Israeli universities are assisting the genocide. Canadian universities refuse to cut ties with them.

Divesting from corporations selling Israeli arms is OK, but cutting ties with Israeli universities is a bridge too far. That’s been the reaction to Canada’s student uprising against genocide even though Israeli universities assist that country’s military.

There are student encampments at McGill, McMaster, Dalhousie, Western, Guelph, University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, University of Ottawa, UBC Okanagan, Vancouver Island University, University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg, University of Victoria, University of Windsor, Université de Sherbrooke, and Université du Québec à Montréal. Queen’s and Ontario Tech students dismantled their two-week-long encampments after the administrations agreed to a pathway towards divestment, while Thompson River College agreed to discuss divestment over fears an encampment might be established. The University of Calgary and the University of Alberta sent cops to immediately dismantle their students’ encampments.

The student encampments have generated significant media attention eliciting countless mentions of Israel’s genocide and sympathetic historical comparisons to student mobilizations against apartheid South Africa and the U.S. war in Vietnam. In its first handful of days, the McGill encampment alone generated as much corporate media attention as the 30 weekends in a row of mass protests in Montreal, including a march of 50,000.

Amidst the attention, there has been sympathetic coverage of students’ call for their universities to divest from corporations, such as Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, selling Israeli weapons. There’s also been some, though less, supportive coverage about divesting from firms complicit in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. But the encampments’ other central demand — ending their universities’ partnerships with Israeli schools — has received little sympathetic coverage even though it’s easy to show how Israeli universities assist a military subjugating and slaughtering Palestinians.

To enable their students to participate in the Gaza holocaust Israeli universities paused classes for nearly three months. As part of restarting classes, the academic institutions came to an agreement with the army to preserve the interests of over 50,000 students and faculty in the military. The universities granted various benefits to reservists killing Palestinians. Hebrew University (HU), for instance, launched an “Enhanced Financial Package for Our Students Serving in the IDF.”

In 2019 HU began offering a three-year training for future IDF intelligence officers. Students in the Havatzalot program live in a former university residence only accessible by biometric identification. Regular university employees need advanced permission to enter the area.

To maintain the IDF’s technological edge, cadets have studied for degrees in physics, math, or computer science at HU for over 40 years. The university provides the IDF with academic information on students enrolled in the Talpiot program. In a story on Talpiot, Jason Gewirtz writes, “the opening years of the program saw the students first and foremost as soldiers…They wore uniforms to their classes at Hebrew University and took shifts guarding Talpiot’s section of the Hebrew University campus.”

McGill’s faculty of management has an exchange program with HU and has had many collaborations with that school. The same goes for the University of Toronto and other schools.

An October 4 article in +972 Magazine headlined “It’ll turn campus into an army base: Tel Aviv University to host soldiers’ program” described a $4 million three-year deal TAU signed with the military to train hundreds of soldiers. Through the Erez program, cadets will wear their uniforms on campus (initially, they were to carry guns), the military can demand information on students, and “the academic staff will refrain from offensive statements toward the IDF soldiers studying at the institution… [including] statements concerning their military service in the IDF.”

The dean of TAU’s Faculty of Humanities praised the program. Rachel Gali Cinamon said, “I don’t think there is another army in the world that does such a thing, that trains soldiers in humanistic values during military service.”

McGill has a series of accords with TAU, which also has a program “to place outstanding technological-mathematical research students into the army’s intelligence and cyber defense divisions.” The University of Toronto, Queen’s, and others also have partnerships with TAU.

Technion is probably the university with the greatest ties to the Israeli military. As “Technion Exposed: Israel Technology Institute’s links with the IDF” details, the Haifa-based school has deep ties to the country’s military-industrial complex. Technion, for instance, developed a remote-controlled bulldozer, which the IDF uses to demolish Palestinian homes. It also established an acoustic system labeled “The Scream,” which the university says “creates sound levels that are unbearable to humans at distances up to 100 meters.” A pamphlet by New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership noted, “Technion has all but enlisted itself in the Israeli armed forces.”

McGill, University of Toronto, and other Canadian schools have ties to Israel’s Institute of Technology.

In a recent Montreal Gazette commentary headlined “McGill encampment an illegal occupation, not a peaceful protest,” the university’s president, Deep Saini, says McGill may be willing to divest from arms firms so long as the criteria are “geographically neutral”. But Saini rejects the notion of severing ties to academic institutions “because of where they are situated.”

“Experience has taught us that maintaining a neutral institutional stance on geopolitical matters best supports — as a whole — our 50,000 members who hold varied political views, represent diverse identities, origins and beliefs, and ardently espouse various causes,” Saini says.

The implication is that McGill’s — or other Canadian universities — ties to Israeli universities aren’t based on “where they are situated.” But, many, if not most, of these partnerships have been instigated by anti-Palestinian donors. When Sylvan Adams gave McGill $29 million to establish the Sylvan Adams Sports Science Institute two years the billionaire required it to partner with Tel Aviv University. In recent years, Adams has plowed tens of millions of dollars into various sports and cultural initiatives explicitly designed to whitewash Israeli apartheid and violence.

Similarly, Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman, who set up a charity to finance non-Israelis joining that country’s military, put up the funds for a McGill project with Ben Gurion University. “Students experience Israel’s Start-Up Nation first-hand” is how McGill’s official organ described the 2019 launch of the study abroad program.

Additionally, pro-apartheid groups have sponsored trips by university leaders that have spurred academic partnerships. The Israeli government has also celebrated the ties between Canadian and Israeli universities.

When the McGill/Hebrew University Summer Program in Human Rights was established in 2012 the professor in charge of the exchange program was open about its political nature. René Provost told the Canadian Jewish News that McGill is “investing significant financial resources… [and], in a public way, is taking a strong stand that the academic boycott of Israel is completely misconceived and cannot be defended.”

We need a proper, honest discussion about student activists’ call for their universities to sever ties with institutions assisting a genocide. University administrations must come clean about why they are so reluctant to put pressure on Israel to follow international law.