My Testimony at the Gaza Tribunal in Istanbul May 26–29, 2025
My name is Maura Finkelstein and, until May 2024, I was a tenured professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I am here in my capacity as an expert in university complicity in genocide, and in the ten minutes I have, I will show how colleges and universities in the United States have actively supported Israel’s U.S. backed genocide in Gaza through three features of university complicity: first, university investments, second, university partnerships, and third, university silencing of dissent.
Before I begin, I note that my testimony is drawn from the U.S context, where my expertise lies. However, I would argue that — across the world — every institution that hasn’t expressly divested from Israel, clearly condemned genocide and scholasticide, and unequivocally supported students, faculty, and staff who are supporting Palestinian liberation, is complicit in this genocide. The jury should also be aware that this work of silencing speech and action in support of Palestinian liberation and in opposition to this genocide is part of a much larger and longer assault on our campuses because they offer a space of solidarity, radical possibility, organizing, and community care despite — and because of — the university’s evolution towards corporate and authoritarian structure. It is against this backdrop that we have watched these last two years of violent repression unfold.
Feature One: University Investments
Most colleges and universities are not transparent about their economic partnerships. So students use the slogan, “disclose, divest” to demand that administrations, boards of trustees, and boards of regents first disclose their investments and then unload investments in companies that are directly aiding in the dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Palestine.
Acknowledging the general refusal of university administrations to disclose, a vast majority of American colleges and universities, on one hand, directly support genocide through investments in Israel and weapons manufacturing and, on the other, indirectly support genocide through investments in companies as revealed in Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese report, “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”, like Google and Amazon, which provide technology services to Israel’s military; Airbnb, which allows for rental listings in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank; and Caterpillar, whose equipment Israel’s military uses to destroy homes and crush Palestinians and their allies.
We must also take account philanthropic support — U.S. universities depend on corporate funding and billionaire donors, which results in stakeholders who have the power to determine the educational policy and ideological brand of these institutions, as well as where the institutions invest their funds.
Feature Two: University Partnerships
Colleges and universities in the U.S. consistently partner with those in Israel to build and cement ties through study abroad and student exchange programs. As Maya Wind’s research reveals, these are all institutions that serve the State of Israel’s projects of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonial genocide.
Additionally, organizations like Hillel International not only host and organize such exchanges, they also facilitate birthright trips and hasbara fellowships for students and, most egregiously, 65 colleges and universities across the U.S. take part in the Israel Fellows Program, which brings former Israeli soldiers to campus to forge deeper ties between American students and Israel. These fellows also aid in the harassment, surveillance, and intimidation of Palestinian and anti-Zionist students, faculty, and staff.
Of further concern are research collaborations. As one example, Since World War II2 and solidifying and expanding during the Cold War, U.S. universities have collaborated with the military and aerospace sectors or the “military-industrial-academic complex”, including what the Department of Defense (DoD) calls “University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs),” a program begun in 1996 to develop “essential engineering and technology capabilities.” There are 15 UARC schools in the U.S. One of them, the University of Southern California, also provides human cadavers to the U.S. and Israeli military for trauma surgery training for Israeli soldiers.
Feature Three: University Silencing of Dissent
In order to protect their investments and partnerships in Israel and its genocide, colleges and universities have been actively and violently silencing dissent and foreclosing spaces of solidarity.
An example of this is University overreach. Columbia University has infamously led the way in normalizing repression and silencing dissent on college and university campuses. We’ve seen this with President Minouche Shafik’s congressional hearing in Spring 2024, where she revealed that she dismissed or removed five faculty members from the classroom and suspended 15 students and two student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace — from campus. She then incorrectly categorized both “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” as hate speech.
Across the US, college and university administrators, following Columbia, are now partnering with Zionist organizations like Hillel International, the Anti-Defamation League, and AIPAC, to run campus “antisemitism trainings”, which, drawing on the IHRA definition of antisemitism, categorizes advocating for Palestinian liberation and condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza with “hate speech.”
Another example is how administrations are silencing and endangering students. The Gaza Solidarity Encampments are the most explicit demonstration.
As part of the steady neoliberal shift over the past 40 years, college and university administrators across the U.S. have worked hand in glove with the police to dismantle student encampments and brutalize and incarcerate students (and some faculty and staff) who have been part of the encampment movements.
Some of the worst violence occurred at Columbia University, with the administrative-sanctioned police attack on Hind’s Hall, and at UCLA, where administrators and police stood back as Zionist and white supremacist mobs brutalized students in the middle of the night. Across the U.S., every single one of these violent acts of repression occurred under the direction and oversight of college and university leadership.
This silencing of dissent by college and university administrators has led to collaborations with ICE and the Trump Administration, and these violences have only escalated.
As of May 2025, the Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Initiative has tracked 1,708 cases involving visa relocations and terminations of immigration records, entry denials, deportations, and detentions of university students, faculty, and staff.
While the most well-known case is that of Mahmoud Khalil, I want to draw attention to two political prisoners, Leqaa Kordia and Casey Goonan, who are still in detention because of their anti-genocide activism and support for Palestinian liberation. Free Leqaa, free Casey.
Lastly, I would like to draw the jury’s attention to how administrations are suspending and terminating faculty and staff. Over the past two years, the Department of Education released a list of over 100 schools under investigation by the Office of Civil Rights for potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Numerous university administrations (famously among them Harvard University, Columbia University, and my former employer, Muhlenberg College) have responded to and exacerbated this situation by conflating political criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and using this to suspend and fire faculty and staff.
Once again drawing on the Middle East Studies Association’s (2025) research, the Academic Freedom Initiative has created a database that tracks all adverse employment outcomes for university employees who have advocated for Palestine since October 2023. Thus far, they have recorded 61 cases of retaliation, including suspensions, terminations, forced resignations, rescinded offers, and removals from service positions, across 37 colleges and universities. I am one of those faculty.
The number of faculty and staff who are targets continues to grow. These ongoing repressive measures by college and university administrators have created a chilling effect across higher education, as many academics are now choosing to self-censor, cancel classes, refrain from publishing and posting on social media, and omit materials about Palestine to avoid investigation.
Conclusions
I’ve thus far talked about how institutions of higher education across the United States have directly defended and justified Israel’s genocide in Gaza. More insidiously, within academic spaces, many university workers have elided the real stakes of settler colonial genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land dispossession by fabricating, circulating, and normalizing “both sides” rhetoric on our campuses. These institutions cannot bring the dead back nor can they undo the damage of Israel’s destruction. But at a minimum, and echoing Rania Muhareb’s call on Thursday, we must demand that these institutions completely divest from weapons manufacturers, all militaries, and companies aiding and abetting genocide, as well as the Israeli State. Additionally, U.S. institutions of higher education must dissolve partnerships and exchanges with Israeli Institutions and ban Zionist watchdog organizations like Hillel International and the ADL from spaces of influence on campuses. But this is not enough — every institution with financial ties to the Israeli State should pledge that number (and more) to Gaza, as Palestinians rebuild the world we in the West have been so active in destroying. While these reparations are not enough, they are at least a start.
This is the text of Maura Finkelstein’s testimony at the Gaza Tribunal in Istanbul, May 26–29, 2025.