Israel in the Academy and the Academy in Israel Since October 7

The sirens woke me at 6:30 in the morning on October 7, 2023. I live in a small community in the Negev Desert, home to a campus of Ben-Gurion University, where I work. We are remote enough that, unlike communities just an hour west of us, we only rarely used to hear sirens and find ourselves in shelters. In fact, it took me a second or two even to understand what the sirens meant. That morning, however, my family and I found ourselves in the shelter, and soon after we began to hear the explosions—some from falling rockets, others the booms of the interceptors. The safe room in our house is also my home office. We quickly turned on my computer and watched the news with increasing shock. I remember our disbelief when initial reports spoke of a hundred casualties in the Hamas attack. As we continued to watch and listen, the numbers continuously rose, and footage began to stream in. It is difficult to remember whether it was the rapidly climbing numbers or the footage that was most horrifying. As the extent of Hamas’s infiltration became clearer, we began to wonder just how far into the country it had reached. I was in the shelter with my wife and three daughters. I didn’t know how I would protect them should invaders show up outside the shelter door.

As it turned out, I was among the lucky ones. The terrorists did not make it as far as my community—although we did not know that for certain for many days. For weeks after October 7, attempting to get any academic work done was made difficult by a range of factors: the general feeling of being in a fog of shock and distress, which made it hard to focus; the round-the-clock guard duty we took upon ourselves in our community; and a range of concrete, almost banal consequences of the attack.

On Friday, October 6, I had been preparing for the annual meeting of the European Association for Israel Studies, which was scheduled to open that Sunday, October 8, on my campus. I don’t remember just when the announcement went out, but, of course, the conference did not take place. Shortly thereafter, the fall semester was scheduled to begin. It did not. It was repeatedly postponed, and the 2023–24 academic year across Israel finally began only on December 31, 2023. It was a strange, incomplete, and chaotic year: My university, located in the south of the country, not far from the border region known as the “Gaza envelope,” was particularly affected by the attack and the ensuing war. The Ben-Gurion University community, which includes Jews, Arabs, and others, saw 115 of its faculty, staff, and students murdered that day and ten others taken hostage; still more were killed or wounded in battle in the ensuing days. Some remain hostages, continuing to wilt in Hamas captivity even as I write these words, more than a year later.

Israel, as many readers may know, has mandatory conscription, which means that students begin their studies at a later stage in life—most undergraduates enter college around the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. Beyond this, after mandatory active duty, many Israelis (mostly men) remain on reserve duty until at least the age of forty-five. Consequently, even when the academic year finally began, a significant percentage of our male students and a somewhat smaller percentage of women were absent. Israeli academic institutions continue to grapple with the effort, on the one hand, to accommodate reservist soldiers so that they will have paid as small an academic price as possible as they leave their families and homes and, by necessity, their studies for their military duty, while on the other hand attempting to maintain academic standards. This raises a host of dilemmas. How do I grade a student, for example, who had to complete a seminar as a requirement for his degree and handed in the final assignment but had never been able to attend any of the discussions?

As I mentioned, I am one of the lucky ones. Nobody in my immediate family was murdered or taken hostage. It is important to understand, however, what it means to be in the orbit of those who suffered great losses: the daughter and son-in-law of a close colleague and friend who were murdered while protecting their son (he was shot but survived); the nephew of the chief administrator of the institute to which I belong, who was abducted and is still being held in Gaza (we don’t know if he is alive or dead); an MA student of mine who lived on a kibbutz near Gaza and has been uprooted from his home for the past year after spending some twenty hours in the shelter with his wife and four young children on October 7. (Just a few weeks ago, that student actually managed to hand in a draft chapter. I’m not sure I would have been able to produce any work of substance or value in his situation.) I could extend this list. Nothing about the academic world or the experience of Israeli academics can be divorced from this all-pervasive reality. It is in this reality that we have attempted in the past year to breathe some life into our academic work.

Understandings of Zionism

Academics in Israel (as in many parts of the world) are viewed as being mostly on the political left. This perception is largely true, at least among academics in the humanities and social sciences, notwithstanding the difficulty of parsing just what the words left and right mean in the current Israeli context. It may be more accurate to say that academics in Israel tend toward the political and ideological camp that is opposed—at times profoundly and vehemently opposed—to the current government, although it is also important to stress that this opposition may stem from differing motivations and reasonings. My own opposition is based on what I see as the antihumanistic and antidemocratic worldview that motivates this government, rooted in impulses that have, sadly, become increasingly pervasive in Israeli society, ever more so in the past year, which has also seen a deeply disturbing, increasing indifference to death and destruction—certainly of Palestinians, but even of Israelis. My opposition to this government stems also from my understanding of Zionism. To some readers, this may sound counterintuitive, given how Zionism has been represented—misrepresented, in my view—on college campuses and in a significant body of academic research.

