It’s not extreme to wish for the IDF to cease to exist

A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that a screensaver displaying an image of the cartoon character Betty Boop alongside the text »Death death to the IDF« had been shown at the Faculty of Law. The image and the university leadership’s subsequent response have generated numerous headlines over the past two weeks in both Uniavisen and national media outlets.

Given its prominence in the Danish media sphere, the episode is a good opportunity to learn more about what the IDF is and does, why anyone would want it to cease to exist and about UCPH’s relationship to the IDF – now in its third year of a continued genocide on the Palestinian people.

The IDF, i.e. Israel’s military forces, was established in 1948 shortly after the Nakba where 700,000 Palestinians were displaced and ethnically cleansed in order to clear Palestinian land for the subsequent creation of the state of Israel. The IDF was made by unifying three underground terrorist groups who led the ethnic cleansing and whose leaders formed the new Israeli government.

Since then, the IDF has been a fundamental tool for upholding Israel’s apartheid system as well as expanding and maintaining Israel’s illegal occupations in Palestine.

The IDF uses some of the most advanced and deadly war technologies in the world. This includes the AI tools Gospel and Lavender which recommend which buildings, equipment, and people to bomb, as well as autonomous fleets of drones used for surveilling and firing ammunition at people.

Since October 2023, the IDF has killed more than 72,000 people in Gaza, including at least 21,000 children, has caused an estimated 4,000 child amputees, and left more than 58,000 children without one or both parents. Although a ‘ceasefire’ was announced in October 2025, the IDF has killed at least 983 Palestinians in Gaza since then.

The IDF has systematically and deliberately targeted and killed civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, IDF soldiers have used sniper attacks, drones, tanks, and bombs to kill children playing, people queuing for food aid, and refugees in camps.

IDF soldiers have used their social media platforms to publicly celebrate and display their violent attacks on civilians. Among these are videos of destruction of civilian homes, humiliation of detained Palestinians, snipers shooting fleeing civilians, and soldiers gunning down and torturing people.

Since October 2023, the IDF has killed at least 247 journalists, 540 aid workers – including 373 UN staff -, and 1722 health workers in Gaza. During the same period, the IDF has destroyed 81% of all structures in Gaza. The IDF has attacked all of the 37 hospitals, leaving 20 of them completely non-functional, and bombed all 12 universities in Gaza.

Across Palestine, the IDF continues to arrest people without charge – including children – who are kept in Israeli prisons where they are raped, starved, beaten, tortured, and killed.

Many universities acknowledge the growing evidence of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and have already cut their academic ties to Israel or are in the process of doing so. Among these are universities in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Italy.

Yet, despite the UN encouraging the cancellation or suspension of academic relations to Israel, UCPH refuses to implement an academic boycott of Israel and criminalises its own students for demanding an end to the university’s complicity. The university has many ties to Israeli universities and institutions that are complicit in apartheid, colonization, and occupation of the Palestinian people as well as in conducting war crimes against Palestinians and violations of international law.

This includes ongoing collaborations with universities such as the Ben-Gurion University, the Technion Israel Institute Of Technology, and the Tel Aviv University which run programs and trainings for soldiers and collaborate with the IDF and its supplying military industry.

Unlike universities such as the University of Amsterdam and the University of Helsinki, UCPH has refused to cancel the student exchange program with the Hebrew University which runs training programs for soldiers and is partially located on occupied Palestinian land.

Additionally, UCPH continues investing in companies that are complicit in Israel’s war crimes, such as Palantir, which supplies Israel with AI-powered military tools.

Considering all this, it is hardly surprising that someone would want the IDF to cease to exist. A meme on a screensaver is not extreme. What is extreme, however, is that the UCPH management keeps on legitimizing and enabling the IDF, given its continued commitment to crimes against humanity.

Signed by:

Agnete Vienberg Hansen, Ph.D. student at the Department of Economics, UCPH

Anastassia Vybornova, Ph.D. in Data Science, ITU, previously employed at UCPH

Buthaina Shaheen, Ph.D. in global political sociology with focus on Palestine, previously employed at UCPH

Christine Borgvold Naaby Hansen, Ph.D. student at the Technologies in Practice Section, ITU

Fernando Racimo, associate professor at SUND, UCPH

Kristoffer Willert, postdoc, Business and Social Science, SDU

Line Kvartborg Vestergaard, Ph.D. in anthropology, employed at SAMF, UCPH

Nikoline Borgermann, Ph.D. in biochemistry, employed at SUND, UCPH

Teresa Santos, Ph.D. in conservation genomics, former guest researcher at UCPH