On March 25, Connecticut College’s hosted the 16th installment of its “Understanding Israel/Palestine” series, featuring Professor Maha Nassar examining Palestinian “sumud” or steadfastness. Ultimately, it offered a revealing case study in how academic theory can blur into political advocacy – without meaningful challenge.

I am a 1976 graduate of the school.

Sumud is the Arabic term to describe the steadfastness of the Palestinian cause.  But her talk also showed why this steadfastness has consistently derailed attempts to achieve peace in the region.

Nassar articulated the belief that the Palestinians were unjustly denied statehood in 1947 when the UN proposed partitioning the Palestine Mandate into Jewish and Arab states. That is an odd view because Palestinian Arabs were in fact being offered statehood in that plan. While Israel accepted the plan, the Arab states rejected it and declared war against Israel. She believes everything since then should be undone, giving those 1947 Arab residents and their generations of descendants the “right to return” to reclaim their land and property in Israel.

It is this steadfastness – the uncompromising insistence on undoing history, on undoing a war, and on returning to the 1947 borders and property ownership – that has left the Palestinian people stateless and exploited by its corrupt leadership.

But Nassar wants more than just setting the clock back to 1947.  She wants all of Israel to be under Palestinian control.

Before assessing the implications of this framework, it is worth examining how Nassar defines it.

In her talk, Nassar explained how she conceptualizes the “spheres of sumud” to understand how Palestinian steadfastness operates across multiple, overlapping levels of life, rather than as a single form of resistance. She defines sumud not simply as individual resilience, but as a collective, proactive practice of resisting oppression and maintaining identity, enacted both within historic Israel/Palestine and........

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