Urgent Briefing Paper (to download pdf file click here: palsocontau_jan_2009_draft3)

Tel Aviv University – A Leading Israeli Military Research Centre

Prepared By SOAS Palestine Society,

In the rough and tumble reality of the Middle East, Tel Aviv University is at the front line of the critical work to maintain Israel’s military and technological edge.

(Tel Aviv University Review, Winter 2008-9)

Introduction

Tel Aviv University (TAU) is Israel’s largest university. Like any large university, TAU hosts an extensive range of well-regarded research and teaching programmes in almost every discipline. Unlike most large universities, TAU is also heavily and openly involved in military research and development (R&D), deeming the pursuit of state security prerogatives and academic research to be harmonious enterprises at the centre of its institutional mission. The following pages offer a brief and necessarily incomplete description of just some of the current work being conducted in the dozens of TAU departments presently collaborating with the military. Nothing is said here of the many professional links between TAU’s senior management and the army; nothing is said of the university’s discriminatory housing, scholarship, and access practices privileging demobilized Jewish soldiers over Palestinian citizens; nothing is said of TAU’s discriminatory mission of serving first not the citizens of the state but of being rather a definitionally ‘Jewish university’1; and nothing is said of the university’s historic role in illegally transforming depopulated post-1948 Palestinian land into a state resource.2 While these are all necessary components in arriving at an understanding of the full extent of TAU’s deep involvement in the pursuit of exclusivist and violent nationalist goals, space prevents their being treated fully here. Instead, this document examines only the most direct and immediate aspects of TAU’s instrumental contributions to the state’s ongoing military projects; it highlights the explicit institutional culpability of TAU in the design and execution of war crimes and in the subjugation of a people. This is, remarkably, an aspect of TAU’s investment in nationalist projects which has received too little attention and yet which most vividly reveals the human consequences of international acquiescence in the militarization of academic institutions in Israel. What follows then is a brief survey of the types of institution and programme which are currently bringing together scholars and soldiers in the laboratories, clean rooms, and classrooms of one of Israel’s premier security research establishments – Tel Aviv University.

The briefing paper comprises five sections. In the first, the scene is set with an account of a major weapons technology and strategy workshop held at TAU between the Lebanon 2006 and Gaza 2008-9 campaigns. Following this, examples of three TAU institutes heavily involved in shaping security doctrine are given; these are followed by two examples of senior TAU scholars whose involvement in military affairs is intense and emblematic of the types of dual competence which unite the university with the army. After this, a survey of a recent TAU bulletin is given to illustrate both the striking extent of inter-departmental involvement in military R&D and the public celebration of this work on the part of TAU’s senior management. The paper then concludes with an account of the overt role played by TAU security experts, military strategists, and legal consultants in the commissioning and legitimizing of war crimes of the most extreme variety, such as those recently seen during the Gaza offensive.

Setting the Scene: 2006-2008 – From Lebanon to Gaza via Tel Aviv University

In December 2007, seventeen months after the Lebanon War, high-ranking officers from the Israeli armed forces convened with chief scientists from the arms industry to evaluate the roles played by new technologies in a military strategy designed, in the words of its architects, to take ‘Lebanon back 20 years by striking its vital infrastructure.’3 The event, “Electro-Optics in the Battlefield of the Future”, was organised and hosted by TAU’s Science, Technology, and Security Workshop under the chairmanship of Yitzhak Ben-Israel.

Lees verder: http://usacbi.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/militarization-of-tel-aviv-university/