Perhaps, faced with a rogue state pursuing ethnic cleansing with intent to genocide and that refuses international law and considers itself above the rulings of the United Nations, it is time to speak seriously about how directly to confront Israel. If it is of the modern, democratic West, as it claims, it needs serious reform or otherwise quarantine. And if the question is not simply to be dominated by geopolitics, it requires an ethical and democratic response.  Let us be clear.  Zionism as an explicitly colonial enterprise, and its founders had no qualms in acknowledging it, cannot be democratic in its intentions. The protection of its ethnocratic rule requires racial purity and apartheid, now embodied in its legal apparatus and constitution. The opposition to this criticism of Israel, invariably labeled as antisemitism, is itself an assault on democracy and the pursuit of historical justice in social and political analysis.

Right now, Zionist ideology and its military occupation of Palestine are, as in all settler colonialisms, pursuing the elimination of the natives, just as previously in the anglophone imperium of North America, Australia, and South Africa. The violent formation of Occidental polities and identities produces silenced histories and forgotten geographies. Nevertheless, as the Palestinians teach us, these histories resist and persist. At the University Orientale in Naples on April 23 there was a significant seminar on «Israel, the arms industry and the role of the university». Among the important contributions was the presentation by the Israeli academic Nurit Peled el-Hanan on the symbolic genocide of Palestinians in Israeli school books. In these texts, vetted and approved by the Israeli Ministry of Education, there are no individual Palestinians, only an anonymous, dehumanized category referred to as Arabs. There are no scientists, artists, academics, or politicians amongst the Palestinians, simply an ethnically distinct group who threaten Israeli life with their underdevelopment and terrorism: the enemy of modern Israel and the Occidental Zionist project of civilization. This pedagogical semiotics, as Nurit Peled el-Hanan illustrated in detail, is central to the racializing mechanisms of an apartheid state, its fascist education (her words), and its military rule of the colonized. Speaking truth to power in this manner has a price. Nurit Peled el-Hanan has recently been suspended from her university post. These days, Israeli universities explicitly declare themselves Zionist. They insist that their role is to defend Zionism and the narrative of the ethnonationalist state. So much for scientificity and academic neutrality.

Now, this narrative is not confined to a small but very powerful state in the eastern Mediterranean. It has been adopted for decades throughout the West. Rather, it has been historically cultivated ever since the initial mappings of the world in the early nineteenth century, overwhelmingly by imperial London. What the Harvard-trained Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, who taught at Columbia, more recently dubbed Orientalism, has sedimented in the common sense of political and cultural pronouncements in Europe and North America: from the White House to the Italian TV studio and newspaper article. To argue against this configuration of ‘knowledge’ and its management of the globe is inevitably to be engaged in an argument with our society and the making of ourselves. As James Baldwin so sharply put it: ‘Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find yourself at war with your society’. I like to think that this is a neat summary of what all critical work and analysis is about. It is also where the unthinkable links between the death camp of Gaza and the juridical execution of migrants in the Mediterranean need to be made as the liberal smokescreen evaporates and we witness the brutal exercise of naked power.

The conclusion is that Occidental institutions, government entities, research agencies, and universities, along with the more obvious participation of arms manufacturers, technological companies, and financial servicing, are part and parcel of a colonial apparatus. If the transformation of conflict into capital is one thing, politically supported by the pursuit of economic prosperity and ‘progress’, its critical analysis is altogether another. Students here in Italy and, above all, on American campuses, are rightly teaching their teachers and administrators this latter perspective. To evoke Hannah Arendt, they are pulling out of the teeth of official history an altogether more honest and democratic narrative of the human condition.

This article previously appeared in Italian in il Manifesto: https://ilmanifesto.it/i-ragazzi-lo-sanno-la-ricerca-va-decolonizzata

Iain Chambers is a writer and independent scholar. He previously taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental University in Naples, where he was director of the doctoral programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. His research work is in different fields, including migration, music and the phenomena of identity in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author, inter alia, of the books Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008).