Breaking every complicity between Italy and Israel: the role of the acedemic boycott

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Cambiare Rotta in International Bulletin November 2023

With the Palestinian resistance until victory

Since October 7 to date, after almost a month and a half of massacres perpetuated against the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip and beyond, the Western world continues to maintain a position of silezio-assent babbling every now and then timid qualms while Israel carries out a real genocide, as much as oceanic demonstrations have invested every corner of the world and as much as some countries such as Bolivia have taken a clear position against Israel’s crimes, nothing is being done in Italy as in the rest of the European Union.

Not only the Meloni government, but also the entire arc of our country’s parliamentary forces, are siding with the inalienable and unchallengeable right to “self-defense of the only democracy in the Middle East,” while journalists and the media are grasping at straws to find new ideological justifications for the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing.

The Gaza Strip, battered by a complete economic, energy, military blockade by Israel, left without electricity, gas, food, drinking water and medical supplies, is the most overpopulated concentration camp on earth, and for the past month and a half tons of explosive bombs have been dumped on that population of 70 percent women and children locked in cages.

The more than 11,000 victims, the number of which continues to grow, including more than 4,000 children weigh on the Western conscience and on our government that has blood on its hands. The impunity Israel enjoys while violating human rights, and the principles of the Geneva Convention of 1950 shows how international law is now nothing but waste paper, or a further weapon of blackmail in the hands of the West.

Phosphorus bombs and cluster bombs are indeed being dropped on the civilian population, but also on the border with Lebanon. In Gaza, hospitals, refugee centers, U.N. schools, journalists, residential buildings are being indiscriminately targeted mind more than 1 million citizens have been forced to move from the north to the south of the strip in a terrible new Nakba.

In our latitudes, as had already been seen with the war in Ukraine, the first weapons used are censorship, distortion of information and widespread use of media propaganda, restriction of political and democratic agility.

Our communist youth organization in Italy is engaging, in schools, universities and neighborhoods, pursuing several lines of work, first and foremost giving centrality to the work of analysis and counter-information. At a time when the media narrative is crushed doing information work proves crucial and successful in raising awareness and mobilizing.

Further ground for work is being done in the universities, raising the issue of relations between the hubs of higher education with Israeli universities, which today is effectively enlisting us alongside the Zionist regime, NATO and the European military-industrial apparatus. In the progressive integration of the defense and military apparatuses and war companies, knowledge training is also being shaped ad hoc. For example, the historical revisionism we are witnessing leads to a return to wartime and military glories, if not directly to fascist and reactionary ideals, a dangerous slope that we protested on November 4 in the streets.

The general tendency for public research to be more and more the handmaiden of the military comes through research agreements, patents, historical revisionism in curricula, covenants of patronage and collaboration, targeted incentives and scholarship, and ever less development of critical thinking.

If already in general public defunding has led to the entry of private companies into our universities, even more in trend this is occurring with companies that are part of the war supply chain and with national and supranational bodies with a military function, such as the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program, large funding presented as resources for scientific development in member and partner countries that conceal the strengthening of control over strategic research for military interests.

Knowledge and knowledge production put at the service of the chain of death instead of in the search for solutions to the cogent problems of Humanity, as of our generation.

It is necessary to mobilize! from Pisa to Genoa, from Milan to Bologna, Bari, Rome… in numerous universities initiatives of students and professors in support of Palestine are growing with signature campaigns against the agreements, principals, pressure on rectors and the Ministry of University. As the occupations of Naples, Padua, Venice, Rome, Turin, Genoa and Marcerta have also shown, the world of university students stands with Palestine, and calls on individual universities and the Minister of Universities not only to take a stand against the ongoing genocide, but also the immediate halt of all agreements between academia and war, against the complicity of education and research with Israeli apartheid.

Going by just a few examples: The dozens of Israeli universities and research centers are involved and fully integrated in the apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people, either overtly through agreements with the Israeli military branch, or less blatantly by occupying with their facilities territories wrested from the Palestinians, and thus contributing to the erasure of the historical memory and politicide of a people.

