When “Land Use” Becomes an Alibi for Hamas Tunnels
The University as a Legitimacy Machine
Link to the report discussed: https://www.timesofisrael.com/nyc-public-law-school-to-host-event-on-hamas-tunnels-as-resistance-to-colonization/
For a prior analysis of the linguistic mechanism involved: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hamas-and-the-tunnel/
This report is best read not only as a controversy but as an empirical case of a mechanism I described earlier: the moment an object is pre-classified by vocabulary, description no longer precedes interpretation — it is replaced by it.
The surface narrative is familiar: a public law school hosts a campus event, critics object, organizers defend the framing. But the core issue is not the drama. It is the institutional conversion of an operational object into an interpretive artifact. The event is advertised as an “anthropologic investigation” of tunnels in Gaza, framed around “land use” and “social organization in resistance to colonization.” That framing is not a neutral choice of lens. It is a reclassification that performs moral and political work before any discussion begins.
A tunnel, in this case, is not originally a metaphor. It is an infrastructure of force: protected mobility under civilian areas, concealment, storage, staging, and the creation of corridors that enable armed activity to persist in ways that exploit the vulnerability of the civilian surface layer. If the object is first named as “resistance,” the primary function is no longer the starting point. It becomes an optional detail, something that can be “acknowledged” later, after the interpretive frame has already stabilized the reader’s posture.
This is where my earlier text becomes directly relevant. In “Hamas and the Tunnel,” I argued that words can function as admissibility devices: they regulate what kinds of descriptions feel legitimate and what kinds feel improper, long before anyone reaches evidence or argument. A term can compress a complex operational reality into a narrative token that carries moral valence without operational clarity. It can also do the opposite: inflate the appearance of complexity with theoretical vocabulary while evacuating the object’s functional description. The result is not necessarily falsehood. It is managed visibility.
The university matters here because it is not just a venue. It is an apparatus of transferability. It is built to transform morally charged realities into transportable discourse forms. Once a phenomenon is converted into the right academic register, it can circulate as “analysis,” “critical inquiry,” or “decolonial theory” without the friction that the phenomenon’s primary function would normally impose. The institution does not need to deny facts. It needs only to control the order of presentation: frame first, functions later.
That is also why this cannot be reduced to “academic freedom.” A law school trains professionals to understand that categories allocate responsibility and that the sequence of qualification matters: what you name first determines what you treat as primary, what you relegate to background, and what legal and moral obligations you recognize as real. When classification precedes description, responsibility is redistributed before facts are even evaluated.
This procedure has a distinctive and recurring effect in contemporary Jewish contexts. It often avoids explicit hostility while still producing a selective moral downgrading. Jewish victimhood is not denied; it is administratively displaced. Hostages become “context.” Massacre becomes “backdrop.” Primary data are admitted only after they have been dissolved into a framework where violence can be narrated as sociological expression. Call it what you will, but the practical result is stable: the suffering of Jews becomes easier to explain than to confront, easier to interpret than to judge, easier to contextualize than to name.
In that sense, the report you are reading functions as a case study for the earlier argument. The same object (the tunnel) is being routed through a vocabulary that changes what is admissible to say about it. What appears as “complexity” is often just a postponement of operational description until after moral posture has been set.
There is an audit-grade test that can be applied without rhetoric. Does the event treat the tunnels first as operational infrastructure with explicit legal and moral implications — including civilian embedding, coercion, and hostage holding — and only then as a subject of cultural or political interpretation? Or does it begin with the interpretive frame, allowing operational realities to enter only as contextual decoration? The second path is not scholarship. It is a legitimacy machine producing admissibility.
So the deeper story is not that a few academics “lost the moral compass.” The deeper story is that the institution can function without one: it can convert violence into acceptable vocabulary and call the conversion inquiry. And that capacity will repeat, with different objects and different victims, for as long as classification is allowed to precede description.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
