlin is an MIT PhD 2008, Course XXIV, Philosophy (etlin@alum.mit.edu).
MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi’s article in the November/December issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter is a spectacular case study in the use and mis-use of language for reality-bending mirror accusations – yet another “textbook case of genocide denial and selective moral disengagement,” to quote from a recent article in the Lancet by Roberto De Vogli, Jonathan Montomoli, Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Ilan Pappé.
Take, say, the very first sentence of the article: “The recent videos of Hamas executing Palestinians in Gaza were horrifying.” Indeed, they were, and so is the history leading to these executions.
But, given the title’s reference to “selective outrage,” one must question whether Professor Sheffi could genuinely be unaware of the voluminous, horrifying reports – including videos – spanning over one hundred years of settler-colonial Zionist war on Palestine. These reports have painstakingly documented acts by Zionist terrorists, ranging from Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang of the 1920s to the 1940s in Historic Palestine, to today’s Israel’s Defense Force – which, in reality, is mostly an occupation force. These acts involve the mass murder, bombing, execution, maiming and pulverization of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children and women, in villages, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and so on. Such actions are part of a sustained campaign of genocide, scholasticide, domicide…
Having flown planes for the Israel’s Occupation Forces for six years, Prof. Sheffi certainly has had a front-row seat to observe firsthand, or at the very least hear about, some of the horrors that constitute what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in his book Ten Myths about Israel, has called an “incremental genocide” over decades of an ongoing Nakba. Yet, looking again at the “selective outrage” part of Sheffi’s title, one has got to be puzzled that the name “Hamas” occurs 14 times in a 700-word piece while “Israel” occurs six times, and genocide occurs …. nowhere! How selective is such moral engagement on the part of Yossi Sheffi? It’s as if there had been no ICJ case, no UN report, no Amnesty International warnings about Israel’s “live-streamed genocide” of Palestinians in Gaza – not even a plausible case for said genocide.
Even more striking, at least to a linguist, is the fact that, of the six occurrences of “Israel” and its derivatives or larger phrases that contain them (“Israeli civilians,” “Israel’s every move”…),
four are in object positions, undergoing actions denoted by verbs such as “tortured,” “denounce,” “[outrage] directed at,” “condemns”;
one is part of the compound adjective “anti-Israel” in “anti-Israel outlets”; and
one is in a symmetric position vis-à-vis Palestinians in “the right of all civilians – Israeli and Palestinian alike – to live free from terror.”
The core linguistic strategy throughout Sheffi’s piece is for him to consistently place “Israel” and “Israelis” in the grammatical role of object (as the patient at the receiving end of some adverse action) while foregrounding anti-Israel critics and Hamas as the active agents of the corresponding events. This rhetorical positioning – making Israel the object of verbs like “torture,” “denounce,” “condemns,” etc. – systematically obscures Israeli agency and reinforces the narrative of Israelis, not Palestinians, as “perfect victims” while simultaneously rendering Palestinian suffering as an agentless event occurring in (quasi) happenstance. To wit, Sheffi’s strategic use of the passive verbal form “caught” in “Gazans caught in the crossfire,” as if the Israeli occupation forces’ innumerable crimes against humanity (genocide, scholasticide, domicide…) were all collateral damage of “crossfire” in which Palestinians are inadvertently “caught.”
In effect, Sheffi manages a linguistic tour de force that puts all but one occurrences of “Israel” and its word- and phrase-level derivatives in propositions that describe Israelis as utterly powerless victims who helplessly suffer the impact of negative actions by Palestinians and their allies near and far. The one exception is the proposition whereby Israelis and Palestinians are claimed to equally share the right “to live free from terror” – as if, it’s Israelis, and not Palestinians, who are being decimated in an ongoing genocide by a racist supremacist ethno-state.
In a related vein, Sheffi’s use of “anti-Israel” and “anti-Zionism” is particularly noteworthy as a rhetorical maneuver, as it represents what I’ve called the “most insidious manipulation of words and concepts” in creating fog around a genocide: these phrases seek to condemn any legitimate critique of Israel as “antisemitism,” thereby conveniently diverting attention from Israel’s genocidal actions by labeling its critics as bigots. Here it’s fortunate that recent rulings in Federal courts in Stand With Us. v. MIT, Sussman v. MIT, and against Homeland Security have consistently protected our First Amendment rights, including what Judge Richard G. Stearns calls “anti-Israel sentiment,” against the weaponization of accusations of “antisemitism.”
Now let’s look at the 14 occurrences of “Hamas” and phrases that contain “Hamas.” These occurrences denote the agent of actions such as:
“executing”
“murdered, raped, and tortured”
“firing […] and carrying out public executions […]”
“control”
“Perpetrators”
“reign of terror”
“information filters”
“Crimes”
“Atrocities”
Then there are two occurrences where Hamas is in object position – object of “demanding accountability from” and “excuses” (as in “A double standard that condemns Israel, but excuses Hamas”).
Inspired by MIT alum Holly Jackson’s analysis of “anti-Palestinian bias in US news coverage” (a topic discussed in my Fall 2024 People’s Seminar on “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel“), I observe that Sheffi consistently uses active-voice predicates and a dehumanizing and highly emotive lexicon – such as “executing,” “murdered, raped, and tortured,” and “reign of terror” – only when referring to Hamas. This linguistic pattern is a textbook example of what I have analyzed as the “weaponization of language.” In their systematic denial of Palestinian humanity, Israeli leaders and their allies have employed terms like “beasts walking on two legs” and “children of darkness.” Such dehumanization is a prerequisite for the atrocities committed by Israelis, which Sheffi conveniently omits from his account, which amounts to a phenomenon that psychoanalysts Lara and Stephen Sheehi have called the “Zionist reality-bending” of mirror-accusations.
In Prof. Sheffi’s narrative, and in contradistinction with powerless Israelis who are tortured, denounced and condemned, it’s Hamas, and Hamas alone, that has the exclusive power to execute, murder, rape, torture, filter information, and commit crimes, atrocities and terror. From the River to the Sea?
How selective is that when talking about an organization like Hamas that’s been called, controversially, “a creation of Israel” whose goal was to counter the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) and undermine Palestinian unity and its resistance to Israel’s occupation? The latter’s endgame is a Greater Israel where Gaza might be turned into some sort of Riviera ethnically-cleansed of these inconvenient Palestinians who refuse to forget their native homeland. Meanwhile it’s the Hamas terrorists who are asking for an independent investigation of the war since October 7, 2023, while Israel’s army (the so called “most moral army in the world”) has banned all journalists from entering Gaza since that date and, even worse yet, this army has killed the highest number of journalists in the recent history of armed conflicts. It’s also Israel that’s committing, advertisingandcovering up unspeakable abuses against Palestinians, with seemingly absoluteimpunity – in the West Bank as well, far away from Hamas “crossfire.” But none of that is mentioned by Sheffi.
None of that should come as a surprise in light of the fact that it was Yossi Sheffi himself who, during a public lecture by an Israeli reservist hosted by the MIT Israel Alliance on September 18, 2024, accused anti-genocide students, including two women of color in the room, of “making up lies” not only about Israel military’s sexual assaults against Palestinians, but about the widespread nature of sexual assault in general. This unfounded and insulting accusation came after one of these students had questioned the speaker about well-documented instances of sexual violence in Israeli prisons. The two students of color, myself and at least one other faculty reported this incident to MIT’s Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office. I myself felt compelled to file this report after watching a video of the incident.
Sheffi’s denial of sexual violence by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians aligns with his earlier insistence that MIT faculty should not regret collaborating with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. As documented in the MIT Faculty Meeting minutes, Sheffi’s ethical calculus suggests that multiple wrongs make one right, and that the end (or the bottom line?) justifies the means (Epstein’s gifts), based on Sheffi’s premise that “there are very few angels among big-time donors and other organizations who fund research.” [See Editor’s Note, below.]
However, it is particularly egregious that he would accuse an entire generation of MIT students – some of them under his instruction – of “making up lies” about sexual violence. This accusation is leveled despite the fact that these two female students at the IDF soldier’s lecture were accurately reporting violence that has been thoroughly documented by prominent human rights organizations, both within and outside Israel.
In yet another feat of reality-bending mirror accusations, Sheffi also misrepresents campus movements such as the MIT Coalition for Palestine (MIT C4P) when he describes their movement as “selective outrage that weakens moral credibility” and “a double-standard that condemns Israel” and when he writes:
“If the campus movements that mobilized under banners of ‘liberation,’ ‘human rights,’ and ‘resistance’ truly cared for Gazans, they would be protesting now. They would be demanding accountability from Hamas.”
This is yet another classic example of “language as weapon” where the students’ ethical use of terms like “liberation,” “human rights,” and “resistance” are tendentiously overloaded with inflammatory, eliminationist interpretations in order to manufacture psychological discomfort and to silence legitimate pro-Palestine advocacy and anti-genocide and anti-apartheid political dissent. Sheffi misrepresents MIT C4P students’, including MIT Jews for Collective Liberation’s, agenda toward freedom and justice for all – Palestinians and Israeli Jews alike – from the River to the Sea.
Be that as it may, what we need to ask, in light of Sheffi’s reproach to the students, is: What reasonable demands can students make of Hamas leadership fighting a nuclear-powered genocidal empire bent on infiltrating and weakening Palestinian resistance and to sew division from the inside? Sheffi seems to have forgotten the claims that Israel too contributed to the emergence and ascendance of Hamas in order to undermine Palestinian unity. This divide-and-conquer strategy failed since, as noted by Rashid Khalidi in his essay “The neck and the sword,” Palestinian solidarity, in Palestine and beyond, has now become stronger than ever.
Meanwhile, one of the main objectives of the students’ movement has always been to contribute to a Free Palestine by “demanding accountability” locally from our own MIT and from MIT faculty, like Yossi Sheffi, whose work contributes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, since October 2023, the students have been asking for an end to MIT’s complicity with what Amnesty International has called a “live-streamed genocide.” To that end, the students have published a most comprehensive research primer on said complicity, MIT Science for Genocide, and a recent article “Engineering for Genocide” – to help document this complicity. The MIT C4P students have alerted us to “MIT’s complicity with merchants of death”:
“Firms that sell and transport weapons to Israel also recruit from MIT and enter institutional collaborations with the university – Lockheed Martin, Maersk, Boeing, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, and L3Harris.
MIT C4P is certainly not the only group worried about Maersk delivering military cargo to Israel. So Sheffi’s long-standing collaboration with Maersk to help optimize its operations, including a collaboration with the port of Ashdod, stands in stark contrast to his unsubstantiated accusation that the students don’t really care for Gazans. Maersk is among the “merchants of death” that, according to U.N. Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, derive immense profits from “the economy of genocide” in Gaza by “sustaining a steady flow of US-supplied military equipment post-October 2023.” Unlike the students, who have no collaboration whatsoever with Hamas (despite slander from Israeli propagandist historians like Ute Deichmann of Ben-Gurion University), Sheffi maintains, and is even proud of, his relationship with a company that aids and abets genocide. His collaboration with Maersk quite literally speeds up the shipment of weapons to Israel. This complicity is particularly notable given MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s use of the adjective “vibrant” to describe this sort of collaboration, seemingly ignoring MIT’s own “red lights” and “elevated risks” principles intended to prevent complicity with entities engaged in human-rights violations.
Sheffi, thus, seems to have failed to notice that his own title applies much more so to himself than to those he aims at critiquing. His is “selective outrage” on steroids – better known as “implicatory denial” or “cognitive dissonance” or, more simply, “historical amnesia,” “selective empathy” and “selective moral disengagement.” In order to help cure these, I’d like to recommend these texts which I’ve used in analyzing the reality-bending allegations against me in the Sussman v. MIT lawsuit:
In closing, let’s adapt and transform a sentence from Sheffi’s article into one that seems more urgent than the original:
“Outrage that ignores [Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and our own complicity in this genocide] is ideology [and greed] masquerading as empathy.”
In his book, Selected Empathy: The West through the Gaze of Gaza, Roberto de Vogli argues that the West’s indifference to Gazan suffering is not due to a lack of knowledge or a universal failure of empathy. Instead, it is a “self-serving, tribal, and parochial” emotional response –“selective empathy” – that reserves compassion for the “in-group” based on factors like race or nationality, while denying it to the “out-group.” This biased, prejudiced, and exceptionalist “us versus them” mentality explains the absence of collective outrage at the ongoing genocide.
If Sheffi does care about universal empathy, universal morality and so on, without self-serving reality-bending, then it’s time for him to join the MIT C4P students’ high ground of moral credibility and to muster “the courage to confront evil wherever it occurs and to speak out, even when it challenges one’s preferred narratives [and bottom-line].”
Sheffi might well respond to me as he did to the students who are protesting his complicity with merchants of death. He might appeal to “academic freedom” and tell me “Go fly a kite!” To this I’ll respond: How about academic freedom denied by Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza? How about Gazan children’s freedom to be children? Why can’t they too fly kites without any risk of being martyred by Israeli snipers, drones, missiles or bombs? Their kites should not be final tales of martyrdom, but hopeful images of angels bringing back love, as in the poem “If I must die,” written by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer before he, his brother Salah Alareer, Salah’s son, Muhammad, his sister, Asmaa Alareer, and her three children, Alaa, Yahia and Mohammad, were all murdered in Gazea City in December 2023 – “caught in the crossfire” (?) of yet another targeted criminal airstrike by Israel’s occupation forces.
Please, Prof. Sheffi, now is time for you too to speak up against the genocide and to cut your ties with Maersk, a company whose hands are red from the blood of the thousands and thousands of innocent civilians who have been martyred in Gaza by military hardware whose componentsMaerskhelpstransport.
Editor’s Note: The full text of Professor Sheffi’s remarks as recorded in the minutes of the September 18, 2019 MIT Institute Faculty Meeting is reproduced below for context.
“Colleagues argue that there is a “money problem” at MIT. Surely, taking money from Epstein and inviting him on campus was wrong but this is an obvious judgement knowing what we know now (and should have known earlier). The moral and pragmatic question is where to raise the money that it takes to conduct state-of-the-art research and subsidize MIT’s education. US universities and MIT take money from Russia (which murders journalists and influences elections in the West), China (which holds a million Muslims in concentration camps), Singapore (with autocratic regime), and the US (enabling the bombing of Yemen children and separating families at the Mexican border), among others. While Epstein’s doing is disgustingly beyond the pale, there are very few angels among big-time donors and other organizations who fund research. So the question of where is the line, assuming that money is needed, is something that each one of us on the faculty, as well as MIT, have to answer.” [Minutes of the September 18, 2019 Institute Faculty Meeting]
The recent videos of Hamas executing Palestinians in Gaza were horrifying. Yet anyone who witnessed the terror attacks of October 7, 2023 – when Hamas militants murdered, raped, and tortured Israeli civilians – should not have been surprised. The cruelty and joy of killing on display then are now turned inward, against their own people. Even the BBC,1 CNN,2 and other anti-Israel outlets have reported Hamas gunmen firing on unarmed men and carrying out public executions without trial or due process.
This is not new. During the war, Hamas executed Palestinians who tried to get food directly from American humanitarian convoys rather than through Hamas’s control.3 Long before the current conflict, it murdered dissenters – often by throwing them from rooftops – for refusing to submit to its rule.4 These acts of terror are not anomalies; they are central to the organization’s culture of violence and repression.
Predictably, UNRWA and the so-called “Palestinian Health Authorities” have issued no condemnation, no report, and no expression of outrage regarding Hamas’s reign of terror. The same institutions that loudly denounce Israel’s every move fall silent when the perpetrators are Hamas. Their credibility erodes each time moral judgment is applied selectively. Only now, as journalists gain direct access to Gaza and bypass Hamas’s information filters, are the world’s media beginning to report the truth.
Here on campus, that same selective morality has become painfully visible. The passionate protests that once filled MIT’s courtyards and lecture halls have vanished. No vigils, no open letters, no outrage over the summary execution of Gazans by Hamas. Even the recent ceasefire agreement, which offered a rare moment of relief for civilians on both sides, passed without comment. Where are the same voices that demanded “justice for Gaza”? are public executions not worthy of campus outrage?
It may be uncomfortable for the slogan-shouting students and their faculty and staff enablers to look in the mirror and recognize who all their demonstrations were really supporting. The absence of any reaction to Hamas’s crimes suggests that the movement was never truly about sympathy for Gazans caught in the crossfire. Instead, it was an outlet for age-old antisemitism and its current anti-Zionism incarnation – an exercise in moral posturing by uninformed students and staff who practiced the age-old convictions directed at Jews. (The point is even more pronounced when one realizes the lack of campus demonstrations against the Chinese treatment of the (Muslim) Uyghurs, the gassing of hundreds of thousand Syrians by the Asad regimes, the genocide of Christians in Nigeria, and other atrocities.)
If outrage is expressed only when it can be directed at Israel, then it ceases to be moral at all. Outrage that ignores Hamas’s atrocities with silence is not solidarity. It is ideology masquerading as empathy. To condemn one set of crimes while excusing another undermines the very language of justice and compassion that our community claims to uphold.
At MIT, a place that prizes evidence and truth, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. Moral consistency is not a political position – it is the foundation of integrity. Condemning Hamas’s crimes does not diminish concern for Palestinian suffering; it affirms it. It asserts that no movement can claim the mantle of human rights while turning a blind eye to murder and repression when committed by those it once championed.
If the campus movements that mobilized under banners of “liberation,” “human rights,” and “resistance” truly cared for Gazans, they would be protesting now. They would be demanding accountability from Hamas, welcoming the ceasefire (despite the fact that it was brokered by the “villain in DC”), and standing for the right of all civilians – Israeli and Palestinian alike – to live free from terror.
Instead, their silence exposes a deeper problem: selective outrage that weakens moral credibility. A double standard that condemns Israel, but excuses Hamas diminishes every genuine claim to justice.
True solidarity is not determined by who the victim is or who the perpetrator is. It is measured by the courage to confront evil wherever it occurs and to speak out, even when it challenges one’s preferred narratives.
Israel Academia Monitor often reports on anti-Israel activities at Western universities, including the U.S, the UK, Australia, and others. This time we are focusing on Germany’s Leipzig University.
Germany holds a unique historical context, in particular Germany’s political and academic institutions, which operate within a framework influenced by responsibility for the Holocaust. As a result, controversies involving Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and academic freedom often receive more scrutiny than in many other European countries. A university dispute in Germany can therefore become a test case for broader debates about the boundaries between criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
Germany’s federal parliament, the Bundestag, passed a 2019 resolution characterizing many BDS activities as antisemitic. As a result, universities have had to navigate the tension between that political position and principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression.
Leipzig is not usually the most prominent case; universities in Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, and Hamburg have often received more international attention. However, examining Leipzig can help determine whether anti-Israel activism is concentrated in a few highly visible campuses or reflects a broader nationwide trend.
Leipzig has seen student and faculty activism connected to Gaza, Palestinian solidarity campaigns, and debates over cooperation with Israeli institutions. As at other German universities, these controversies have involved disagreements over demonstrations, invited speakers, resolutions, and the use of university facilities.
One of the most significant incidents occurred on 7 May 2024, when approximately 50–60 pro-Palestinian activists occupied Audimax, the university’s main lecture hall, and set up tents on campus. Protesters displayed banners including “University occupation against genocide” and demanded that the university sever ties with Israeli institutions. The university administration called police to remove the occupiers, arguing that teaching and campus safety were being disrupted. Criminal proceedings for trespassing were initiated against some participants.
Following the occupation of the lecture hall, activists established a “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” outside the university. Representatives of the encampment met with university leadership and presented demands concerning Gaza and the university’s relationships with Israeli institutions. University officials described the meeting as constructive but noted substantial disagreements remained.
In May 2026, when the student group “Students for Palestine” campaigned for votes and resolutions concerning Leipzig University’s cooperation with Israeli universities, the university withdrew permission for a planned assembly after concluding that the event was intended to promote a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. According to the university, Rector Professor Eva Inés Obergfell has revoked the permission, citing an intent to restrict academic freedom and promote partisan statements. The university management says it continues to enforce a policy that preserves its institutional relationships with Israeli universities, while also stating a commitment to supporting the small number of Palestinian students currently enrolled on campus.
The Israel–Palestine conflict has also led to controversies over invited speakers and academic events. For example, in December 2024, Leipzig canceled a lecture by Prof. Benny Morris, an Israeli historian from Ben Gurion University. The decision was framed as a security issue. Leipzig professors Gert Pickel and Yemima Hadad wrote a statement canceling the talk: “As a university, we are committed to promoting respectful dialogue and the open and critical exchange of ideas, even when these ideas challenge and contradict our own perspectives… In principle, inviting speakers to the university does not necessarily mean that we agree with their views.” However, recent statements made by Morris “that can be read as offensive and even racist” led to “understandable, but frightening in nature, protests from individual student groups… The above points mean that Prof. Benny Morris’ lecture will not take place.” The statement went on to distance the university from “a culture of cancelations” over ideas.
The university itself has publicly expressed concern about the exclusion or marginalization of Israeli scholars while also defending academic debate.
In a striking contrast, in 2016, Leipzig University’s student council passed a resolution condemning the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement as antisemitic and rejecting BDS-related activities on campus. The resolution was adopted after controversy surrounding a visit by an activist promoting BDS. University of London anthropology professor Lori Allen, an anti-Israel activist, intended to foment support for BDS during a visit to Leipzig University. At the time, the resolution also called the BDS campaign “an existential threat to the Jews,” given the openly stated threats by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime against Israel and Jews worldwide.
Worth noting that activist groups at German universities often collaborate with national and international Palestinian solidarity organizations.
One of the anti-Israel activist groups on campus is Aktionsbündnis (Action Alliance) Leipzig, a student and staff coalition at Leipzig University. The group is known for its campus activism, focusing on academic boycotts and protests against institutional cooperation and research partnerships with Israeli universities. Institutional ties campaigns challenge specific research projects and university affiliations. The campus protests include organizing rallies, assemblies, and public campaigns targeting Leipzig University’s administration. The group also published a report on Leipzig University’s cooperation with Israeli institutions.
Leipzig’s anti-Israel activities on campus drew the attention of three media outlets, all of which are anti-Israel. One is Etos Media, a German media outlet that is strongly critical of Israeli state policy. The platform (formerly known as Die Freiheitsliebe) explicitly states its mission is to build a borderless space regardless of origin, religion, or background. The platform frequently publishes left-wing, anti-imperialist, and pro-Palestinian commentary. Its editorial stance includes severe criticism of the war in Gaza. The publication has repeatedly described Israel’s military actions in Gaza as a “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” The platform supports academic boycotts and covers and promotes efforts—such as student assemblies in Germany—to sever academic ties with Israeli institutions. The website is deeply critical of Germany’s Staatsräson (the concept that Israel’s security is part of Germany’s core reason for existence), arguing that this policy prioritizes geopolitical interests over Palestinian rights. Not surprisingly, Etos Media has Arab editorial involvement. Its editorial team includes Julius Jamal, the platform’s founder (in 2009), who is of Arab descent, and Jakob Reimann, a core editor who leads the publication’s coverage of wars and conflicts in West Asia and North Africa. The broader writing team and list of contributors feature various Arab journalists, activists, and international guest writers reflecting a pro-Palestinian and anti-imperialist perspective. The second media outlet is Al-Jazeera, and the third is Middle East Eye. All three reported that last week, 700 students signed a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
Like in many of the previous cases reviewed by Israel Academia Monitor, the Leipzig University case demonstrates the increasing role played by Arab and other Muslim students and their allies on the left. The so-called Green-Red alliance is especially prominent in Germany, where the number of Jews is minuscule.
The cancellation of a lecture by Benny Morris, once a member of the New Historians, an early anti-Israel group of scholars, is also a victory for the Green-Red alliance. By violating free speech and disrupting events to promote anti-Israel causes, they give the university authorities a convenient excuse for revocation.
Israel Academia Monitor will continue to report on further developments.
Demand an end to their university’s collaboration with genocide and apartheid enablers: hundreds of students in Leipzig. Photo: Anton Trexler
Nearly 700 students at Leipzig University voted almost unanimously in favour of six demands, including a call to cut all ties with Israeli universities and publicly condemn the war against the Palestinians in Gaza. In conversation with Jule Stein, Orlando, spokesperson for Students for Palestine Leipzig, explains the rationale behind the resolution, discusses academic boycott campaigns, describes what the group sees as attempts by the university administration to obstruct the vote, and outlines the movement’s next steps.
etos.media: Leipzig University’s General Student Assembly voted in favour of a resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. Before we get into the details, can you tell us about the significance of this vote?
Orlando: The nearly 700 attending students almost unanimously adopted six demands. Among them is the call to acknowledge and publicly condemn the genocidal war on Gaza, including the scholasticide. The students also decided that Leipzig University must cut all ties with Israeli universities and institutions. This is the first time a German-speaking university has held a General Student Assembly on an academic boycott.
etos.media: What was the process behind formulating those demands? Were there any points you wanted to include in the resolution but ultimately decided against?
Orlando: In drafting the demands, we looked at other movements in Germany and around the world, because we are by no means the only students or university staff advocating for an academic boycott. We also drew specifically on the 2004 call by Palestinian civil society, PACBI, which outlines demands and guidelines for meaningful academic boycotts. Building on this extensive work, we formulated a set of proposed demands for the General Student Assembly, including the termination of all ties with Israeli universities.
It was also important for us to include the demand that Leipzig University publicly condemn the genocide in Gaza. Our university has failed to acknowledge this genocide and the scholasticide. Instead, it has repressed groups and students who have become active in solidarity with Palestine. The one cooperation agreement Leipzig University had with a Palestinian university expired last year, and when that university — Birzeit University — was raided by the Israeli military in January, Leipzig University once again remained silent. This has nothing to do with academic neutrality, as you cannot be neutral in a situation of genocide or military occupation.
For us, it became clear that Leipzig University was not living up to its own commitment to “human rights for all.” As students, we therefore wanted to make our voices heard. Every demand could be discussed during the General Student Assembly, and every student present had the opportunity to propose additional demands or amendments. In this way, we made clear that the students of Leipzig who participated in the assembly collectively stand behind these demands.
etos.media: Why do you think academic boycott movements are important with regard to the rights of Palestinians?
Orlando: The boycott movement against South Africa historically demonstrated that organised boycotts can be an effective tool in combating apartheid systems. That is why PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) has been fighting for such a boycott since 2004. As Students for Palestine Leipzig, we published a report in October 2025 that not only documents the ties between Leipzig University and Israeli universities but also extensively demonstrates how these universities function as a vital part of the Israeli state apparatus. We therefore believe that cooperating with these universities is problematic in itself, because the very act of cooperation legitimises and normalises these institutions.
All five Israeli partner universities of Leipzig University are an essential component of the Israeli military complex. They develop weapons, surveillance systems, and recruit students on their campus in order to make them join military units. Students who end up joining the units that carry out the genocide in Gaza get academic credits for that.
Moreover, Israeli universities produce knowledge that helps the state design and maintain the apartheid system. They also contribute to the production of narratives and ideological paradigms that legitimise Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing and present them as acceptable to the international community. One relevant example of this phenomenon is archaeology projects. These projects often seek to support the myth that Palestinians don’t exist and that Palestine was empty before the settlers came. That’s how Israel, for instance, justified ethnically cleansing the Palestinian village Susiya. Leipzig University participates in one such archaeology project together with Ben Gurion University.
Additionally, all Israeli universities stand on occupied land. They were built on the ruins of Palestinian villages that were destroyed during the Nakba and were partially founded in order to speed up the colonisation of Palestine. Leipzig University maintains student exchange programs with four Israeli universities and is therefore actively supporting the ongoing occupation of Palestine.
etos.media: What were the greatest difficulties and challenges to get to this vote?
Orlando: Our biggest challenge was certainly the repression we faced from the rectorate of Leipzig University. We are consistently treated differently from other groups. It starts with smaller things, such as being threatened with fines for unauthorised flyering or having university security present during our lectures to monitor us. To our knowledge, this is the first time in the history of the university that this has happened to any group to such an extent.
The situation further escalated over the last couple of weeks. One major issue was that the university blocked the distribution of the invitation email to all students, which would have invited everyone to the Vollversammlung. According to the law — the Sächsisches Hochschulgesetz — this is illegal.
