The Stakes When An Academy Forgets Its Core |
Israelis and Palestinians are fighting not only in the alleys and tunnels of Gaza or beneath skies crowded with weaponized drones. They are also engaged in a battle over meaning: over what these events signify, what moral vocabulary will define them, and what political future they are meant to endorse.
The aftershocks of October 7 continue to reverberate across borders, institutions, and intellectual life. Its savagery shattered not only the lives of men, women, and children caught in its path; it also exposed the collapse of interpretive frameworks within universities, long celebrated for their scholarly rigor. Professors with seemingly unimpeachable credentials responded not with disciplined inquiry, but with narratives saturated in platitude and slogan, untethered from history, politics, or moral proportion. Facts carried authority only when they reinforced a presumed ‘record’ of Israeli culpability. Reality itself became subordinate to a moralized legend in which Palestinians were elevated into sanctified victims and Jews cast as the singular source of Palestinian suffering and, by extension, global injustice.
A war over words has transformed the university into a staging ground for conflicts that will not end when the guns fall silent in Gaza or Lebanon, or even when cargo ships again pass unmolested through the Strait of Hormuz. The investments made in shaping what can be said and taught on campus have yielded extraordinary returns. One need only imagine a balance sheet measuring the political dividends accruing to Qatar or to networks of progressive philanthropy when Hamas’ brutality was met on elite campuses not with revulsion, but with rationalization, sympathy, and at times celebration. It would be difficult to engineer a more successful return on billions spent cultivating a narrative of Israeli malevolence than the immediate eruption of calls for “global intifada” and for Israel’s disappearance “from the river to the sea.”
In the wake of October 7, activists harassed Jewish students, disrupted lectures, occupied buildings, and paralyzed precisely the forms of analysis necessary to understand a conflict of immense historical and political complexity. Within hours, a moral inversion hardened into dogma: Israel, rather than Hamas, was recast as the primary aggressor. Accusations of genocide—often deployed with little concern for definition, evidence, or legal precision—transformed the victims of one of the most barbaric attacks in recent history into its alleged perpetrators. Such rhetorical reversals, astonishing even in an age shaped by disinformation and algorithmic distortion, reveal a........