`It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as `scholasticide - UN OHCHR.

Among the many dimensions of deliberate destruction of Gaza is that of the Palestinian education sector. In its April 2024 expression of concern about the pattern of assaults on Gazan schools, universities, students, and teachers (at which time over 80% of schools in Gaza were damaged or destroyed) experts of the UN said `it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as `scholasticide

Subsequent reports that `[e]very university in Gaza has been obliterated and `[l]ibraries have been burned to the ground leave no doubt that `scholasticide a term which refers to `the systematic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure; also seeis indeed apposite to describe what has taken place.

One of the many urgent questions to which the appalling phenomenon of scholasticide gives rise concerns the response to it by western educational institutions. On 4th January of this year, at its 138th annual meeting, the American Historical Association (the oldest learned society in the US which was founded by an act of Congress) voted in favour of a resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza. Yet a week and a half later, the elected council of the Association, comprising 16 voting members, vetoed the resolution - which had passed by an overwhelming 428 votes in favour to 88 against - and rejected it as the official position of the AHA

This overturning could in turn be regarded as an instance of institutional betrayal, which holds that institutions, no less than individuals, can violate and betray trust. As the veto by the American Historical Society leadership of the vote of the majority of its members to condemn scholasticism in Gaza graphically illustrates, institutional betrayal has chilling implications for the ethical calling out of egregious human rights violations in all contexts as well as for the travesties being perpetrated upon Gaza.

It is not new, although still often confronting, that academic institutions, disciplines, and professional bodies can be guilty of perpetrating harm and of ostracising their own members who speak out against such injustices. A recent and pertinent case is the collusion of sections of the American Psychological Association (APA) with the US Department of Defence, report of which was described as `devastating and which led to a public apology along with `a formal commitment of the [US] APA to correct its mistakes

In fact the impugning of students and staff who speak out against the attempted annihilation of Gaza which include penalties imposed by the leadership of the academic institutions in which the right to peaceful protest has traditionally been upheld - is proceeding apace. In violation of the reasonable expectation and often self-proclaimed mandate that universities will protect the right to peaceful expression of protest on their own campuses, the compounding and egregious irony of the current period is that peaceful expression of protest against the ongoing genocide in Gaza is routinely described as anti-Semitic while the genocide itself is not censured.

For the most part and in most cases, the leadership of western universities, in Australia as in other western countries, mirrors mainstream media in failing to note the critical distinction between criticism of the state of Israel for its ongoing perpetration of genocide against the Palestinian people, and criticism of and prejudice against Jews per se (many of whom, including Nazi holocaust survivors and anti-Zionist rabbis, are appalled by the actions of the state of Israel and of what is seen as a betrayal of Judaism; Gaza Besieged, Jews Divided, & a World in Pain: Gabor, Aaron, & Daniel Mat in Conversation ; Existence of Zionist Israel is antithetical to Judaism: Rabbi Weiss ) Said universities are not only abrogating their mandate (i.e. reasonable expectation that educational institutions should uphold and protect peaceful expression of views) but are engaged in penalising peacefully protesting students and staff in a context which has traditionally been regarded as safe in which to express dissent. The institutional betrayal- glaringly apparent in the failure of academia both to condemn scholasticide in Gaza and the sanctioning of staff and students who peacefully protest it- could not be more stark.

The extent of the current scapegoating and penalising of students and staff by university authorities of western `liberal democracies is startling. Disturbingly, it is not an exaggeration to see it not only as complicity but as active academic participation in what has become a new form of McCarthyism; It is prevalent, for example, at Ivy League universities in the US including Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University (at which the student body of the latter was pioneering in protesting the Vietnam War). The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, has likewise been ruthless in its crack-down on peaceful protest, in enlisting the police in the breakup of student encampments, and in sanctioning and suspending students and staff who express even the mildest peaceful opposition to the carnage inflicted on Gaza with western government support.

University administrators have shown themselves to be unwilling and unable to protect the right to peaceful protest on campus (as former Columbia University president Minouche Shafiks `deer in the headlights response to a US Congressional committee hearing clearly showed ;Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges has excoriated the `absolute moral depravity of universities which have become corporatised, beholden to trustee boards and donorsand intolerant of expression of dissent even in the face of the cataclysmic ongoing assaults against the Palestinian people which have been determined by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to constitute plausible genocide and for which the International Criminal Court (ICC) has sought arrest warrants.

