In 2022, Mr. Barghouti wrote that the Palestinian struggle was nearing its “South Africa moment” – when institutions “wake up, smell morality” and “end [their] complicity in apartheid”. In light of the events on the ground in Gaza today, and the international reaction to it - including on college campuses - where do we stand?
Omar Barghouti: In September 2024, almost a year into the Western armed, funded, and otherwise enabled Israeli genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, the UN General Assembly made history. For the first time ever, it overwhelmingly called out Israel’s apartheid regime, and for the first time in 42 years it called for sanctions to end Israel’s illegal occupation, as determined by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024.
However, Palestinians have no illusions whatsoever that justice will shine on us from the ICJ or the UN, the latter being historically responsible for the 1947-1949 Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the majority of Indigenous Palestinians, and the establishment of Israel as a settler colony over most of the area of historic Palestine.
We have international law on our side and the ethical high ground as an Indigenous people resisting a depraved, genocidal system of oppression to achieve our rights. Both are necessary, but never sufficient. To dismantle a system of oppression, the oppressed invariably need power as well: people power, grassroots power, intersectional coalition power, solidarity power, media power, among others. This is what I have meant by making states, corporations, and institutions “smell morality”, and fulfil their legal obligations under international law by ending their complicity.
Over this year of genocide, we have witnessed an unprecedented growth in the reach and impact of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Major corporations, from McDonald’s to Puma to Intel, are feeling the impact of mass, strategic, effective BDS-campaigning worldwide. Following pressure by BDS-supporting trade unions, some massive investment funds are divesting from Israel or from companies that are complicit in its crimes against Palestinians. These include the Norwegian oil fund, the world’s largest sovereign fund, which fully divested from Israel Bonds, amounting to around $500 million.
BDS has also played a significant role in the decision by states to ban Israeli or Israel-bound ships, as Malaysia did; to deny port to ships carrying weapons to Israel, as it recently transpired with Namibia, Portugal, and Malta; and to cut trade ties, as Turkey did. City councils from Liege in Belgium to Oslo in Norway to Barcelona in Catalonia have cut or totally severed ties with apartheid Israel.
All of this is bringing us closer than ever to what I call our South Africa moment, despite all the pain.
Revital Madar In May 2021, there was a clear shift in how Western media covered Israel’s reaction to Palestinian protests following the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to evacuate Palestinian families from Cheikh Jarrah. While the media did not become pro-Palestinian, Palestinian narratives were given more coverage than before. Coupled with support for Palestine on social media, that was a significant turning point that undermined Israeli propaganda.
Nevertheless, had Israel not reacted to Hamas’ attacks on October 7th in the pathological, violent, and genocidal way it did, it might have buried the Palestinian cause, especially given Hamas’ miscalculations over the reproduction of May 2021’s united front of Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel, and the assumption that it would have the support of “strategic allies.” After one year, the sense I have is of a split between the so-called Global South and North, between age groups and, above all, between citizens and their governments.
Consequently, we should differentiate between public opinion and states’ direct collaboration or lack of action – even on diplomatic fronts. There are cracks that just a year ago would have been unimaginable, such as calls to limit or stop the selling of arms to Israel. While they are far from enough, as the carnage continues daily, the annihilation and destruction that Israel brought on Gaza – and the live streaming of a genocide we have been watching for more than a year – cannot be undone. I will be very surprised if we do not see an intensification of current calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions in the following years.
If we are willing to listen to more than official statements, there is no question that Israel is in the process of becoming an isolated state, at least economically and culturally. One can only hope that this isolation, despite US and German support, will force it to relinquish its settler-colonial project, leading to the liberation of both Palestinians and Israeli Jews who live in historical Palestine in the form of either a two-state, one-state, or federation solution.
Both of you have previously discussed the impunity Israel seems to enjoy in the international community given its level of influence and convergence of interests vis-à-vis Western powers. Do you feel that academic institutions and communities contribute to that phenomenon? If so, how?
Omar Barghouti: Student-led mobilisations on campuses in the US, Europe, and elsewhere have mainstreamed the B and the D in BDS more than ever by focusing on the ethical and legal responsibility of academic institutions to end their direct and indirect complicity in enabling Israel to carry on with its genocide and underlying apartheid.
Universities that maintain financial ties to companies that are complicit in Israel’s atrocity crimes, including through procurement or investment, are themselves complicit. Universities that maintain academic ties to Israeli universities, all of which are deeply implicated in decades of Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights – as meticulously documented by Israeli anthropologists such as Maya Wind – are also complicit. Complicity can occur in several other ways, including repressing the peaceful advocacy of Palestinian rights, suppressing and censoring Palestinian voices, contributing to the epistemic erasure of Palestinians and, therefore, to the colonial process of dehumanising us.
Israeli universities are indeed indispensable in the design, implementation, justification and whitewash of the state’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and now genocide. This partnership takes many forms, including the development of weapon systems and military doctrines used in the commission of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity. They systematically provide the military-intelligence establishment with indispensable research—on archaeology, demography, geography, hydrology, psychology, philosophy, among other disciplines—and they tolerate, and often reward, racist speech, theories, and bogus “scientific” research the dehumanises the Indigenous Palestinians. This complicity also includes the construction of campus facilities and dormitories in the occupied Palestinian territory, as Hebrew University has done in East Jerusalem, for instance.
According to UN human experts, Israel’s ongoing genocide has included “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and, more recently, ecocide.” Even though the Israeli occupation forces have destroyed all Palestinian universities and many schools in Gaza, Israel’s scholasticide, a term coined by the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi at Oxford University, did not begin with the genocide, but instead goes back to the 1948 Nakba, as well documented by Palestinian and Israeli scholars. This should compel universities and scholars worldwide to act to end their own complicity in arguably the largest, most criminal, livestreamed attack on institutions of higher education in modern history.
Revital Madar: As noted recently by Nitzan Lebovic, “complicity is a form of entanglement.” As such, it involves different arms that, together, normalise dehumanisation, oppression, and violent crimes. As a part of society, academia – perhaps even more than other institutions – is one of the arms that enables Israel to whitewash its crimes by presenting itself as a liberal start-up nation. Even before it destroyed every university in Gaza, Israel, time and again, targeted Palestinian universities, violating both students’ and faculty’s freedom of expression and denying visas to international scholars who wished to collaborate with them, to name just a few ways in which Israel has been targeting Palestinians’ right for education. The confiscation and violation of Palestinian fundamental rights by Israel since its establishment aim to ensure the flourishing of only one ethnic segment of the population living under Israeli control.
Meanwhile, Israeli universities have historically played an active role in Israel’s settler-colonial project through their involvement and complicity in the occupation of Palestinian lands and the surveillance, oppression, and targeting of Palestinians in territories under Israeli control. This has been widely documented and simple to track, as it is often openly celebrated by Israeli higher education institutions. Prior to and after the establishment of Israel, Zionist militias established research bases on Israeli campuses, and students and faculty lent their expertise and equipment in support of the Zionist militias and the Israeli military. This collaboration with the Israeli army continues in the present day through programmes such as the “Erez” at Tel Aviv University, which trains IDF combat officers, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s “Havatzalot,” which trains intelligence officers, turning Israeli campuses into de facto military bases.
The participation of Israeli higher education institutions in Israel’s settler-colonial project and apartheid regime means that by actions such as attending conferences, financing projects, and establishing institutional partnerships, we make it clear that the ongoing discrimination and targeting of Palestinians is not a problem. Given the current situation, accepting a visiting position at an Israeli university amounts to tacit approval of a system where formal democracy is a privilege reserved for Israeli Jews. It understates, if not ignores, the role played by Israeli universities in an oppressive apparatus that is intertwined with the persecution and killing of Palestinians.
