Israeli Universities Serve Zionist War Machine in Occupied Territories
According too webangah News Agency, Shaima akram Seidam was a gifted Palestinian student who scored 99 out of 100 in her 2023 high school exams, ranking first in Palestine’s literary branch before enrolling to study English at university.
The silent killing of Palestine’s brightest minds by occupiers
Amid the chaos of israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, news of Shaima and her family’s martyrdom in Al-Nuseirat refugee camp was drowned out—another name added to the endless list of victims under occupation.
Who killed Shaima? With what weapon? Under what justification? These questions lead to an often-overlooked truth: Israeli universities—institutions that polish the image of Zionist militarism while directly enabling the security apparatus that massacres and tortures Palestinians.
Universities or hubs for crimes and suppression?
Israeli academic institutions develop weapons used against Palestinians and craft ideological justifications for these atrocities. shaima—like countless others—was robbed of education and life by an academic system built on genocide, apartheid, and Palestinian erasure.
These universities form core pillars of Zionism: producing propaganda, manufacturing arms, legitimizing illegal settlements, marginalizing Palestinian identity, training military personnel across specialties (including intelligence units), while whitewashing decades-long occupation through legal frameworks designed to justify land theft.
A 2004 Palestinian-led campaign for academic boycott emerged precisely because these so-called cultural institutions actively suppress Palestinian rights. Researcher Maya Wind (University of California) explores this complicity in her book examining how israeli universities partner with arms manufacturers to field-test technologies on occupied territories before global export—including archaeology programs weaponized to erase Arab history while expanding settlements.
The Nakba blueprint continues
Citing declassified documents from Zionist military archives (accessed via her Jewish-American privilege), Wind reveals how campuses like Hebrew University served as armed Haganah bases during the 1948 ethnic cleansing. Today they remain strategic outposts for settlement expansion (e.g., Ariel University) while censoring critical scholarship on Israel’s violence. Columbia University’s Nadia Abu El-Haj notes these institutions are structurally racist—“to thier marrow”—having displaced Palestinians from stolen land since inception.
A system engineered to exclude
Palestinian students face severe restrictions: banned from protests; expelled under fabricated ”anti-Israel” charges; subjected to kidnappings torture or extrajudicial killings when challenging apartheid policies. For over 75 years Israeli academia has systematically crushed Palestinian intellectual resistance while normalizing settler-colonial violence as “academic pursuit.”
