The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region

On October 11, 2023, Israeli fighter jets bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, a leading Palestinian educational institution, reducing its campus to rubble. Soon after Israel destroyed the academic futures of over 18,000 Palestinian students, the Israeli University of Haifa called on international academic leaders to stand for “academic freedom” and to stand “by Israel and the enlightened world.”

Since destroying the Islamic University of Gaza, Israel has decimated every single Palestinian university in the Gaza Strip. During this year of relentless bombardment, the University of Haifa mobilized on all fronts to support this destruction. By the end of October, the university was fundraising for bullet proof vests for Israeli combat soldiers. By December, the university announced it would offer designated benefits, scholarships, and even course credit to soldiers returning from Gaza to its classrooms. By September 2024, the university expanded exemptions from assignments and course credit for reserve soldiers to complete their degrees throughout continuous deployment to Gaza.

The University of Haifa’s active participation in this Israeli war of elimination is no aberration. While the latest war on Gaza has been declared a genocide by legal experts, in settler-colonial studies and anthropology, genocide is understood as structural to the project of the settler state itself, wherein settlers aim to eliminate Native people to establish a settler nation on Native land (Simpson 2018; Wolfe 2006). This is the case for the Israeli state, premised on the elimination of Palestinians and their replacement with Jewish Israelis. The University of Haifa, like all Israeli universities, is a central pillar of this project––officially termed “Judaization.” This essay advances an understanding of Israeli universities as settler universities: universities in service of the reproduction of the 76-year Israeli state project of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (Masalha 1992; Pappé 2007).

Since its founding in 1972, the University of Haifa has anchored the state’s settlement program in the northern region of the Galilee, home to the largest population of Palestinian citizens of Israel who survived and remained after the mass expulsion of the Nakba in 1948. This role expanded after March of 1976, when the Palestinian National Committee for the Defense of the Land gathered in Nazareth to mobilize against the Israeli ongoing campaign to expropriate lands from the state’s Palestinian citizens.

Their efforts culminated in “Land Day” on March 30, when thousands of Palestinians took to the streets in mass strikes and protests. The Israeli state responded with lethal force. Israeli forces killed six Palestinian citizens and injured dozens, and conducted a campaign of mass arrests and raids on Palestinian communities. Land Day became a watershed event for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the state immediately moved to subdue this Palestinian rebellion that erupted in the Galilee.

In the wake of Land Day, an escalation of the Israeli state program to “Judaize” the region was deemed urgent. A new plan was initiated to expand the Galilee’s Jewish population distribution through the rapid establishment of thirty new settlements. Called mitspim (lookouts), these were nuclei of Jewish settlement built on strategically selected hilltops throughout the Galilee to solidify Israeli control over Palestinian lands and facilitate their transfer to Jewish-Israeli ownership. Within just a few years, Israel built sixty mitspim in the Galilee, which began as temporary edifices and developed into permanent gated communities. They remain exclusively Jewish.

The mitspim were made possible by another land-grab institution in the Galilee: the University of Haifa. Situated on the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Khureiba, which was depopulated in 1948, the campus is strategically located at the apex of Mt. Carmel, symbolically dominating the region which it continues to “Judaize.”

The University of Haifa’s departments of urban planning and geography offered faculties, resources and expertise to refine and legitimate the mitspim project. The University’s Society for Applied Scientific Research partnered with the Ministry of Defense to publish policy recommendations in support of the program. University research consistently embraced Israeli state terminology, labelling the low ratio of Jews as compared to Palestinians a “severe negative balance” and warning of “Arab infiltration” into the Galilee’s lands. University experts aided in infrastructural planning for increased investment in Jewish settlements and settler regional councils and developed scholarly justifications for the expulsion, containment, and discrimination of Palestinian citizens. Anchoring the mitspim and other Galilee “Judaization” programs, the University of Haifa serves as a pillar of regional demographic engineering.

As its centers and prestigious research chairs produce scholarship advancing Palestinian dispossession, the University of Haifa continually denies its Palestinian students their basic rights to resist it. These students––Palestinians whose Israeli citizenship was itself created as a result of the 1948 War, and many of whom have families displaced by it––have been restricted in educating their peers about the Nakba, or mobilizing for Palestinian return. After three years of being refused permits to commemorate the Nakba, in 2014 two student groups defied the university and held a protest of commemoration. They were suspended until the end of the academic year, along with the primary Palestinian student group on campus, which was suspended for a month. Only an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court succeeded in compelling the university to permit the student groups to resume their public activities.

With the launch of Israel’s declared war on Gaza in October 2023 almost a decade later, the university once again escalated its campaign to suppress the political expression of its Palestinian students. On October 10, the administration announced it would suspend and investigate six Palestinian students for their posts online. One student was asked to vacate her dorm room with just 24 hours’ notice. With no due process, and in a move that the human rights organization Adalah and some university faculty argued is a violation of both the institution’s own code of conduct and foundational civil rights, the University administration accused the students of “support for terrorism.” The administration made clear to its Palestinian students that they must exercise extreme caution when daring to speak against Israeli mass killing—whether on, or even off, campus—and even referred student cases to the police for criminal investigation. As the Israeli state's bombardment raining terror over Gaza was officially and materially supported by the university, Palestinian student protest against it was criminalized.

After months of escalated political repression on campus, on Nakba Day in May 2024, Palestinian students nevertheless organized a rally. They advertised it as an event against Israel’s war on Gaza, which they explained as the “ongoing Nakba.” They stated that the Gaza Strip was itself a refugee camp to which Palestinians from across historic Palestine were deported in 1948, and that the current war further displaced Palestinians within Gaza. “Therefore,” they wrote, “it is not possible to separate the Nakba from the war, and vice versa.” The university response was unequivocal: it refused to authorize the rally and assured the press that the protest would absolutely not take place on its campus.

As Palestinian students at the University of Haifa articulated, the war in Gaza lays bare that the Nakba is ongoing. Since October 2023, Israel has carried out a mass displacement of Palestinians on a scale surpassing that of 1948. In offering its campus as a site of knowledge production for Palestinian dispossession, but not for critical education about this project, the University of Haifa sustains its continuation. This settler university actively participates in the elimination of Palestinian communities, epistemologies, and politics.

To those inhabiting settler universities on other continents, built on Indigenous lands seized through genocide, there is now a renewed call for solidarity issued by Palestinian faculty, staff and student unions. It is a call to join the movement, led by Palestinian and Indigenous students, scholars, and activists across the world, to sever university ties to colonial violence and remake higher education for liberation.