Hala Marouf Associate News Editor

For the past two years, students at universities across Canada and the globe have been demanding that their institutions disclose and divest from Israeli institutions in light of the Zionist entity’s genocide of Palestinians. These students have been conscientiously objecting to the normalization of relations with the colonial power through encampments, protests, and other forms of direct action.

Though our administration claims neutrality, it financially benefits from the upholding of the apartheid state by accepting heaps of donor money from Israeli institutions, becoming beholden to these donors, hence the resistance to divestment—evident in the administration drawing a blind eye to student campaigns to end these collaborations. Israeli academic institutions play an active role in developing weapons and military technology that kill Palestinians and in providing academic justification for ethnic cleansing. This isn’t neutrality, but is instead complicity in the genocide of Palestinians by aligning freely with institutions that facilitate the human rights violations and war crimes committed by the IOF.

Occupy UofT, a student-led group organizing to end our institution’s enabling of the apartheid state, is urging the university to cease its exchange program with HUJI, the Hebrew University in Israel. HUJI is host to the Havatzalot program, a program that trains IOF intelligence officers on its campus. Over the past 5 years, 50 UofT students have gone on exchange to HUJI, going to class alongside trained combatants and war criminals. The demand is simple: that our academic institutions stop collaborating with those who kill and oppress, and stop enabling the genocide and scholasticide occurring in Gaza by suspending relations with universities in Israel. While UofT builds relationships with Israeli universities, no universities in Gaza remain.

As a culmination of a week of action, a crowd of students gathered outside of Sid Smith on October 8th to make their voices heard to our administration. As students took to the streets and reclaimed space on their campus, different speakers educated the crowd about UofT’s array of ties to the apartheid state. Students marched from Sid Smith, down St. George, to King’s College Circle, stopping intermittently outside different faculties to clarify their ties to Israeli institutions, ending outside the office of the President.

Additionally, a group of students has compiled a comprehensive timeline of ‘ties that bind’ UofT to Israeli institutions, spanning 2003 to the present day.

These include UofT’s status as a top worldwide collaborator with the Weizmann Institute of Science, an Israeli university deeply entrenched in the development of military technology for the state, as per its collaborations with drone manufacturer Elbit. Moreover, UofT is host to several institutional partnerships with Technion University in Israel through the physics, computer science, and math departments. Technion’s Advanced Defense Research Institute’s website openly boasts about turning academic research into “operational solutions for the battlefield,” particularly in “advancements in swarm drone technology, cyber defense, and battlefield robotics.” UofT’s collaborations with these institutions legitimize the Israeli state’s brutalization of Palestinians by enabling it to wash its war crimes with a veneer of academia and research.

The biggest partnership in the engineering faculty is through the Lyon Sachs Collaborative Research Fund and involves the civil engineering department. One of the projects funded by this partnership is between Technion Institute’s Center for Catastrophic Events and Extreme Loading and UofT’s Centre for Resilience of Critical Infrastructure, and it crucially involves test-bombing structures. Though it may be advertised purely defensively, as a means to acquire data on how to protect structures from blasts, this data, as stated by one of the speakers at the protest, can easily be used to ascertain what bombs can destroy which structures.

Moreover, students at the event vocally criticized UofT’s hosting of a recruitment event for the weapons manufacturing company Pratt & Whitney, which was shut down by student protesters on September 29th. Israel has been known to employ Pratt & Whitney aircraft in their offensive on Gaza since the Nakba in 1947.

Opponents of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions purport that universities are havens of reflection and free inquiry, and that this boycott violates the academic freedom of these institutions. In fact, academic freedom simply involves the freedom of academics to voice their opinions about their institutions and, more importantly, comes with the obligation of supporting the academic freedom of others. HUJI, however, has a pattern of suppressing academic freedom, such as when they pressured Palestinian professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian to resign because she called Israel’s operation in Gaza a genocide. UofT has an obligation to support the academic freedom of Palestinians and their right to an education, which has been degraded by the occupation.