Academic Boycott Now: It is time to end the UC Davis-Hebrew University Professional Veterinary Exchange

Emblazoned on the UC Davis crest is the motto “Let there be light.” 

Let what is done in darkness be brought to light.

It is time to end the decades-old institutional cooperation agreement and veterinary medicine professional exchange program between the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine at the Hebrew University.

The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is annually ranked the top university of its kind in the world. In April 2024, multiple UC Davis veterinary faculty members participated in a university-sanctioned “research retreat” to the Koret Veterinary School at Hebrew University. Students and veterinary residents complained about the blatant disregard for Palestinian life and the insensitivity of a program like this. The school refused to suspend the program or condemn the genocide. Instead, it coldly acted to silence them.

The Koret-Davis professional exchange program is over three decades old. It is financially supported through a large endowment that “has funded over 100 faculty and resident exchanges between UC Davis and the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.”  The exchange program serves to “enhance clinical and research initiatives at UC Davis and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by linking bright, talented faculty and graduates, and providing an opportunity for a meaningful exchange of people and ideas.”  

Contrary to its benevolent mission, the exchange program legitimizes a culture of anti-Palestinian racism and mass death, where genocide is simply business as usual. After 403 days of protests to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, and ecocide and war crimes in Lebanon; after 17 years of Israeli blockade and siege of Gaza; after 67 years of total Israeli occupation of historic Palestine; after 75 years of ethnic cleansing and Israeli apartheid; and after over 100 years of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine and University of California partnerships with the Zionist movement, students, faculty, and people of conscience are demanding decolonization. How can UC Davis explain sending faculty to a university actively participating in apartheid Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the current genocide in Gaza?  

The Koret-Davis faculty exchange program normalizes relations with apartheid Israel. It normalizes anti-Palestinian racism. It normalizes censoring criticism of the ongoing genocide and occupation at UC Davis. It normalizes collaboration with the institutions of racial domination and apartheid of which Hebrew University is a central force. The professional exchange program is ethically and morally repugnant and inherently discriminatory.  

Now is the time to end the multimillion-dollar Koret-Davis faculty professional exchange program and other genocide enabling institutional cooperation agreements and investments. This program directly aids the Israeli genocide in Gaza, abrogating its responsibilities under U.S. and international law, and furthering a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism on campus.

Hebrew University is an occupation university

Hebrew University is part and parcel of apartheid Israel’s regime of terror and control. It is essential, argues Nick Reimer, author of Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation, to see Israeli “universities as tools of apartheid.” 

According to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott (PACBI), Hebrew University, “like all Israeli universities… is deeply complicit in Israel’s regime of oppression and should be boycotted. Hebrew U is itself partially built on stolen Palestinian land in occupied Jerusalem, and actively cooperates with Israeli occupation forces.”  This cooperation entails subjecting residents of the adjoining Palestinian neighborhood of Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem to “unrelenting and unfathomable police brutality,” including “lending its rooftops to Israeli police for mass surveillance of Palestinians.” 

Since 2001 one of Issawiya’s only two entrances into the city has been arbitrarily closed by Israeli occupation police forces in cooperation with Hebrew University. In 2020 Israeli police stated that the “closure of the entrance was at the request of the [Hebrew] University, and that if the latter were to announce that it has no security need for the closure, it would be removed,” confirming Hebrew U permits Israeli “police forces to operate from campus against the neighborhood.” In a letter to Hebrew University’s highest administrators, the Middle East Studies Association and the Committee on Academic Freedom denounced the “closure of the southern entrance to Issawiyah” which rendered “the university a de facto partner in the collective punishment of the neighborhood’s residents.”  

Academia for Equality stated that “this closure of one of the only two entrances to the neighborhood is an act of collective punishment” on Issawiya’s “twenty thousand inhabitants.” Hebrew U is complicit “with repression of civilians” and has been transformed “into a forward base for human rights violations,” normalizing “an immoral situation which contradicts academic values recognized throughout the democratic world.” 

Hebrew University plays its part in Israel’s deliberate strategy of hemming in and strangling the Palestinian residents of Issawiya. Maya Wind, author of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, notes that apartheid Israel “incrementally expropriated 90 percent of Issawiyeh’s lands” as “the neighborhood is encroached on all sides by the Hebrew University Campus, Hadassah Hospital, a Jewish settlement, major highways, and two military bases.” Israel plans to seize and turn more Palestinian land near Issawiya into a National Park. Israel “wants the land,” Eyal Hareuvani details, “but not the Palestinians living on it.”

Hebrew University is an arm of Israeli settler colonialism.

In 2004 Israeli occupation bulldozers began to dig and plow Mt. Scopus on more land belonging to Palestinian families, confiscating it for the Hebrew University. Its fortress-campus on occupied Mt. Scopus expands the Israelization and Judaization of Jerusalem. Student housing complexes are built atop an illegal university settlement on stolen and occupied Palestinian land. Other universities have ended their exchange programs with Hebrew U due to this reality alone.

The Land Research Center details Hebrew U’s origins from the early 20th century onwards. Hebrew U’s history is one of colonization and continued land confiscation. “On Aug 24th 1970 Hebrew University impounded Palestinian lands belonging to Hijazi and Al Abasi clans living in the southwestern part of the University where it built a park associated with it. Israeli occupation forces helped in the establishment of the park as it demolished an old palace which belonged to Al Shihabi clan and replaced it by [a] ‘Bus Stop’ for Eged Bus Company inside the University.” 

After 1967, Hebrew U coveted more Palestinian land in its vicinity, claiming it belongs to the university. Expansion, its university senate committees determined, “‘will demand the expropriation of [Palestinian] land,” deeming it empty space, and that “empty space in Mount Scopus and its surroundings must be filled. If we will not fill it, someone else [Palestinians] will do [it].”’ The occupation imperative has been clear: drive out Palestinians in East Jerusalem so Hebrew U can expand its control over the adjoining Palestinian territories as a settler university.  

PACBI notes that Hebrew University “has joined legal actions to forcibly displace Palestinians to allow for campus expansion.” It “hosts the Israeli military’s Havatzalot program, effectively a military base on campus that includes combat training” and “has also hosted recruitment events for Shin Bet, Israel’s notorious domestic intelligence agency. The Shin Bet has been condemned by the UN Committee Against Torture over its use of violent interrogation tactics on Palestinians.” 

“Israeli universities,” says Wind, “serve as pillars of Israel’s system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent.”

Hebrew U has been providing on the ground support to apartheid Israel’s genocide, boasting that “The University provided diverse logistics equipment to several military units” in its ongoing invasion and ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Not surprisingly, “Hebrew University, among others, are training intelligence soldiers to create target banks in Gaza.” 

Hebrew U began offering an “enhanced financial package for students serving in the IDF” for their “invaluable contribution” to genocide in addition to course credits for soldiers returning from Gaza to the university. Student-soldiers who fled colonial settlements may receive aid stipends.

Hebrew University is an extension of Israeli state terror.

In addition to the Davis-Koret faculty exchange, the University of California’s Education Abroad Program advertises study abroad to Hebrew U and its colonial student housing units, an experience available to students at all UC campuses. For UCEAP, it is an exotic and militarized escape, “Housing in this program overlooks the incredible panorama of Jerusalem from the comforts of a student village complex located right on campus. Guards are located at all campus entrances and units regularly patrol the dorm complexes.” Exchange participants become frontline soldiers in this “incredible” military settler educational enterprise.

While students and faculty cosplay Indiana Jones, the settler colonial violence which sustains Hebrew University’s colonies remains. Through checkpoints, colonial zoning, bans, restrictions, settlements, demolitions, lynchings, its wall, and martial law, apartheid Israel controls all life and movement of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Palestinians live under complete and choking Israeli military rule in violation of international law. Hebrew University entrenches this segregated and crushing system of racial apartheid and settler colonialism.

Academic boycotts target academic institutions like the Hebrew University. Boycotts shame and censure pariahs and rogue institutions creating conditions that destroy life and defile humanity.

While Hebrew U claims to be a distinguished liberal institution, from its founding it was envisioned as “A university of the Jewish people” to the exclusion, dispossession, displacement, and replacement of non-Jewish Palestinians on whose land it is built as a monument of colonial power. It functions as an appendage to Israel’s occupation army. War is its education.

Every university in Gaza has been obliterated as seven thousand Hebrew University student settler-soldiers were called on for compulsory reserve duty last year to carry out Israel’s scholasticide, a little more than 50% of the Jewish male population at the university according to Hebrew U President Asher Cohen. So far this school year, at least two thousand student-settler soldiers have been called on for duty. While Cohen wishes for a return to normalcy, Palestinian students of Hebrew University experience its militarization and violence daily, while Gazans and Lebanese face Armageddon. Colonized and colonizer are not the same. Israeli militarism rules.

The destabilizing figure of the Palestinian student as the undead to be pulverized juxtaposes the Zionist settler-student genocidaire hero. Palestinians are defiled, rendered soulless, nobody, discarded in zip-tied body bags in schools. It is the formula for U.S. academe.

The Koret-Davis exchange is irreconcilable with “veterinary medical ethics” when it naturalizes annihilation. A rotten core runs through Hebrew University to UC Davis, and its residue is rancid.

Hebrew University is an occupation university. This alone warrants an academic boycott, an end to the Davis-Koret faculty exchange program, and all related UC study abroad programs, contracts, and cooperation agreements with Israel epitomizing it as a white supremacy state.

We have an obligation, Birzeit University in Palestine reminds us, to hold “Israeli universities responsible as they have been indispensable to the regime of settler colonial oppression and apartheid, complicit in grave violations of human rights including developing weaponry, military doctrines, and legal justification for the indiscriminate, mass targeting of Palestinians.” Birzeit U calls on all international universities, unions, and students: “Do not be silent about genocide.”

Border racism, academic exchange, and U.S. law

But if Hebrew University’s role in upholding the Israeli occupation isn’t enough the UC Davis-Hebrew U exchange program also violates American laws preventing discrimination in education, including UC Davis’s Title VI’s obligations to provide access to equal education.

Palestinians face border interrogation, indefinite detention, intrusive searches, abuse, degrading, humiliating conditions upon arrival, and banishment. To exchange, one must arrive, and then live freely. Israeli border control and occupation forces preclude it. Palestinian refugees are denied by Israeli law their right to return, to study or teach at universities, or visit. Israeli policy for entry into the Occupied Palestinian territories enshrines anti-Palestinian racism.

According to Zaha Hassan and Mathew Duss, Israel’s discriminatory border policies also target “Arab and Muslim Americans and those born in, or who have ever held travel documents from, states Israel considers enemies.” Apartheid Israel excludes “any American who publicly supports constitutionally protected political boycotts of Israel—including U.S. members of Congress—or those who write, teach, or speak out about Palestinian human rights,” by law.

In 2014, apartheid Israel was denied entry into the U.S. Visa Waiver Program because “The Department of Homeland Security and State remain concerned with the unequal treatment that Palestinian Americans and other Americans of Middle Eastern origin experience at Israel’s border and checkpoints, and reciprocity is the most basic condition of the Visa Waiver Program.”  Despite the State Department’s knowledge of the realities of Israeli apartheid and border racism, the Biden administration permitted Israel into the program in Fall 2023. Palestinian and Arab Americans are currently challenging the decision to permit Israel into the Visa Waiver Program in court, arguing it is racist and deprives them of their rights and liberties.  

The State Department is fully aware of apartheid Israel’s discriminatory entry policies. Its current travel advisories to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza are clear. In a unique section titled “What if I am denied entry?” the State Department warns travelers, “The Israeli Ministry of Interior has continued to deny entry into Israel and the West Bank to some foreign nationals (including U.S. citizens) affiliated with certain political and non-governmental organizations that the Government of Israel views as anti-Israel. Participation in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)-related activities is one of the considerations Israeli authorities consider when deciding whether to refuse entry to individuals into Israel and the West Bank.” Reciprocity is contingent.

Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and BDS advocates’ academic freedom and constitutional right to condemn Israel’s ongoing genocide and Nakba are sacrificed at the altar of unequal exchange, while the University of California feigns neutrality and ignorance. Today, a U.S. passport, education, and citizenship’s worth rely on your race, nationality, religion, and fealty to Zionism.

The U.S. government’s unconditional patronage of Israeli settler colonialism does not erase the UC’s responsibility of enforcing its mandate under Title VI, prohibiting “discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance.” 

Ending the Koret-Davis professional exchange is imperative. Former Hebrew University professor David Enoch wrote to Jewish Americans over one year ago: “Even if the justification of boycotts has in the past been questionable, I think that American Jews owe it to Israel, and to Israelis like myself, to promote such measures now… Supporting Israel has to mean also — perhaps primarily — fighting the all-corrupting occupation and the oppression of millions of Palestinians that comes along with it, an occupation that the current government is determined to strengthen in more and more violent means. And the way to do this now — to support Israel rather than its government or policies — is by exerting pressure.”  

Sunaina Maira, UC Davis Professor of Asian American Studies affirms the urgency of academic boycotts, stating “Israeli universities are complicit with the state’s occupation and warfare targeting Palestinians and in the systemic racism against Palestinians, and none have taken a stance against these human rights abuses… we declare that we will not study in Israel until Palestinians can return to their homeland.”  Universities must terminate study abroad and exchange programs “until Israel complies with the human rights principles of BDS.”  

Presciently current, Nada Elia, Professor of Cultural Studies at Western Washington University observes that as “government officials in Washington DC and Tel Aviv are mired ever deeper in their racism, corruption, warmongering, and attempts at scandal mitigation, the political battlefront, and the promise of change” has moved “onto campuses around the nation, where Israel continues to lose its foothold amongst students and faculty, as its criminality becomes more obvious by the day.” Faculty, students, staff, administrators, and communities must “register their opposition to Israel’s violations of international law and the human rights of the Palestinians by endorsing the call for an academic boycott of Israel.”

Universities’ obligations under international law

Hebrew U in Jerusalem is a colonial university on stolen, occupied land. International law tells us that until its ongoing participation in the Palestinian Nakba ends, academic exchange must end unapologetically.

Hebrew U is in violation of UN Resolution 242 for its university settlements. According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing colonies, including university colonies, on occupied territory is illegal and a war crime. UN Security Council resolutions 446 and 465, and Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, among others, affirm this. 

Article 3 (Section C) of the UN Commission on Human Rights, Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights, explicitly states business enterprises, including those of the University of California, “shall not engage in nor benefit from war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, forced disappearance, forced or compulsory labour, hostage-taking, extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, other violations of humanitarian law and other international crimes against the human person as defined by international law, in particular human rights and humanitarian law.”

Israel is guilty of all these crimes. The Davis-Koret exchange contravenes international law. It engages in and benefits from Hebrew University’s war crimes. 

In its advisory opinion of July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, reiterated that Israel’s occupation is unlawful annexation. The removal and subjugation of the indigenous Palestinian population, their replacement with over 700,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and its continued dominion over Gaza must end. Violations of international law require consequences for Israel and other states including the United States and institutions that comprise it like institutions of higher education. 

In summarizing the ICJ’s advisory opinion, it declared “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. They are also under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is for all States, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure that any impediment resulting from the illegal presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the exercise of the Palestinian people of its right to self-determination is brought to an end. In addition, all the States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have the obligation, while respecting the Charter of the United Nations and international law, to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.”  

While the opinion still has gaps, human rights experts hailed the ruling stating it “reaffirmed a principle that seemed unclear, even to the United Nations: Freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable.” This applies to education: “States must immediately review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel, inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities.” “The Court’s findings,” they contend, “should also be widely disseminated to ensure that the illegality of Israel’s presence in the occupied territory is fully understood at all levels of the government and reflected in public documents and education systems.” 

Non-recognition is a call to BDS, and sanctioning complicit parties to Israeli occupation. UC Davis is “under an obligation to not render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” UC Davis’s institutional cooperation agreement with Hebrew University is more than academic exchange. It legitimizes a loathsome occupation and amounts to aiding, assisting and maintaining Israel’s occupation. 

Institutional boycotts and divestment are common practices. California restricted state-funded travel to anti-LGBTQ+ states. The UC divested from apartheid South Africa, Sudan, fossil fuels, and private prisons. The UAW divested from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa. The UAW Arab Workers Caucus moved multiple locals to liquidate their Israeli state bonds decades ago, though the UAW has refused to end its investments in Israeli genocide. From Montgomery to Delano, boycotts are critical tools for justice. The American Association of University Professors states that academic boycotts are “legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

To implement the ICJ’s ruling, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding Israel end its occupation in “no later than 12 months.” Institutions must refrain from “entering economic or trade dealings with Israel concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory or parts thereof which may entrench its unlawful presence in the Territory, including with regard to the settlements and their associated regime.” This includes investments and exchange with occupation Hebrew U.

Both state and university leaders must “ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law.” The IRS and Treasury must end the 501c3 status of Zionist settler organizations receiving tax-deductible donations used to dispossess Palestinians. The US must cut all aid, weapons transfers and sales, and diplomatic shelter for Israel until it complies. UC Davis must end all relations with the entity, including relations with Hebrew U and other Israeli universities. The University of California must divest its 32 billion in assets with companies profiting off apartheid Israel’s settler-colonial genocide and violations of international law. 

Following the ICJ’s advisory ruling, UC and UC Davis agreements, contracts and investments with entities that impede Palestinian self-determination are unlawful, unethical, and must end. As Craig Mokhiber deftly argues, boycott, divestment and sanctions are not matters of fancy or opinion, they are a “moral imperative” and “international legal obligation.”

UC Davis’s obligation under its own policies

In response to student, staff, faculty, and alumni pressure to boycott apartheid Israel and divest, the UC in April reiterated its position that it “has consistently opposed calls for boycott against and divestment from Israel…a boycott of this sort impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses.” Conspicuously, the violation of Palestinians and their allies’ academic freedom is the basis upon which UC exchange programs with Israeli institutions are built. Academic freedom founded on the forcible negation of Palestinian freedom is not freedom, it is oppression. 

If Palestinians cannot return, travel, teach, research, study, or live freely due to Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, universities must respond. Renowned Palestinian Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian was pressured to resign from Hebrew U after condemning Israel’s genocide and denouncing Zionism as a racist and violent ideology. “Anti-Zionism,” she says, “is to refuse to accept continued dispossession, is to refuse to accept this ideology of supremacy, is to refuse to accept the securitized ideas of one group against the other.” 

In spite of its public relations chicanery, the University of California system and UC Davis are in violation of their own Standards of Ethical Conduct. The policy applies “to all members of the University community, including The Regents, Officers of The Regents, faculty and other academic personnel, staff, students, volunteers, contractors, agents and others associated with the University.” It governs all institutional relationships, including international settler-exchange. 

The UC Davis-Hebrew University exchange violates the UC’s anti-discrimination mandate by interfering with, denying, and limiting participation due to apartheid laws privileging Jews and Zionists, while creating “an environment that a reasonable person would find to be intimidating or offensive.” Anti-Palestinian exchange and apartheid enables prohibited “unfavorable action” and “adverse or unequal treatment” of Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and BDS advocates. 

The Koret-Davis exchange violates the ethical standards of the institution. It does so incontrovertibly while Israel exists as a Zionist, Jewish only state, as defined by its own laws. The destruction of Palestinian national existence is the foundation of Israeli law and society. Equal exchange and academic freedom are impossible under an apartheid regime that legalizes racial, national, and religious discrimination, bans its victims and critics, rules by demographic engineering, ethnic cleansing and “transfer,” and denies Palestinian refugee’s right to return.

The UC standards require leaders to “exercise responsibility appropriate to their position and delegate authorities. They are responsible to each other, the University and the University’s stakeholders both for their actions and their decision not to act.” Responding to the UC Ethnic Studies Council’s call to the UC Regents to ‘“uplift the Palestinian freedom struggle, and to stand against Israel’s war crimes against the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people,”’ as required by international law, Regent Jay Sures retorted, ‘“Let me be clear, I will do everything in my power to never let that happen.’” His personal axe to grind with anti-racists aside, he and other Regents may wear Caesar’s robes but the institution is not absolved, its power never absolute.

According to the UC’s Policy on Anti-Discrimination, the documented pattern of apartheid and border-racism University of California Davis participants of the Koret-Davis exchange are or will be subjected to due to their actual or perceived identity or political activism alone warrants immediate termination of the program. The policy applies to all conduct in the “context of a University program or activity (including, for example, University sponsored study abroad, research,” and more. So long as the program exists, there is sufficient “information indicating an ongoing threat to the University community.” It is an ongoing threat to this and all university communities with exchange programs with Hebrew University and other Israeli universities. 

UC Offices of Compliance are responsible for enforcing its policies with regard to professional exchange programs. Additionally, the University of California Education Abroad Program (UCEAP) currently manages three study abroad programs to apartheid Israel and certifies their credits.  All are not in compliance with the UC’s standards and policies and are on notice for it.

The standards of ethical conduct also encompass investments and those who manage them.  Profit motive, ideological commitments to Zionism, or the UC’s ideals of “academic freedom” and “unfettered exchange of ideas” cannot justify settler colonial academic exchange and investments. Its mission of “knowledge for the betterment of our global society,” rings hollow.

With UC Davis’s introduction of an optional Statement of Contributions to Public and Global Impact, Davis faculty contributing to Israeli occupation and war crimes through exchange with Hebrew University and other Israeli institutions can write about the “aggregate impact of their global activities” as “part of the campus merit and promotion process.” UC Davis’s settler colonial academic exchange, like imperial Orientalism, advances careers. 

Long before the Davis-Koret exchange, the University of California and UC Davis (as Berkeley’s farm extension) have remained engaged partners working with apartheid Israel’s government, and its parastate predecessor the Jewish Agency, for over 100 years. Gabi Kirk, Professor of Geography at Cal Poly Humboldt, has traced the long history of this settler colonial “transnational agricultural technoscientific collaboration,” tying Zionist expansion in Palestine to the development of the agricultural and animal sciences, and to UC Davis’s role in the settler colonization of California and other global settler colonies (published in a forthcoming article). 

European Zionist agronomists learned from California’s agricultural settlements and experts in designing their own settler colonial enterprise in Mandate Palestine, and vice versa, as part of a “global infrastructure” of imperialism. Apartheid Israel’s ongoing genocide is the fruit of these relations, implicating every discipline, researcher, leader, administrator, and intellectual at UC Davis and across the UC System in war-profiteering and settler colonial knowledge exchange.

In 2018, a memorandum of understanding was signed between Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization, UC Davis, and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources in a “pledge to work together more on research involving water, irrigation, technology and related topics that are important to both water-deficit countries.”  

