Ending any collaboration with Israeli universities is an important instrument to put pressure on Israel and its allies to comply with international humanitarian law and to remind our policy makers that we want academic institutions in countries where critical thinking and human rights are protected and encouraged.

University workers and students across Ireland mobilised on Wednesday for a Day of Action in solidarity with Palestine. Our demands are directed at the institutions’ presidents who have largely been silent while all 12 of Gaza’s universities have been bombed, some completely destroyed. 

We want our presidents to condemn Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians, call for a ceasefire, offer sanctuary to Palestinian colleagues and students and support those who are already in Ireland, disinvest from institutional collaboration with Israeli institutions, and adopt ethical investment policies that exclude holdings in companies associated with the arms trade.

Why is Israel targeted, one may ask, and not, say, Iran? Academics should always question collaborations with partners that engage in systematic human rights violations. Israel’s academic institutions are part and parcel of a system that structurally oppresses Palestinians — a de facto apartheid regime. 

This has been denounced by numerous Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organisations, along with many UN experts. Yet, Israel’s academic institutions benefit significantly from international and European research funding schemes. Iranian universities are nearly absent from these schemes while Israeli universities have been extremely successful in obtaining funding.

As many scholars and experts have pointed out, what is taking place in Gaza today qualifies as ‘scholasticide’ or ‘educide’. That is the intentional and systematic destruction of the material and immaterial infrastructures for research and education. Today, the higher education and schooling system in Gaza is devastated. So are the archives, libraries and museums.

The numbers are traumatising for anyone trying to make sense of them. More than 5,000 academics and students have been killed including 95 deans and professors and three university presidents. More than 8,000 have been injured and maimed. All universities in the Gaza Strip have been either partially or totally destroyed. Some 200 schools have been bombed, a quarter of them destroyed.

Together with hospitals and markets, which are regularly devastated by the Israeli military, schools and universities constitute the hallmarks of civilian life in Gaza. This is what Israel tries to annihilate. 

Therefore, educide or scholasticide is part and parcel of what the International Court of Justice in January defined as a “plausible genocide” and of what Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, defined as a genocide in her latest report issued in March.

As of today, not one single Israeli university has condemned the military assault on Gaza. Officially, all universities in Israel support its continuation. Additionally, they have been very proactive in punishing those brave and courageous colleagues who have expressed critical opinions. 

The most famous case is Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. After expressing solidarity with Palestinians and criticising her government’s line of action, she was suspended and then reinstated thanks to an international campaign in her favour. Later, she was temporarily detained and deprived of her passport — which she was given back, eventually.

Many of those who have paid a professional and personal price for their criticism of the Israeli government are asking their international colleagues to dis-invest from co-operating with institutions that systematically silence internal opposition and oppress Palestinians. 

Maya Wind, the Israeli scholar and peace activist based in British Columbia, recently published the book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. In it, she retraces the origins of the education system in Israel and its complicity with the apartheid regime and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. 

Other international (Nick Riemer), Israeli (Ilan Pappe), and Ireland-based academics (Ronit Lentin, David Landy and Conor McCarthy) have demonstrated that this complicity is systematic. 

It is expressed in many different forms which all together create a system that enables structural oppression and dispossession, including the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory to build campuses (as in the case of Ariel University and the Hebrew University in Mount Scopus, Jerusalem), the intimate relationship with the military sector and arms industry, and the discrimination against Palestinian students and staff.

Wind discusses the intertwining of the arms industries and the universities in detail, highlighting how STEM departments as well as the social sciences and the humanities have, in the course of the decades, complemented and imbricated their development with the weapon industry. For example, two of the largest Israeli weapon-producers, Rafael and Israeli Aerospace Industries, developed as “start-ups” out of the infrastructures of the Technion Institute of Haifa and the Weizmann Institute, two higher education institutes in Israel.

Also, many universities are responsible for technological advancements in the field of weapons construction, which are then “proved in the field” and marketed by public and private companies as “battle proven”, usually after military campaigns in the Gaza Strip, as shown by Israeli director Yotam Feldman in his 2014 documentary “The Lab”.

As the world is fast moving toward an escalation of war and the total annihilation of Palestinian lives in Gaza, it is urgent that university presidents and representatives do not remain silent. They must join the voices of the workers and the students in demanding a commitment to justice, human rights, peace and academic freedom. This includes calling out those who do not demonstrate such commitments and it also includes disinvesting from collaborations with them, until they do so. In this way, together, we can hold policy-makers and government representatives accountable.

• Paola Rivetti is Associate Professor in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University.