The Columbia University community is recently divided over the institution’s plan to open a centre in Tel Aviv, which has triggered a debate over the complicity of universities in normalising Israel’s apartheid and occupation, and their direct contribution to these systems of oppression.
The Tel Aviv centre would be part of the Columbia Global Centre program, which was launched almost fifteen years ago, and has since established centres in ten countries, including Jordan, Greece, France, China, Turkey, Brazil, and Kenya.
An official by the university reads that: “The Centre’s initial priorities will include climate change, technology and entrepreneurship, and aspects of arts and the humanities, as well as biological science, public health, and medicine. An additional priority will be to offer collaborative learning and research opportunities, working with peers, for Columbia undergraduates and graduate students.”
Columbia University already has a number of institutional collaborations with Israel, including a dual degree with Tel Aviv University. Still, the announcement to open a centre in Tel Aviv at the present juncture, when Israel is openly embracing fascism at both the official and street levels, led to immediate backlash from both students and faculty, who explained that this would legitimise the country’s regime and policies.
When Columbia faculty member Katherine Franke first learned about the plan, she drafted a letter that has since gathered close to 100 faculty signatures, that “It will be impossible for the University to announce the establishment of this new Global Center and avoid creating the impression that it is endorsing or legitimising the new government.”
The letter continues: "For Columbia to pre-emptively invest in a new Global Centre in Israel at the very moment when the domestic and international community is pulling away as part of a concerted and vehement objection to the new government's policies would render Columbia not only an outlier, but a collaborator in those very policies."
“The state of Israel, through formal and informal law, policy, and practice, refuses to abide by international human rights laws and norms both domestically and in its treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories,” Franke wrote in the letter. Franke is the James L. Dohr professor of law and director of the Centre for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia. She was denied entry into Israel in 2018 because of her support for BDS.
The official university announcement of the projected centre claims to link knowledge across “the wider region”. It is surprising, to say the least, that Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger is unaware that a centre in Tel Aviv would in reality not be accessible to faculty and students “in the wider region” - that is, unless Palestinian students from the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as students from other Arab countries are disregarded entirely.
Similarly, he does not seem overly concerned that American students of Arab descent at his own institution will likely be denied entry into Israel. Or, for that matter, even distinguished faculty at his own institution have not been allowed into the country, because they have expressed criticism of its policies.
Franke’s letter opposing the Tel Aviv centre was countered by another letter, by Columbia faculty members who support that centre. The letter, co-authored by Nicholas Lemman, “There are sound scholarly reasons not to apply a political litmus test to the countries we study and the intellectual resources the university invests in them.”
This is a dereliction of academic integrity. It is possible to “study” a country without collaborating with it. And we should certainly reconsider establishing a program with a country that itself imposes a political litmus test of who can study it.
Arab American students at Columbia, or students of any descent who have had the misfortune of being listed on such smear sites as Canary Mission, will be turned away at the airport, should they take the chance to fly all the way there.
Indeed, the very thought that scholarship can rise above politics is preposterous. Scholarship from prestigious universities produces the dominant discourse, which then shapes people’s ideas about a topic.
In this sense, it is “scholarship,” both from Columbia and Tel Aviv University, that has presented Israel as an intellectually vibrant country, when it is off limits to anyone critical of its policies, thus effectively silencing differing opinions. But more specifically, if we look at what is actually produced in various Israeli university departments, we see that it is fully at the service of Israel’s domination of the Indigenous Palestinian people.
Israel’s sociology and history books, for example, written by Israeli scholars, skip over the impact of that country’s establishment on the Palestinian people, making no reference to the Nakba.
When Israeli scholars such as Ilan Pappe publish analysis that runs counter to Israel’s official narrative, they are subjected to extreme pressure, frequently leading them to leave the country. Pappe himself said he was, and was threatened with expulsion from the University of Haifa, before he left and took up a job in the UK.
But also, the scholarship that this country produces is put directly to the use of its illegal occupation. As the 2009 by the Alternative Information Center (AIC) documents, "Israeli academic institutions have not opted to take a neutral, apolitical position toward the Israeli occupation but to fully support the Israeli security forces and policies toward the Palestinians."
For example, the AIC report documents that the Technion Institute of Technology has strong ties with the Israeli military and arms manufacturers, and that Technion researchers have developed a remote-controlled bulldozer used to demolish Palestinian homes.
Technion also collaborates with Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, which built the illegal Apartheid Wall, the US-Mexico border wall, and is now putting an Indigenous reservation under constant surveillance.
“Technology” is listed among the top priorities of the projected Tel Aviv centre, and Israeli technology is routinely put to the service of Israel’s domination of the Palestinian people, so an academic collaboration centred on technology is a collaboration centred on the tools of oppression.
Dissenters in academia frequently feel that they are in the belly of the beast. In reality, however, students, faculty, and public intellectuals chafing under censorship and accusations of anti-Semitism as they denounce Israel’s oppressive policies are struggling to remain ethical in the brain of the monster, where the tools of oppression and the narratives that erase it are generated.
It is our commitment to academic integrity, to scholarship for the public good, rather than that for maintaining domination, that drives us to oppose collaborations with Israeli universities.
Nada Elia is a Diaspora Palestinian scholar, writer, public speaker and a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
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