The university also unilaterally cancelled our room for the Vollversammlung just one day before it was scheduled to take place. We had requested the room on 17 February and received confirmation on 20 March. The university had plenty of time to raise any concerns but decided to cancel the booking at the last minute. It is difficult not to interpret this as an attempt to silence, sabotage, and repress us.
The rectorate also tried to delegitimise our student assembly, claiming that it does not represent the students and is not in accordance with our constitution. Contrary to these claims, the student assembly is perfectly legal and compliant with the constitution of the student council, as the body’s own management confirmed in its statement. The rectorate should know this, since it signed that constitution itself. We manually collected close to 1,300 signatures in order to convene the Vollversammlung. The assembly is therefore not only legitimate; it is also a clear reflection of the students‘ demand and need for discussion on this topic, as evidenced by the high number of signatures and participants in the General Student Assembly. By targeting student self-governance, the rectorate is illegally undermining its own democratic institutions — not based on legitimate concerns, but out of a blatant disregard for student concerns and a fundamental refusal to engage with valid, well-founded criticism.
etos.media: In your opinion, is it true that Leipzig is a centre of “Antideutsche,” and what kind of interactions have you had with them?
Orlando: Leipzig certainly was a centre of the so-called Antideutsche. They definitely had a strong presence right after the start of the genocide in Gaza, as they would at times disrupt our events, going so far as to physically attack us. The hegemony of those people has long since been broken in Leipzig, as the Vollversammlung itself demonstrates. The Vollversammlung was attended by around 800 people, including close to 700 voting students, while the counter-protest consisted of nine Zionists well past their thirties who played techno songs celebrating the genocide.
Among those protesting against us was Juliane Nagel (PdL), which demonstrates that while the Antideutsche have no social base and are rapidly dying out, they still occupy some institutional positions. We are happy to be part of the movement that has transformed Leipzig from a centre of Zionists into a centre of anti-imperialists.
etos.media: What will be the next steps after the vote?
Orlando: The student council will publish the resolutions in an appropriate manner. Given that the resolutions of the Vollversammlung now represent the demands of Leipzig University’s collective student body, it will become progressively harder for the university to publicly ignore or disregard the issue of academic complicity.
However, for Leipzig University to cut all ties with Israeli institutions, a fundamental shift in Germany’s political landscape is required — one that begins with steadily growing public dissent across all spheres of society. On campus, we will continue to organise, advocate, and build support for an academic boycott among both students and university staff. The Vollversammlung is only one of many ways to rally support and channel our discontent through the university’s official democratic mechanisms.
etos.media: How can people in Leipzig and people in Germany support the next steps?
Orlando: We are not alone in our struggle against academic complicity. If you study in Germany, chances are high that there is an academic boycott campaign happening at your university right now. Not only in Leipzig, but across Germany, groups have published or are currently in the process of writing reports that lay bare their universities’ complicity. Every single person can make a difference in these campaigns. We call on everybody to join these groups and help keep the discourse on campus alive. This means not only informing yourself by reading the reports, but also sharing that knowledge and engaging in discussions with friends, fellow students, and university staff.
As for us, we will be holding an open plenary on 10 June at 7 p.m. in front of the Ziegenledersaal on Leipzig University’s main campus.
Jule Stein studierte Nachhaltige Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und ist ausgebildete Traumapädagogin. Sie arbeitet u. a. für gemeinnützige Initiativen im Bereich Flucht und Migration.
Nearly 700 students from Leipzig University, in Germany, sat down last month on the square outside the college cafeteria, next to the city’s old, ruined fortifications, to vote. A sea of hands rose, holding yellow cards.
The vote was almost unanimous: The student council demanded the university cease all collaboration with Israeli institutions.
“All five [Israeli] partner universities of Leipzig University are an essential component of the Israeli military complex: They develop weapons, surveillance systems and recruit on their campus for military units,” 22-year-old Orlando Becker of Students for Palestine Leipzig told Al Jazeera.
“We therefore think that cooperating with those universities is in and of itself problematic, because one is legitimising and normalising those institutions.”
The Leipzig vote is the latest success for a wave of Palestinian solidarity at German universities that has accelerated since March, in which at least three other student councils – in Berlin and Dusseldorf – have put forward similar motions.
Israeli universities have long been accused of complicity in war crimes and other alleged abuses committed by their government. To argue their case, the students put together a report outlining how academic institutions contribute to the Israeli war machine – for example, in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank – as well as advancing the government’s narratives.
“One example is archaeology projects,” said Becker. “Those often have the goal to prove that Palestinians do not exist and that Palestine was empty before the settlers came. In the name of science, Israel justified ethnically cleansing the Palestinian village of Susya in order to conduct archaeological research there, and later on twisted the findings to prove that the very same people that were ethnically cleansed never existed in the first place. Leipzig University has one archaeology project with Ben Gurion University.”
After sharing the report around campus, Students for Palestine collected 1,300 signatures to convene a general student assembly. The day before the assembly was due to take place, the university withdrew permission to use a lecture hall.
In response to a query, a Leipzig University spokesperson directed Al Jazeera to a statement that permission was denied on the grounds that the students were making a “partisan statement and the intention to restrict academic freedom”.
Becker described “a historic moment for Germany” as more students across the country are joining campaigns in support of Palestinians.
“We are not naive, though. If the past is any indicator, then the rectorate will care more about Israel than about their own democratic institutions and the collective will of the students … Our fight is not concluded until all of Palestine is free.”
‘Students have organised for years’
In March, at the Hertie School, a private university in Berlin, the student council voted on a resolution supporting BDS – the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign – by cutting ties with Israeli institutions. It was the first German student council to do so.
“Students have organised for years to demand the Hertie School end all collaborations with organisations complicit in human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories,” said a member of the Hertie Student Representation (HSR), who requested their name be withheld.Pro-Palestinian activists in May 2024 occupied a courtyard of the Free University in Berlin [Markus Schreiber/AP]
“The university leadership has inadequately responded to these popular student initiatives and ignored many of our demands … Therefore, a coalition of students drafted this resolution to apply the BDS framework to student-administered funds. It was passed by the student council with over 90 percent of votes in favour and none against.”
The Hertie School distanced itself from the HSR, with the Hertie Foundation calling the motion “unacceptable” in a statement. There were mixed reactions among the students, with some reporting a tense atmosphere on campus, and the HSR stepped down after losing a vote of no confidence.
“[The university] used fear tactics like telling students that their job prospects would be damaged by association with BDS, that international students’ visa statuses could be jeopardised, and that the Hertie School’s funding might be cut,” said the HSR member.
“Furthermore, the university leadership implied students in support of the motion were acting outside the bounds of law.”
‘It almost felt like I was back in Russia’
BDS is considered extremist by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, although it is not banned.
“I went to a meeting about this situation at the university and was shocked. The entire discussion felt staged,” said Arshak Makichyan, an environmentalist and antiwar activist now in his final year at Hertie.
“It almost felt like I was back in Russia. I feel disappointed that, instead of having an honest discussion at a university where we read academic works about what constitutes genocide and why what Israel is doing is clearly against international law, students cannot even raise these issues … I feel disappointed in Germany and in the other students who did nothing to defend our representatives.”
Support for Israel is considered one of modern Germany’s core national interests, referred to as its Staatsraison, or reason for state.
“Being pro-Israel has always been a way to prove Germany has learned from its past and is amongst the good again,” explained Peter Ullrich, an anti-Semitism researcher at the Technical University (TU) of Berlin, alluding to the legacy of the Holocaust.
“This has resulted in a strange discourse where Israel is nearly sacrosanct in the political establishment, and Palestinian voices and their supporters are treated badly with undifferentiated discourse (and) severe state handling of demonstrations.”
A Jewish student at Hertie, who requested anonymity, said that as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, they have been “alienated”.
“It was insinuated that my commitment to fighting oppression stood in contradiction to my identity, my history, and my love for the Jewish people,” they said. “For many Jews, supporting non-violent political pressure wherever rights are violated is an expression of the moral responsibility thrust upon us by generations of persecution. Levelling accusations of anti-Semitism in this context trivialises a term that should remain reserved for genuine hatred and violence against Jews, and must not be used as a shield against criticism of state power.”
Pro-Palestinian activism at German institutions is suppressed by event cancellations, police interventions and even legal proceedings against students involved.
In response to a query, a Leipzig University spokesperson directed Al Jazeera to a statement that permission was denied on the grounds that the students were making a “partisan statement and the intention to restrict academic freedom”.
In November 2023, a Free University of Berlin (FUB) lecture hall was occupied by students in solidarity with Gaza. Then, in May 2024, Humboldt University’s Institute of Social Sciences was occupied and renamed Jabalia Institute, after a besieged Gaza refugee camp.
Both times, police were called and violently removed the students, dozens of whom were injured. People of colour, including those with Arab identities, were reportedly treated more harshly.
Several were charged with trespassing, and four FUB protesters were expelled from the country.
In April, Heinrich-Heine University Dusseldorf (HHU) pledged to continue its collaboration with Israeli institutions despite a student parliament resolution demanding an academic boycott, while last week, another BDS resolution was voted down at the FUB.
“I think you’ll find pretty strong criticism of the current Israeli government or politics at universities, it’s just that the universities in Germany are state-funded,” said Uffa Jensen of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at TU Berlin.
“The real question in Germany is the political support for Israel, and that comes first. Because in the case of Russian universities after the attack on Ukraine, they were officially ordered to stop all collaborations by the German Education and Science Ministry. And they did this immediately … the treatment is strikingly different, even after two years of intense conflict in the Middle East.”
Leipzig University withdraws permission for Students for Palestine to use lecture hall
News from 18/05/2026
Leipzig University has today withdrawn permission previously granted to the group Students for Palestine to use a lecture hall. The group had planned to hold a “studentische Vollversammlung” (“student general assembly”) tomorrow, Tuesday, 19 May 2026, which was to include a vote on Leipzig University’s cooperation with Israeli universities. “It became necessary to reassess our decision. This is no longer about academic debate, but about a partisan statement and the intention to restrict academic freedom,” says Professor Eva Inés Obergfell, Rector of Leipzig University.
“The open exchange of ideas is important. That also includes conducting controversial discussions within the University,” the Rector explains. “This is why Students for Palestine, a working group recognised by the Student Council plenary assembly, was recently once again allowed to use rooms at the University for its events. However, over recent days it has emerged that the planned general assembly is intended to support a call for a boycott directed against the University’s stated policy, and that a vote was planned on whether our long-standing cooperation with partner universities in Israel should continue. On social media, the impression was being created that the resolutions adopted at the assembly would reflect the will of Leipzig students as a whole. We reject this characterisation. This would by no means be a general assembly of all students, which the Student Council management would be required to convene in accordance with its statutes. Instead, the event would effectively claim to speak on behalf of all students. There is no place at our university for such an event. It cannot reasonably be expected of our academic community, especially our Jewish students and staff.”
The Rector emphasises that Leipzig University’s relationships with Israel, and particularly with its academic partners in Israel, are of the utmost importance to the institution. “We have made this clear repeatedly, including in public statements. A boycott of Israeli universities is out of the question for us. We remain committed to our partnerships with Israeli universities, which foster this academic exchange,” says Obergfell.
She adds that what she wrote in an internal circular email in November 2025 still applies: “What is needed instead is to strengthen academic cooperation with Israel. This is also a matter of solidarity and of nurturing academic discourse. At the same time, our collaborations allow us to strengthen those who seek dialogue and balance. Calls for boycotts do nothing to help resolve the conflict. By contrast, many scholars in Israel are actively contributing to debate on the peace process in the Middle East.”
Correction note of 20 May 2026: From 2017 to 2025, the DAAD funded cooperation between the German Department at Birzeit University (north of Ramallah) and the Herder Institute under its “German Language, Literature and Culture: Institutional Partnerships Worldwide” (GIP) programme. This funding has ended. The Rector was not aware of this information on 18 May, which is why the relevant quote initially referred to “partnerships with Israeli and Palestinian universities”. We have corrected this.
In German first, Leipzig students vote for academic boycott of Israel
Nearly 700 students at the University of Leipzig have voted almost unanimously to demand the university sever all ties with Israeli academic institutions over the genocide in Gaza
Students at the University of Leipzig attend vote on academic boycott of Israel, 19 May 2026 (Migu Lohmann/MEE) By Hebh JamalPublished date: 25 May 2026 14:00 BST | Last update: 3 weeks 6 days ago
In a historic first for Germany, nearly 700 students at the University of Leipzig voted almost unanimously on 19 May to demand that their university sever all ties with Israeli academic institutions over the genocide in Gaza.
The location is significant.
For decades, Leipzig has been regarded as one of Germany’s strongest centers of the “Antideutsche” current, a tendency within the radical left defined by militant anti-nationalism and vocal support for Israel under the banner of combating antisemitism. Antideutsche activists also frequently clash with pro-Palestinian activists at demonstrations and events.
The adopted list of demands calls on the university to recognise and condemn the genocidal nature of Israel’s war on Gaza, including the scholasticide taking place there, a term used to describe the systematic destruction of educational institutions, students and staff.
Students demand an end to all cooperation with Israeli universities and institutions, and insist that the University of Leipzig neither participate in, promote, nor publicise collaborations or activities organised or hosted by Israeli universities.
According to a report written by students and staff, the University of Leipzig’s cooperation agreements with Israel aid and assist Israel in genocide and other violations of international law.
The university’s collaborations include extensive student exchange programmes, ongoing direct research projects and partnerships with various institutions within Israel that have been accused of advancing illegal settlement of Palestinian land.
“Leipzig University is very open about its collaboration with institutions that violate international law,” a student and contributor of the report told MEE.
“Cooperations must be ended on three grounds: moral because the cause against genocide is universal and just, ethical because the university must be a place of learning and knowledge production that upholds the value of life and education and rejects human rights violations and scholasticide, and finally legal because the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that confirms the illegality of aiding and abetting violations of erga omnes [universally binding] laws including by Israeli educational institutions.”
University moves to block vote
The University of Leipzig did not welcome the assembly call or the subsequent near-unanimous vote. After an inquiry was sent to the university’s spokesperson, MEE was referred to a statement issued on 18 May, in which the university explained its decision to withdraw the room provided to students to conduct the assembly the following day.
“It became necessary to reassess our decision. This is no longer about academic debate, but about a partisan statement and the intention to restrict academic freedom,” said Professor Eva Ines Obergfell, the universitiy’s rector.
“Yesterday’s assembly, attended by an estimated 1 percent of our students, was not convened by the Student Council management in accordance with its statutes,” the university told MEE.
The Student Council rejected the accusation as unfounded. The student representative body said that under its statutes, a general assembly can be convened through a petition signed by at least 3 percent of the student population. According to the council, students collected around 1,300 signatures, exceeding the required threshold.
“The collected signatures clearly show that we, as a status group of students, want and need to be part of this discourse. The convening of this general assembly as a direct means to this end must be accepted by the university administration,” said Alaska Krakor, a member of the Student Council.
The University of Leipzig is not the only institution in Germany with entrenched ties to Israel. It is difficult to find an educational institution in the country that does not.
The German Rectors’ Conference, the association of state and state-recognised universities in Germany, released a statement in June 2025 calling for the reinforcement and strengthening of academic and research collaborations with Israel.
The statement was in response to calls for the suspension of the EU Association Agreement with Israel, the primary legal framework governing political dialogue and economic trade between the European Union and Israel.
“Israeli universities and the academic community in Israel have always been a strong, liberal and democratic force and a central element of academic and ethical reflection and balance, especially in the Middle East conflict,” the statement read.
‘Think globally, act locally’
Another student at the University of Leipzig told MEE that while this was not the first time a student council had voted in favour of resolutions supporting an academic boycott, this vote was different because it was a general assembly specifically convened around the issue of ending academic complicity, rather than having such resolutions introduced during a broader meeting.
MEE also spoke to representatives from Students for Palestine (SFP) Leipzig, who explained that the foundations for the success of the assembly – which took place outside the university courtyard – started at the beginning of the academic year with the launch of the complicity report.
Although student councils had previously passed similar resolutions, organisers used presentations on the report and on academic boycott strategy to educate as many students as possible prior to the assembly.
“We as students wanted to think globally and act locally,” SPF said.
“Our university is complicit with its direct ties and cooperation with Israeli institutions which helps develop weapons, makes bombs, and increase knowledge production on how to oppress Palestinians, and we want no part in this complicity. We call on the university to respect the will of the student body,” it added.
We call on Leipzig University to suspend its ties with Israeli institutions
As students and staff of Leipzig University, we take the University’s declaration of commitment to the dignity of all people seriously.
Leipzig University maintains institutional relationships with Israeli universities that are embedded in the Israeli political system and in many cases directly contribute to the illegal occupation of Palestine and genocidal war in Gaza. We call on Leipzig University to honour its ethical commitment to human rights and respect for the dignity of all people by suspending its cooperations with Israeli universities and academic institutions, until these institutions:
publicly recognise the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, as enshrined in international law. These include: The end of the occupation of all Arab lands, the dismantling of the Apartheid Wall, and full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel.
respect, protection and promotion of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.
end all forms of complicity in violating Palestinian rights, including discriminatory practices, justifying Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian human rights, contributing materially and ideologically to the crimes of apartheid and genocide committed against the Palestinian people.
This report details Leipzig University’s direct and indirect support of Israel in its violations of international law
When the University of Leipzig in Germany canceled a lecture by Israeli historian Benny Morris planned for Thursday, its professors took pains to frame the decision as a security issue, not a political one.
“As a university, we are committed to promoting respectful dialogue and the open and critical exchange of ideas, even when these ideas challenge and contradict our own perspectives,” wrote Leipzig professors Gert Pickel and Yemima Hadad in a statement last week canceling the talk with Morris, an academic considered controversial on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Morris’s research on the 1948 War of Independence made him an early leader of the “New Historians” post-Zionist movement, as his documentation of expulsions and killings of Arabs during the war challenged Israel’s traditional narrative of its history. However, Morris has also made statements comparing the Palestinian people to “wild animals” and saying that Israel would have been better off committing “ethnic cleansing” than being exterminated by them.
“In principle, inviting speakers to the university does not necessarily mean that we agree with their views,” they wrote. However, recent statements made by Morris “that can be read as offensive and even racist” led to “understandable, but frightening in nature, protests from individual student groups,” they said, without providing details. “The above points mean that Prof. Benny Morris’ lecture will not take place.”
The statement went on to distance the university from “a culture of cancelations” over ideas, but many saw the decision as a capitulation to anti-Israel threats.
“This is just another part of the ongoing story of academic boycotts against Israel,” said Emmanuel Nahshon, a former Israeli diplomat now leading an Association of Israeli Universities task force for combating academic boycotts. “This decision was a bit surprising because Germany is among Israel’s staunchest allies in the academic world. Many university presidents in Germany have spoken out strongly against any calls for boycotts. But sometimes, you have cowardly professors who give in to the pressure of students to avoid fighting.”
Israeli academia has been subjected to boycotts for decades, particularly after the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign made it a central target of its anti-Israel strategy in 2004. But the push for the institutional isolation of Israeli universities and intellectuals has grown substantially since Hamas launched its October 7, 2023, onslaught in Israel, sparking the ongoing war.
An internal document from the Association of Israeli Universities in November shows that more than 300 boycott activities were recorded worldwide during the first year of the war. These included 50 cases where academic publications were barred, 30 lectures that were disrupted or canceled, and dozens of spoiled collaborations and grants. Universities in Belgium were by far the worst offenders, with more than 40 boycott activities.
Israeli academia relies heavily on international cooperation, with some 38 percent of Israeli research conducted in cooperation with European academics, the Innovation, Science and Technology Ministry has said.
“The problem is that boycotts have now come to be seen as legitimate in the academic world,” Nahshon noted. “Until recently, universities placed high value on respecting diverse points of view and shunning politics. They would have been ashamed to take part in boycotts. But now, they have given in to radicals trying to suppress freedom.”
That change came to the fore in August, when the American Association of University Professors, the largest organization of academics in the United States, reversed its decades-old stance against academic boycotts.
The new policy says: “Academic boycotts are not in themselves violations of academic freedom; rather, they can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”
While the statement did not explicitly target Israel, many understood the new approach to be a capitulation to BDS as a new tactic to target Israeli academics.
“The hypocrisy of that statement was clear,” Nahshon said. “It’s obvious that the point of this is to give universities greater cover to discriminate against Israel. It’s not an intellectual debate.”
As the specter of boycotts grows, Israel has begun taking steps to fight back. Last summer, the Innovation, Science and Technology Ministry led by Gila Gamliel allocated NIS 90 million ($25 million) to counter academic boycotts through a combination of legal efforts, international collaborations, and programs to promote Israeli academia to foreign students and researchers.
A program called “Scholar Shield” was also launched by the Technion’s Samuel Neaman Institute to track and respond to boycott activities. And efforts are being made to penalize universities that participate in boycotts.
“It’s important to understand why there are not more institutions in Europe boycotting Israel,” Nahshon said. “Schools that receive EU funding through programs like Horizon Europe or Erasmus+ are expected to follow certain principles like promoting academic freedom and cross-border collaboration. That means a formal boycott would endanger the school’s access to billions of euros earmarked for research and development.”
Israel is hopeful that similar regulations will be implemented in the United States during the administration of incoming president Donald Trump, Nahshon noted.
“There are huge federal funds available in the US for research,” Nahshon said. “We would like to promote legislation that would block any university or individual who boycotts Israel from those funds.”
But tracking boycotts isn’t always easy. “There are overt boycotts, where the institution states their intentions clearly, and then there are covert boycotts, where Israelis are not invited to conferences or considered for publication, but there is no official university policy,” Nahshon said. “We are starting to see more of those types of boycotts, and we are working to identify them proactively. This work is critical for the future of Israel’s academia.”
Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) has reported extensively on Prof. Haim Bresheerh-Zabner, a filmmaker, photographer, and film studies scholar at SOAS University of London. He is a former activist in Matzpen, an Israeli socialist and anti-Zionist organization. Matzpen was a small but influential Israeli radical left organization founded in 1962. It rejected mainstream Zionism, viewed Israel through an anti-colonial framework, and advocated cooperation between Jewish and Arab socialists throughout the Middle East. Although never electorally significant, it had a lasting intellectual influence on parts of the Israeli and international anti-Zionist left. Bresheeth-Zabner joined Matzpen’s London branch.
Recently, on June 10, 2026, Tehran Timesreported that “Iran Honors Activists with ‘Right Side of History’ Medal.” A group of international activists, artists, academics, and political figures participated in a ceremony in Tehran on June 8, 2026, highlighting “a growing global movement in support of Palestine and opposition to Western-backed policies in West Asia.” The award recognizes individuals who “have publicly supported the Palestinian cause and challenged dominant Western narratives regarding conflicts in the Middle East.”
Bresheeth-Zabner is among the winners. Several recipients were unable to attend and instead delivered video messages that were screened during the event. Among them was Bresheeth-Zabner, who was “honored for his academic work critical of Zionism.” In his videoed remarks, Bresheeth-Zabner “praised Iran’s support for Palestinians and described standing for political principles as increasingly difficult in today’s international environment.”
Mahdi Ebrahimzadeh, deputy and chief of staff of the Islamic Revolution Cultural and Research Institute, welcomed the guests, followed by a “series of speeches focused on resistance, political activism, and international solidarity with Palestine.” The medal “Right Side of History” was named after a letter that Ayatollah Khamenei wrote to American students in May 2024 praising them for political activism and urging them to stand on the “right side of history” by protesting against the war in Iran and supporting the Palestinians.
Tehran Times noted that similar ceremonies have previously been held in Tehran, Caracas, and Ghana, reflecting “an expanding international network of activists, intellectuals, and public figures advocating for Palestinian rights and opposing Zionism and global hegemonic policies.”
Bresheeth-Zabner stands out even by the standards of the anti-Zionist fraternity. In late 2024, Israel Academia Monitor reported that Bresheeth-Zabner was detained overnight in the UK by the police for delivering hate speech during a pro-Palestinian rally in October 2024 on behalf of the group Jewish Network for Palestine, which he co-founded. IAM noted that Bresheeth-Zabner was wearing a keffiyeh.
In June 2025, Israel Academia Monitor posted a “Report on the First Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna,” which Bresheeth-Zabner helped to organize.
Last week, Bresheeth-Zabner reported on the upcoming second Congress, which will take place on June 26–28, 2026, in Dublin, Ireland, titled “From Vienna to Dublin: Gathering for the Second Anti-Zionist Congress.” According to Bresheeth-Zabner, the Dublin Congress “has a very loaded agenda to discuss and to move from mere debate to political action.”
Bresheeth-Zabner stated that in last year’s Congress, “The foundation was laid, and we are now tasked with the next stage – building the movement, directing its objectives, listening and collaborating with the Palestine global movement and contributing towards turning the Jewish communities from servile centers of support for Israeli crimes to becoming part of the Anti-Zionist opposition to the Israeli genocidal entity.”
The Congress participants include “leading voices in the struggle for Palestinian liberation and international justice, including Ilan Pappé, Ramzy Baroud, Francesca Albanese, Jérôme Lagarce, and Craig Mokhiber, the Congress seeks to move beyond analysis and towards practical strategies for confronting Zionism and supporting Palestinian freedom… As Anti-Zionist Jews, we are well placed to change all that – to play our part in the decolonization, de-Zionisation and liberation of Palestine from the Zionist oppression that Britain has imposed on its indigenous population. For two millennia, Jews have suffered various forms of oppression, including becoming the victims of one of the greatest genocides. This should drive all Jews to oppose genocide, and especially one perpetrated by Jews in the name of all Jews!”
Bresheeth Zabner ended by stating that “The debates in Dublin must concentrate on the liberation of Palestine from Zionism and its militarized genocide, indeed, on liberating the whole of West Asia from the monstrosity which Israel has become – the chaos engine of the West, involved in sowing death and destruction in six states over the last couple of years. But there is another type of liberation we must achieve in Dublin – the liberation of the Jewish mind, now under occupation by Zionism, militarism, racism and Jewish supremacism. Zionism has not only occupied Palestine and other states in West Asia – it has occupied and destroyed Judaism itself, exchanging the deity and Jewish history with the militarized racism of Israeli settler-colonialism. That is the first task of the Congress – let us liberate Judaism everywhere from the claws of genocidal Zionism. Let us fully join Palestinians in their struggle for justice, peace, and equality, for freedom in their own land. Let us do everything humanly possible to stop the genocide, to reverse its terrifying damage, to help rebuild Gaza and Palestine, and to bring to justice those responsible for the genocidal crimes. Only thus will there be a future for humans in Palestine – to liberate Palestine by ending Zionism is to create an independent and just Judaism, free of antisemitism and Islamophobia. This has existed in many Arab and Muslim societies where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in a form of coexistence termed “Convivencia” by later historians. Such societies were free of the deep racism of Europe, now making a comeback. If it was possible in Al Andalus, North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Turkiye and the Balkans, why is it not possible now? The removal of Zionism may open the gates to a new history of Convivencia, and not just in Palestine.”
Bresheeth-Zabner’s vision of reviving Convivencia—a concept often described as a period of peaceful coexistence among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in medieval Spain and viewed as having been romanticized—rests on a highly idealized interpretation of history. Critics of this view note that Jews in Muslim societies lived as dhimmis, a protected but subordinate non-Muslim population subject to various legal and social restrictions. They were also vulnerable to episodes of discrimination and violence. One notable example was the Farhud, the pogrom that took place in Baghdad in 1941, during which mobs killed Jews, looted homes and businesses, and destroyed property.
His dream of Convivencia seems particularly ironic given that the Iranian regime has long declared its desire to obliterate the State of Israel. Ayatollah Khomeini, whose medal he received, went so far as to argue that, based on verses from the Koran, Israel will disappear from the face of the earth in 2040. A digital countdown clock in Tehran was set up according to this timeline.
Whatever their intentions, in practice, the rhetoric of the anti-Zionists functions as ideological reinforcement for Iran, which openly frames Israel’s destruction as a political objective. By blurring the line between critique and delegitimization, they amplify a discourse that does not aim at reforming Israel but at erasing it. This is what Bresheeth-Zabner is calling for.
Iran introduces winners of Right Side of History Medal
Iran has announced the winners of its Right Side of History Medal to a number of international activists, artists and politicians in a ceremony held in the capital Tehran on Tuesday.
Ali Bagheri, Deputy Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, addressing the ceremony, denounced US President Donald Trump’s explicit admission of seeking “peace through force,”, Taqrib News Agency (TNA) cited Khamenei.ir as reporting.
He described Trump’s policy as the complete trampling of logic, dialogue, and rationality in favor of savagery and murder.
Saeid Reza Ameli, a jury member hailed the awakening of American youths and mobilizing protest against the US war on Iran and killing of Minab school students in contrast with the years needed to build anti-war awareness during Vietnam era.
Mick Wallace, the former Irish Member of the European Parliament, was among the recipients of the award, recognized for his independent foreign policy and advocacy for social justice.
In part of the ceremony, video messages were screened from recipients who could not attend the meeting among them Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, a British historian and filmmaker at SOAS, renowned Syrian actress Sulaf Fawakherji, Yemeni cartoonist Kamal Sharaf, Tushar Gandhi, an Indian activist and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Charlotte Kates, a Canadian human rights lawyer and coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
Organized by the Office for the Preservation and Publication of the Works of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, the ceremony was held on Keshvardoost Street, close to the site where the Leader of Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei was martyred in February.
The Right Side of History Medal originates from a letter by the martyred Leader of Islamic Republic addressing the American university students in May 2024, in which he praised their political awakening and support for Palestine.
The event is one of several ceremonies held worldwide to honor those who have formed a branch of the Resistance Front and taken part in this activism to voice their opposition to the brutal crimes of Zionism and Global Arrogance.
TEHRAN — Iran awarded its “Right Side of History” Medal to a group of international activists, artists, academics, and political figures during a ceremony in Tehran on Monday, highlighting ‘a growing global movement in support of Palestine and opposition to Western-backed policies in West Asia.’
The event was held on Keshvardoost Street, near the site where Iran says the late Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, was martyred in a joint US-Israeli airstrike on February 28, 2026. The ceremony drew domestic and international guests, as well as members of the public, who gathered to commemorate the late leader.
Opening the event, Mahdi Ebrahimzadeh, deputy and chief of staff of the Islamic Revolution Cultural and Research Institute, welcomed attendees before a series of speeches focused on resistance, political activism, and international solidarity with Palestine.
Saeed Reza Ameli, speaking on behalf of the award’s selection committee, said the medal was inspired by Ayatollah Khamenei’s message to young people around the world. He argued that recent protests against the war in Iran and support for Palestinians demonstrated ‘a growing political awakening among younger generations.’
According to organizers, the award recognizes individuals who have publicly supported the Palestinian cause and challenged dominant Western narratives regarding conflicts in the Middle East.
Several recipients who were unable to attend the ceremony delivered video messages that were screened during the event.
Among them was British historian and filmmaker Professor Haim Bresheeth-Zabner of SOAS University of London, who was honored for his academic work critical of Zionism. In his remarks, Bresheeth-Zabner praised Iran’s support for Palestinians and described standing for political principles as increasingly difficult in today’s international environment.
Syrian actress Sulaf Fawakherji discussed her film Land of Angels, which she said was produced to highlight the humanitarian situation in Gaza. She described the project as an effort to draw attention to the loss of basic rights and daily hardships faced by Palestinians.
Yemeni political cartoonist Kamal Sharaf described the award as an encouragement for activists and advocates of social justice worldwide.
Indian activist Tushar Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, also addressed the audience via video, calling support for Palestinian rights a moral responsibility and urging greater international engagement with the issue.
Ali Bagheri, Deputy Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, delivered the ceremony’s keynote address, portraying recent events as evidence of Iran’s resilience in the face of external pressure.
Bagheri sharply criticized US foreign policy, particularly President Donald Trump’s doctrine of “peace through force,” arguing that military pressure cannot achieve political objectives. He said Iran’s response to recent military confrontations demonstrated the country’s determination to defend its sovereignty.
“We are proud that we defeated America, and America is defeated today,” Bagheri said, drawing applause from the audience.
Algerian journalist and writer Yahya Abou Zakaria also addressed the gathering, describing support for Iran and Palestine as a responsibility shared by advocates of freedom worldwide.
Filmmaker and screenwriter Babak Lotfi Khajeh-Pasha focused his remarks on the role of media in shaping international perceptions of conflicts. He argued that cultural and media institutions play a decisive role in influencing public understanding of global events and called for greater efforts to challenge dominant narratives.
“The media battle is one of the most important fronts in today’s world,” he said.
The ceremony concluded with medals being presented to recipients and representatives attending on behalf of those unable to travel to Tehran.
The “Right Side of History” Medal takes its name from a letter written by Ayatollah Khamenei to American university students in May 2024, in which he praised student activism and support for Palestine.
According to organizers, similar ceremonies have previously been held in Tehran, Caracas, and Ghana, reflecting ‘an expanding international network of activists, intellectuals, and public figures advocating for Palestinian rights and opposing Zionism and global hegemonic policies.’
The debates in Dublin must concentrate on the liberation of Palestine from Zionism and its militarized genocide, indeed, on liberating the whole of West Asia from the monstrosity which Israel has become.
Less than a year ago, the first Anti-Zionist Congress met in Vienna for three days of debates and discussion, in the very city that in February 1896 Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, the small volume which started the development of political Zionism which led to the Zionist movement, and the settler-colonial state of Israel, now involved in fully-fledged genocide, ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a war against Iran and the destruction and genocide in South Lebanon. 130 years of Zionism have created the worst political monsters since the Third Reich. This was, of course, done in the name of liberating Jews.
The Jewish Apartheid state was set up in the same year, 1948, that the White Apartheid state was created in South Africa. At least that monster is already gone, though the way this was done did not lead to the liberation so many have worked for, and Blacks in South Africa are still living with many of the inequalities created by the White Apartheid regime.
Yet in Palestine, the Settler-colonial state of Israel seems stronger than ever, controlling the agenda, decision-making and the political direction of much of the global West, while it is involved in the most terrifying genocide of our lifetime. Despite the fact that this has gone on for almost three years, there seems to be no end in sight for the oppression, suffering, and destruction of Palestinian life in their own land, with every organization, institution, and even states that have partaken in the struggle against Israeli war crimes being crushed and punished by the combined might of the global West.
Surely, we are all involved? Surely, we are all suffering the loss of our rights for free speech, the right to protest, or the duty to uphold the law of the land and international law, under governments that are united in supporting crimes against humanity? That this is done in the name of helping Jews against antisemitism is one of the most persistent lies of our time. And Jews all over the world are uniting against it.
Last year, the Vienna Congress brought together a thousand activists to start the process of building a global Jewish opposition to Zionism, to Israel and its crimes, and to the states supporting these illegal atrocities – militarily, politically and financially. The foundation was laid, and we are now tasked with the next stage – building the movement, directing its objectives, listening and collaborating with the Palestine global movement and contributing towards turning the Jewish communities from servile centers of support for Israeli crimes to becoming part of the Anti-Zionist opposition to the Israeli genocidal entity.
Dublin was chosen for the second iteration of the Congress due to the specific role played by the Irish in opposition and defeating British settler-colonialism on the island of Ireland, at least in the South. Ireland was the first colony of the nascent British Empire, and we found it fit to discuss the future defeat of its last colony, the Zionist state in Palestine.
This is where this political malady had started, and this is where we should discuss the ending of the Palestine colony, started by the British Empire with its sordid gifting of Palestine to the Zionist movement in 1917, with the Balfour Declaration. Britain is the first empire that supported Zionism then, and has continued to do so without a break for 110 years – all British governments, of whatever political bent, have supported the crimes of Israel, and the current British government is proving there is nothing they will not do to continue such support – even the perversion of justice in Britain itself.
UK is alone in having arrested over 3,000 people, many of them frail and elderly, for the terrible crime of displaying a hand-written poster, judged as an act of terror, and justifying bringing terror charges against law-abiding citizens, by a regime displaying deep disregard for human rights, not just in Palestine but also in Britain. Dublin is an excellent historical location to remind the British regime that the struggle against injustice is sometimes successful. Indeed, in the long run, it is always successful.
The Dublin Congress has a very loaded agenda to discuss and to move from mere debate to political action. With contributions from leading voices in the struggle for Palestinian liberation and international justice, including Ilan Pappé, Ramzy Baroud, Francesca Albanese, Jérôme Lagarce, and Craig Mokhiber, the Congress seeks to move beyond analysis and towards practical strategies for confronting Zionism and supporting Palestinian freedom.
Most Western states are still supporting Israeli crimes. Most Jews in the West are still supporting Israel, and we need to turn this round. Most Jewish communities are still sending their sons and daughters to serve in a genocidal army.
Most synagogues in Britain are still holding Zionist events, holding prayers for Israel and the IDF. Most Jewish communities are still spreading Israeli Hasbara lies, silencing action for Palestine, and presenting themselves, as well as Israel, as the eternal victim, rather than admitting to the crimes of Zionism, aided and abetted by such communities. Such communities are still resistant to argument, evidence, and international law, not to mention morality.
As Anti-Zionist Jews, we are well placed to change all that – to play our part in the decolonization, de-Zionisation and liberation of Palestine from the Zionist oppression that Britain has imposed on its indigenous population. For two millennia, Jews have suffered various forms of oppression, including becoming the victims of one of the greatest genocides. This should drive all Jews to oppose genocide, and especially one perpetrated by Jews in the name of all Jews!
The debates in Dublin must concentrate on the liberation of Palestine from Zionism and its militarized genocide, indeed, on liberating the whole of West Asia from the monstrosity which Israel has become – the chaos engine of the West, involved in sowing death and destruction in six states over the last couple of years.
But there is another type of liberation we must achieve in Dublin – the liberation of the Jewish mind, now under occupation by Zionism, militarism, racism and Jewish supremacism. Zionism has not only occupied Palestine and other states in West Asia – it has occupied and destroyed Judaism itself, exchanging the deity and Jewish history with the militarised racism of Israeli settler-colonialism.
That is the first task of the Congress – let us liberate Judaism everywhere from the claws of genocidal Zionism. Let us fully join Palestinians in their struggle for justice, peace, and equality, for freedom in their own land. Let us do everything humanly possible to stop the genocide, to reverse its terrifying damage, to help rebuild Gaza and Palestine, and to bring to justice those responsible for the genocidal crimes.
Only thus will there be a future for humans in Palestine – to liberate Palestine by ending Zionism is to create an independent and just Judaism, free of antisemitism and Islamophobia. This has existed in many Arab and Muslim societies where Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in a form of coexistence termed “Convivencia” by later historians.
Such societies were free of the deep racism s of Europe, now making a comeback. If it was possible in Al Andalus, North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Turkiye and the Balkans, why is it not possible now? The removal of Zionism may open the gates to a new history of Convivencia, and not just in Palestine.
To find out more about the Congress, its program, and to register and partake, please check the Congress website https://jazic.org – if you are unable to partake, please help us by making a donation: https://jazic.or
– Haim Bresheeth-Žabner is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, and the author of An Army Like No Other: How the IDF Made A Nation, Verso 2020. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
Anti-Israel activism and BDS calls in Australia are not new. In August 2024, Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) reported on “BDS Infiltrating Australian Campuses.”
On March 26, 2026, an anti-Israel protest took place at the University of Sydney. One of the posters used by activists featured Handala, a cartoon figure depicted as a barefoot child with his back turned and hands clasped behind him. The poster also showed red markings resembling blood splattered over the logos of Israeli universities.
In mid-May, the University authorities launched an investigation into the posters. The University wrote to two students it believed were involved in producing the material, warning that they may have breached student conduct rules. In the letter, the university said the posters targeted Israeli universities, which it described as civilian academic institutions rather than government bodies. It said portraying those institutions as complicit in apartheid could risk collective blame and potentially affect visiting students. The letter also raised concerns about the red slashes or smears across the university logos, saying they could be interpreted as blood splatter and could be seen as implicitly endorsing or inciting violence.
A Jewish newspaper, J-Wire,noted that the investigation follows a separate controversy involving Honi Soit, the University’s student newspaper, after a Honi Soit article called for support for listed terrorist organizations and used intifada rhetoric. J-Wire noted that the article was later removed, and the University said it would strengthen oversight and accountability at the publication.
Interestingly, Honi Soit, the student newspaper, reported on June 1, 2026, about a rally against the University of Sydney’s investigation. Approximately 50 students, staff, and members of the public protested on 20 May outside the Fisher Library, demanding that the University “immediately drop disciplinary proceedings against two students over a Palestine solidarity poster calling for ‘No Exchange with Israeli Apartheid’.” Honi Soit added that the protest was organized by Students Against War (SAW) and that the rally comes after an open letter launched by SAW gained more than 800 signatures, including from academics, students and others. Speakers at the rally included a recently returned activist from the Sumud Flotilla, as well as representatives from Sydney University Staff for Palestine and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), among others.
Honi Soit added that the protesters claimed that the “allegations are politically motivated attempts to silence criticism of Israel and suppress pro-Palestine activism on campus.”
According to Honi Soit, Students for Palestine (SFP) published a statement on social media condemning the “intimidation and the racism.” The group stated, “This particular complaint is extremely concerning and exposes an escalating pattern of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism… Falsely claiming that a symbol of Palestinian identity and dignity calls for, endorses, or incites violence, or associates with and promotes antisemitism denies the lived experiences of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and genocide. The University of Sydney has repeatedly abused such complaints to put students through serious distress and risk, via lengthy and complex disciplinary processes, in attempts to punish on-campus support for Palestine and dissent to the University’s ties with Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” SFP stated.
Honi Soit added that Students Against War (SAW) activists defended the protest poster and the campaign for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. They stated that the University of Sydney is “saying that our poster with blood splatter on Israeli university logos like the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is inciting violence against Israeli universities… The blood splatter represents the blood-soaked record these universities have in the genocide and occupation of Palestinian people. The Israeli universities we are protesting are not just civilian institutions, as Sydney University claims. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem runs the Havatzalot program which trains members of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. Academic boycotts were used against South African apartheid, we have to build them up again against Israeli apartheid.”
At the end of its article, Honi Soit added an Editors’ Note, stating, “The University of Sydney has asked Honi Soit to clarify that it does not ‘charge’ students. Under the complaints process, matters may be referred as misconduct allegations, and that, as no formal finding was made in this case, it would be incorrect to say the students were found innocent.”
On the same day, also on June 1, 2026, the University published an announcement on its website titled “University responds to recent commentary about complaints received regarding posters on campus.” It stated that “When we notified the students involved of the complaints and the concerns raised with the University, we were clear it was the combined effect of the language and imagery used on the poster – including the use of what may be construed as blood splatters over the names of Israeli institutions and the Handala image – that may be inconsistent with University policies and codes of conduct, including in relation to the safety and wellbeing of members of the University community.”
The University clarified, “In the context of this poster, we considered its use not to breach University policy. However, we confirmed that the imagery on the poster, including the red slashes or smears, could reasonably be interpreted as signaling or condoning harm towards the named institutions and individuals associated with them. Material that has that effect, including material that contributes to fear, anxiety or exclusion within the University community, is inconsistent with students’ obligations under the University policy. The students’ conduct was found to fall short of the standards of behavior expected by the University, and appropriate action was taken, including a direction to not use the specific imagery of blood splatter over institutional logos, or similar violent imagery on University lands again.”
Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) notes that some student newspapers have become a tool for anti-Israel activism. Some studies and reports by student newspapers support the notion of pro-Palestinian bias. For instance, many student newspapers devoted extensive coverage to the Palestinian issue, often presenting it through frames and headline choices that critics viewed as sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Some publications went beyond news coverage and adopted explicit political positions. The Harvard Crimson, for example, endorsed the BDS movement in 2022. Pro-Israel and Jewish students frequently received less favorable treatment or found it more difficult to secure comparable representation for their perspectives, contributing to the skewed portrayal of the conflict.
The University of Sydney’s decision to strengthen its oversight of student-media publications represents an important step toward improving accountability and ensuring that editorial standards are applied consistently. IAM will continue to report on these developments.
1 June 2026University responds to recent commentary about complaints received regarding posters on campusThe University of Sydney has issued a public statement and addressed some misrepresentations being made online.
The University’s full statement is below.
There’s been a lot of misinformation around this matter, and given some incorrect public commentary we believe it is important to provide broader context and to correct the record.
Our complaints process
As a university, we’re required to assess all complaints we receive in a manner that’s procedurally fair and consistent with our policies. Where a complaint relates to student conduct, that includes notifying the student of the complaint made, explaining the relevant process, including the possible pathways for resolution, and inviting them to provide their response. We then consider the complaint and the student’s response before deciding next steps, including whether it would be appropriate to commence disciplinary action.
That’s what we did in this case, after receiving multiple complaints about the display of a particular poster on our campus.
Combined effect of language and imagery
When we notified the students involved of the complaints and the concerns raised with the University, we were clear it was the combined effect of the language and imagery used on the poster – including the use of what may be construed as blood splatters over the names of Israeli institutions and the Handala image – that may be inconsistent with University policies and codes of conduct, including in relation to the safety and wellbeing of members of the University community.
At no point did the University make allegations of misconduct against the students involved, or threaten them with expulsion or suspension, as has been incorrectly claimed and reported.
Outcome of our considerations
While the University does not typically comment on individual student outcomes, some misleading commentary being generated by certain student groups and other individuals means we are compelled to provide additional context to address some misrepresentations.
We can confirm that, after careful and fair consideration of the poster and its particular context against applicable University policies and codes of conduct, we finalised the complaints and notified the students of the outcome last week.
We found that although some interpret the Handala symbol as opposing Jewish self-determination, or being associated with violence, its meaning is contested and context-dependent. In the context of this poster, we considered its use not to breach University policy.
However, we confirmed that the imagery on the poster, including the red slashes or smears, could reasonably be interpreted as signalling or condoning harm towards the named institutions and individuals associated with them. Material that has that effect, including material that contributes to fear, anxiety or exclusion within the University community, is inconsistent with students’ obligations under University policy.
The students’ conduct was found to fall short of the standards of behaviour expected by the University, and appropriate action was taken, including a direction to not use the specific imagery of blood splatter over institutional logos, or similar violent imagery on University lands again.
Despite certain claims, recent protest activity and a petition had no impact on our decision.
Our commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom
We remain absolutely committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom, including the rights of students and staff to engage in lawful political expression and protest on difficult and contested issues. At the same time, those freedoms exist alongside the University’s obligations to foster a safe, respectful and inclusive environment for all members of the community.
We recognise that these issues are deeply felt across our community and encourage respectful engagement, particularly where views differ strongly.
If anyone in our community feels unsafe or witnesses antisemitic, discriminatory or harassing behaviour of any sort, we have a support network in place so they can alert us and we can take action.
On 20 May at 1pm, approximately 50 students, staff, and members of the public protested outside Fisher Library to demand the University of Sydney (USyd) immediately drop disciplinary proceedings against two students over a Palestine solidarity poster calling for “No Exchange with Israeli Apartheid.” The protest was organised by Students Against War (SAW).
The rally comes after an open letter launched by SAW gained more than 800 signatures in under two weeks, including from academics, students, journalists, politicians, and public figures such as author Yanis Varoufakis, Palestinian-Australian activist Nasser Mashni, American journalist Chris Hedges, NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong, and Senator Fatima Payman.
Speakers at the rally included Ethan Floyd, a Wiradjuri, Wailwan & Ngiyampaa activist and USyd alumnus who recently returned from the Sumud Flotilla after being kidnapped by Israel, journalist and activist Wendy Bacon, Greens MP Jenny Leong, and representatives from Sydney University Staff for Palestine, Autonomous Collective Against Racism, SAW, and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).
University alleges antisemitism over Israeli boycott poster
Two students were facing disciplinary action after USyd issued them with a Notice of Complaint on 5 May, claiming the poster may constitute “antisemitic material”. Protestors claimed this complaint could have led to disciplinary action as severe as expulsion or suspension.
A USyd spokesperson told Honi Soit that “at no point did the University make allegations of misconduct against the students involved, or threaten them with expulsion or suspension, as has been incorrectly claimed and reported”.
The university specifically objected to the inclusion of the Handala symbol, a well-known cartoon figure of a Palestinian child created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali in 1969. Handala is a boy, forever 10 years old, because this is the age Ali was when his family was displaced and dispossessed during the Nakba in 1948. The Handala cartoon is a common symbol in protest placards, street art, and posters. The complaint stated the cartoon is “considered by some to be associated with violence against Israeli citizens or a symbol against Jewish self-determination”.
The complaint notice also alleged that red paint-like markings across the logos of Israeli universities “could be seen as implicitly endorsing or inciting violence,” and stated that opposing exchange programs with Israeli universities “risks amounting to collective blame”.
Protestors at the rally stated that the allegations are politically motivated attempts to silence criticism of Israel and suppress pro-Palestine activism on campus. In a joint statement posted on social media, the Students Representative Council (SRC), its collectives, and Students for Palestine (SFP) publicly condemned the “intimidation and the racism represented by the attack on the Handala”.
“This complaint is just one example of many politically-motivated complaints toward pro-Palestine staff and students over the past two and a half years. This particular complaint is extremely concerning and exposes an escalating pattern of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism,” the statement read.
“It is shameful that the University of Sydney has attacked student groups for using Handala, a prominent symbol for peace and justice. Falsely claiming that a symbol of Palestinian identity and dignity calls for, endorses, or incites violence, or associates with and promotes antisemitism denies the lived experiences of Palestinians under Israeli occupation and genocide.
“The University of Sydney has repeatedly abused such complaints to put students through serious distress and risk, via lengthy and complex disciplinary processes, in attempts to punish on-campus support for Palestine and dissent to the University’s ties with Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
Speakers condemn “gutless” university
SAW activist Jeanette Monteiro, who chaired the rally, condemned the university’s allegations. “It is an outrage that Sydney University would consider a cartoon of a Palestinian child a threat when Israel has killed over 20,000 children in Gaza since October 7, 2023,” she said.
“Sydney University, taking their cue from Albanese, Minns, and Segal, are dangerously conflating all opposition to Israel with antisemitism. Anti-Zionist Jewish activists have repeatedly rejected this claim.”
SAW activist and Barkinji student Vieve Carnsaw defended the protest poster and the campaign for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. “USyd is saying that our poster with blood splatter on Israeli university logos like the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is inciting violence against Israeli universities,” they said.
“The blood splatter represents the blood-soaked record these universities have in the genocide and occupation of Palestinian people. The Israeli universities we are protesting are not just civilian institutions, as Sydney University claims.”
“The Hebrew University of Jerusalem runs the Havatzalot program which trains members of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. Academic boycotts were used against South African apartheid, we have to build them up again against Israeli apartheid.”
Ethan Floyd stated that when it comes to pro-Palestine activism on campus, the university has shown “they are gutless, they show they are afraid of mass student protests, and they show they… care more about their reputation than they do about students’ ability to protest… to express themselves freely on campus”.
“Students have always been on the right side of history, always on the front lines of the social movements, which have won so much over the last 100 years. Let’s remember, it was students who boarded the 1965 freedom rides through NSW. It was students who mobilised to end the Vietnam War, to pull Australia out of the US’s dirty war in Vietnam.
“It was students who… set up tents on the front lawns in 2024 and stayed there and refused to leave for nearly three months. That was a student initiative. That’s what the kind of legacy that we’re standing in as students who refuse to let genocide be accepted as normal.”
Journalist and activist Wendy Bacon spoke next, statingthat she is “appalled at the way the complaints process is being weaponised to intimidate students… One only has to read the letter to see how farcical it is, and if someone would have said to me 10 years ago that I would be standing here today, standing up for students who’d received a letter like that, I would have thought I was part of a satirical play.”
“This is deadly serious, and there’s something really disturbing going on in the Vice-Chancellor’s office that needs to be publicly investigated. I say that as a journalist who’s done a certain amount of investigation into it myself. I have written for Michael West Media on the appointment of the special advisor in the Vice-Chancellor’s office to advise on antisemitism. This is Michael Abrahams-Sprod, and I’d like to say that… he is not an appropriate person to be treated as a resident expert in the Vice-Chancellor’s office, and his own work shows that he is a threat to freedom of speech and academic freedom in the university.”
“His appointment was not even announced until… two months after he was actually in the Vice-Chancellor’s office, so no one even knew he was there, and he was already getting ready to take the courses that are training the people who will make the decisions, like the one that is behind the letter that was written… you only have to read that letter to see what distorted thinking really lies behind that.
“My own feeling is this ridiculous letter that has been sent is part of trying to satisfy Jillian Segal, the envoy for antisemitism… so the so-called report card on the university and its actions against antisemitism can be filled in satisfactorily. I think they’re going overboard to get a few runs on the board, and the students at the receiving end of this letter are just their collateral damage, just like the children in Gaza.
“I would like to call for the retraction of this letter, the immediate retraction, and I think there should be an independent inquiry into what is happening at the University of Sydney to trash a very long history of standing for academic freedom.”
NSW Greens member for Newtown Jenny Leong spoke at the rally, stating tactics such as the disciplinary complaint are used to “silence and intimidate us. We know that the Royal Commission into antisemitism that is happening right now is not being challenged for the things that are being put out there, that are so far from being antisemitic that it is laughable.”
“I know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I know that we are not hearing about the level of complaints that are being waged against students and staff on this university campus. The reality is that some people will be so intimidated and fearful by these complaints that they will not want to speak out, they will not want to share the details, they won’t want us to highlight it and rally for them.
“We mustn’t be silent, we must keep showing up, we must keep speaking out, and as terrifying as it is, as so many in this crowd have experienced, to feel the heat and pressure that comes from the pro-Zionist, the pro-Israeli Defence Force, and indeed the right-wing conservatives.”
Rally moves outside Vice-Chancellor’s office
Outside the Michael Spence Building, where the Office of the Vice-Chancellor & President is located, Luna Choo, a USyd student and activist spoke: “We demand USyd management drop all charges on students right now and publicly apologise for failing the university community so profoundly with their anti-Palestinian and anti-refugee libel.”
Academic Matt Rochford, who works in the School of Languages and Cultures and is a member of the NTEU, also spoke: “Opposing the genocide is not antisemitic. The call to boycott Israeli institutions is not antisemitic. The Handala symbol is not antisemitic. An illustration of blood on the building of Israeli institutions is not antisemitic. The investigation into the members of Students Against War should be dropped immediately, and students apologised to.
“The chilling effect of the campus access policy on democracy and free speech at this university reflects a general trend where people wearing a keffiyeh can be stopped by police because they look suspicious,” said Matt, referring to NSW police apprehending and “humiliating” a pro-Palestine activist Ibrahim Bob Mouammarat Bunnings in Rose Bay. Despite no crime being committed and no arrest, Bob was told to leave the area by “scores of police”. Bob, who was wearing a keffiyeh, was at Bunnings to buy supplies for a work project.
Rochford continued that university campus security are “questioning union members who are handing out leaflets, intimidating students holding stalls and putting on meetings, asking for extra information, and delaying room bookings for our forums.”
Rochford said the NTEU USyd branch committee passed a motion to “call on university management to end the misconduct investigation against students for promoting the institutional academic boycott of Israel and displaying the Handala image.”
“University management must stop criminalising activism against the genocide and apologise to students immediately. The investigation into students for pro-Palestine activism must be dropped, as must be the attack on staff for displaying the flag of Palestine from office windows, and for putting up posters and using university email lists to promote union rallies.
“We must fight to cut the ties with Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion, and Tel Aviv University. Cut ties with weapons and defence companies, and prioritise education over profit, war, and imperialism.”
No disciplinary action taken by USyd after sustained pressure
The complaint made against the two students have since been resolved. This comes after the USyd NTEU branch passed the motion discussed by Rochford, calling on the university to end the disciplinary proceedings. The motion read: “We call on university management to end the misconduct investigation against students for promoting the institutional academic boycott of Israel and displaying the Handala image, a common symbol of Palestinian identity and resilience.
“The suggestion that opposition to institutions deeply involved in the oppression of Palestinians is antisemitic and may incite violence is an unacceptable slur. University management must stop criminalising activism against the genocide, and apologise to the students immediately.
“We note that the academic boycott, an explicitly non-violent tactic of resistance, is policy of the NTEU at Branch and national levels”.
A SAW social media post details how in its final decision, the university recognised that the call for a boycott of Israeli universities was “part of lawful BDS-style political protest” and “criticism of or protest against these institutions is not, in itself, antisemitic or a policy breach”.
The post also claims that the university stated that the Handala’s “meaning is contested and context dependent” and that “its use here does not breach university policy”. USyd, according to the social media post, now only demands that the image “incorporating blood splatter or similar violent imagery is not to be used again on University Lands.”
In a statement which can be read in its entirety here, a USyd spokesperson said that “recent protest activity and a petition had no impact on our decision”.
“We remain absolutely committed to freedom of speech and academic freedom, including the rights of students and staff to engage in lawful political expression and protest on difficult and contested issues. At the same time, those freedoms exist alongside the University’s obligations to foster a safe, respectful and inclusive environment for all members of the community”, the spokesperson said.
SRC President Grace Street told Honi: “Public pressure has successfully shown the ridiculous nature of these complaints by the University, but we still need them to apologise and stop this crackdown on pro-Palestine activism… it is wildly alarming that they entertained that claim and such complaints in the first place. The letter clearly says that the University is concerned by the poster – and currently has many other complaints along similar lines – which seems to assume wrongdoing and misconduct having occurred.
“It is a huge overreach to maintain that poster’s blood smears on institutions’ names could be interpreted as inciting violence, rather than the obvious meaning that those institutions – and therefore the University of Sydney as their partner – are complicit and have blood on their hands. This appears to be a wilful misinterpretation of the poster which provides no certainty at all that, if not for the petition and protest, that these students would have been found innocent and not threatened with disciplinary action, which could lead to expulsion.”
________________________________
Editors Note: The University of Sydney has asked Honi Soit to clarify that it does not “charge” students . Under the complaints process, matters may be referred as misconduct allegations , and that, as no formal finding was made in this case, it would be incorrect to say the students were found innocent.
Sydney University investigates posters accused of promoting violence
May 14, 2026 by J-Wire Newsdesk
The University of Sydney has launched an investigation into anti-Israel posters circulated on campus that used blood-like imagery and a Palestinian cartoon symbol in material targeting Israeli universities.
The posters promoted a March 26 protest and featured Handala, a cartoon figure usually shown as a barefoot child with his back turned and hands clasped behind him. The image is widely used by pro-Palestinian activists as a symbol of Palestinian displacement and resistance, but Jewish groups have raised concerns about its use in material they say can carry hostile or extremist messaging.
The offensive poster (photo: The Daily Telegraph)
The posters also showed red markings over the logos of Israeli universities. According to the Daily Telegraph, the university wrote to two students believed to have been involved in producing the material, warning that it may have breached student conduct rules.
In the letter, the university said the posters targeted Israeli universities, which it described as civilian academic institutions rather than government bodies. It said portraying those institutions as complicit in apartheid could risk collective blame and potentially affect visiting students.
The university also raised concerns about the red slashes or smears across the university logos, saying they could reasonably be interpreted as blood or gun splatter and could be seen as implicitly endorsing or inciting violence.
The letter also referred to the use of Handala, saying the image was considered by some to be associated with violence against Israeli citizens or opposition to Jewish self-determination.
A separate university letter reportedly warned that the students involved could face disciplinary penalties, including expulsion.
The investigation comes as Jewish students and community groups raise fresh concerns about the climate at Sydney University. The Daily Telegraph reported that two other students were recently seen on Instagram distributing posters promoting a “Globalise the Intifada” forum.
The phrase has drawn strong criticism from Jewish students and communal organisations, who say references to an intifada cannot be separated from terror attacks against Israelis and Jews. The concern has sharpened since the Bondi Beach terror attack, which targeted a Jewish community event.
Australasian Union of Jewish Students advocacy and public relations manager Liat Granot said the combination of the Handala symbol, blood imagery and Israeli academic institutions was deeply troubling.
“Pairing the Handala symbol with blood imagery, specifically directed at Israeli universities and institutions, draws on one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in existence: blood libel accusations,” Granot said.
“Blood libel accusations have been used for centuries to incite violence against Jewish communities, and putting this imagery on a poster so soon after Bondi is far from political commentary.”
StandWithUs Australia executive director Michael Gencher said Jewish and Israeli students should not be forced to confront targeted hostility on campus.
“Once again, it beggars belief that Jewish and Israeli students at the University of Sydney are being forced to confront this sort of targeted hostility on campus,” Gencher said.
“It is welcome that the University of Sydney has launched an investigation, and it is important that the university has acknowledged the seriousness of the material. But concern and process are not enough. We now need to see clear, decisive action and real consequences.”
Gencher said students had the right to take part in peaceful political expression, but universities also had a duty to protect students from intimidation.
“Students have every right to engage in political expression and peaceful protest, but universities also have a responsibility to ensure that their campuses do not become platforms for intimidation, hostility, or the normalisation of language that targets Jewish and Israeli students,” he said.
A University of Sydney spokeswoman said the institution could not comment on individual student matters or ongoing processes but said it responded to complaints and worked to keep its campuses safe and welcoming.
“We take appropriate action if breaches of our policies or codes of conduct are identified,” she said.
“If anyone in our community feels unsafe or witnesses antisemitic, discriminatory or harassing behaviour of any sort, we have a support network in place so they can alert us and we can take action.”
The investigation follows a separate controversy involving Honi Soit, the university’s student newspaper, after an article was published calling for support for listed terrorist organisations and using intifada rhetoric. The article was later removed, and the university said it would strengthen oversight and accountability at the publication.
About 50 students and staff at the University of Sydney (USyd) gathered outside Fisher Library on May 20 to protest university management’s repression of those showing solidarity with Palestine.
Two members of Students Against War received a disciplinary letter on May 5 because a poster calling on the university to end exchange programs with Israeli universities included the Handala symbol. Management said the symbol was antisemitic because some consider it “to be associated with violence against Israeli citizens or a symbol against Jewish self-determination”.
The symbol depicts a 10-year-old Palestinian child with his back turned. It was created by Palestinian artist Naji Al-Ali and is widely seen as a symbol of the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom and self-determination.
Ethan Floyd, a USyd student, Wiradjuri, Ngiyampaa and Waiwan man and Students for Palestine activist, addressed the protest.
He only recently returned from the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, where he was illegally kidnapped by the Israel Defense Forces in international waters. He spoke about management’s other attempts to silence Palestinian and First Nations voices on campus.
Investigative journalist Wendy Bacon spoke about the history and importance of boycotts. She criticised USyd’s recent appointment of a pro-Israel academic as its “special advisor” on antisemitism.
Luna Choo, USyd student and Pride in Protest activist, described her experience of being threatened with expulsion and deportation for Palestine activism on campus.
Matte Rochford, from the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), outlined how staff are resisting management’s attempts to silence their support for Palestine. Greens MP for Newtown Jenny Leong also spoke.
NTEU members at USyd passed a motion on May 21 calling on management to end the misconduct investigation. The motion, supported by almost all staff present, said management “must stop criminalising activism against the genocide, and should apologise to the students immediately”.
More than 700 students have signed a petition calling on management to drop the investigation and charges against students.
[Chiara Reeves is a student at the University of Sydney and member of Socialist Alliance.]
Recently, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) published a call for papers. The invitation reads, “We seek submissions that contribute to the field of Critical Zionism Studies, support the movement for Palestinian liberation, and advance the anti-Zionist struggle. As such, we seek manuscripts that demonstrate logical and consistent argumentation, thoughtful engagement with the relevant scholarship, and a generative expansion of Critical Zionism Studies.” The submission deadline is June 30, 2026, and the planned publication date is December 2026.
According to its website, the ICSZ aims to “support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project that intersects with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, studies of land and climate, disability, performance, and many other related areas scholarship and activism. The Institute approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine. Many scholars and activists are working to illuminate such ‘other work’ of Zionist institutions and discourses.”
In September 2023, Israel Academia Monitor reported on the newly founded ICSZ. The following month, in October 2023, ICSZ hosted a conference aimed at battling “the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” and showing how it “amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.”
One of the ICSZ founders is Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a Palestinian-American scholar from the Department of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. She discussed ICSZ in an interview titled “Why we created the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.” Abdulhadi declared that Zionism aims to erase the Palestinians’ embodiment and that the JNF aims to erase Palestinian agriculture. Both claims are baseless, malicious, and used to demonize the Jews.
Israel Academia Monitor noted that the name “Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism” derives from the neo-Marxist, critical scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, which rejects the positivist, empirical paradigm based on facts. In the eyes of “critical scholars,” facts and statistical data are considered suspicious because they are generated by the “dominant, colonial or imperialist powers.”
The topics of the upcoming journal would be, “Zionism as a global phenomenon; Zionism as a system of power (analyzed through critical frameworks such as settler colonialism, empire, militarism, and racial capitalism); Palestinian life, resistance/sumud, knowledge production, and futurities; Zionist epistemic framing of Islam & Islamic counter-theology; Zionism and formations of gender, sexuality, disability, and the body; Abolitionist, decolonial, and anti-imperialist frameworks and practices for anti-Zionist work Pedagogical interventions, political education, and curriculum-building; Cultural production, art, film/media, literature, and popular discourses on Zionism, Palestine, and anti-Zionist organizing.”
Emmaia Gelman, the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and one of its founders, has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. She has published the Call for Papers. Gelman recently authored a book about “The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State.” She gave a talk about it at UC Berkeley on April 28, 2026, and at UC Irvine on May 14, 2026. The invitation to the book launch reads, “Emmaia Gelman exposes the ADL’s alliance with American white supremacy and western empire and its historic investment in Cold War anticommunism. Her definitive account shows how the ADL as a Zionist organization has advanced and supported pro-state policing, a hate-crimes framework that obscures racialized structures of power, and a ‘War on Terror’ that has stoked anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.” Gelman’s talk was co-sponsored by UC Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, among others.
Worth noting that harsh criticism of Israel is tied to broader intellectual trends in parts of the humanities and social sciences that have embraced postcolonial theory, intersectionality, and global power analysis. Even a cursory reading of the literature indicates that the Jewish state is framed through settler-colonial or oppressor/oppressed paradigms. Global power analysis, in particular, places Israel at the epicenter of the so-called “global power nexus.” Couched in academic terms, this definition echoes the old antisemitic trope that Jews rule the world.
Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists in Western Universities have turned campuses into their playing field, with the sole purpose of negating the right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland.
There are no easy solutions to the challenge of balancing academic freedom with malign or one-sided criticism of Israel in academia. University administrators are generally hesitant to intervene in an issue that has become deeply politicized and, at times, toxic. One possible response is to cultivate platforms for more pluralistic discourse, where differing and even competing perspectives can be aired and debated openly.
In this case, there is a need to fight antisemitism. University administrators should challenge the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and urge it to include a critical study of the Palestinians. The upcoming journal could reflect this challenge.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project that intersects with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, studies of land and climate, disability, performance, and many other related areas scholarship and activism.
The Institute approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine.
Many scholars and activists are working to illuminate such “other work” of Zionist institutions and discourses, historically and in the present, to shape the material conditions of life, the movement of capital, the construction of racial identity, and more.
ICSZ supports this expansive work with fellowships to support academic and activist work, conferences, and publications that expand the reach of scholars’ and activists’ work into political culture.
Submission deadline for inclusion in the 2026 general issue: June 30, 2026
The Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism (JCSZ) invites submissions for its next general issue, with rolling submissions accepted through June 30, 2026. We seek submissions that contribute to the field of Critical Zionism Studies, support the movement for Palestinian liberation, and advance the anti-Zionist struggle. As such, we seek manuscripts that demonstrate logical and consistent argumentation, thoughtful engagement with the relevant scholarship, and a generative expansion of Critical Zionism Studies.
Please note that for this call, we invite full papers and finished projects that must include the name of the author(s), institutional affiliation(s) including activist and community organizations, if any, title of the manuscript/project, abstract (400-500 words), list of five keywords or tags, and short bio (no more than 100 words). Please review our Submission Guidelines for more details on submission procedures. For any additional questions, email journal@criticalzionismstudies.org.
Target length for manuscripts
Articles: 6,000-8,000 words.
Essays: 3,000–6,000 words.
Works-in-translation: Translation, in full or excerpted, should be accompanied by a framing introduction (1,500–3,000 words) by the translator, explaining the provenance and relevance of the original manuscript.
Manuscripts of any format and genre should not exceed 10,000 words (including endnotes and abstract).
About the Journal
JCSZ is a multidisciplinary, transnational journal committed to anti-Zionism and the abolition of all forms of oppression. The journal serves as a platform for rigorous scholarship, political analysis, creative work, and movement-engaged knowledge production that interrogates Zionism as a system of power along with its material, historical, and ongoing determinants and effects. See JCSZ Mission Statement for more details.
Scope
We invite submissions on topics including—but not limited to—the following:
Zionism as a global phenomenon;
Zionism as a system of power (analyzed through critical frameworks such as settler colonialism, empire, militarism, and racial capitalism);
Palestinian life, resistance/sumud, knowledge production, and futurities;
Zionist epistemic framing of Islam & Islamic counter-theology;
Zionism and formations of gender, sexuality, disability, and the body;
Abolitionist, decolonial, and anti-imperialist frameworks and practices for anti-Zionist work
Pedagogical interventions, political education, and curriculum-building;
Cultural production, art, film/media, literature, and popular discourses on Zionism, Palestine, and anti-Zionist organizing.
Formats and Genres
JCSZ welcomes submissions in a wide range of formats, genres, and mediums. In addition to traditional scholarly articles, we are interested in:
Book and film/media reviews (including review essays and collective reviews)
Interviews and conversations
Organizing notes and movement documents
Political educational materials and syllabi
Works-in-translation
Creative writing and poetry
Forums and roundtables
Photo, video, and multimedia essays
Art, zines, and interactive or experimental media
Analytical and critical theoretical writing
We especially welcome work that is movement- and community-engaged and that expands what counts as scholarly and political intervention.
Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis, but June 30, 2026 is the final deadline for inclusion in the 2026 general issue. Authors will be notified by September 30, 2026. Planned publication date is December 2026
Battling the IHRA Definition: Conference Press Release
Press release
Conference on the “IHRA definition” of antisemitism launches new Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
October event welcomes broad support from academic and community organizations; resists attacks by conservative groups.
Oct. 5, 2023 – The newly-formed Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) will hold its inaugural bicoastal conference, Battling the “IHRA Definition”: Theory & Activism, on October 13-14. Through the lens of research on structural racism, state violence, and social justice movements, the conference will analyze political campaigns that seek to codify the “IHRA definition” of antisemitism, and efforts to oppose IHRA policies. This is the first research conference focusing on IHRA campaigns, which have been a feature of conservative strategy since 2016 and are linked to anti-Critical Race Theory campaigns. IHRA campaigns have been widely criticized as efforts to chill academic freedom, and to exclude groups from funding and civic life including human rights, peace, racial justice, and legal advocates, and Palestinian and progressive Jewish organizations.
Battling the “IHRA Definition”: Theory & Activism is also the first conference under the banner of Critical Zionism Studies. Critical Zionism Studies studies Zionist politics and ideas in relation to forces including states, capital, race, and culture, and it examines power from the perspective of people experiencing its effects. The Institute supports the “research from below” that is central to Critical Zionism Studies.
The conference is sponsored by numerous academic centers and departments spanning critical race and ethnic studies, Near East studies, Arab and Muslim studies, culture, creative practice, and environment at New York University, the University of California Santa Cruz, and San Francisco State University. It is additionally sponsored by student groups at NYU and CUNY, academic freedom groups in the United States and Europe, and grassroots organizations. Panels and events will take place in New York City (at NYU and The People’s Forum) and Santa Cruz (at the Resource Center for Nonviolence).
“We have been thrilled with the outpouring of support for our conference, and for the establishment of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. There’s almost a sense of relief that it finally exists,” said Emmaia Gelman, director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. “There have been decades of conservative investments in Israel Studies and Jewish Studies, which have helped create a repressive environment where it’s risky to critically examine Zionism. And yet we absolutely must study this political movement – how can a major political movement be off limits to study?”
“It’s clear enough that we need to study Zionism when we watch Israeli settlers literally steal houses from Palestinians, protected by Israeli soldiers. Critical Zionism Studies looks also at the lesser understood political work undertaken by Zionist organizations. In the U.S. for instance, Zionist groups have joined white Christian nationalists in opposing antiracist education. Shouldn’t we be trying to understand why that’s happening, researching the history, placing it in the context of research on race?” said Emmaia Gelman.
Conference panels will feature scholars of American studies, Arab studies, art and visual culture, Black studies, carceral studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, film and media studies, geography, history, Indigenous studies, Jewish studies, law, Palestine studies, philosophy, politics, sociology, and more, in conversation with community groups targeted by IHRA campaigns. Sessions will explore the political history of terms and concepts including Zionism, antisemitism, racism, and “DEI”; the relationship between IHRA campaigns and global movements including Hindutva and white/Christian nationalism; interactions between IHRA and anti-CRT campaigns; and the material impacts of IHRA campaigns on K-12 education, higher education, and civic life. The conference will be opened by Emmaia Gelman (Sarah Lawrence College & Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism), Hatem Bazian (UC Berkeley/Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project, Zaytuna College, and American Muslims for Palestine), and Corinna Gould (Spokeswoman and Tribal Chair, Confederated Villages of Lisjan/Ohlone, and Sogorea Te Land Trust). The conference will be closed by Arun Kundnani (Author/scholar) and Kaleem Hawa (Palestinian Youth Movement.) A preview of panels and presentations is online at criticalzionismstudies.org.
Right-wing groups and media outlets have launched false and defamatory attacks at Battling the “IHRA Definition”: Theory & Activism and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism since both were announced in July 2023.ICSZ’s statement on right-wing attacks is available at criticalzionismstudies.org/academicfreedom. The attacks seek to make university administrators afraid to defend the rights of scholars and students, and aim to derail the study of racism and state violence as well as efforts to oppose such violence. In the face of attacks, the conference and ICSZ have been defended by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, the faculty councils of every campus of the University of California, California Scholars for Academic Freedom, and the graduate student union of UC Santa Cruz (UAW 2865). Letters from Jewish scholars and educators and the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council additionally defend the ethnic studies faculty (including ICSZ scholars) subjected to parallel attacks by the same actors and using the same misrepresentations of antiracist scholarship.
“The work of the ICSZ is vital because it creates a collective space for scholars who face cynical and dishonest forms of repression, censure, and personalized attacks from those who treat Zionism as an exceptional system of beliefs and practices that should be insulated from critical analysis. I am relieved to observe that a growing global community understands that accusations of ‘antisemitism’ against critics of Zionism are misplaced, misinformed, and dishonest,” said Dylan Rodríguez, a professor of Black Study and Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside and former president of the American Studies Association. “Now is the time for scholars of principle and seriousness to lend their skills and labor to the work that is required to address the political and ideological history of Zionism as well as its concrete effects on Palestinians who must resist and survive massive state terror, supported by U.S. policy and militarism.”
ICSZ is a new institute that supports the development of Critical Zionism Studies with resources for academics and activists engaged in research. Its planned work includes fellowships, collaborations, conferences, and publications that expand the reach of scholars’ and activists’ research.
Legal & academic organizations defend the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism from right-wing attacks
Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism Sept. 22, 2023
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism is organizing the first-ever conference examining the politics and impacts of calls to adopt the “IHRA definition of antisemitism.” Campaigns for the IHRA definition are a relatively new, potent form of cultural politics, and they call for scholarly research. IHRA campaigns take a form closely tied to developments in the U.S. political landscape: they emanate from the right, often funded by mega donors seeking to curtail criticism of the Israeli state and Zionist political claims, while also making use of anti-discrimination policies perceived as liberal or progressive and grassroots-driven. Research is particularly needed because IHRA campaigns do not simply call for expressions of sympathy, but materially impact the flow and expression of ideas, resources, rights, and the conditions of life. They determine whether, for instance, Palestinians and progressive Jewish communities can be heard in political discussions and scholarly fora, and whether academic research will be funded or defunded. A significant body of researchandreportingonIHRA’simpacts shows it is used primarily to silence, threaten, smear, and deny public resources to researchers in academic fields including American studies, Palestine studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies, as well as community-based researchers and people who are themselves subjected to state violence.
While communities, academics, and legal advocates have opposed IHRA campaigns’ repressive impacts since 2016, researchers have more recently begun to turn a scholarly lens on IHRA. The October 2023 conference, “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism”, is the first to bring together the burgeoning movement to critically examine IHRA campaigns and clarify the cultural and political conditions in which they are situated. This conference, sponsored by academic programs on both U.S. coasts, applies the standard tools of critical study. Scheduled talks at the convening consider topics such as the history of definitions of Zionism, antisemitism, and protection; how IHRA campaigns have employed Cold War concepts to oppose antiracist political movements, and how key ideas in political culture like racial justice and safety are employed and shaped by IHRA campaigns.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and our conference have been attacked by right-wing organizations who are engaged in IHRA campaigns. They have used the same false charges of antisemitism, exclusion, and “viewpoint discrimination” to try to curtail our academic freedom and deny space and funding to research on IHRA campaigns. Taking a page from white nationalist attacks on education, our attackers have attempted to smear the idea of critical study as “Soviet”; drawing on Islamophobic post-9/11 fears they have called us “terrorist”; and merging these smears with the weaponization of antisemitism, they have defamed our work as “Nazi.” In keeping with the despicable nature of these institutional attacks on our research, scholars and Institute staff have been targeted with individual racist and misogynistic abuse, including pornographic messages, attacks on the Jewish identity of scholars in the Institute, and a smear article targeting an Asian American scholar in the Institute published with a photo of a different Asian woman. The attacks have fallen most heavily on Institute members who are leaders in the field of Ethnic Studies, who were already being targeted and smeared by conservative, anti-critical race theory groups.
Setting an ominous precedent, the two universities where the conference is organized, NYU and UC Santa Cruz, have not defended academic freedom and research against these attacks. Although the universities have not banned the conference, they have acceded to right-wing demands to misuse anti-discrimination policy to chill research on racism and political power. They have made faculty and students – particularly people of color and queer people in academia – even more vulnerable than usual. We note that similar attacks have targeted the upcoming Palestine Writes conference at the University of Pennsylvania, and that Penn has similarly failed to defend that conference, its writers and scholars, and expressions of Palestinian experience. The failure of academic institutions to hold space for this work makes clear that the conference, and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, are crucial supports for academic freedom.
We are incredibly honored that legal advocates, academic organizations, Jewish scholars and educators, and other research communities are standing with us against efforts to stifle critical study and research on the IHRA definition and Zionism. We share these letters of support with admiration for those who, under difficult conditions, insist on making space for these conversations.
***
Letters supporting ICSZ against right-wing attack:
UAW 2865 Santa Cruz
Solidarity with ICSZ “We will defend the right of workers on our campus to participate in advocating for Palestinian liberation, and we stand in solidarity with the organizers of ICSZ.”
The Council of UC Faculty Associations
Letter to Chancellor Larive and VC Kletzer about UCSC admin response to ICSZ conference “We remind you that it is a misappropriation of university resources to use campus legal counsel funds to curtail faculty members’ academic freedom and First Amendment rights. To the contrary, it is campus legal counsel’s responsibility to ensure that the university protects faculty members’ freedom of thought, expression, and speech… Issuing a statement of ‘non-endorsement’ has a chilling effect on the critical study of Zionism at UCSC and on the examination of any subject that administrators deem undesirable.” (9/25/23)
Palestine Legal & the Center for Constitutional Rights
Letters defending antiracist scholarship against the same right-wing organizations
Jewish Studies scholars, Jewish academics, and Jewish educators
Open letter from Jewish Studies scholars, Jewish academics, and Jewish educators on Ethnic Studies (9/13/23) This letter relates to the weaponization of antisemitism in attacks on Ethnic Studies and critical race theory, including scholars involved in the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. It identifies the organizations attacking both ICSZ and Ethnic Studies as right-wing organizations.
The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State: A Book Talk with Emmaia Gelman
Date: Thursday, May 14, 2026 TIME: 5:00 pm Location: Social Science Plaza A (SSPA) 1100
“The ADL was born of the belief that the best protection from antisemitism was admission into the white racial state and waging a vigorous defense of capitalism, individual rights, and the West against communists and barbarians. And it has never looked back.” –Robin D. G. Kelley
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) once sought to portray itself as a defender of civil rights aligned with racial justice movements in the United States. In a groundbreaking study that Publishers Weekly describes as a “gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization,” Emmaia Gelman exposes the ADL’s alliance with American white supremacy and western empire and its historic investment in Cold War anticommunism. Her definitive account shows how the ADL as a Zionist organization has advanced and supported pro-state policing, a hate-crimes framework that obscures racialized structures of power, and a “War on Terror” that has stoked anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere.
Cosponsored by the UCI Department of Global & International Studies, UCI Office of Inclusive Excellence, UC Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California, and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
Emmaia Gelman – The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
April 25, 2026 @ 3:00 pm | Resource Center for Non Violence
“The ADL was born of the belief that the best protection from antisemitism was admission into the white racial state and waging a vigorous defense of capitalism, individual rights, and the West against communists and barbarians. And it has never looked back.” –Robin D. G. Kelley
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) once sought to portray itself as a defender of civil rights aligned with racial justice movements in the United States. In a groundbreaking study that Publishers Weekly describes as a “gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization,” Emmaia Gelman exposes the ADL’s alliance with American white supremacy and western empire and its historic investment in Cold War anticommunism. Her definitive account shows how the ADL as a Zionist organization has advanced and supported pro-state policing, a hate-crimes framework that obscures racialized structures of power, and a “War on Terror” that has stoked anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere.
_____________________________
This event is presented by the Center for Racial Justice and cosponsored by the Resource Center for Nonviolence, Jewish Voice for Peace–South Bay, Santa Cruz Jews for a Free Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine Santa Cruz, Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UC Santa Cruz, UC Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California, and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
Emmaia Gelman. Univ. of California, $29.95 (301p) ISBN 978-0-520-41044-2
American studies scholar Gelman debuts with a trenchant, elucidating history of the Anti-Defamation League. The book opens with the 1993 raid on the ADL’s San Francisco offices for “spying on civil rights groups and antiracist organizers,” a revelation that, as the New York Times wrote, “caused confusion for some liberals” due to the Jewish organization’s longtime association with civil rights. A similar culture shock occurred in 2025 as the ADL brushed aside Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute as “an awkward gesture” while also labeling protesters of Israel’s assault on Gaza as “supporters of terror.” Delving into the ADL’s little-told history, the author uncovers a long legacy of such conservative stances, as the organization repeatedly worked to sideline or actively target leftists. Among the revelations is an upending of the myth of the ADL’s founding as a response to Leo Frank’s 1915 lynching in Georgia; instead, Gelman asserts, the ADL “was formed in 1913 by midwestern German Jews of the fraternal lodge B’nai B’rith” worried that the influx of “uncouth” and impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms were “changing the perception of Jewishness.” Following the organization across the 20th century, the author unearths a multitude of right-wing positions, from “insist[ing] that antisemitism did not play a role” in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs to supporting neoconservative policy in Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s by pegging leftist governments as antisemitic. It’s a gutsy, razor-sharp demystification of a powerful organization. (June)
Hagar Kotef is a Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS, University of London. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Spitz Prize, the C.B. Macpherson Award, and the Yale H. Ferguson Award. Her next book, The Civil Infrastructure of Torture: Administrating Violence in Israel/Palestine, is forthcoming with Oxford UP. Kotef is the co-editor of Theory&Event.
Merav Amir is a Reader of Human Geography at the School of Natural and Built Environment and a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. She is the 2021 recipient of the Emma Goldman Award of the FLAX Foundation for her contributions to feminist research and knowledge in Europe, the 2023 Emma Goldman Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences, and a member of the Geography and Geosciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. Her research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, Environment and Planning D, International Political Sociology, and Antipode.
Nurit Peled Elhanan
Demand an end to their university’s collaboration with genocide and apartheid enablers: hundreds of students in Leipzig.
israel-academia-monitor.com 