19 May 2025
Will UK universities respond to Israel’s Gaza Scholasticide?
(The link to the Academic Commitment follows)
One of the Israel’s targets in Gaza has been its education system, which it has largely destroyed. All of Gaza’s universities have been bombed, and most are now in ruins. Not only the buildings have been targeted: according to a report from the group of experts at the UN Human Rights Council, by April 2024, 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors had been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers injured. Staff have been killed not only during attacks on universities, but also by air strikes on their homes. The 53- year-old physicist Dr. Sofyan Abdel Rahman Taya was serving as the president of the Islamic University of Gaza when he was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Jabalia on Dec. 2 along with his wife, parents and five children. He is one of three university presidents killed by Israel.
The destruction of schools and the killing of teachers and students has paralleled the destruction of universities. For more than a year, none of the roughly 900,000 children in Gaza have been able to go to school. Despite making up only a small part of the huge number of deaths and injuries in Israel’s war on Gaza, the killing and injuring of university staff and teachers in primary and secondary education will greatly reduce the capacity of the Palestinians left alive to resume any kind of life after the war is over. It parallels Israel’s campaign of destruction of hospitals and persecution of doctors and the systematic destruction of places of worship.
Along with the devastating toll of deaths and injuries and the deliberate starvation of the Palestinians by blocking humanitarian aid, the targeting of the means of Palestinian cultural survival is evidence of genocidal intent, as are the explicit calls by Israeli leaders that their armed forces should act without restraint.[1] The South African case at the International Court of Justice, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, was launched in late 2023, shortly after the war had started. Already its careful documentation provided convincing evidence of genocide. The war has continued unchecked for another year and a half. It is effectively the first genocide to be live streamed, and the first that everyone can see and learn about if they take the trouble to do so.
How have academics and universities outside Israel reacted to the genocide and the scholasticide?
News of campus repression of protest in the US has distracted attention from the less dramatic situation in the UK, but here, as in the US, there has been a sharp division between staff and students on one hand, and university authorities on the other. Students, very often supported by staff, have taken part in passionate protests, with marches, encampments, occupations and calls for boycotts of Israeli institutions. University leaders, who might have felt some responsibility to speak out against scholasticide or to defend international humanitarian law, have instead been more concerned that Zionist students should feel comfortable on campus, and have responded to the protests in most cases with unprecedented levels of repression.
On February 25, 2025, the investigative unit of Liberty, in conjunction with Sky News, produced an article on the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism at UK universities. They report that at least 28 universities have launched disciplinary investigations against students and staff in connection with their Palestine activism since October 2023, sanctioning students and threatening expulsion. The article includes a link to footage of a violent police action against students peacefully occupying a building at Newcastle University. It also lists the large number of universities that have hired private security companies to gather intelligence on student protestors. Reporters spoke to both students and staff who criticised their universities for stifling academic freedom by allegedly placing “disproportionate” restrictions on pro-Gaza guest speakers, or calling the police on non-violent demonstrations, leading to violent clashes with officers on one campus and leaving students subject to tough police bail conditions at another. The findings prompted Gina Romero, the United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly, to condemn the “deeply disturbing situation” across UK campuses.
Of course, the situation in UK universities is nowhere near as dramatic as it is in the US. But to focus our attention on what happens in the US is to miss what is happening in universities in other countries. And other countries’ universities are apparently more conscious of their international responsibilities than ours in the UK. As reported by Ha’aretz on Feb. 25 2025, since October 2023 the Israeli Association of University Heads (IAUH) has received about five hundred complaints of boycott from its members. That is, five hundred Israeli academics and Israeli academic institutions have reported being the target of boycotts by academic and academic institutions outside Israel. These involve institutional ties, international research collaborations involving individual Israeli academics, invitations to Israeli academics to conferences outside Israel, and participation by outside academics in conferences in Israel. Some academics outside Israel are refusing to conduct peer reviews of papers by Israeli academics, further increasing their international isolation. The IAUH has set up a special task force to combat this wave of boycotts.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) keeps a tally of boycotting institutions. Many have not only severed ties with Israeli universities in protest at the genocide but have felt able to make clear statements on their websites, describing and justifying their action. A sample:
• On May 9, 2024, the Conference of University Rectors in Spain (CRUE), which brings together the heads of 76 Spanish universities, announced they were suspending all ties with Israeli institutions and research centres deemed to be complicit in the war in Gaza, following widespread student protests across the country. CRUE said it would “suspend collaboration agreements with Israeli universities and research centres that have not expressed a firm commitment to peace and compliance with international humanitarian law”, and demanded the immediate and definitive cessation of military operations by the Israeli army and any terrorist activities, the release of those kidnapped by Hamas, and the State of Israel to respect international law and allow the entry of all necessary humanitarian aid into Gaza to address the emergency needs of its civilian population.
• The University of Barcelona placed a particularly clear statement of its responsibilities towards the international legal order on its website in a posting announcing an end to its links with complicit Israeli academic institutions and companies.
