A colloquium entitled “Palestinian history between past and present,” scheduled to take place on Friday, March 6, at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, should trigger all kinds of alarm bells.

A legitimate academic event is supposed to advance a search for truth. As contrived with the connivance of the CUNY Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, however, this particular colloquium seems guaranteed to be little more than an echo chamber for one-sided anti-Israel tropes and the deliberate dissemination of disinformation. That this has become the state of academic discourse on a critically important, multi-faceted, and complex topic is nothing short of disastrous.

The March 6 event is organized by CUNY Ph.D. Students who arguably have the academic and constitutionally protected freedom to engage in rhetoric of their choice, even hateful rhetoric. The set-one’s-hair-on-fire problem is that this purportedly academic get-together is co-sponsored by the aforementioned Center for the Study of the Holocaust whose proclaimed mission “is to promote the exchange of ideas across disciplines and generations” and to serve “as a hub for a vibrant community of scholars from many fields with convergent interests.” By its endorsement, the Center, far from promoting any “exchange of ideas,” is championing the promotion and propounding of one-sided vitriol against a country and against individuals who identify with or are sympathetic to that country.

The most serious shortcoming of this colloquium is that it contributes absolutely nothing to a possible, however distant, resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All it will do is exacerbate rather than decrease existing........

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