Palestinian Liberation and Zionist Ideology at the Western University

Israel's genocidal war on Gaza escalated in the fall of 2023 and sparked a mass student uprising across the world. This student intifada recentered universities as crucial battlegrounds and sites of mobilization for Palestinian liberation. Building on the liberated zones of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, students constructed their own “people's universities” through building encampments on their campuses. This essay traces the material and intellectual entanglements of the Western university with Zionism, profoundly contested by student organizers in recent months. It then shows how the current student uprising challenges long-held ideas about the “crisis” of the university and unsettles the very administrative and violent structures formed by the university as it reconstituted itself in response to the demands of previous student occupations. Finally, it asks what we might learn from this student uprising, which the essays that follow further explore.