One impact of the whirlpooling discourse after October 7 has been the increased legitimacy granted—whether in demonstrations or on the pages of academic publications—to a dehumanizing demonization of Zionism that often has little to do with the historical record, with what most Zionists thought or wrote or with how they conducted themselves. To be sure, Zionism was always a multifaceted phenomenon. But as a historian of Zionism, I think it is fair to say that much of Zionism much of the time was not rooted in the Jewish supremacy that is so flippantly and unfittingly attributed to it both by some opponents and by some of those who claim today to speak in its name and to represent it. It was rooted, rather, in the fundamental belief that the Jewish collective has a right to self-determination in national terms (the terms in which very many Jews in Israel and beyond understand themselves) and in the long-standing (if shifting and complex) bond that the Jewish people has had with the Land of Israel (as it is known in Jewish parlance) for the past three thousand years or so.

In the vast bulk of Zionist thought, this belief was firmly rooted in the broadly humanistic notion that such rights are shared by all. Zionism did not demand these rights for Jews as some sort of exclusive Jewish privilege but rather as a claim for equality of rights. Contrary to common perceptions, this included a wide range of ways in which Zionists of various stripes sought pathways through which the Jewish claim might be made compatible (if imperfectly) with Arab claims. Indeed, for many (although certainly not all) Zionists, the revolution they sought to bring about in Jewish life entailed a reunion with their origins in “the Orient” and a fusion of Jewish and Arab cultures. “Our rebirth,” as one writer expressed it in the early twentieth century, “is a part of the general rebirth of the nations of the East from their subjugation by the West.” In the 1920s, Itamar Ben-Avi, a leading figure of what was at the time the right wing of Zionism, argued that Jews and Arabs alike were indigenous to Palestine and that what was needed was the cultivation of a shared patriotism (which he termed “Palestinism”) and a division of Palestine into Jewish and Arab cantons, united in a federal system, in order to create “a shared community of Arabs and Jews, based on the Swiss model.” To be sure, notions of “racial kinship,” in the language of the time, were not universally embraced among Zionist writers and leaders, but they were fundamental to a great deal of Zionist thought, spanning Zionist politics from right to left. More ubiquitous yet were diverse efforts to articulate a way to make Palestine a space shared by Arabs and Jews together. A full historical picture must consider all of those voices (as well as those opposing them), and the voices, choices, and agency of Palestine’s Arabs—a piece of the picture that is often missing in historical treatments of the budding conflict.

It was axiomatic for much of Zionism, in fact, that Zionism and humanism were not only compatible but fundamentally of a piece. Stemming, moreover, from an acute sense of Jewish crisis—a central component of which was a crisis of culture and identity and the values that underlie them—it was clear in much of Zionist thinking that the ultimate goal was, as David Ben-Gurion put it, “the fulfillment of the redemptive vision” rooted in the vision of truth and justice of the biblical prophets. Although the creation of the state, as he would put it not long after its establishment, had been “a miracle,” it was clear even to him that the state was not an end in itself but rather a means to much more ambitious goals. The establishment of the state, he wrote a few years after he declared Israel’s independence, “does not mean that the vision has been fulfilled.” That vision, he would argue in multiple forms and manifold formulations, would be met when Israel lived up to its obligation to the age-old Jewish “vision of national and human redemption.”

I can already imagine readers who will raise an eyebrow (or more) at my suggestion that Zionism is a liberationist, humanistic ideology in most of its manifestations. I believe this is the case, and I am confident that the evidence supports this. Like any loyalty to any kind of group—from family to social class, religious groups, or nations—Zionism was forced to contend with the inherent tension between the particular and the universal. Consider the words of Aimé Césaire, the poet and politician from Martinique: “I’m not going to confine myself to some narrow particularism,” Césaire writes. “But I do not intend either to become lost in a disembodied universalism. . . . I have a different idea of a universal. It is a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.” Now compare these words with those of Joseph Klausner, a historian and Zionist intellectual (and a central focus of my own current research), who argued that the idea of a conflict “between nationalism and humanism has in fact no foundation in the concept of nationhood: The national idea, in other words, the need for multiple and diverse nations, and the importance of nurturing the spiritual assets of each unique nation . . . is based on the needs of humanity itself. Were it possible for nations to cease to exist and for human beings to become one general group, humanity would lose a great deal in its values and spirit.”