Apartheid Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization (ANR) is the “research arm of Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture.” Considering apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestinian water, its water war crimes and crimes against humanity, its use of water as strategy of genocide, and its colonial terraforming of the land, water and airscape of Palestine, it is a cruel jest to suggest Israel’s environmental apartheid and war on Palestinian water sovereignty is helping, in their words, make “the world a better place.” UC Davis actively solicits tax-deductible donations for its California Israel Research Fund, offering research and settler colonial exchange and travel grants to apartheid Israel. These agreements and programs too must end. 

Recent UC-Israeli collaborative university projects include cancer research, supernova imaging, tomato and lettuce research and more, that rationalize ongoing genocide as scientific progress. For decades UC Davis faculty, with support from their institution, have received grants through BARD, the United States-Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development fund, BIRD, the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation and BSF, US-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

The multicultural neoliberal University of California is committed to investing in and receiving funding from the highest-bidding war profiteers. The UC is an engine of imperial war. Evan Apodaca’s curious question remains relevant: are UC researchers mercenaries or scholars?

Challenging the culture of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism at UC Davis

Draconian repression at UC Davis, across the University of California, and nationwide are the janus face of universities’ commitments to Israeli genocide exchange, partnerships, and investments. Further militarization of campus police, brutality, misconduct, politically motivated student conduct charges, and “content-neutral” restrictions and policies authorize anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism. Repression is the consequence of universities’ material commitments and contracts. The Koret-Davis professional exchange naturalizes Zionist exceptionalism, racism, apologetics, and university violence. 

Criticism of Israel is prohibited openly because it exposes UC Davis and the veterinary school as a partner and participant in apartheid Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes.

At a non-violent, peaceful student walkout in support of Gaza in the Fall of 2023, UC Davis veterinary school faculty staged a counter-walkout to harass them. Draped in Israeli flags, professors screamed at their Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and allied students and veterinary residents, hurling anti-Palestinian racial slurs at them like “women can’t be doctors in Gaza,” “the IDF has woman soldiers who will liberate the Palestinian women,” and “Hamas will kill and rape you all.”

A professor of pathology berated students, “Hamas would rape you,” “Hamas would kill you,” “Let me buy you a ticket to Palestine and you’ll see what happens,” and “you’re dumb and don’t know your history.” 

A professor of dentistry and oral surgery shouted, “You should go visit the hospital in Gaza. I heard it’s being remodeled.” This was made in reference to the bombing and destruction of hospitals in Gaza. After this comment, laughter erupted from the counter-demonstrators.  

A professor of pathology stood over students as they sat on the floor, screaming in their faces, “why are you covering your faces? What are you ashamed of? They are covering their faces because they know they are wrong. What are you hiding from?” This person filmed and intimidated students, and was later elected to Davis city office.   

Veterinary students resisted the racist conflation of Palestinians with animals and how “Animality is mobilized as justification for human annihilation.” As they openly challenged the Veterinary exchange and the school’s complicity in the genocide and oppression of the Palestinian people through walk-outs, vigils, and teach-ins, anti-Palestinian censorship was codified in response. 

Leaders changed policies overnight denying access to Veterinary school spaces, and barred emails from students related not just to the ongoing genocide but also to Palestinian and Arab history and culture. Students promoting Arab American Heritage Month and other educational events through MENASA Vets, a registered student organization, were prevented from using the same listservs used by other organizations to advertise. Veterinary students are releasing a statement detailing more of the racist horrors experienced at the veterinary school here.

Veterinary school leaders are now prohibiting all student organizations from using school listservs to keep Palestinian perspectives shut out of campus conversations and debates. 

Across UC Davis, administrators and department chairs adapted to protests by changing rules and protocols, processes for co-sponsorships, canceling events, and restricting communication. Acts of solidarity with, or presentations of knowledge about, Palestine justified suppression. UC Davis’s Medical school prevented a student-led humanitarian drive from using the word “ceasefire” when it was used for similar drives for Ukraine. Administrators from the School of Law interrupted a sacred drum circle held by the Native American Law Students Association, tearing down a banner that said “From Turtle Island to Palestine: Land Back in Our Lifetime.”

Apartheid exchange and Zionist propaganda are promoted because these programs exist as UC Davis programs. Zionism as a political ideology is a university practice: it is indistinguishable from the university itself, while contemporary Palestine, Arab, and Arab American studies programs are gutted. After all, UC President Michael Drake’s “viewpoint-neutral” Middle East history is predicated on stamping out Arab and anti-Zionist faculty, history, and perspectives.

UC Davis is facing an ongoing Office of Civil Rights complaint and investigation into anti-Palestinian racism, in violation of Title VI, with more complaints pending. University contracts, policies, practices, and people produce cultures of violence and resistance to them.

As UC Davis marshals all its repressive tactics to protect its partnership with occupation Hebrew University, students find themselves trapped in a fortress-university hemming them in, tightening around their minds and bodies, so the UC can fulfill its commitment to its apartheid partnerships.

“Let there be light”

“Every empire,” the late Edward Said wrote on the eve of the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, “tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” The imperial academy, Sandy Grande further reminds us, plays its part in the United States’ mission as “an arm of the settler state.” 

From Patwin land to Palestine, the Koret-Davis faculty exchange is built atop one indigenous graveyard to another. These universities were erected as a testament of settler might. The national policy of American settler colonialism to “kill the Indian [animal], save the man” accompanies the nation’s self image as a “shining city on a hill.” Flipping the adage, “Save the animal, kill the Palestinian” captures the Davis-Koret veterinary partnership, philosophy, and common manifest destiny.

Israeli leaders’ genocidal calls to “destroy” Palestinians, those “human animals,” “beasts,” through “complete siege,” conform to UC Davis Veterinary School values. When Netanyahu says genocide is a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” calling on Congress to “give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster,” or when Israeli Minister of Education Yoav Kisch declares that Lebanon will be “annihilated” and “that there is no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon, they will be destroyed in the light,” it is clear what UC Davis’s motto “Let there be light” truly underwrites. 

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community have been undeterred in their calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions from Israeli genocide and settler colonialism done in their names. After a student-worker strike for the right to condemn apartheid Israel’s genocide; after 45 days of the Popular University for the Liberation of Palestine and hundreds of students occupying the UC Davis Quad demanding the exchange end, calling for divestment and other institutional changes; after the Davis Graduate Student Association and Associated Students of the University of California Davis (ASUCD) passed resolutions calling for total Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions; after the ASUCD passed the first student government boycott bill of its kind in the country; after student petitions demanding institutional transformation garnered thousands of signatures; after teach-ins, townhalls, mass demonstrations, and righteous rage, students have stood firm and resolute that settler colonialism and genocide will not be tolerated.

This Spring, the University of California Office of the President and UC Regents obstructed negotiations between student protestors and the UC Davis administration, preventing any written agreement that redressed anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism on campus. Their antipathy for Palestinians is legislated as colorblind policy, emboldening campus and off campus vigilantes. UC leaders are more concerned with maintaining a colonial order and revenue stream, ending disruptions and discomfort, than they are ending the injustice of their making. Suppression is the art of denial, and “denial,” Ibram Kendi notes, is “the heartbeat of racism.” 

No matter the UC’s draconian time, place and manner restrictions, policies to curtail freedom of speech, expression, assembly, masking and health safety, or the number of campus police they militarize and deploy to subdue and brutalize students, disparately impacting Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and BDS advocates, the dam of fear has broken. The swelling tide cannot be stopped. Students and workers are no longer accepting lies as truth, education as subjugation, or genocide as justice. The future belongs to them. It is time to end the Koret-Davis professional veterinary exchange and all settler-colonial exchange programs, relations, and investments.  

Or face their light.

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Beshara Kehdi
Beshara Kehdi is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies at UC Davis, with a Designated Emphasis in Writing, Rhetoric, and Composition Studies. He specializes in Arab American history, student movements and the formation of the Organization of Arab Students in the US, and Ethnic Studies in the K-16 classroom.

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