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 discursive war no less consequential than the military conflict unfolding alongside it. That so many within the academy could interpret acts of terror as instruments of liberation—not only for Palestinians but for the world’s “oppressed”—poses a profound challenge not merely to Israel or to Jews, but to the intellectual foundations of the university itself.
An examination of the financial and ideological endowments shaping discourse on Israel and Palestine is long overdue. Money flowing into universities once sustained scholarly inquiries about competing national claims and contested histories. Increasingly, however, major institutional and philanthropic networks underwrite a worldview in which the very existence of a Jewish state is treated as both the origin of Palestinian suffering and a central source of global disorder. Israel has become a kind of Rorschach test governing the boundaries of permissible campus discourse and, no less significantly, the pathways to academic legitimacy and advancement. The savagery of violence has been accompanied by the savagery of language. A political lexicon has emerged whose function is to establish that Jews deserve whatever violence gets sent their way and that any Israeli action, regardless of circumstance, constitutes a “crime against humanity.”
A scripted vocabulary—compressed into TikTok-ready slogans such as “From the River to the Sea”—has become the liturgy of a secular political ritual. Chants, costumes, flags, and performative gestures now substitute for analysis, reducing a century of conflict into theatrical declarations envisioning the erasure of the Jewish state. The appeal lies less in political reality than in political fantasy.
Viewing Israel as a uniquely malignant force has encouraged the conviction that the Jewish state itself can and should be dismantled. The emotional force surrounding Hamas’ violence derives partly from its presentation as an act of historical atonement: revenge for the founding of Israel and a symbolic cleansing of a supposedly demonic power. October 7 was thus interpreted not merely as an atrocity, but as a redemptive act meant to reverse history itself. Hamas’ depravity became, in this moral universe, the pathway to liberation.
Rather than examining where the atrocities of October 7 were likely to lead Israelis and Palestinians, many protests redirected attention backward, toward the trauma of 1948. Torture, massacres, kidnappings, and the occupation of Israeli towns and military bases were rapidly reframed on social media as forms of historical restitution. Murdered Israelis were made retroactively accountable for events that preceded their births by decades. This is a remarkable conception of history: one in which the past never ends because it can always be reenacted. History is no longer something to be studied or understood; it becomes something to be relitigated through violence.
At the center of this transformation lies a conception of Palestinian identity increasingly defined by absolute dispossession and therefore endowed with an almost sacred right of resistance irrespective of method or consequence. Palestinian identity has become simultaneously a symbol of total powerlessness and a vehicle for moral redemption through destruction.
Unsurprisingly, then, Hamas’ assault radiated symbolic energy far beyond the Middle East. It resonated with protest movements across the West by appearing to demonstrate that borders could be breached, military power humiliated, and established institutions disgraced in the service of a sacred political cause. A performative protest culture—keffiyehs, flags, chants, encampments—fed broader mobilizations against structures portrayed as colonial, racist, and irredeemably oppressive. Opposition to Israel became fused with a generalized revolt against assumptions long taken for granted by rightly governed societies.
The demonstrations also conveyed the impression that antizionism constitutes the defining moral cause of a new generation, one carrying immense future electoral and cultural power. Few images exert greater influence over the contemporary campus imagination than that of Palestinians recast as Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”: a people supposedly denied all meaningful political agency except through violence or through appeals to sympathetic global audiences acting as their moral tribunes.
Within this framework, identification with Hamas or with “resistance” movements functions as a ready-made portal into a broader coalition against global inequity. Palestine has become the decisive symbolic frontier separating an allegedly oppressive past from a redeemable progressive future. Israel’s defenders are portrayed as relics of a dying order, while moral legitimacy is assigned automatically to those claiming victimhood, regardless of the brutality of their actions.
Palestinian leaders, meanwhile, have increasingly transformed their struggle with Zionism from a territorial and national conflict into a ‘clash of civilizations’. Repeatedly rejecting opportunities for state-building and political compromise, they have often preferred a politics of perpetual grievance and revolutionary symbolism to the difficult responsibilities of sovereignty. That choice has brought international attention, financial support, and ideological prestige. It has also condemned Palestinians to recurring cycles of devastation within an apocalyptic struggle that cannot produce victory because it cannot accept finality.
What should be occurring on university campuses—careful research, rigorous analysis, and disciplined examination of evidence—has too often given way to advocacy masquerading as scholarship. Books and articles circulate within closed intellectual systems, reinforcing one another through repetition rather than verification. An echo chamber has replaced academic scrutiny.
If a conflict that has already consumed more than a century yields only slogans, chants, and moral hysteria within institutions ostensibly devoted to thought, then the academy itself risks becoming one of the war’s casualties.
Universities therefore possess an enormous stake in the outcome of this struggle. To recover their purpose as centers of intellectual inquiry, they must once again cultivate environments of scholarly ferment rather than ideological conformity. Knowledge advances not through orthodoxy but through argument, criticism, and the disciplined testing of assumptions. Academic life depends not only on discovering answers, but on generating new questions and preparing future generations to confront them seriously.
Donors should not dictate what may be said or taught on campus, as recent controversies at institutions such as Northwestern University suggest have occurred. But universities must also resist becoming platforms for organized political mobilization masquerading as intellectual life.
The academy must therefore reestablish a boundary between intellectual inquiry and political activism. Within the university, ideas must be debated freely and rigorously, without intimidation, censorship, disruption, or boycotts. Outside it, students and faculty should remain entirely free to participate in political movements, but without conflating those commitments with the scholarly mission of the university itself.
Such a distinction is not without philosophical precedent. In The Republic, Plato’s allegory of the cave—the great metaphor for liberation from inherited illusion—is followed by the “Noble Lie,” the acknowledgment that political communities often rely upon sustaining myths to preserve social order. The tension matters. What is necessary for education—the relentless interrogation of assumptions—cannot be transferred wholesale into political life without consequence. Universities betray their purpose when they abandon inquiry for dogma and scholarship for liturgy.