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The Israeli anthropologist Maya Wind explained the structural role played by Israeli universities in entrenching the Zionist colonial project and in supporting the system of apartheid against Palestinians, stressing that this role provides a strong basis for calls for academic boycott.
Her remarks came in an interview with Mediapart, in which she drew on the Israeli army’s archives and the universities’ own documents.
Wind said that Israeli academic institutions have, since their establishment, been assigned a central mission: to build the repressive apparatus and provide the intellectual and organizational infrastructure for the apartheid system.
She explained that they were constructed to function as direct tools in the service of “Judaization” and settlement policies.
Journalist Younes Abzouz, who conducted the interview, noted that in her book Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, the researcher presents arguments that bolster the boycott campaigns led by student movements at Western universities.
Wind said Israeli universities were deliberately built in Palestinian areas—both within the 1948 borders and in the territories occupied in 1967—to reinforce settlement expansion and demographic control.
She pointed to Ben-Gurion University, the University of Haifa, the Hebrew University, and Ariel University as institutions that played direct roles in expanding settlements and effectively annexing land.
She also highlighted what she called the “deep interconnection” between universities and Israel’s military industries, noting that the army’s scientific infrastructure emerged on university campuses and that major arms companies were founded within these institutions. Universities, she added, continue to provide officer training and legal cover for occupation-related policies.
The Canada-based researcher said this connection has only deepened since Oct. 7, as universities granted extensive privileges to student reservists—including scholarships, loans, and academic exemptions.
These measures allow them to combine military service with their studies during a war that international organizations describe as amounting to “genocide” in Gaza.
She added that, throughout the war, universities continued providing direct support to the military establishment, including the development of combat technologies in Tel Aviv University laboratories, while simultaneously imposing severe restrictions on Palestinian students and academics critical of the war.
These measures included the arrest of students over social media posts, as well as the detention of Palestinian law professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian over statements linked to her research on genocide in Gaza.
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