In its current genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Israel has destroyed every single Palestinian university in the enclave with aerial bombardment or controlled detonation. Medical and engineering laboratories, training courtrooms of faculties of law, assembly and graduation halls, rich collections of books, art pieces, archival and archaeological artifacts, all completely decimated. Decades of Palestinian student academic and political life instantly wiped out.

This war on Palestinian education, what Karma Nabulsi has called “scholasticide,” is central to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. And it did not begin now. It has been waged for seventy-five years. To fully understand how this war has been sustained, we cannot simply look to the Israeli military and military industries, nor to Israel’s far-right government. We must also look to Israel’s most vaunted liberal institutions — its universities.

For decades, Israeli universities have been celebrated in the West as exceptionally free. Upon launching its only Middle Eastern dual degree program with Tel Aviv University in 2020, Columbia University advertised its Israeli counterpart as one that “shares Tel Aviv’s unshakable spirit of openness and innovation — and boasts a campus life as dynamic and pluralistic as the metropolis itself.”