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on the Trump-Netanyahu peace “agreement” may end the bombing of Gaza, but the fact remains intact that the neoliberal era has been left behind and a new era is now dawning, that of brute, even genocidal, military force. Israel’s “success” in Gaza is not a promise of peace, but a now credible threat of repetition. Two Israeli authors help explain first the genocide and then the grim implications. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an academic, analyzed more than one hundred textbooks from Israeli schools, and we can say that education does not justify the genocidal vision and practice, but rather that it creates it. He argues that “the most widely used books in Israel’s secondary schools implicitly legitimize the murder of Palestinians as an effective instrument for preserving the security of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and suggests that this legitimation prepares Israeli youth to be good soldiers and to carry out the corresponding tasks in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” (“The legitimation of massacres in Israel history books” in: Discourse & Society (Sage Journals) Vol. 21, No. 4).
For his part, Noah Harari goes further and points out that the route of excessive violence that Israel has chosen will mean “a spiritual catastrophe that can destroy 2,000 years of Jewish culture… and that in addition to the ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians… and the worship of military power, it means the end of democracy” and, therefore, we add, the return to the existence of the Jews as in Harari’s words, “a very bloodthirsty religious tribe….” (Video interview: On the spiritual disaster in Palestine. In Unholy Live in London. 35 min). And since the United States is now clearly also moving along that route, Mexico will be directly affected. That is to say, as a world economy and politics we will not move towards the cultured and wise Athens, but towards the militaristic Sparta that rejects the limitations imposed on it by international organizations and courts, treaties, agreements, commercial and financial obligations, and also, at the national level, the disdain for commitments in health, pensions and education. And evidently this violent policy will result in innocent deaths, social upheavals, social deterioration and suffering, and massive protests in peripheral countries.
Faced with this panorama, universities are obliged to reflect deeply. Define, for example, what is the active and strategic role that corresponds to them as creators and reproducers of culture and socially valid knowledge. But also about its existence: mainly in the budgetary issue, since it will be under siege and in its deep structure. If their organizational framework remains rigid and extremely vertical and exclusive, as until now, their process of extinction will continue and they will be relegated to museum pieces. On the contrary, if they are poles of intense participation and organization and assume social mandates from below, they can once again – as in the past – become nuclei that strengthen the country, since in each entity they recreate a culture and autonomous performance of political and business power. To do this, they require a change that opens their power structures to the direct and decisive participation of students, academics and administrators in institutional leadership and incorporates the social demands for knowledge that arise from below. They also need to recover university policy that today almost irremediably atrophies when it is reduced – as in recent months we have outlined – to getting there for the sake of getting there even if what was considered until recently “very important processes of divisional change” is abandoned. Put aside politics that is a mere fruit of court struggles and conflicts, favoritism on the one hand, and repression and dismissals on the other. Politics as mere authoritarianism without substantial background content and that is even counterproductive for the officials themselves. Like the fact that the secretary of the Unit, a candidate for the Xochimilca rectory, does not exactly have followers by keeping the community dining room for academics, administrators and students closed for months. The latter, in particular, are already adults who vote, but upon arriving at the UAM-Xochimilco they are infantilized with calls of all kinds (“come take a photo with ‘Xochito’ – emblem of the Xochimilco Unit–”, and the general rectory, in a survey, makes them answer a question with racist overtones about what the color of their skin is. It is forgotten that they are young adult citizens with full rights. recognizes that they come to a serious task and look at avenues as important as the collective exercise of power, scientific theories that serve to find answers and to give meaning to their concerns about society, their profession and the world where they live. That’s what they come for.
