Originally published by Overland, April 22, 2025. Read the original here.

With its complete blockade of food deliveries to Gaza since March 2, Israel’s genocide has changed register. No need, any longer, even to claim that Gazans murdered by the IDF are terrorists or human shields or unavoidable collateral damage; now, Israel’s strategy involves indiscriminately annihilating an entire civilian population by starvation, without any pretence of doing otherwise.

Eraducation

There are few places in the West where this depravity is scrutinised more than in universities. But genocide opponents on first-world campuses have more than just the cataclysm in Gaza to campaign against. At the same time, they have to confront the Zionist-sponsored collapse of the university as a venue where opposition to genocide can even be expressed.

In today’s universities, the most freedom staff and students can hope for is to scroll through Israel’s crimes against Palestinians on their phones. Contesting or even discussing them is regularly outlawed. Members of the university community are given a simple choice: either you declare your opposition to genocide, or you study or teach in peace. You cannot do both. The price of participating in higher education without sanction is silence over Israel’s inconceivable barbarism in Palestine. Knowledge is paid for by acquiescence to the killing of tens upon tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Universities often pose as laboratories of innovation. If nothing else, their embrace of authoritarianism and their repression of basic political freedoms since October 7 have demonstrated one way that they do, in fact, live up to this aspiration. With very few exceptions, they have joined the vanguard of enablers of the Gaza genocide. As institutions, they are supposed to be safeguards against fascism. But they have spawned a political dispensation with authoritarian urges more than worthy of the far-right. In universities, eraducation has become the name of the game: education that normalises, and therefore promotes, the eradication of Palestinian life.

The imposition of eraducation as a structuring principle on campuses has happened frighteningly quickly, but it does not represent a qualitative departure from the status quo. Universities may, thanks to students and some of their staff, be hubs of Palestine solidarity, but structurally they have rarely been distinguished by more than a veneer of progressivism, and they have always been instrumental to Zionism. Their leaders’ current willingness to turn them into showrooms for genocide is entirely in keeping with the opportunism that other neoliberal elites have shown since October 7. Their “moral” actions have been, at best, like the hands of a stopped clock: accurate twice a day.

In their determination to discredit, censor and punish Palestine supporters on campus, university heads are voiding universities of whatever critical function they might once have performed. Anti-Palestinianism is now so normalised in higher education that it deeply characterises even institutions which have resisted its most extreme versions. Harvard may have stood up to Trump’s funding blackmail, but it has done more than its fair share to gratify Zionists in their bid to snuff out solidarity with Palestine on campus. At my university, the authorities’ willingness to accommodate Zionists has even extended to banning a cake-stall raising aid money for Gazans, and to the highly symbolic gesture of hosting a propaganda tour by current and former members of the IDF in the university’s shiny main administration building.

Eraducation is not just education for and in the eradication of Palestinians. It entails the simultaneous suppression of the values that critical and democratic institutions of learning should embody. In the current genocide, university managers, whose function is to systematically subordinate those values to a grim Realpolitik, have even deserted the principle of performing intelligence. The stratagem of the Israel lobby — discrediting support for Palestine as probably or certainly antisemitic — is plain as day to everyone. Yet university heads are ready to swallow it whole, with no or minimal hesitation, as an assurance of their loyalty to Zionism. Evidently, they are more than willing to sacrifice the public exercise of their critical faculties to the spectacle of servile and voluntary stupidity that is required of them.

IDFing the campus

Eraducation in universities has recourse to a time-honoured mechanism of classical propaganda: shameless deformation of the plainest meanings of words. University chiefs have seized on the identitarian concept of “Jewish safety” as part of the arsenal they train against Palestine supporters. This shibboleth, weaponised by Zionists to call for a witch-hunt against anti-genocide activists, is now used to dress up anti-Palestinian racism as the protection of Zionists’ feelings, and thus (on their reasoning) of Jewish identity itself. Zionists hope that, thanks to this framing, the project of quashing campus opposition to Israel will bathe in the same progressive aura that surrounds the necessary opposition to discrimination against minorities. This naked attempt at “consciousness design” shows that, on the lips of presidents and Vice-Chancellors, words can be given whatever meaning expediency demands. How soon until criticising the IDF also gets counted as “antisemitic hate speech”?

The intensifying eraducational bent in higher education confirms universities as what I have previously called “little Israels”. Like Israeli society in its permanent war footing, universities are constantly militarising. And, in fact, a comparison between Western universities and the IDF has no shortage of material. Now led by extremists who are also neoliberals, the IDF presents itself, as one scholar has argued, as a “purely merit-based institution” functioning as “a mandatory business internship” in which soldiers are “battlefield entrepreneurs”. In this imaginary, the IDF becomes an “incubator of leadership skills and innovation, leading to the cultivation of business networks that extend into the civilian world.”

These repellent clichés are more than partly reminiscent of the marketing claims which Western universities continually churn out. Academic managers’ universal currency of ranking results and grant income echoes the IDF’s own bean-counting logic which, on one analysis, “has given in to a fascination with purely statistical results, as if it was enough to reduce the “stock” of Hamas fighters in order to eliminate the “terrorist threat”.” The techniques of university managerialism, that is, share the same quantitative and positivist premises as those of the Israeli genocide.

Resisting the liberal destruction of everything

Scholasticide, defined by Karma Nabulsi as “the systematic destruction of education” is part and parcel of genocide, whether in Palestine or Sudan. In the West, in the nineteenth month of the catastrophe, university leaders’ willingness to deliver universities over to the purposes of Zionist sadism is compatible with the belief that Gazans were born for no other purpose than to be slaughtered. In their witch-hunt against the Palestine solidarity movement, they validate attacks on democracy in front of a new generation of students, and mirror the authoritarian governmentality of states like Orbán’s Hungary or Trump’s America. At every turn, they demonstrate their complete, abject failure as moral actors. They would sooner strip the university of its independence and abrogate its critical function than allow it to oppose genocide. For university staff and students sickened by the disaster in Palestine, the intensifying feelings of disgust at remaining in the employ or under the responsibility of genocide-supporters should be harnessed as reminders of the urgent necessity of maintaining resistance to the eraducational regime in universities.

We should mostly be talking about the genocide in Palestine: the horrifying toll of bodies, the thousands or tens of thousands of amputees, the bereavement at a national scale, the gutting intergenerational trauma. Especially, we should be talking about Palestinians’ astonishing sumud and resistance amid an entire lifescape razed to dust and the wanton destruction of everything. In the face of all this, we should not have to talk about universities in the West. But nowhere in society has the breakdown of liberal institutions under Zionist pressure been faster or more obvious.

As Ilan Pappe has shown in his recent book on Zionist lobbying, the state of public opinion, especially in the US, is of such great concern to Israel’s government that while local lobbies are entrusted with influencing politicians domestically, the fight against public delegitimation abroad has been directed from Israel itself. There can be no question that the Palestine solidarity movement is winning that fight. Israel has never been less legitimate, especially on campus. This means the task is to keep on doing what we are doing already: continually seeking out new and better ways to press the case for justice, on the basis that solidarity with Palestine is not just a political obligation or a litmus test for progressivism, but a necessary component of the fight against reaction and neofascism.