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IN ITS FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM, ISRAELI ACADEMIA REMAINS BLIND TO A
BASIC TRUTH  
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Anat Matar
February 26, 2025
972 Magazine
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_ The government’s assault on democratic norms can't be separated
from its oppression of Palestinians: they are two lobes of the same
right-wing brain. _

Activists protest the judicial overhaul and and Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit in Manhattan, New York
City, September 19, 2023., Luke Tress/Flash90

 

Never before have the two Israeli communities between which I divide
most of my time, the academic and the activist, been so estranged from
one another — and this, despite both being genuinely concerned about
the fascism tightening its grip on Israeli society.

An indication of this abyss is the contrast between both
communities’ responses to the blessed ceasefire, which went into
effect last month. While we as left-wing activists celebrated the
ceasefire, it was clear to us that it should have been reached much
sooner. By the second week of October 2023, we understood that
Israel’s war on Gaza was motivated purely by feelings of revenge,
concealed by a rhetorical facade of “self-defense,” and that it
would lead only to immense suffering for both Israelis and
Palestinians; we also understood that it would risk the lives of the
Israeli hostages. 

The response of Israel’s liberal academic camp to the ceasefire, on
the other hand, has been sentimental rather than political: they talk
endlessly about the hostages’ misery but offer hardly any criticism
of the war’s initial aims, the army’s conduct in the war, or any
attempt to understand how we arrived at this point. This is sadly in
line with how they have behaved these last 16 months. After leading
the protest movement against the government’s planned judicial
overhaul
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the beginning of 2023, Israeli academia quickly fell into line after
October 7. From militant speeches and op-eds defending a “just
war” to the mass enlistment of Israeli students in the reserve
service, the academy broadly supported the war in its first months.

What my academic colleagues fail to grasp, but what my activist
friends understand clearly, is that the Israeli government’s ongoing
assault on democratic norms and institutions cannot be separated from
its genocidal oppression of the Palestinian people. They make up the
two lobes of the same right-wing brain.

A steadfast refusal

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government
announced its judicial overhaul, just days after its formation at the
end of 2022, the liberal academic community burst into
action. Professors and students flooded out of the university and
into the streets, waving huge blue-and-white Israeli flags and
carrying signs that read “No Academia Without Democracy.” Academic
leaders, including Tel Aviv University president Ariel Porat
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against what they saw as the dangers the proposed reforms posed to
“Israeli democracy,” joining the protests and penning dozens
of open letters
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op-eds.

The horrors of October 7 silenced some of these voices for a time.
Others were recruited into the Israeli propaganda machine, and cheered
what they saw as Israel’s justified war against Hamas: as Porat
put it in November 2023
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Amalek.” Over time, when the truth that the activist left had
concluded already in mid-October became clear — that the government
had no interest in rescuing the hostages languishing in Gaza — there
were soft murmurs of discontent within academic circles. There was
even concern expressed about the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and
demands to prevent it.

Ariel Porat, President of Tel Aviv University, attends an Education,
Culture, and Sports Committee meeting at the Knesset, in Jerusalem,
December 10, 2024. (Oren Ben Hakoon/Flash90)

But it was only with the renewal of the government’s assault on
state and public institutions that liberal voices began again to speak
out _en masse_. On Jan 1, 2024, the Israeli High Court of
Justice ruled
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one of the cornerstones of the judicial reform. Gradually, this step
brought the topic back to the attention of both the Israeli Ministry
of Justice and the liberal public. For many months the Justice
Minister Yariv Levin refused to convene the committee responsible for
electing the Supreme Court president — and is now refusing to
acknowledge the appointment
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In a recent article for Haaretz
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Porat detailed the kinds of “mega-events” that, should they occur,
would demand demonstrations and even strikes: the dismissal of the
attorney general, the firing of the head of the Shin Bet, and the
government’s noncompliance with Supreme Court rulings. Porat’s
remarks received widespread support from academic organizations,
including Bashaar – Academic Community for Israeli Society
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Sciences, and faculty unions.

These individuals and groups have also strongly opposed several
Knesset bills targeting academia, which they have dubbed the
“Silencing Laws”: one that would cut state funding
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academic institutions that fail to dismiss lecturers who express
“support for terror” and another requiring universities to shut
down student groups
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support “terrorism or armed struggle against the State of Israel.”

There is no doubt that academic leaders’ rage and urgent calls to
resist all aspects of the judicial overhaul are completely justified.
However, they have exhibited a steadfast refusal to recognize other
aspects of the same agenda, implemented by the same abhorrent
government long before October 7: the intensification of occupation
and Palestinian dispossession; the expansion of settlements and
settler outposts, often through force and violence; and the deliberate
and total erasure of Palestinian political existence.

Since that dreadful day, the “judicial overhaul” regime has
carried out a second Nakba in Gaza, far more brutal than the first. It
has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians while displacing
and starving
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destroyed the physical landscape
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the entire Strip, including all of its universities
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blocked the entry of food, humanitarian aid, and medical supplies —
in short, all of the components that constitute genocide.

At the same time, the government has tightened its grip on the
occupied West Bank by expanding settlement construction, depriving
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their livelihoods,
launching massive new military operations in refugee camps
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and granting its settler proxies free rein to commit systematic abuse
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Israeli military vehicles advance through the streets of Tulkarem
refugee camp as the army conducts a raid in the occupied West Bank
city, February 6, 2025. (Wahaj Bani Moufleh)

The same government, the same agenda, the same totalitarian
escalation, and the same blatant disregard for human lives. Yet for
two years, the established liberal Jewish elite has persistently
denied the connection between these two hemispheres that form the
brain of the current regime.

