At that event, President Gay fell into the trap of accepting Representative Elise Stefanik’s radical mis-characterization of two expressions that have a long history within Palestinian struggles for freedom—“intifada,” and the phrase “from the river to the sea,”—as calls for genocide against Jews, and then, when pressured, failed to state unequivocally that such speech was a violation of Harvard’s rules of conduct. That is, when pressed to state that pro-Palestinian perspectives, wherein the use of these terms is commonplace, should be forbidden from campus, she wavered, perhaps momentarily confused by her free speech concerns. It was this failure to denounce the illegitimacy of pro-Palestinian speech and activism—glossed as “genocidal” by Stefanik, and accepted as such by all present, including Gay—that ultimately spelled her downfall.

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Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 2023. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images).

The main reason liberal pundits have downplayed the salient role of what could be called “anti-Palestinianism” in sealing Dr. Gay’s fate is that, unlike the attack on liberal education, it cannot be framed as a partisan issue. The termination of her presidency did not provoke any outcry among Washington Democrats largely because they also have embraced the position expressed in Rep. Stefanik’s rhetoric, namely, that anti-Zionism (i.e. expressed in calls for an end to the Israeli occupation) is equivalent to antisemitism or, in other words, that calls for Palestinian liberation, for full legal and political rights for Palestinians, constitute a murderous threat to exterminate Jews.

For clarification, let me note here that intifada, as used by Palestinians in recent history, simply means “uprising,” and more specifically, an uprising against the oppressive conditions of the Israeli occupation; “from the river to the sea (Palestine will be free),” for its part, is chanted at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, not as a call for genocide of Jews, but a demand that everyone inhabiting this geography have equal rights and freedoms. That scholars of the region have vehemently and publicly criticized the misuse of these terms within US political discourse has not hindered pro-Israeli pundits from rehashing such mistranslations.

Stefanik and co. have now demonstrated how the political class’s unwavering support for pro-Israeli perspectives and policies can be weaponized against the university, including its commitments to racial equality. The current chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who originally organized the congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses, now plans to expand the scope of her investigation into antisemitism on campus to other elite schools, giving particular attention to the way DEI programs may have adversely affected Jewish students.

The congressional group, under Foxx’s leadership has already demanded that Harvard make available a list of “posts by Harvard students, faculty, staff, and other Harvard affiliates on Sidechat and other social media platforms targeting Jews, Israelis, Israel, Zionists, or Zionism.”

And who will be the primary victims of this congressional campaign targeting critics of Israeli occupation? Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, of course, will find themselves directly in the crosshairs of this witch-hunt. But—and, for the critics of the liberal university, this is the genius of the Republican plan—so will the Black and Brown folk who have played a dominant role in urging universities to adopt DEI concerns and commitments. Why? Because the underlying values and principles informing DEI initiatives are radically incompatible with the ethnonationalism of the Zionist project. Indeed, if there are three terms that are completely foreign to Israeli political discourse on the Palestinian people they are Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

The Young Turks Video: “Right-Wing Activist BRAGS About His Scheme To Oust Harvard President Claudine Gay”

Will the Democratic majority in congress be able to counter this Republican assault on liberal education and on its recently bolstered commitments to anti-racism? Unlikely. As the congressional ambush of the presidents of Harvard, U Penn, and MIT demonstrated, the Democrat’s near total devotion to the cause of defending Israel, however egregious its violation of international laws, renders them largely incapable of defending the academic institutions they claim to value. Their blind dedication (“subservience” is probably a more accurate term) to Israel prevents them from calling out the weaponization of the antisemitism charge for what it is, a well-planned and orchestrated effort to silence any criticism of Israel’s decades-long brutalization of Palestinians.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that antisemitism is not a real issue in the US today, simply that its use to tarnish the struggle for Palestinian justice is based on a profound and dangerous political lie. As Bernie Steinberg, a previous executive director of Harvard Hillel, has written: “As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”

The fact that the Democrats are willing to throw their commitment to racial equality under the bus for the sake of demonstrating their infinite devotion to Israel suggests that such a commitment may have been rather thin to begin with. Can support for Israel’s apartheid system (as it has been described by most reputable human rights organizations), not to mention for the war crimes currently being committed in Gaza (again, the designation comes from those same human rights organizations), be squared with a politics of racial justice in the US? When push comes to shove, which is where we are now, then it is obvious the answer is clearly no.

For writings on Israeli assault on Gaza by Charles Hirschkind, see:

The Invisible Slaughter of Palestinian Children . Informed Comment.

Palestine Forgotten. Informed Comment.

“Exterminate the Brutes.” . Mondoweiss.

To support BDS, click here.

Statements made by politicians or military personnel to mitigate the significance of this number—that Israel is making every possible effort to spare civilian lives, that collateral damage is sadly unavoidable in war, that Hamas is to blame for forcing Israel to defend itself, or, most perversely, Biden’s baseless caution about the numerical accuracy of the data—all of these qualifications seem morally obscene when weighed against the fact that close to 4000 children have been blown to shreds in a few short weeks.