Again, it is difficult to make sweeping claims that would include all varieties of Zionism. But for most of its history, most of Zionism much of the time was an ideology of Jewish liberation, one that claimed not Jewish supremacy but rather the same collective national rights for Jews as those claimed by other national groups and that sought Jewish participation in the universal drama of humanity. These values have been increasingly challenged in Israeli society and culture for longer than the past year, of course. This year, however—which has seen a deliberate normalization of corruption by Israel’s government, an intentional sowing of discord and animosity, and a withering of sensitivity to fundamental human values and the value of human life—feels like an overpowering and heartrending rupture. Some have suggested various versions of post-Zionism or, as the rabbi and Jewish studies scholar Shaul Magid has called it, a “counter-Zionism,” in response. My own sense is that it is rather a return to Israel’s Zionist sources that offers the most promising foundation for renewed hope and for a pathway out of our current morass. The term often used in Hebrew to refer to the literary, linguistic, and cultural currents associated with the Zionist project is Tehiya, revival or rebirth. This notion was based on a classical Zionist diagnosis that held that Jews were a people on its deathbed, in need of a revival, of renewed life. The air of those foundational values would serve us well, I think, in our much-needed search for a new breath of life in our current moment of crisis and breakdown.

Attacks on Israeli Academe from Within

This understanding of Zionism shapes my view of the current Israeli government not only as destructive to Israel’s democracy and humanistic foundation but also as fundamentally anti-Zionist. This is a government that in idea and in practice has launched a campaign of destruction against the core ideas of Zionism as I’ve roughly outlined them here. And in practice, it is a government that seems bent upon dismantling the achievements of Zionism in the most tangible, practical sense, as well as in its more abstract and far-reaching ethical and cultural ambitions—and this has direct implications for Israeli higher education. One of the institutions that has been under sustained attack since this government came to power two years ago is in fact Israeli academe—a flagship of Zionist cultural work since the opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925. A revival of the spirit and the intellect was a leading goal of Zionism. The establishment of academic institutions, to quote Joseph Klausner once again, constituted no less than “the redemption of the Jewish spirit from foreign servitude” and hence was a core component of the Zionist undertaking. The current government’s efforts to cast the academic world as a supporter of terror and to control and to politicize the Council on Higher Education, the national body that determines policy for Israel’s universities, exemplify how it has adopted an approach that is the diametrical opposite of much that Zionism was about.

The sense that this government is intent upon this kind of destruction—indeed, that it has already succeeded in leading us to social, moral, economic collapse; to the decline of Israel’s standing in the international arena; and to a breakdown of the educational system, the social welfare system, and more—now pervades much of the experience of many Israelis, academics or not. This past July I returned from the joint annual meeting of the Association for Israel Studies and the European Association for Israel Studies (in the latter case, meeting for the first time since the October 2023 meeting had to be canceled because of the war). The flight was filled with other Israeli scholars returning from the conference. It was striking to note that the primary topics of conversation among all the returnees were the questions of how much damage had already been done to Israeli academia (and to Israel), how much of a future we may have as academics in Israel, whom we know who has already left and who is considering such a move, and how to determine the point at which such a move becomes necessary. We have effectively adopted a refugee mindset, whether or not we have made the choice to become refugees. From a longue durée perspective on Jewish history, my own sense is that a choice to become a refugee is a choice to return to being “wandering Jews,” both on a personal level and in a collective, historical sense. I tend to accept the classical Zionist argument that such an existence was not only culturally and existentially fraught (history seems to have borne this out) but also ethically problematic, since it meant that Jews would necessarily have to rely on others for their defense.

I have no doubt that the current war began as a war of more than legitimate self-defense. But I am less confident that it remains such a war at this point, at least in some of its components. And with a leadership that seems not only to have no compelling vision of what is to come after—a leadership that seems bent upon normalizing destruction, mass death of Palestinians and Israelis, pogroms by settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, corruption, and hatred—I wonder how we can pick ourselves up from the moral Sodom and Gomorrah that we are becoming. How do we reestablish a belief in the humanistic values that undergirded the Zionist project? How do we recapture the ability to envision a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike?

