Dr. Maya Wind's Powerful Call for Accountability at Erasmus University

Dr. Maya Wind, who described herself as "a Jewish Israeli, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors", addressed a packed auditorium of more than 250 people at campus Woudestein on 17 May 2024: "Israeli universities are complicit in genocide. And our own universities –including here in Rotterdam and elsewhere across the Netherlands— which support and legitimise and fund them and send students abroad for semesters there, they are all implicated. And so are all of us. But this also opens the door for us to intervene effectively. We have power. All the students here and the faculty who support them: Thanks for showing us just how much power we have. Because we have tremendous power, we can hold our own universities accountable to the values they claim that they uphold."

Her words resonated keenly with many of the students and faculty, who braved a rainy Friday evening and a largely deserted campus to hear Wind and other participants explore and discuss dimensions of EUR connections with Israeli universities in the event: "Towers of Ivory and Steel: Scrutinising our university's complicities and possibilities." Some other people joined the online livestream. 

The Many Sides of Complicity

Wind's work carefully documents the various ways in which Israeli universities are structurally implicated in the actions of the Israeli state and the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). These institutions, Wind shows, host military academies and training programs. They also develop weaponry and legal interpretations to justify IDF attacks. Their complicity extends to different academic fields, including archaeology, where research is used to erase Palestinian history, and Middle Eastern studies, where Arabic is taught as a "foreign language" for occupation. University campuses themselves have been strategically placed on the ruins of Palestinian villages and serve as vehicles for further Israeli expansion, explains Wind. 

Scholasticide 

While Israeli higher education is instrumental to the Israeli state, Wind argued, "Palestinian education has always been regarded as a threat to its rule, so it [the Israeli state] has targeted it relentlessly at every turn." Since October 2023, this "scholaticide" has intensified and led to the destruction of all universities in Gaza. As Wind explained: "It's not only that Israel is trying to eliminate the Palestinian people, but also centuries of knowledge production, culture, history, central to who they are as a people." 

Universities Actively Sustaining the Genocide

How do Israeli universities react to this scholasticide? Wind explained: "Not one, not a single one of the Israeli universities' administration has at any point called on the Israeli government to cease the bombing on Palestinian universities and the utter decimation of Palestinian higher education. And this is not coincidental because Israeli universities have not only been, for decades and, by design, pillars of Israeli settler colonial rule and apartheid. Israeli universities are actively sustaining this genocide right now." 

Silencing of Critical Voices

Wind also referred to the silencing of critical voices in Israeli universities, which she described as "actively standing in the way of change." "They suppress –and increasingly violently so—Palestinian organising for liberation on their campuses." She specifically referred to the long-term persecution of one of her mentors at Hebrew University, professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, "a luminous and courageous feminist scholar," who has been accused of incitement and whose work has been confiscated by the police. "Only international visibility will keep her safe from Israeli state violence," Wind said.

While Wind's book is new, the author kept reminding the audience that its core findings have already been highlighted for decades by Palestinian scholars. These scholars have also developed the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a "road map" for Israeli universities to stop their complicity and for universities internationally to hold them accountable. 

The entire event, including the contributions during the panel discussion, can be rewatched in this video. 

Panel Discussion

At EUR's event, Wind was introduced by Dr. Dina Zbeidy, lecturer and researcher at Hogeschool Leiden, who knows Wind since they both were students and activists at Columbia University in the US. Wind then shared the panel with other academics and students. Rosalba Icaza - Professor in Global Politics, Feminisms and Decoloniality at Erasmus University's International Institute for Social Studies (ISS) - connected Wind's book with international efforts to revisit the university's pedagogical approaches and ethical foundations. 

Contributions from Other Academics and Students

In a pre-recorded message, Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether, Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut, in the US), underscored Wind's key contributions to our understanding of universities' political and economic role in contemporary societies. Student members of the University Council Aki Negate and Tom van Dijken spoke of the advocacy, critical educational engagements, and activism of students in Gaza. 

Organisers and Moderator

The event was organisied by a group of academics from four different EUR campuses. Two of them, Jeff Handmaker (International Institute of Social Studies) and Zara Sharif (Erasmus University College), linked Wind's concerns with EUR's existing connections with Israeli universities and EUR students' protests against them. The moderator was Jiska Engelbert (Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences), theme lead of the Vital Cities and Citizens EUR initiative, which co-sponsored the event together with the Legal Mobilization Platform.