Scholasticide and research on antisemitism

The Contemporary Antisemitism Haifa 2026 conference positions itself as the world’s largest academic forum for the study of antisemitism, promising pluralism, “scholarly” debate, and intellectual refuge. Yet to convene such a gathering at the University of Haifa, at a time when Gaza is enduring what scholars, human rights organizations, and international jurists increasingly recognize as genocide, exposes the deep entanglement of antisemitism research with what Palestinians and their allies have termed scholasticide: the systematic destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, scholars, and students. The University of Haifa is not a neutral space. It has long been implicated in apartheid structures through the disproportionate targeting of Palestinian students in disciplinary measures, the celebration and material support of “student soldiers” in the Israeli military, and active efforts to delegitimize pro-Palestinian activism. In the context of scholasticide, where universities in Gaza have been bombed into rubble and hundreds of educators and students killed, the spectacle of an international academic conference on antisemitism hosted at an Israeli university functions as an act of erasure. It re-centers Israeli institutional legitimacy while Palestinian academic life is being annihilated, effectively weaponizing the language of antisemitism research to obscure state violence and to criminalize critique of Zionism. Rather than fostering “critical and respectful dialogue,” this conference exemplifies how academic infrastructures are mobilized to normalize genocide and launder state crimes through the authority of scholarship. I am currently developing a paper on precisely this entanglement and the ways antisemitism research is being instrumentalized in the service of scholasticide.