According to the charity, Save the Children, “More children have been killed in the Gaza Strip over the last three weeks than in every other armed conflict annually since 2019.” Whatever viewpoint one may hold in regard to Israel’s military actions in Gaza, in one very real and empirical sense, this has been a war carried out -— to a stunning and unprecedented degree -— on the bodies of children. This, I would argue, is a salient moral fact of the conflict, one that any attempt to come to terms with Israel’s assault necessarily confronts.

Or perhaps not. For when our major news media update us on the results of Israel’s relentless bombing campaign, we hear, not that 100 Palestinian children were crushed in the day’s rubble, a now daily occurrence, but rather, that Israel successfully destroyed more of the “terrorist infrastructure,” that “terror tunnels” were eliminated, that 15 Hamas terrorists were killed by the Israeli Army and Air Force, and so on.

We are presented, in other words, with a narrative that conceals the very slaughter that we know from the available casualty statistics is occurring. The massive carnage in children’s lives -— again, an inescapable moral fact of the conflict, whatever one’s point of view—is replaced by the so-called “war on Hamas,” and presented in a language ever more obedient to Israeli military speak, where protocol seems to demand that every third word in a sentence be “terror” or one of its derivative terms.

ABC News: “Gaza is now a ‘graveyard for thousands of children’: UNICEF”

From the standpoint of Western media, Palestinian lives are relevant precisely in proportion to their ability to resist Israel’s crushing grip upon them. Insomuch as Hamas is the primary institution of organized resistance in Gaza, it is they -— not dead children -— who are the only significant Palestinian casualties in this war. It is this perceptual regime that lays behind comments such as the following, made by a US government official, just a few days ago: “We believe that a ceasefire right now benefits Hamas, and Hamas is the only one that would gain from that right now.” The thought that thousands of Palestinian children might also derive some benefit from a ceasefire, namely by not being blown to pieces, is not even to be entertained.

The erasure of enemy deaths is an established practice within war, and the deaths of children are no exception. Thousands of children were killed by the US in the “War on Terror.” These deaths never achieved significant visibility within American public discourse, never weighed heavily on the American political conscience.

Our mainstream media present us today with two events that cannot be squared, the war on Palestinian children and the war on Hamas, and then proceed to coach us in how not to see one of them. This is the task in perception management that today sets their agenda.

How had this condition of normalcy and forgetting been achieved? In Gaza, it had been achieved through a blockade that kept the entrapped Palestinians in a permanent state of poverty, unemployment, hunger, and dependency, an architecture of enforced scarcity and suffering meant to crush the spirit and will of those seeking to resist the relentless bulldozer of Israeli expansion into Palestinian lands.

In the West Bank, a similar though somewhat more porous blockade, combined with intense restrictions on movement and daily harassment and violence at the hands of Israeli military personnel and settlers, has aimed to achieve comparable results. Normalcy for the people of Israel, in other words, had been achieved through policies and practices meant to decimate the material infrastructures of will, hope, resistance, and agency among the more than five million Palestinians.

This policy, pursued by the Israeli government with extensive material and diplomatic support from the US and the EU, had for a while been extraordinarily successful, allowing Israelis to not only enjoy the fruits of their impressive, technology-driven, economic growth, but also make great strides toward normalizing their relations with neighboring Arab countries. Israel, it seemed to many observers, was looking more and more like what it had long claimed to be—a normal, prosperous, democratic country.

On October 7, the bubble of immunity, built by Israel in order to silence and forget the Palestinians living under the crushing fist of its occupation, burst, and with it, the image of Israel as a normal country.

There are two ways, as I see it, to interpret and respond to the horrific attack by Hamas’s military on Israel, its murder of civilians, hostage-taking and commission of war crimes. The first, is to say that the people who committed such wanton acts of bloodshed are evil (“human animals,” as Israel’s defense minister, Yoan Gallant, called them) and their acts must be met by a campaign aimed at nothing less than their total destruction. If the success of this campaign requires that all of Gaza be crushed into a pile of debris, with thousands of ordinary Palestinian men, women, and children slaughtered in the process, this is simply the price that must be paid when confronting evil.

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People gather by the wrapped bodies of victims, in front of the morgue of the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Balah in the central Gaza Strip, following an Israeli strike on October 22, 2023 . . . (Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images).

Once Hamas is defeated, moreover, what will stop another political formation from rising up to replace it, if not the reduction of its entire population to human rubble, to bits and pieces of human life incapable of any action beyond despair? Only then, this argument goes, can Palestinians be once again forgotten, and Israel turn back to its career as a normal country.

Another lesson that might be learned from the attack on Israel is that however brutal, dehumanizing be the cage in which you imprison your neighbor, in the end it will not hold. In the soil of human misery that you have spread over the land, a will to live will eventually take root, one from which you will never be safe. In this light, the current Israeli military campaign, one aimed at crushing the life out of the people of Gaza, is bound, in the long run, to backfire. Instead of promising the people of Israel the normal lives they seek, such a campaign can only further endanger them and intensify their insecurity.

The truth of this latter lesson is simple and clear, and accords with our deepest moral commitments about justice and human rights. Why then, we must ask as Americans, does our government continue to support, year after year, Israel’s relentless assault on the caged people of Palestine? What is the desired future that this support is meant to achieve? None that I can imagine or wish for.