Many of these universities rise on land illegally annexed by Israel from the Palestinian territories, such as Ariel University founded in 1978, which “presents a new perspective of contemporary Zionism and strives to revitalize the values of state-building through excellence in science and research,” as the website states. Or how Tel Aviv University is located on land belonging to Sheikh Muwannis, a Palestinian village whose inhabitants were expelled by Jewish militias in 1948.

Or it is about agreements that tie us directly involved institutions such as the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in the city of Haifa, to programs for military purposes in the national academic system and is within a collaborative network with the European Union. With Horizon 2020 alone, the Technion has obtained research projects worth a total of 89.6 million euros from the EU. It is also affiliated with the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research (CESAER), which has 53 excellent universities from 24 European countries + Israel (including Italian universities) cooperating together in the technical and scientific area.

The Technion is internationally known for having directly contributed to the research, design and implementation of some of the most destructive weapon systems used by the Israeli armed forces: prominent among them is the remotely controlled “D9” bulldozer, used by the Army to demolish Palestinian homes; or the optical fibers capable of detecting underground tunnels, the testing of which first took place in the Gaza Strip. Or the air defense missile system “Iron Dome,” which has been employed since the bombings against Gaza in the summer of 2014.

Technion is just one of several examples of Israel’s widespread use of education in the occupation in Palestine.

Indeed, research centers facilitate with financial and/or educational benefits students called to serve in the military during war operations. In addition to collaborating with companies such as Elbit Security Systems Ltd. A manufacturer of technologies and drones used in mass surveillance.

The Italian MUR since 2000-2001 has entered into cooperation and research agreements in the academic sphere with Israel to ensure the development and flourishing especially of certain fields among which applied engineering and new technologies stand out.

On the other hand, with regard to academia’s general connection with the war industry, one of the most disturbing investors in Italian universities is the Italian military technology giant Leonardo spa. The company finances through agreements, internships and carreer days universities and technical colleges in our country.

With the creation of Leonardo Labs it has, in collaboration with university research centers, developed new technologies and patents that will be used in war production.

But there is no shortage of funding from the U.S.

Pentagon and direct agreements of our Ministry of University and Research with NATO, and with the Ministry of Defense, going on to actually strengthen through academia the geopolitical role of Italy and especially the EU on a global scale.

In 2021, the Leonardo Med-Or Foundation was established with the aim of “promoting cultural, research and scientific training activities in order to strengthen the ties, exchanges and international relations between Italy and the countries of the Mediterranean area extended to the Sahel, Horn of Africa and Red Sea (Med) and the Middle and Far East (Or).” President Marco Minniti, a former interior minister in the PD government who is best remembered for the funding of Libyan lagers and the repressive measures of the security decrees, has included several rectors of Italian universities in the scientific committee.

Or again Thales is one of the world’s largest arms companies, producing military drones, armored vehicles, missile systems and more.

One of its projects is the development of UAV watchkeeper drones carried out in collaboration with Israel’s Elbit systems. Thales has seen its shares grow by 60 percent since the military escalation in Ukraine, a growth similar to that of Leonardo, with which it is a partner in the Space Alliance strategic alliance, formed in 2005, with two joint ventures on aerospace: Thales Alenia Space, where the French company has 67 percent and the Italian 33 percent, and Telespazio where Leonardo has 67 percent and Leonardo 33 percent.

Case in point was for the period 2021-2027 the European Defense Fund 8 billion euros of funds allocated by the European Union to boost military research for defense purposes and the industry related to it.

The central aspect of the research and agreements we highlight is that behind a civilian or even “internationalist” mask lies a scientific project to strengthen warfare, with so-called “dual use” research, military research in civilian guise.

The reason we condemn research agreements is to be found in the fact that our university model does not distinguish between wartime and civilian research, thus going out of its way to exploit a basic ambiguity to fund full-fledged war projects.

Therefore, it is important to reiterate the impossibility of coexistence that exists between the idea of public research serving society and the warfare supply chain to which universities nowadays contribute.

It is therefore necessary to pursue paths that aim to interrupt any kind of relationship with war environments and military apparatuses in our universities, to block at the origin the complicity between the world of education and Israeli apartheid, for universities that are of new places of thought and promoters of peace, not dowel in works of extermination.

It will not be in the name of students that the genocide of the Palestinian people will be carried out and that Western imperialist wars will be financed.

November 2023