An additional dimension of academic abrogation, institutional betrayal, and implicit and explicit western support for scholasticide goes further. This is not only by investment in companies which themselves invest in the military machine which upholds the genocide (hence student and other calls for divestment). In the case of MIT it is in the form of direct contribution to operation of the military itself. Collaboration with the Israeli military is institutionalised at MIT (`institutional collaboration) in the form of direct ties with Elbit Systems - Israels largest defence contractor - which as suspended PhD students and members of the Coalition for Palestine at MIT Richard Solomon and Prahlad Iyengar describe, `gives Elbit privileged access to the campus, MIT faculty and expertise, the ability to recruit graduates, and to engage in research which has practical application to conducting of Israeli assaults on Gaza How MIT Silences Students and Facilitates Genocide - YouTube What this ultimately means is that MIT’s research can enable a genocide and in fact is enabling the ongoing genocide against Palestinians America’s Academic Gulag (w/ MIT Student Activists) | The Chris Hedges Report

As Melbourne-born Antony Loewenstein discusses in his book of the same name, Palestine is in fact `the laboratory for weapons testing and operation in many parts of the world Elbit Systems and major weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin- which actively recruit on the MIT campus and to which many western institutions have ties do not just assist but perpetrate and sustain the genocide in Gaza and rights violations in diverse locations around the globe.

We are on an ignominious path when the leadership of academic institutions traditionally styled as contexts of free inquiry not only invest in companies which support genocide and sanction students and faculty who protest this, but who - as in the case of MIT senior administration - have little compunction in directly serving the US and Israeli military by way of advanced technology research collaboration and partnerships.

Yet academic - in this sense like other - institutions of western capitalist economies are not immune from the sectional and other interests which influence their operation in a myriad of ways. Far from being emblematic of rationality and `reason, celebration of intellect can also mean enhanced capacity to ration_alise._ And when that comes to be seen as the smokescreen it is, universities - like other governing bodies and corporations - can be no less decisive in the blatant exercise of power to silence and sanction their critics.

So what at this point which is very belated - should the governing bodies and senior academic and administrative staff of universities be doing in relation to the continuing western-backed Israeli assaults on the Palestinian people?

At a minimum, they should be taking the lead in articulating and publicising the distinction between criticism of the actions of the state of Israel and anti-Semitism. This means a clear statement from all universities with respect to the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, because conflation of the two remains common and confusing in public discourse and the stakes of this distinction are becoming increasingly urgent as the military assaults on the Palestinian people continue. Many Australians continue to remain unaware of this distinction and that it is possible to be both Jewish and anti-Zionist. Hence reference to the growing body of material which supports this fact in the form of reputable links such as the following should not only be included on university websites but should feature prominently on them.

Conflation of criticism of the state of Israel with criticism of and prejudice towards Judaism and the Jewish people per se (as in the definition of anti-Semitism by theInternational Holocaust Remembrance Alliance(IHRA), which clearly accounts for much of the timidity of western academic leadership in dissenting from this conflation) not only stymies criticism of Israel where it is warranted. It contributes to a climate and situation in which those who do criticise the attempted destruction of Gaza are themselves criticised, stigmatised, and penalised while said destruction continues unabated. Hence the importance of clarification and leadership surely particularly by university governing bodies of the stakes of widespread and continuing conflation of criticism of the actions of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism_._

A further key point of which the public is largely unaware and which universities should take the lead in publicising is that Zionism is a western and European phenomenon which did not originate in the Middle East nor speak to the experience of people of that region. It is also the case that Jewish and Palestinian people not only coexisted peacefully prior to establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 but Jewish people were offered sanctuary by Muslim countries at the time of the Inquisition Existence of Zionist Israel is antithetical to Judaism: Rabbi Weiss That this is not well known, also because not widely declared by and within western academia itself, speaks to the continuing shadow of Orientalism, the mindset and prism elaborated by Palestinian scholar Edward Said through which the non-western world has long been viewed.

Speaking truth to power entails costs, and the sanctioning of students who have peacefully protested the genocide in Gaza is as harsh as many of us regard it as illegitimate. It is disturbing that academic leadership in western countries, including Australia, has committed institutional betrayal not only in this regard but by forfeiting the opportunity to unequivocally articulate to the public that criticism of Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism. Should we not demand more of our universities and institutions of `higher learning? And if they fail to step up in this regard in this new age of McCarthyist prohibition of those who speak out against the genocidal actions of the state of Israel against the Palestinians, how is the tipping point question at the 1954 US Senate hearings to Joseph McCarthy by Army Counsel Joseph Welch not applicable: `Have you no sense of decency,sir?