What are some of the concrete steps universities and academics can take today, should they want to show solidarity with Palestinians? And, in particular, the European University Institute, as a research university and an international organisation linked to the European Union institutions and EU member states?
Omar Barghouti: Given Israel’s ongoing genocide and the unprecedented level of Western complicity in it, to the extent that the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has described it as “total impunity”, dozens of UN human rights experts have called to “cancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements, and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory.” Accordingly, there are five urgent and concrete steps that universities must take to comply with their legal obligations and be more ethical.
First, they must enact academic boycotts of Israel and its complicit academic institutions. Second, they must divest and exclude from investment and procurement companies that are complicit in Israel’s grave human rights violations, particularly atrocity crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Third, they must adopt Ethical Procurement Policies and Ethical Investment Policies that exclude companies implicated in grave human rights violations anywhere. Additionally, they must form inclusive, democratic mechanisms that include representatives of faculty, students, and trade unions, where applicable, to monitor the enforcement of these policies. Fourth, universities must also consistently reject all forms of racism, uphold the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression, refrain from censoring or suppressing the peaceful advocacy of Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law, and reject the conflation between safety and discomfort over being exposed to controversial ideas. Finally, they must pressure EU institutions, such as through the League of European Research Universities (LERU), to exclude Israel and its complicit institutions, universities included, from Horizon projects and funding until Israel fully complies with its obligations under international law, including those stated in the two relevant rulings of the ICJ this year.
Revital Madar: The measures universities can and should take depend on the nature of the institution, public or private, and its current collaborations with complicit institutions and private actors. In addition to the actions noted above, universities should review their donors and investments, cut ties, and divest from sources complicit in human rights violations. This includes Israeli higher education institutions that, as noted, directly participate in the maintenance of Israel’s control and oppression of Palestinians, and actively discriminate against Palestinian academics and dissident Israeli-Jews. It also includes every private actor or association directly involved in human rights violations and in the ongoing normalisation and whitewashing of Israel.
Beyond these specific actions, universities and their communities can and should speak out to publicly express their support for the three basic demands of the BDS movement: ending the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, ending the Israeli apartheid regime, and committing to the right of return of Palestinian refugees. These three basic demands are all in line with international law. As a public university and an international organisation, a statement of this nature by the EUI could have a significant impact, influencing other institutions to follow through with similar steps and declarations while letting Israeli higher education institutions know that their work, prestige, attractiveness, and funding are impacted by their support of Israel’s criminal actions and policies.
During the last year, as support for the BDS increased, we have seen that the academic boycott represents a real threat to Israeli scholars and institutions. They are afraid of a situation in which they would have less access to funding, where scholars would avoid any collaboration with Israeli higher education institutions, and force Israeli academia to work in isolation. To date, there has been no shift in the actions and approach of heads of universities. However, faculty members who, in the past, vocally endorsed the persecution of Palestinian students and faculty, as well as Israeli-Jewish dissidents, have realised that they must change their tune and consider expressing support to, for example, a two-state solution. Dishonest as they may be, these statements prove that the BDS represents a non-violent measure to pressure Israeli-Jewish society to rethink its actions and their costs, even while Israel still enjoys diplomatic and military support from its allies.
Mr. Barghouti and Dr. Madar examined the ethical responsibility of academia in the Palestinian struggle at the event Just Academics? The Ethical Responsibility of Academics to End Complicity in Denying Justice for Palestinians, chaired by Professor Martijn Hesselink and organised by the Department of Law of the EUI. This event is a direct follow-up on the Task Force on Palestine’s recommendation to organise a series of events on the social responsibility of universities, as part of the EUI’s commitment to fostering academic freedom and inclusive debate on campus.
Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy (Ethics) at the University of Amsterdam.
Revital Madar is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, sovereignty, and violence in the context of Palestine-Israel.