THE ACADEMIA-ARMY NEXUS

This deliberate disconnection is often made possible by separating the
actions of Netanyahu and his government — what former Chief of Staff
Moshe Ya’alon recently described
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“the government of messianics, draft-dodgers, and the corrupt” —
from those of the military. The former commit horrific war crimes; the
latter, which includes innocent soldiers and officers, might find
themselves accused in The Hague, through no fault of their own.

This stems in part from the close cooperation between Israeli academia
and the Israeli army, through joint research, special programs for
soldiers, conferences on “security” — collaboration that has
continued apace since October 7. Tel Aviv University, for instance,
recently hosted the inaugural DefenseTech Summit
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the latest deadly innovations in AI and drone warfare, all while
Israeli armed forces destroyed any possibility of life in the Gaza
Strip. Among its main speakers was Major General (Res.) Eyal Zamir,
the Director-General of the Israeli Defense Ministry and newly
appointed chief of staff.

Even while facilitating these links between the university and the
military, Israel’s liberal academic leaders do not always tout them;
nor, however, do they deny them. In a recent interview
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Professor Milette Shamir, Tel Aviv University’s vice president for
international academic collaboration, appeared entirely unwilling to
take responsibility for her university’s complicity in Israel’s
war effort. “While it is true that our research sometimes benefits
the military effort,” she admitted, “we do not decide for our
faculty what they should research.” She also didn’t delve
into whether this commitment to academic freedom should allow for
faculty to conduct archaeological excavations
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the occupied West Bank, in clear violation of international law,
or develop dog-mounted cameras
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help the army’s canine unit carry out deadly attacks on Palestinian
civilians in Gaza. 

Nor did Shamir address the contracts the university signs with the 
military for specialized academic programs, which allow uniformed,
gun-toting soldiers to flood
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Tel Aviv campus. In the mind of the vice president, like that of the
president and many other senior academic faculty members, the
government is what they oppose, and it has no real connection to the
army, which they are proud to serve. This is how Shamir is able to
argue: “it would be wrong to claim that we cooperate with the
government.”

Milette Shamir (Tel Aviv University/Wikimedia Commons)

This reverence for the Israeli military, guided by a belief in its
inherent morality and that of the majority of its soldiers, was also
on full display in Porat’s most recent op-ed in Haaretz
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published just several days ago. In it, he warned against a Knesset
bill
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approved last week in a preliminary hearing, that would prohibit
Israeli citizens, authorities, and public bodies from cooperating in
any way with the International Criminal Court.

As Porat rightly pointed out, this law would severely restrict the
work of journalists and academics, who could risk imprisonment for
merely publishing articles about the crimes of Israeli soldiers. But
for Porat, a no less “serious consequence” of the law would be the
threat it poses to Israeli soldiers, who he believes would be at
greater risk of prosecution abroad. Again, we see a genuine care for
democracy, alongside total oblivion to the fact that Israel is far
from one, and, in his words, a deep faith in the purity of “the vast
majority of IDF soldiers” — even “if, God forbid, war crimes
were committed” by a few.

The present moment, however, may offer a rare opportunity to remove
the blinders from so many liberal Israelis’ eyes. Recent
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point to Israelis’ widespread disillusionment with the course of the
war in Gaza, and particularly with Netanyahu’s efforts to hamper a
permanent ceasefire deal.  After 16 months during which most of my
countrymen, among them liberal academics, were consumed by a desire
for revenge, it is finally possible to detect a longing for the end of
the bloodshed.

It is time for liberal academics to acknowledge that the judicial
reform is intimately linked not only with warmongering policies, but
also with other fundamentally anti-democratic, Jewish-nationalist
measures the Israeli government has implemented in recent years, such
as the passing of the Nation-State Bill
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with the unending occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It
is time to insist on genuine democracy in Israel and forsake the
illusory and inconsistent mantra of a “Jewish Democratic State.”
And it is time to promote a civilian culture and demilitarize Israeli
society. These crucial steps should indeed include the active
participation of a sober, liberal academia — and they must begin by
opening their eyes.

_A version of this article was also published in The Nation,
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in Hebrew on Local Call
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_Until her recent retirement, DR. ANAT MATAR was a senior lecturer in
the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. She is a founding
member of Academia for Equality
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OUR TEAM HAS BEEN DEVASTATED BY THE HORRIFIC EVENTS OF THIS LATEST
WAR. THE WORLD IS REELING FROM ISRAEL’S UNPRECEDENTED ONSLAUGHT ON
GAZA, INFLICTING MASS DEVASTATION AND DEATH UPON BESIEGED
PALESTINIANS, AS WELL AS THE ATROCIOUS ATTACK AND KIDNAPPINGS BY HAMAS
IN ISRAEL ON OCTOBER 7. OUR HEARTS ARE WITH ALL THE PEOPLE AND
COMMUNITIES FACING THIS VIOLENCE. 

We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to
engulf the entire region. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed
by the army, are seizing the opportunity to intensify their attacks on
Palestinians. The most far-right government in Israel’s history is
ramping up its policing of dissent, using the cover of war to silence
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This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
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militarism, entrenched occupation and apartheid, and a normalized
siege on Gaza.

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