Opinion: Higher education or higher surveillance? The role of universities in repressing dissent

The urgent need to take collective action against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank did not end with the ceasefire agreement. Those who believe otherwise are misattuned to the structural and far-reaching violence of settler-colonialism, of its cyclicality, of its unboundedness in time and space. This genocide is more than a contained event that we can point to, deem as completed and turn away from. It is the product of Western imperialism’s unquenchable thirst for capital and land accumulation, achieved in this instance through Israel as its proxy. As Israel resumes its full-scale attack on Gaza – and, crucially, as the repression of protestors intensifies globally – it is clear that this thirst will never be quenched; a ceasefire didn’t and can’t stop it. 

Even during the so-called ceasefire, Israel continued to massacre Palestinians in Gaza. Only a day after the supposed “end to hostilities”, Israel launched its military offensive on the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank. Since then, Israeli forces have killed over 60 Palestinians and forcibly displaced an estimated 40,000. The ceasefire wasn’t “fragile”; it was already being flouted daily by a settler-colonial entity whose raison d’être is to maximise destruction to achieve expansion. Israel is, by definition, an eliminatory and annihilatory project.  

Throughout this period of supposed “relative calm”, university campuses across the US and Europe have been anything but calm. Columbia University serves as a prime example: we witnessed as Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia, two Palestinian student organisers involved in last year’s encampment, were illegally abducted by brutish federal immigration authorities. They are now being held captive in detention facilities far away from their families and loved ones, at risk of deportation. As Khalil himself alludes to in his letter from an ICE center in Louisiana, their captivity echoes the thousands of Palestinians unlawfully held and tortured in Israel’s prisons, a mass carceral system with intimate ties to the US’s own prison-industrial complex.  

Of course, this was all done at the orders of the Trump administration and in overt defense of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, as immortalised in the White House’s chillingly sadistic tweet: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Importantly, however, it was also facilitated by fascist Zionist organisations who have taken it upon themselves to compile “deportation lists” of student protestors who they accuse of being “terror supporters”.

Mobs of fascists come onto university campuses, harass and doxx students and then share these lists with immigration authorities. It’s crucial to emphasise that these groups are not politically fringe; they are comfortably embedded within the US’s governmental apparatus, in both Republican and Democratic circles. Their confidence and collaboration with governments and neo-Nazi white supremacists reveals the interconnectedness of global fascism.  

Take Betar, a particularly notorious zio-fascist group that openly advocates for violent “pager” attacks on (pro-)Palestinian advocates such as Nerween Kiswani, Norman Finkelstein and Francesca Albanese. Betar was formed in 1923 and became an ultra-right Revisionist Zionist and Kahanist paramilitary formation. Its US chapter was revived in 2023 by the Israeli-American entrepreneur Ronn Torossian, a donor both to the Trump campaign and to proud Zionist and Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres. Betar’s condemnation by other Zionist organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is ironic; this repulsion is “over style not substance” – Betar expresses its violent intent too overtly for their liking, doxxes students too candidly, calls for bloodshed in Gaza too openly.  

We should take care to not exceptionalize Betar, just as we shouldn’t exceptionalize Trump. After all, the genocide was spearheaded by Biden and the Democrats. The West’s political establishment – openly fascist or not – is interested in the same material gains: a perpetually destabilised Middle East through which arms traders can continue to profiteer off of mass death and depraved property developers can fantasize about the real estate potential of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza. These goals must be protected through extreme violence and repression, both in the imperial core and its peripheries.

Israel develops and tests surveillance and border technologies on colonized Palestinians and then exports them back to the colonial metropolis where they are deployed against national populations. This “imperial boomerang” is on particular display on university campuses, where groups like Betar have been given carte blanche to utilise AI facial-recognition technologies developed by Israeli spyware companies to identify student activists.  

So, where do universities lie within this complex network of imperial complicities and alliances? It is not that they have failed to protect their students from fascist violence; they have actively empowered fascists to come onto campus. They have done so by maintaining financial complicity in Israeli occupation and genocide, by repressing student organising through extralegal means, by bowing to political pressure to punish and expel protestors, by colluding with government authorities and disclosing private student records and by bringing in the police to violently raid student occupations and encampments. The list goes on. 

This isn’t a case of inaction but rather an active stance against the well-being and safety of students and staff. Students are physically assaulted on campus, are given no support and yet the suspended attacker receives a settlement deal from Columbia University. Across the pond, British universities allow Betar to harass students and threaten violence. It is not just their silence we should listen to but rather their persistent alignment with imperial violence.  

Western universities should, therefore, be understood as new frontiers for fascist mobilisation, border militarisation and settler-colonial expansion. Here, I draw on Dr. Lara Sheehi’s critical intervention on Zionist smear campaigns in academic contexts as “settler-colonial outposts” that are “intent on expanding the sovereignty of the settler-colonial state of Israel.” Sheehi explains how these outposts are “political and ideological formations that create spaces of convergence for right-wing, fascist, and liberal actors alike.” They have the intent to “harm those who denaturalize Zionism”; in other words, those who pose a threat to US-Israeli hegemony over the terms of public discourse.  

Through their bravery and sacrifice, student organisers lay bare the hypocrisies of “liberal” education and reveal these institutions’ active opposition to a decolonial liberation movement. Led first and foremost by the bravery and sacrifice of Palestinians in Palestine, the burgeoning internationalist student movement is a force to be reckoned with – which is why the structures of imperialism and fascism are so anxious to quell it and why it will go to any lengths to do so.