Israeli academia was transplanted from Europe rather than imposed over prior tradition

Evidence

Israeli academic institutions as well as public discourse and national narratives are densely derivative of their Euro-American parent, a fact that explains the strikingly near-identical similarities between the Zionist and American colonizations. From their inception, Israeli academic institutions (foremost among which is the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) were replicas of their Euro-American counterparts, and did not evolve, for instance, as did universities in most Asian countries, namely, through having to suppress their long-standing traditions of learning and the institutional structures by which they were sustained in favor of the imposed institutions of a foreign and colonizing intruder. In other words, Israel’s academia is effectively a transplantation from European soil. Academically and intellectually, Israel is largely a replica of the average Western European country, “average” because those who established, staffed, and operated its academia were predominantly emigrants into Israel from those very countries. The more recently established institutions, now populated mostly by Jews born in Israel, simply followed the already-established tradition. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader argument running through Restating Orientalism about academia as a carrier of colonial thought structure; also pairs with the reader’s interest in how knowledge institutions are transplanted.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘Grafting & Growth’ in a loose way — the metaphor of transplantation from European soil into Israel — though the tree infrastructure piece is about literal grafting.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 439