Western Universities Are Committed to Defend the Zionist Project, Not to Stop the Genocide or Study Its Origins

I’m grateful to the students for inviting me to come to speak here today, in this university-within-a-university that you have created since the beginning of the genocide. Although a big part of my scholarship for the last thirty years has focused on this place between the river and the sea, the university where I’m teaching didn’t reach out to me to ask how I understand the current situation and its history.

And yet, the administration has sent several messages in the last couple of months indicating that they consulted members of the Jewish community at Brown. But it is important to clarify—it was never me that they consulted, neither as a Jew nor as a scholar whose work is about Palestine and Israel. I wonder: Who are the Jews that they did consult? Do they have any expertise in the history of the colonization of Palestine? Or is their knowledge shaped mostly by a Euro-American history of Zionism which for decades has normalized the ongoing Nakba?

The fact that the university can bypass anti-Zionist scholars like me and always consult the same Jews as if they are representatives of a Jewish “community”—a community that was invented to exclude Jews like me—is because since the late eighteenth century in Europe, and after World War II in the United States, the West has decided to support the Zionist project and recognize it as representative of all the Jews. Despite the fact that prior to that moment, the Zionist project was marginal—yes, marginal!—the West continues to force us diverse Jews to be represented by those they have chosen as “our” representatives. They never represented us and were always against us. The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) is such an example. Despite our vocal opposition to invite its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to campus during the genocide in Gaza, Brown invited him and gave him the stage to state that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. We do not have representatives. Jews never had “representatives”—or not until the Zionist movement began to act as if it represents all Jews, and the West (recognizing it as such) facilitated the destruction of Palestine in 1948. And it is only after the Holocaust, when the Allies decided to support this rather marginal movement, ignored or rejected by the majority of Jews, that the West integrated the Zionist’s claim for statehood into the new world order the West imposed.

We have always been diverse communities, and many of us lived for centuries in the Jewish Muslim world. And more importantly, until the creation of the state of Israel, Arabs and Muslims were never the “enemies” of the Jews. Imposing Zionist–Jewish leadership on diverse Jewish communities only served Western imperial interests: the West’s global struggle against Islam and Arabs.

We non-Zionists or anti-Zionist Jews, whose histories were stolen from us by the Zionists supported by the West, were for a long time the silent majority: Jews of all kinds, colors, and beliefs forced to be identified in histories and memories and actions that were not ours.

No one will speak for us regarding what Israel-funded-by-the-West is doing in Gaza. We see genocide and we will not be silent about it! We are here to name this violence for what it is, to protest against the genocide, and against the complicity of our universities in funding the genocide and trying to gaslight us into thinking that they are not.

Since its beginning, did we see any task force created by the university to study the genocide? Any research group with the scholars teaching here who work on genocide, Palestine, and the entire area between the river and the sea? Was any dean hired to provide you, our students, with the proper study program to understand this genocide? Was there any emergency plan to welcome students and scholars from Gaza whose universities were destroyed as part of the genocide?

Since the beginning of the genocide, the administrations of many universities instead created task forces to silence the communities of students, staff, and scholars, to limit protests, to police the truth, to deprive us of spaces for gathering and thinking, to investigate, to punish, to arrest. From the very beginning, the goal was to intimidate us, so that we might be afraid to say that it is a genocide—but we will not be silenced about it. We are not afraid and since the beginning of the genocide we protest it, we study it, we investigate the entanglement of our universities with it. The more we are repressed the more we are, the more we are—the less we are afraid!

We say it aloud and with millions—this is a genocide and it has ought not to have happened. No excuses. It will never disappear from our minds, hearts, and scholarship, even when it will end (whatever is the meaning of “ending” a disaster of such a scale). With this genocide against Palestinians, it is clear how much the West is invested in keeping Zionist Jews as mercenaries of the white supremacist imperial order that continues to fashion the world in which we live—a world where such a genocide could unfold for over two hundred days and where people are expected not to see genocide when there is one. We see genocide and this is why we are here. We are horrified anew every day by the genocide and every day we are here to amplify the collapse of decades-old Western lies about Palestine.

What are we doing here when we demand “Divest”? We are actually asking for the truth; we insist that the truth should be said and shared with others. The truth is that our universities fund the genocide.

We do not have illusions about the nature of our universities, but we do not consider the universities to be what the administration or the board of trustees are trying to make of them. We are here, and as long as we stay, we are deciding what the university should be. This encampment stands because we want our university to be what we believe a university should be—a place to facilitate learning relevant not to the imperial world but to a decolonized world, and to question the foundations and funding of the knowledge they endorse. We want our universities to be in solidarity with those who survived the destruction of their institutions of higher education, like is the case in Gaza.

For us—those who gather in solidarity with Gaza every week—it is crystal clear: our universities should not design weapons, should not fund weapon companies, should not benefit from the murder of people, and should shield the infrastructure of education from the interests of weapons and other predatory companies.

When we demand “Divest,” we actually force the university to acknowledge the obvious—so long as the university is invested in the genocide, it cannot assume its role in producing true knowledge about the world in which this genocide unfolds. We will not camouflage this truth, since we are here to say bigger truths—about the genocide and the regime that perpetrates it, as well as about the West that is invested in its perpetuation. We will not be used to normalize this.

When we demand “Divest,” we insist on our right to seek the truth as part of what we understand should be the mission of higher education.

Let’s make it clear—it is not about freedom of speech—it is about truth telling. There is a genocide in Gaza and all this campaign of repression of us amplifying the truth about Gaza is to deny that this is a genocide. I wonder how in 1943, 1944, or 1945—when it was clear that Jews have been exterminated—did American universities act?

We cannot avoid asking why do we have to struggle for the truth in academic institutions? Because the universities and many other institutions are being funded by and invested in imperial technologies in order to make sure the truth of their nature and entanglement is not being immediately legible, and that the obvious cannot be named.

These are encampments of truth telling! And this is why the universities call the police to dismantle them.

These encampments respond and amplify the truth telling of hundreds of journalists, photojournalists, and media workers in Gaza, who act as prophets—literally risking their lives to broadcast the truth of what is being done to them and the truth of the genocidal regime responsible for it.

When universities consult “Jews” when they devise their counter-truth-telling policies, they want to make the world believe that all Jews support this genocidal regime, and those who do not are antisemitic.

We do not support the genocide and we refuse to be captive of the position the West shaped for us, by denying us our histories and making of us members of their idea of what Jews are and should be!

I’m a proud Muslim Jew, Arab Jew, Berber Jew, Algerian Jew, Palestinian Jew, inhabiting with love all these unruly identities that the Western Zionist project wants to eradicate, as they tell different truths about who we are and how antisemitic is this Western project that forced us to part away from our Jewish Muslim world.

Let me end with words from Rosa Luxemburg, who was imprisoned for her antiwar activism; that is, her militantism toward total divestment from the infrastructure of war. “The only way to rebirth is the school of public life itself”—keep running this school of public life.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches political theory at Brown University from an anticolonial perspective, using photography and material culture. Her latest books: The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (2024) and Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019); her latest films: The World Like a Jewel in the Hand: Unlearning Imperial Plunder II (2023) and Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder I (2019); her latest exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020) and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).