Study Abroad in Israel Violates Your Campus Policies

One of the ways to advance the academic boycott of Israel is to dismantle your university’s Study Abroad program in Israel. Many of these programs were set up after college presidents were directly solicited by Israeli state agencies. In most cases, their operation is in clear violation of campus codes regarding non-discrimination and equal opportunity because they are not accessible to all students and faculty.

It is well-known that Israel routinely denies entry to persons of Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim origin and subjects them to detention and harassment at borders, engaging unashamedly in racial profiling, which effectively declares such travelers to be suspect in advance. Those of Palestinian descent experience particular difficulties in entering.

This practice has been confirmed by the U.S. State Department, which openly observes that “U.S. citizens whom Israeli authorities suspect of being of Arab, Middle Eastern, or Muslim origin… may face additional, often time-consuming, and probing questioning by immigration and border authorities, or may even be denied entry into Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza.”

Just as egregiously, a 2017 Israeli law prohibits entry for anyone who has publicly supported the BDS movement, on the basis of their political opinion alone.

Israel’s racial profiling has a real and discriminatory impact on students and faculty participating in educational programs, while its anti-BDS law means that US students and faculty could be prohibited entry into the country for an act of political expression that is fully protected under the US Constitution.

No college should operate a program that contravenes its own campus policies by denying access to members of its community.

Aside from these violations, there are many other reasons for non-cooperation with Study Abroad programs. Almost all of the U.S. college programs are embedded within Israeli universities that are heavily complicit with the Occupation and ongoing Nakba. These universities have constructed and expanded their campuses on stolen Palestinian land. They maintain degree programs that systematically discriminate against Palestinian and advantage Jewish students; conduct demographic and resource research that guides land and resource expropriation; and contribute to the design of weaponry and information technology that maintain not only the Occupation but also the apartheid system of discrimination against the Palestinian population. No Israeli university has ever publicly opposed the Israeli state’s illegal military occupation of the West Bank or its racial discrimination against Palestinians within Israel or the Occupied Territories nor the systematic and premeditated destruction of Palestinian universities, libraries, and schools in Gaza. Indeed, commemoration of the Nakba is prohibited in Israeli universities as part of their erasure of Palestinian history and denial of Israel’s settler colonial character. See Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom.

Israel nevertheless makes considerable public relations capital out of touting higher education opportunities and research collaborations as part of its Brand Israel campaign. Publicity for its Study Abroad programs presents Israel as a modern democracy with exciting intellectual opportunities for all. Yet beneath that facade is a racist and colonial state that segregates both its citizens and its subject populations on the basis of national, ethnic, and religious origin. While some claim these programs are an opportunity for “dialogue,” or even for “fact finding” about the conditions in Israel-Palestine, true dialogue and education cannot take place in a reality from which Palestinians are denied their rightful presence and in conditions under which they are racially subjugated and violently displaced.

The academic boycott of Israel has been called for by Palestinian scholars and students living under military occupation, siege, and in an apartheid state, and whose rights to education are violated on a daily basis. To enroll, or participate in any way, in a Study Abroad program at an Israeli institution means ignoring if not perpetuating the ongoing violation of the academic–and, indeed, human–freedoms of Palestinians.

We call on FJP chapters to push for the suspension of these programs on their campuses and to ask all students, faculty, and staff of conscience to pledge non-cooperation with any campus process—advising, registration, credit approval, departmental participation--that supports such programs.