My first distinct recollection about Palestine dates back to late 2014. Israel had just concluded one of its periodic massacres in Gaza, slaughtering more than 2,200 Palestinians and destroying more than 18,000 homes in the space of just 51 days. Reading UN reports on my phone, I was particularly horrified to learn that nearly 65 percent of those killed had been defenseless civilians, including 551 children. And I was even more horrified when I reflected on the fact that these Palestinian children had been murdered with U.S.-made bombs, to the bipartisan applause of U.S. lawmakers, with considerable support from the U.S. public. This would be my first concrete lesson in just how little my government, my co-citizens, and many in my community care about Palestinian life.

A few years later, shortly after entering a master’s program at the University of Chicago, I watched in admiration as the besieged population of Gaza began staging weekly protests demanding freedom from Israeli occupation and their right to return to their ancestral lands. My admiration merged with horror, once again, as Israel responded to Gaza’s calls for freedom with a campaign of murderous violence. U.S.-backed Israeli snipers were positioned on the periphery of Gaza and given carte blanche to open fire on Palestinian protestors. In total, 36,143 Palestinians were left wounded, maimed, or dead. More than 7,000 were shot with live ammunition. Soldiers cheered (and sometimes filmed) as they sniped medics, journalists, teenagers, Muslims kneeling on prayer mats, and disabled people. A UN Commission presented evidence that Israel had engaged in “serious human rights… violations that may constitute… crimes against humanity,” but Israel faced no material consequences for its behavior. Instead, as in 2014, it enjoyed the bipartisan support of U.S. lawmakers and the broad sympathy of the U.S. public.

It was around this same time that the University of Chicago announced its decision to host Meir Elran, a former Brigadier General in the Israeli army, as a teaching fellow. Elran knew a thing or two about brutalizing Palestinian protestors, having served as Deputy Director of Military Intelligence during the first Palestinian intifada. During Elran’s tenure (1987-89), Israeli soldiers were supplied with truncheons and ordered to “break the bones” of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. And break bones they did: more than 23,600 children required medical treatment for beating injuries within that two-year period, one third of them children under the age of 10. Another 300 protestors were outright murdered, including 56 children.

Notwithstanding his deeply criminal track record, Elran was received by the University with open arms. In fact, Elran remains a regular University fellow to this day, in which capacity he offers a semi-annual course called “Security, Counter-Terrorism, and Resilience: The Israeli Case.” Drawing directly from his experiences upholding military occupation and crushing Palestinian resistance to it—as well as his subsequent career as an Israeli military strategist—Elran urges students to look to Israel as a model that “liberal democracies” might emulate. Never mind the fact that Israel is a widely recognized apartheid regime operating the longest-running military occupation in modern history. Elran possesses “expertise”; the University is grateful to have him.

One might imagine that General Elran’s campus presence is an anomaly—an unfortunate byproduct of the University’s oft-trumpeted commitment to political “neutrality” and “culture of fearless inquiry.” But he is nothing of the sort. In fact, his presence owes to the University’s entrenched partnership with the Israel Institute, a propaganda organization with deep ties to the Israeli military and security establishment. Founded in connection with the Schusterman Family Foundation—an overtly political organization that embraces “the vision of Zionism” and funds pro-Israel advocacy—the Israel Institute sends annual fellows to teach propagandistic courses in University of Chicago classrooms, including those taught by Israeli military personnel. Elran’s fellowship is a product of this well-established institutional arrangement (for which no parallel exists); he is neither an anomaly nor an exception.

The Israel Institute is not, moreover, the only anti-Palestinian institution with which the University maintains a partnership. In 2013, just two years after the South African University of Johannesburg terminated its research partnership with Ben-Gurion University (BGU) on account of the latter’s “ongoing, deliberate and wide-ranging support for the Israeli military and illegal occupation,” the University of Chicago stepped in to announce a large-scale partnership with this same institution. Similar partnerships have been announced over the years with Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and other Israeli institutions with well-documented track records of stealing Palestinian land, developing Israeli military technologies, suppressing Palestinian academic freedom, and/or actively buttressing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

Nor has there been any shift in University policy as a result of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. On the contrary, just days before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled it “plausible that Israel’s acts could amount to genocide,” and long after UN officials had announced that Israeli policies had driven more than half of Gaza’s population to the brink of starvation, President Paul Alivisatos formally hosted an Israeli Consul General to discuss ways of “further enhanc[ing]” partnerships between the University of Chicago and Israeli institutions. This would be an unconscionable act of genocide normalization under any circumstance, but it is all the more galling when one considers that this same President, for more than five months, has continually refused to hold a public meeting with students concerned about University complicity in Israeli genocide. To meet with such students, apparently, would be to jeopardize the University’s commitment to “political neutrality.” To host representatives from the state actively perpetrating said genocide, however, poses no problem at all.

Still, the University might argue, the inviolability of academic discourse must be protected: if partnering with Israeli propaganda networks, hosting Israeli state officials, employing blood-stained Israeli generals as professors, and working collaboratively with academic-cum-military Israeli institutions is the price to be paid for a maximally free and expansive “exchange of ideas,” then so be it. If Palestinians and South Africans fail to appreciate that these are, in fact, “politically neutral” policies, they are naive idealists at best, antisemitic bigots at worst. And besides, what do they really know about how universities work?

Putting aside the fact that the University does not, for example, partner with pro-Russia propaganda organizations or host Russian generals to teach “security studies” courses, there are two glaring problems with this line of argument. For one thing, the Palestinian people—including Palestinian universities—have issued a clear call to the world community for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions that play a direct role in maintaining Israel’s regime of apartheid and military occupation. The University is free to ignore this call, as it previously ignored South Africa’s, but it cannot claim to be “neutral” while doing so. There is no neutral option in the face of a national boycott call: one either adheres to it or does not. The University likes to point out that divesting from complicit Israeli institutions would constitute a “political act,” which is true enough. What it doesn’t like to acknowledge is that, by the very same logic, and for the very same reason, forming and maintaining partnerships with them is a political act as well.

But all this is secondary to the larger problem at hand: the University’s entanglements with Israeli apartheid far outstrip anything that could even conceivably be construed as “academic.” As an investigation by the Maroon revealed in 2020, the Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs) in which the University maintains investment “have $6 billion invested in the manufactures of both conventional and nuclear weapons.” High-end recipients of this investment include General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other leading arms suppliers to Israel. And there is every reason to believe that this alarming revelation only scratches the surface of the University’s investments in Israeli militarism. After assessing the University Office of Investments’ compliance with human rights earlier this year, for example, Amnesty International gave it a failing grade of 0/40 – the lowest score of any university examined. Not only does the University refuse to sign the UN Principles on Responsible Investment, its endowment “has no publicly available policy mentioning human rights as a consideration… and no public disclosure of investment holdings.” The diagnosis quite literally could not be worse.

Like many other students, I’ve spent the past six months glued to the news. I’ve watched in horror as the pervasive disregard for Palestinian life I first witnessed in 2014 has reached openly, indeed triumphantly, genocidal heights across the U.S. and Israel. I’ve had painful conversations with Palestinian friends who have had their friends and relatives exterminated in real time, whether blown to pieces by U.S.-made bombs or shot by U.S.-armed soldiers. And I’ve watched with disgust as Congressperson after Congressperson, pundit after pundit, university president after university president insist that, at the end of the day, there’s nothing to do but be civil, wait it out, and continually remind ourselves of Israel’s right to defend itself.

For Israel and its U.S. cheerleaders, it is apparent that this “right of self-defense” knows no moral or legal boundaries. Forcibly depriving 2.3 million captive civilians of food and water; slaughtering more than 13,000 children; violently displacing 1.9 million people; systematically targeting hospitals, shelters, schools, mosques, and churches; calling for the infliction of “severe epidemics” on Gaza’s population; dropping white phosphorus on population centers; striking hundreds of humanitarian sites and aid convoys; destroying more than 70 percent of Gaza’s housing units; citing biblical injunctions to leave no man, woman, child, or infant breathing—these and other genocidal tactics have been either championed or excused by nearly every major U.S. politician, media pundit, and Israel-linked academic institution.

It is against this grisly backdrop that I and many other students have been organizing against University complicity and in support of divestment from Israel. It has been sickening enough to witness this situation as a U.S. citizen: to watch as my government and my co-citizens cheerlead (or else shrug off) the ongoing extermination of a people about whose history, sufferings, dreams, and aspirations they have never bothered to learn. But in some ways it is even more sickening to eat, study, and attend classes at a university known to be ideologically and materially complicit in that extermination; to read stories about babies forced off incubators and starved to death in Gaza while General Elran lectures on the merits of Israeli “counter-terrorism”; to receive texts from Palestinians facing home demolition in the West Bank while the University hosts Israeli officials and proudly maintains partnerships with militarized Israeli universities; to watch the Palestinian death toll rise into the dozens of thousands while the University blandly laments the “loss of life” on all sides and continues to profit from Israeli arms deals.

These months of organizing have yielded a number of tangible gains: a Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter has been formed; a Jewish anti-Zionist student organization has been created; the graduate student union has endorsed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel; students in public policy, medicine, and STEM have all formed area-specific Palestine solidarity groups; and many thousands of dollars have been raised for humanitarian relief in Gaza. But it is apparent that the University administration remains as dead-set as ever on maintaining the anti-Palestinian status quo, including by disciplining Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and arresting student protestors for raising their voices against that status quo.

The Israeli regime will ultimately fall, as all apartheid states do. The Palestinian struggle for liberation will outlast, and finally triumph over, Zionism’s racist attempt to construct an exclusivist Jewish ethnostate atop the Palestinian homeland. It is anyone’s guess how many Palestinians will be killed, starved, and brutalized before that happens. One thing, however, is clear: when Palestinians do win their liberation, it will be despite the concerted efforts of the University of Chicago and other Israel-linked U.S. institutions to delay, obstruct, and prevent it. Administrative propaganda aside, there is nothing politically neutral about this University and never has been. Long an enabler of apartheid in South Africa and dictatorship in Chile, it has become a proud enabler of genocide in Gaza.

Christopher Iacovetti is a PhD student in religion and literature and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Views are his own.