Attacks on Israeli Academe from Without

Israeli academics, however, have been contending with attacks on another front as well in the past year. Israel has always been a complex phenomenon—in marked contrast with efforts in some academic circles to portray it in black-and-white terms, in a betrayal of our task, as scholars, of presenting complex pictures of complicated realities. And being Israeli is a complex kind of being. This is no less the case with the current predicament in which we find ourselves as Israeli academics. For at the same time that we have been under sustained attack by the antiliberal, anti-intellectual, and anti-Zionist government that has been ruling the country for the past two years (and against which many of us have been spending our weekends demonstrating over the course of those same two years), we have also been forced to contend with spoken or unspoken boycotts, with suspensions of international collaborative projects, and in general with an international academic world that has become less than hospitable. This deepest thrust of this offensive is most palpable, however, not in specific acts targeting particular Israeli scholars but in the intellectual-conceptual paradigms that have come to be regnant in many academic circles. These discourses penetrate more deeply in terms of their effect, not only on Israel and Israeli academics but ultimately on the very pursuit of humanities and social science scholarship broadly conceived, since they, too, are rooted in a (different) variety of antihumanistic and antiliberal thinking.

Both the language of campus demonstrations and the published work of significant clusters of scholars use this intellectual-conceptual framing. Ostensibly acceptable campus discourse in many countries today includes phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and “by any means necessary,” which, by any reasonable interpretation, legitimize the killing of Israelis and the eradication of their state, and eulogies by student groups celebrating Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist mob boss and mass murderer of Israelis and Palestinians alike. One American historian could declare that he was “exhilarated” at the sight of the October 7 Hamas attack. To be sure, he qualified his statement with a recognition that the attack had involved some “horrific acts.” Such horror, however, evidently did not significantly mitigate his overall exhilaration. Can one imagine a faculty member at any university making a similar statement in any other context? Would a Russian studies professor proclaim “exhilaration” regarding the murder, rape, and mutilation of 1,200 civilians—men, women, children, babies—in the Russo-Ukrainian War, whether those casualties were Russian or Ukrainian? A Holocaust scholar expressing “exhilaration” at the bombing of Dresden?

The impact of statements such as this, and of the legitimization they receive more broadly, is not only to create an environment in which many Israeli and, at least sometimes, Jewish scholars generally, are unwelcome. It also suggests that the underlying assumptions of humanities scholarship—which I take to be assumptions regarding humanity itself—do not apply to us (as Jews? as Israelis?). When aimed at us—the holders of an identity branded a priori as illegitimate, citizens of a state branded as criminal, the product of ideas castigated as imperialist and racist—murder, brutality, and abduction are legitimate and, as it turns out, even a cause for celebration.

The various academic currents that include the axiomatic casting of Zionism as colonialism, Zionism as racism, and Israel as an apartheid state, as well as the argument that the very identity that I and so many others hold is an illegitimate fabrication—these are in my view intellectual strategies to effectively say that my collectivity is illegitimate in its very conception as well as in its every action, that we are an abomination that must be eliminated. One impact of October 7 has been to bring into sharper relief the responsibility that we as academics involved in the humanities and social sciences bear in a struggle that is not only about Israel itself, not only about Israel and the Palestinians, but in fact about the nature of academic work itself, the meaning of the humanities, and how exactly we shape and understand our work as humanists. An ever-deepening exploration of the human, an ongoing effort to expand our understanding of it and, through this broader and deeper conceptualization, to expand the horizons of what it actually means to be human—this is what we should be in the business of doing in universities, and it is the leading goal of the humanities. Any methodology, then, that is based on assumptions that would deny a group the right and the freedom to define itself and its identity ought to be spurned and disdained by the academic humanities. This includes the kinds of assumptions that would axiomatically deny Jews the freedoms and rights to self-identification and self-determination just as much as it does any would-be scholarship that would deny Palestinians or any others the right and freedom to shape their own identities. The humanities can survive, and can be seen to be of worth, only if they remain true to the humanistic vision that is their foundation and essence. Where they have become an antihumanistic endeavor—and I believe this is the case in a great deal of what passes for legitimate academic discourse on Israel and Palestine— they have inherently failed and have lost their very reason for being.

Arieh Saposnik is associate professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is also director of the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism.