UBC communities held a vigil to honor murdered Palestinian scholars at Allard, where UBC hosted an event as part of an exchange program with Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution that trains intelligence officers for the IOF and partners with global arms dealers such as Lockheed Martin. This program is bankrolled by the Koffman family, with an explicit intention to normalize the “Israeli” apartheid regime. We demand that UBC cuts all institutional ties with Israeli universities.
UBC students hold signs at the law school vigil
Background on the Vigil
On Sep 22, academics, students, and staff joined a silent vigil to honor murdered Palestinian scholars outside an event that was part of an exchange program with Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and to protest UBC’s complicity in genocide by maintaining ties with Israeli universities central to Zionist apartheid, occupation, and racial rule.
UBC students hold signs during the vigil held at UBC Allard School of Law
This event is part of a faculty exchange program bankrolled by the Koffman family, with an explicit intention to normalize the Israeli apartheid regime. The Koffman family, in describing the program’s purpose, said: “People need to learn what an amazing place Israel is.” [1][2]
Hebrew University
Hebrew University (HUJI) runs courses in partnership with the IOF, including the Havatzalot, the Talpiot, and the Tzameret program.
HUJI opened the Havatzalot (Lillies, in Hebrew) program in 2019 to train intelligence officers for the IOF. Soldiers in the program complete a joint BA alongside military training in intelligence gathering, all in preparation for a minimum of 6 years as officers reaching the status of captains or majors in the IOF Intelligence branch.[3]
Collaboration with Arms Dealers
Hebrew University has a long history of collaborating with global arms dealers to develop weapons and surveillance techs. Hebrew University’s technology transfer company Yissum partners with Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest weapon manufacturer, to ensure the university holds exclusive licenses for any technologies they jointly produce.[4]
Israeli universities are central to the Israeli military industry, to Israel’s racist settler-colonial project, and to its longstanding violations of human rights and international law. Israeli universities not only birthed Rafael and Israeli Aerospace Industries, two of Israel’s largest weapons producers and global exports, but also continue to sustain them through their research and laboratories. Israeli universities develop and design weapons and technologies used on Palestinians and then exported abroad as “battle proven” or “field-tested.”[5]
Israeli universities were built as land-grab universities.
Israeli universities are not only established on stolen Palestinian land, but designed as part of the central infrastructure of the Zionist movement and later the Israeli state project of Palestinian dispossession, to shrink lands in Palestinian ownership, to interrupt Palestinian territorial contiguity, and, at the same time, to expand Jewish settlements, to aid a unidirectional transfer of land ownership from Palestinians to Jewish Israelis.
Israeli universities’ knowledge production is a form of epistemological complicity in the apartheid and genocide.
Different disciplines in the Israeli academy, such as archaeology, religious studies, criminology, law, ethics, just to name a few, really have to coordinate their research agenda and their knowledge production to produce expertise to serve the Israeli military, government and state in sustaining apartheid.[6]
For decades, Israeli universities have suppressed Palestinian knowledge production.
Meanwhile, Palestinian universities have been under siege by the full force and brutality of the Israeli military—both part of Israel’s broader strategy to deliberately destroy Palestinians’ cultural, intellectual and social foundations, and to kill the future of Palestine; Israel seeks to suppress the long-standing Palestinian tradition of education as a form of resistance; it sees Palestinian education as a threat, and counters it with military checkpoints, imprisonment and limited movement that restrict intellectual life.[7]
The UN’s 2025 report found that Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s education system as part of its genocide.
The report found that, in Gaza, higher education facilities were targeted and destroyed or damaged by Israel, affecting about 87,000 university students.
More than 57 university buildings had been completely destroyed as of 25 March 2025.
403 of a total of 564 school buildings were directly hit and sustained damage.
As a result of the destruction of educational facilities, over 658,000 school-aged children in Gaza have been denied access to formal education and the accompanying protective support of a functional education system.[8]
UBC’s Role
UBC currently has exchange programs with 3 Israeli universities with central roles in the Israeli apartheid system: Hebrew University, Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion), and Tel Aviv University.
UBC’s Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern department runs an archeological excavation course in partnership with Hebrew University, taking UBC students to dig on stolen Palestinian land.
We urge UBC, university departments, and UBC student organizations to face our responsibility to end the Scholasticide in Palestine by cutting all institutional ties with Israeli universities.
Yaniv Kubovich, “The IDF is working to establish a fenced base inside a university” [in Hebrew], Ha’aretz, Mar 25, 2019; Havatzalot, “Havatzalot: The flag-ship program of the IDF intelligence division” [in Hebrew] havatzalot.org ↩︎
Press Release on Long Term Research Collaboration Agreement ↩︎
Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel. Verso. 2024. ↩︎
Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel. Verso. 2024. ↩︎
Wadee Alarabeed “Education in a time of genocide: scholasticide and the duty of humanitarians”. Sep 18, 2025 Link to Publication ↩︎
UN, “Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds” Sep 16, 2025. Link to Press Release ↩︎