The shocking raid by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Birzeit University, saw IOF soldiers shooting at students and injuring 11. Israel’s scholasticide, which saw all academic institutions in Gaza reduced to ruins, and has now spread to the scenes in Birzeit, continues to be facilitated by the University of Manchester. Though the University claims that its legitimisation and direct funding of Tel Aviv University through UoM and TAU’s collaborative research program is ‘neutral’ the attack on Birzeit University is a direct challenge to this. The truth is, no academic institutions are ever neutral to their societies. The IOF’s raid on Birzeit shows that it understands the importance of the university to the Palestinian society it seeks to erase, just as it knows the importance of TAU to the genocidal Israeli state.
Even without all the abstractions, TAU’s Erez program, a humanities program that essentially recruits to the IOF, means that the soldiers that stormed Birzeit University yesterday could as well be TAU graduates. That University of Manchester continue not only to legitimise but to fund TAU as an institution means that yesterday, it effectively paid for students to be shot on campus, for exams to be disrupted and for classes to be cancelled.
Judge for yourself whether shooting students and funding their attackers is ‘neutral.’ Complicity in scholasticide is not neutrality.