• In Norway, five universities, University of Stavanger, Oslo Met, University of South East Norway, University of Bergen and Nord University, have cut ties with Israeli universities. In the words of USN Rector Pia Cecilie Bing-Jonsson, “Israeli authorities have chosen to ignore the statements of the International Court of Justice and not made any moves to improve the humanitarian situation. This is the background for us not wanting any longer to have a co-operation agreement with universities in Israel.”
• In South Africa, the University of South Africa, Fort Hare University, Nelson Mandela University, the University of Western Cape, University of Venda and the University of Cape Town have all cut links with Israeli universities.
• In Belgium, the Universities of Ghent, Antwerp and Liège have cut ties with Israeli universities. A coalition of more than 6,600 professors, researchers, university staff and students signed an open letter urging Belgian universities to end all collaboration with Israeli institutions. Among the signatories are prominent figures such as outgoing deputy prime minister Petra De Sutter and war correspondent Rudi Vranckx. The letter accused Israeli universities of direct or indirect involvement in human rights violations and alleged complicity in what the signatories describe as an “ongoing genocide in Gaza”. It called on Belgian universities, as public institutions, to sever ties with Israeli institutions and align their policies with international law. The signatories argue that universities have a responsibility to uphold international law, both through teaching and by example. They highlight rulings from the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court over the past year, including arrest warrants issued against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence minister Yoav Gallant. The open letter was signed by 29 deans, 64 department heads, 1,107 professors, 1,518 researchers, 634 administrative staff and 3,290 students.
What explains this contrast with the UK?
In UK universities, the stated aim of the repression has almost invariably been to “enable all students to feel safe on campus”– meaning, largely, to protect Jewish students who identify with Israel and allegedly find criticism of Israel deeply hurtful. But at what point does the obligation to ensure students of every ethnicity feel safe on campus cease to override the right of other students (and faculty) to denounce genocide? And which students are being protected?
Let us deconstruct the first question for a moment. First, it is certainly not true that all Jewish students feel unsafe in the proximity of campus protests against Israel’s war. In fact, many Jews are themselves active in these protests, including in leadership roles, and do not feel remotely threatened or unsafe. Indeed, the principal threat to the welfare of Jewish students on UK campuses comes from police action to detain demonstrators and the action of university authorities to sanction those detained. These are surely more severe and more damaging than feelings of discomfort at being confronted by the facts about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Pro-Israel pressure groups like the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) and the Community Security Trust (CST) have actively promoted the idea that protest against Israel is antisemitic. The CST publishes a biennial survey of campus antisemitism in which it lists the number of “antisemitic incidents” on UK campuses. Its report from December 2024 speaks of 53 incidents in 2022/23 and 272 in 2023/2024, a five-fold increase. The summary of its report on the CST website is headed by a photo showing the words “IDF off campus” painted on a wall at an unnamed university. The full report displays a large photo of a campus protest featuring banners saying “Zionists off our campus”, “Free Palestine”, and “75 years of illegal occupation. How would you like it?”. The banners and slogans may be aggressive but they refer only to Israel and to supporters of Israel. None of them refers to Jews per se. Clearly, the allegations of antisemitism should not be taken at face value, however sincerely they are made.
Second, the Jews who feel threatened are those who view Israel’s actions with approval or have been persuaded by the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and by the CAA, the CST and publications like the Jewish Chronicle that claim all protest against Israel is motivated by antisemitism. They may well feel uncomfortable by the perceived presence of antisemitism on campus and disturbed by the Hamas murders on October 7. But those murders are surely overshadowed by Israel’s subsequent killing of more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza and the almost total destruction of their homes, mosques, churches, schools, libraries and hospitals.
There is no survey documenting the feelings of Muslim students at these mass killings, but it can be reliably imagined that they are distressed both by the killings and by the impunity enjoyed by Israel.
Concern that all students should feel safe on campus should lead university authorities to speak out against genocide, not to punish those who do. To quote Christopher Browning, in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, “What a university or college cannot do is try to protect its students from the anxiety produced by academic challenges or the political controversies that affect all society. The campus is not a sanctuary from discomfort.”
International humanitarian law owes a great deal to the work of two Jewish lawyers, Raphael Lemkin (1900– 1959) and Hersch Lauterpacht (1897– 1960), both born in the region of Europe whose Jewish population was largely wiped out in the Holocaust. Lemkin, who was influenced both by the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust and the earlier genocide of the Armenians in Turkey, was responsible for invention of the term “genocide” and played a large part in the creation and adoption of the United Nations Genocide Convention, to which the UK is a signatory. Hersch Lauterpacht was a judge in the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership. He is credited by the Human Rights lawyer Philippe Sands with the adoption into international law of the concept of crimes against humanity. Their legacy is threatened both from Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the decision of much of the West to turn a blind eye towards that genocide. It is a poor reflection on the leaders of British universities that they have allowed their concern for the comfort of a small group of students to override their responsibility to call out the present genocide and crimes against humanity.
Here’s the link to the Academic Commitment.
[1] See pages 59-67 in the South African case lodged at the International Court of Justice, available via https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2024/01/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf
