The Impresarios of Hate: What Professors Are Teaching Your Kids About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

“Education”—or Incitement?

What is described below is all too common across all too many campuses.

Israel-haters have a way with words. “Genocide” is applied to Gaza where (according to the CIA) the population has apparently increased over the past year of war. “Apartheid” applies to the one country where Jews and Arabs actually cohabit in significant numbers and where Arabs serve in the government, judiciary, army, etc., but not to the many Arab countries that ethnically cleansed all their Jews, have policies incentivizing the murder of Jews, and/or legally discriminate against their own Palestinians. “Occupation” applies even though the country allegedly occupied never actually existed before being “occupied.” The head spins from the language abuse, so one would hope that an “educational” series at a reputable liberal arts college would help navigate the obfuscations. Alas, the word “educational” has been colonized, too, and chucked into the linguistic abyss.

On Friday, November 22, the pro-Hamas lecture series at my college calling itself an “educational series” for “understanding Israel/Palestine” offered its last installment of the semester. Forgive me for calling the series “pro-Hamas,” but considering that nearly every one of its many speakers since Hamas raped, tortured, dismembered, and massacred 1200 mostly unarmed civilians (including children, the elderly, pregnant women, and the disabled) spent their time explaining exactly why that massacre was justified, it seems an accurate label. (To be fair, a few offered pro forma condemnations of the massacre before then justifying it at length.) Besides, if you’re opposed to Hamas—if you reject its jihadist desire to conquer the world for Islam, its murderous oppression of its own people, and its genocidal ambitions against Jews—you’d probably be advocating for global pressure on Hamas to return the hostages and surrender, thus ending this nightmarish war and freeing the Gazan people from their nightmarish subjection, rather than advocate for a ceasefire that ends Israeli military activity with Hamas still in power and their perpetual violence against Gazans and Israelis alike ensured. Recently even the top Islamic scholar in Gaza issued a fatwa condemning Hamas’s use of human shields and its failure to provide aid to civilians (Hamas steals it instead), and the Israel Defense Force (IDF) released an excerpt of thousands of hours of captured footage of Hamas torturing Gazans. Only someone who supports Hamas could not be against all that, yet not one of the many speakers advocated for this obvious position, so, again, the label seems justified.

The speakers in the series had some useful material to share. But still, this series has done this community, and especially our students, a profound disservice. Starting last year just weeks after the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust this “educational series” consisted of one anti-Israel speaker after another essentially justifying the slaughter. I think there were eight last year, and three more this year so far. Eleven speakers, one after the other, explaining exactly why those naughty children, elderly, pregnant, and disabled people had it coming, and/or condemning Israel for having the audacity to defend its citizens by attempting to remove the genocidal jihadist threats nestled directly on its borders. That conflict over there, which I prefer to call the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim-Iran Conflict, or IPJAMIC, is precisely as complicated as that name, and more. Yet this series “educates” our community with an onslaught of speakers speaking in a single voice that also happens to support the groups targeting Jewish non-combatants for mass slaughter. “Educational”? There are other words for when you present only one side of a complicated issue, and do so repeatedly, through eleven speakers and counting: “propaganda”? “brainwashing”?

And given the apparent support of mass violence targeting non-combatants, perhaps “incitement”?

Or in brief: “hate.”

Really, eleven speakers. And counting. One wonders why this conflict merits so much sustained, single-minded, dare we say obsessive, focus. There are over 100 active military conflicts in the world right now, some several orders of magnitude worse in terms of civilian casualties, human rights violations, and overall suffering. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands and millions dead, displaced, actively dying of starvation, in Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Russia-Ukraine, Burkina Faso, 120,000 Armenians forcibly cleansed from Azerbaijan, 500,000 Afghanis forcibly expelled from Pakistan, the massive ongoing slaughter of Christians in Nigeria and elsewhere, Turkey actively bombing, killing, and displacing Kurds by the hundreds even just in recent weeks, etc. Just last week Turkish bombing cut off electricity and water to a million Kurds. Our campus, in response to these enormous global catastrophes? Crickets. Meanwhile we are inundated with eleven speakers portraying the tiny sliver of a Jewish state—itself the victim of a large-scale jihadi terrorist massacre and having been attacked now by 31,000 missiles in an area just larger than Connecticut—as the epitome of all evil, and its (mostly Jewish) civilians as deserving of being slaughtered, for defending itself in a conflict featuring a mere fraction of those other casualties. There’s probably a word for an obsessive focus on, and egregious double standards applied to, the Jews, as well.

The abuse of the word “educational” extended into the details, as well, as the talks have been filled with misinformation, misrepresentations, omissions of context and facts, and more that should embarrass an accredited institution of “higher education.” Let’s start with the final speaker of the semester, Ramzi Kaiss ’17, now working with once respected NGO, Human Rights Watch (HRW). Regrettably HRW long ago developed a deranged anti-Israel obsession that belies its alleged commitment to “human rights,” as it now spends an inordinate amount of time largely inventing Israeli human rights abuses while mostly ignoring real, and far worse, abuses occurring all over the world, including by Israel’s enemies. A particularly incisive exposé of its absurd degree of bias is in a resignation letter penned by a departing senior editor there and follow-up article here; its outright twisting of international law to find Israel guilty of “apartheid” is documented here; its ignoring of actual IDF procedures to levy its false allegations of “targeting civilians” is illustrated here; and its recent allegation that Israel is committing the “war crime of forcible transfer” is exposed by one expert here as “a work of fantasy and fake law.” As alum Robert Huebscher ’76 puts it,

HRW [has] a long history of anti-Israel bias. That bias is documented here and here. More specifically, since October 8, 2023 when Hezbollah launched an unprovoked missile attack on northern Israel, HRW has published 38 reports on that conflict. Many were authored by Kaiss. There is virtually no mention in those reports of crimes by Hezbollah or the toll it has taken on Israeli civilians. The focus is on alleged war crimes by Israel.

Hezbollah is a terrorist organization with a long history of antisemitism. It violently opposes Israel and Western powers. It has a political wing (as does Hamas) that provides some support to the Lebanese population. But it also engages in drug trafficking, sex slavery, and human trafficking.

Now imagine telling the story of Israel’s current actions in Lebanon while leaving Hezbollah largely out of the picture. It would seem like Israel is just waltzing in there and blowing everything up, which surely looks pretty bad. Of course that would not be an accurate story, but a defamatory one. And that’s more or less what we got on November 22—in addition to learning that this “educational series” is also pro-Hezbollah in addition to being pro-Hamas.

Our faculty colleague began the session by offering some “context,” starting with the September 17, 2024 episode in which Israel blew up thousands of Hezbollah pagers. Note that slick move: omit the preceding eleven months altogether and everything begins with an act of Israeli aggression, an act which our colleague kept returning to, clearly desiring to get across how “illegal” it was, a “booby-trapping” of ordinary “civilian devices,” producing an “indiscriminate” attack in which civilians were harmed. Propaganda 101: take some “facts,” omit all the relevant context, twist the narrative toward the pre-desired conclusion (here, per usual: “Israel is the epitome of evil”). A textbook case, in other words, of educational malpractice.

This war with Hezbollah didn’t start on September 17. It started on October 8, 2023, when Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel while the Hamas massacre was still ongoing, weeks before Israel had even begun its military response. Hezbollah spent the next eleven months firing rockets, missiles, and drones relentlessly into Israel, having fired at least 10,000 by September, 10,000 projectiles into a country just larger than Connecticut, every one of which is a double war crime: almost all fired from civilian areas, almost all fired toward civilian targets. (The number fired by Hezbollah is today now well over 20,000.) Those projectiles have murdered several dozen people, injured hundreds more, caused billions of dollars of damage and destruction, and forced some 80,000 Israelis to abandon their homes, from which they have now been displaced over a year. That is a war, a war of aggression started by Hezbollah and perpetuated by Hezbollah, to which all Israeli actions are a response, a defensive response: to protect its citizens from being murdered by rockets, missiles, and drones, by, ultimately, removing the aggressor who is firing them.

Our faculty colleague suggested otherwise. Hezbollah was not an aggressor but began firing “in support of Gaza.” Presumably the same applies to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran, who have also been firing at Israel “in support of Gaza.” The mental contortions here are painful. Although all these countries (or terrorist groups therein) initiated hostilities, they are never aggressors but “defenders” (or “resisters”). Apparently anyone in the world can perpetrate violence against Israel and say it’s for “Palestine” and it no longer counts as aggression, and Israel will then count as the aggressor for responding.[1] Of course, that is racist and absurd: if you do not have your own direct legitimate grievance against another party, then if you attack that party you are the aggressor, no matter what you say motivates your attack. And, as for their motivations, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran (which backs and funds them all) are not “human rights” groups aiming to bring freedom and equality to the poor oppressed Palestinians; these groups do not believe in human rights, freedom, and equality even for their own people much less for anyone else. To the contrary they are homophobic, misogynist, intolerant, anti-diversity Islamist supremacist jihadi hate groups seeking for Islam to conquer the world, oppressing their own subjects mercilessly, and endorsing the murder of all Jews on earth as enemies of their extremist theocracy. Hezbollah, to boot, is also a major criminal operator funded by Iran that tyrannically holds Lebanon hostage. These groups are fighting not for anyone’s rights or liberation but to exterminate the Jews in the name of Islam, and say so openly, and repeatedly, and all their behavior demonstrates it. Hamas’s foundational charter, never revoked, states that Islam is at war with the Jews, declares that Islam will obliterate Israel, and quotes Islamic holy writ endorsing the murder of all Jews. Now deceased Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in addition to (i) referring to Jews (via Islamic scripture) as the “sons of apes and pigs,” and (ii) saying “Jews are the enemies of God” and “If we search the entire globe for a more cowardly, lowly, weak and frail individual in his spirit, mind, ideology and religion, we will never find anyone like the Jew—and I am not saying the Israeli,” also (iii) said that God created Israel so the Jews would be gathered in one place, to save Hezbollah “from having to go to the ends of the world" to kill them. The Houthis’ official motto, emblazoned on their flags, is “Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Hamas and Hezbollah have spent decades acting on their genocidal aspirations, culminating in the October 7 massacre and the year of Hamas warfare, terrorist attacks, and Hezbollah bombardment since. Call me crazy, but the ambition to murder all the Jews in the region, and in the world, in the service of Islamist supremacy, looks to me just a teensy weensy bit like aggression.

That is the context in which to understand the September 17 pager attack, that the November 22 talk entirely left out. Without that context, Israel’s action looks aggressive; but with that context that action is clearly and unambiguously defensive, attempting to impair Hezbollah’s ability to carry out its genocidal ambition against millions of Jews. Remember: Israel has no claims on Lebanon or beef with Lebanon. Israel would readily welcome a peace treaty with Lebanon, and exist side by side with no conflict. In contrast, Hezbollah—which constitutes the Iranian occupation of Lebanon, a relevant fact you’d also think an “educational” series or a “human rights” expert might point out—started this war entirely unprovoked, then continued to propagate the war for the preceding eleven months, relentlessly firing rockets targeting non-combatants. Israel is now attempting to stop Hezbollah’s war of aggression.

You’d never know that, from this talk.

Fine, so Israel’s pager operation was a defensive one. But was it “legal”?

“Human rights” organizations should be reliable sources for the answer to that question. An “educational series” should offer reliable sources for the answer to that question. Alas, one must be disappointed twice over.

Kaiss rejected the legality, in the terms sketched above: the “booby-trapping” of “civilian devices,” with no way of ensuring that civilians aren’t harmed. But he is simply mistaken (or lying) here. Indeed he almost immediately contradicted himself, because he also admitted that Hezbollah confirmed that the pagers had been distributed only to its “units and institutions,” i.e. to Hezbollah operatives, all legitimate military targets. That key fact makes all the difference. For with respect to the “booby-trapping” and “civilian devices,” again, here is Huebscher:

Here is the relevant international law that relates to this attack:

Rule 80. The use of booby-traps which are in any way attached to or associated with objects or persons entitled to special protection under international humanitarian law or with objects that are likely to attract civilians is prohibited.

Thus, you cannot plant a bomb in medical equipment to be used by doctors or in cameras to be used by journalists. You cannot plant a bomb in a child’s toy. But you can plant a bomb in a pager or walkie talkie that is designated to be used by terrorist organization members.

It’s that simple. The allegation here, that this operation was “illegal,” is simply false. To the contrary that operation was a textbook case of discriminate (not “indiscriminate”) targeting: these pagers were bought by and distributed only to senior Hezbollah operatives to coordinate their military operations, as Hezbollah confirmed. They were not “civilian devices” just because civilians might use other pagers but military devices with a dedicated military use. And in fact the overwhelming majority of the casualties were Hezbollah operatives, exactly as foreseen. That there were some incidental civilian casualties is tragic, but that fact is both unavoidable during any military activity and legally permissible as long as it is “proportionate,” as this operation indisputably was. The legal responsibility for any civilian casualties is entirely on Hezbollah, for embedding itself among civilians. (For a more thorough analysis by international law expert Alan Dershowitz, see here.)

Let us reflect on what they are doing here. A masterful legal military operation that targeted and significantly incapacitated Hezbollah’s military capabilities while generating stunningly minimal civilian damages is falsely being portrayed as “illegal,” distorting the concepts of “booby-traps” and “civilian devices” to do so. Worse, the conclusion that “Israel is evil” was clearly determined in advance, so the presentation misrepresented or omitted the relevant facts in order to reach that predetermined conclusion. And finally, on the emotional level, the entire context—of Hezbollah initiating a genocidal war with the aim of murdering seven million Jews—was left out, in order to paint Israel as the aggressor instead of the one defending itself from genocidal aggression. And that Israel did so, with care taken to minimize civilian casualties in response to the genocidal attacks that aim to maximize Israeli civilian casualties, is falsely portrayed as “indiscriminate.”

This near inversion of reality surely does not constitute “education.”

The preceding was representative, but there were many more falsehoods, distortions, omissions etc. during the talk. Israel was accused of the illegal use of white phosphorus without noting that there are legal uses of it as well and that HRW can have no way of knowing the relevant military circumstances to determine whether it is being used legally.[2] More generally, Kaiss noted the difficulty of accessing southern Lebanon without acknowledging that this entails that HRW simply has no way of knowing whether many of its allegations—for example that Israel “deliberately” targets journalists and medics—is true. (To know that, you’d need to know what intelligence Israel is acting with, and who exactly are the people who have died, neither of which can be known without that access.) Israel was condemned for destroying some southern Lebanese villages without mentioning that these villages were thoroughly militarized by Hezbollah (a war crime) with elaborate bunkers, attack tunnels, and weapons stockpiled in civilian buildings, all in preparation of a planned invasion of northern Israel far larger than that perpetrated by Hamas on October 7. Nor was there any mention of UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701, according to which Hezbollah was supposed to be disarmed and removed from southern Lebanon. By those resolutions every aspect of Hezbollah’s existence and presence in southern Lebanon is literally illegal, never mind its unprovoked aggression of firing now 20,000-plus rockets etc. at Israel—and what Israel is doing in its invasion is actually enforcing the international law that the U.N., via the useless group UNIFIL, failed to enforce.

These are not minor omissions or misrepresentations, but major. Without them, Israel looks like the aggressor, illegally invading Lebanon for no reason and blowing things up. But with them, Hezbollah becomes a literally illegal jihadi terrorist organization perpetrating war crimes aiming to murder seven million Jews, and the Jews are not only defending themselves but enforcing international law. These omissions indeed substitute for the truth a 180-degree inverted alternative reality.

A lie, in other words.

Hate, in another word.

“Education?” Not so much.

If this were a one-off we could perhaps excuse it, but it isn’t.

On November 13, the series brought Laila Al-Arian, an Al Jazeera journalist, to speak about “A Year of Genocide in Gaza.” For some background, Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government, a primary backer of, funder of, and cheerleader for Hamas. To give you a sense of their journalism, Al Jazeera TV threw a birthday party for a man named Samir Kuntar, its host enthused to “celebrate your birthday with you,” its Beirut office head calling him a “pan-Arab hero.” The occasion, besides his birthday? His release from Israeli prison, where he’d been convicted of the terrorist murder of several people, including shooting a father in front of his four-year old daughter, then smashing the head of the four-year old child against some rocks to kill her. That’s who Al Jazeera celebrates. More recently, the IDF released documents showing that six Al Jazeera “journalists” were active members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In light of these examples it’s not surprising that allegations of Al Jazeera’s not merely being biased against Israel but (like HRW) actively complicit in a disinformation “cognitive war” against it are both longstanding and well documented. One might wonder whether a representative from such an organization is well suited for an “educational” series at an accredited college. (But then again, given the pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah slant so far, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. What’s next? A talk from the Houthis? Perhaps entitled, “Why You Should ‘Curse the Jews’ Too?”)

The falsehoods began even before the talk itself. The title, alleging genocide, is simply a blood libel. A thorough debunking of this malicious lie, from a member of the High Level Military Group (a collection of distinguished senior-ranked officers from a multiplicity of Western militaries), is here. Yet one more piece of evidence of the utter corruption of the U.N. is that when its “Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide” recently issued a guidance paper emphasizing the importance of “adhering to the correct usage of the term,” and then determined that Israel’s actions in Gaza did not constitute genocide given the actual meaning of the term, she was fired. The just released report by the disgraceful NGO Amnesty International charges Israel with “genocide” by changing the legally accepted definition, fabricating some quotes and taking others completely out of context in a way that changes their meaning, and completely omitting both the role that Hamas plays in the conflict (starting the war, persisting in fighting it, using human shields, etc.) and the actual casualty numbers including militant casualties—in other words, by inventing information to support their allegation and by ignoring all the material that directly refutes their allegation. This is not the place to go through the casualty statistics, which I have done elsewhere (happy to share on request). Suffice to say that (a) the relevant statistics are all provided directly by Hamas, which has every incentive to lie and has been shown to lie many times before, (b) the actual civilian:militant ratio is likely the lowest in modern urban warfare, indicating the careful targeting of combatants, and (c) the frequently bandied about (including in this talk) allegation of “70%” of the casualties being women and children is demonstrably false. More generally, the blogger Elder of Ziyon points out just how the genocide allegations aren’t merely defamatory but antisemitic:

Everyone who tried to apply the definition of "genocide" to Israel is antisemitic. Genocide requires intent. They rely on out-of-context quotes from Israelis that show that in the days after 10/7 they were very angry at Gazans. The reason they believe that the out of context quotes indicate genocidal intent is because they ascribe the worst attributes to Jews. The reason they don’t accept the many, many, quotes from Israeli officials that they are only targeting Hamas and not Gaza civilians is because they don’t believe anything that Jews say that make them less than horrible monsters. The reason they don’t accept the physical evidence (asking Gazans to get out of the way of attacks, coordinating humanitarian aid, using the smallest possible munitions, etc.) is because they claim Israel is only trying to cover up what are obviously its crimes, because that’s what Jews do. All counter-evidence is looked upon as faked; all “evidence” is trumpeted no matter how tenuous or proven false it is. Every piece of evidence and counter-evidence is viewed through the prism of Jew-hate.

The “genocide” libel isn’t merely antisemitic either: it’s dangerous incitement. To repeatedly, obsessively defame Israelis as perpetrators of genocide is to mark them, and those who support Israel, for persecution and violence. The massive worldwide uptick of violence against Jews in the past year, including in the U.S. and on many campuses, is no accident but a direct consequence of this global defamation hate campaign. That an “educational” series at an accredited college openly contributes to such a campaign is nothing less than revolting.

The falsehoods then continued in the opening sentences of the event, during which our faculty colleague gave a brief update on “Israel’s war on Gaza.” I found that a strange name for this war, considering that (a) Gaza started the war, (b) Gaza has persisted in fighting the war for the past fourteen months, (c) Gaza continues to fight it to this moment, and (d) Gaza has rejected numerous ceasefire proposals along the way (including one quite recently, where Hamas was offered free passage from Gaza and Israeli withdrawal in exchange for returning the hostages), indicating that they are not particularly eager for the war to end. That sure looks like a two-way war to me. Bare minimum it is a “Gaza-Israel war” (Gaza first because they started it), or maybe even “Palestine-Israel war,” considering the active contributions of the Palestinian element in Judea-Samaria (or if you prefer, “West Bank”). But even that isn’t adequate, because Israel is actually under attack on at least seven fronts, from Gaza, Judea-Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself. Perhaps the “Islamist War on Israel”? Well, what’s in a name—other than an accurate conception of what is actually happening here. (All of that also leaves out the lawfare and campus war against Israel, but I can’t figure out how to fit those into the name.)

So much for the title and the first sentences. The fabrications kept coming. Allegations that Israel is starving Gazans and firing on designated “safe zones.” But the allegations of “famine” have been levied repeatedly since the start of the war, and explicitly refuted multiple times along the way, including just this month by the IPC Famine Review Committee. Hamas claims that a total of 37 Gazans have died of malnutrition during the war. But even if that statistic were credible (nothing Hamas claims is), it means nothing: in 2022, nearly 21,000 Americans died of malnutrition even here, in the U.S., in peacetime, constituting a per capita rate three times that of Gaza. Reports alleging the famine, such as one in June, in fact routinely temper their allegations by only suggesting that famine is “imminent,” or has “substantial likelihood of occurring” in the near future. Well, the famine has been “imminent” for over a year now, yet has not arrived, perhaps because of the unprecedented humanitarian aid that Israel has facilitated into Gaza since early in the war, at great labor and expense to itself, including sometimes at the costs of its soldiers’ lives. (For example Hamas has multiple times bombed crossings through which aid is delivered, sometimes killing Israeli soldiers, crossings that Israel then quickly repairs to continue delivering aid!) Indeed, as Daniel Pomerantz notes,

Not only is Israel fighting a war of self-defense that it did not start or desire, but Israel delivers an average of 3,729 food trucks per month into Gaza, representing an average of 3,374 kcal per person per day: almost double the needs of an average adult human. This data is from a detailed study by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (whose conclusions can be easily verified using public information). Similar data is available regarding fuel, water, medical supplies, and all other forms of humanitarian aid.

Somehow none of these actual facts stopped the speaker or our faculty colleague from accusing Israel of deliberate “starvation.” One starts to suspect that this disinterest in truth is rather systematic. Meanwhile the well documented fact that Hamas actually steals most of the aid went entirely unmentioned. As did the revelation, last month, that Hamas had earned $500 million selling the aid it has stolen, and was sitting on warehouses overflowing with aid. It just might turn out that the copious “humanitarian” aid provided by the U.S., the U.N., and others, and facilitated by Israel, has actually been fueling Hamas’s ongoing war effort and prolonging the war these anti-Israel activists claim they want to end.

As for the “safe zones,” perhaps we can agree they are made rather less safe when Hamas commandeers them for military purposes, first by embedding themselves in the “safe zone,” then by using them, for example, to fire rockets at Israel. By the laws of war, by ordinary morality, and by simple common sense, the danger to civilians in a designated safe zone is to be blamed upon the party that militarizes such zones. But hey—easier to blame Israel for trying to defend itself from Hamas’s relentless genocidal activity against Jews, than to blame Hamas for that activity itself.

And all this was before the invited speaker started speaking!

There is terrible suffering in Gaza, and Al-Arian did an important job in conveying that suffering, in describing her work. And it is essential that as many people as possible be aware of that suffering—as essential as it should be that people become aware of the massive human costs of military conflict everywhere, including all those other major and larger conflicts mentioned above (and including in Israel, where there is also much suffering). But “education” requires more than just conveying some of the relevant facts, and more than just tugging the emotional heartstrings. It requires helping us understand what is happening, including determining just how we should apportion responsibility for that suffering to the parties in the conflict. That educational requirement is surely not met by disseminating falsehoods, leaving out necessary context, telling only one side of the story, and entirely blaming only one side in a multi-party conflict.

Nor may we refrain from raising credibility issues, where relevant. Al Jazeera (per above) is not known for neutrality and objectivity. More importantly Al-Arian mentioned “Pallywood,” the practice wherein Palestinians create fake news about their suffering, fake footage of casualties, pretending that dolls are dead children, etc. Al-Arian perhaps rightly condemned those who invoke the term in order to “discredit Palestinians even while they are filming their own genocide.” Yet that statement is Pallywood itself, if you believe, as I do (per above), that the “genocide” label is a blatant lie, a maliciously false label for the ongoing two-way conflict. But even if you disagree about that, the Pallywood phenomenon is real. It happens, often. There’s even a Twitter account focused on documenting specifically “Gazawood.” Sometimes the fake videos are quite professionally produced, which naturally produces a credibility challenge for any allegedly “true” videos documenting genuine Palestinian suffering. Al-Arian insisted her work was exceptionally well-documented, and perhaps it is (and kudos to her if so). But the existence of Pallywood cannot be dismissed, and it is legitimate to demand that exceptional level of verification even for her own work in light of the phenomenon. If you want to get at the truth of the matter, you have to work to sift the true from the mountains of false, particularly with respect to Israel, where there is an entire international industry devoted to disseminating falsehoods about the Jews.

Indeed, just as Kaiss acknowledged that HRW has challenges in working in southern Lebanon, so Al-Arian admitted that logistical obstacles prevented her from filming in Gaza herself, so she relied on a “non-Al-Jazeera crew” and a local “Palestinian production company” for her documentary work. Since it is impossible to imagine local media services in Gaza that are not directly managed by Hamas, which has an iron grip on controlling all aspects of life there including the media narrative, that immediately calls into “Pallywood”-question anything these teams might produce. (See here for a Hamas representative describing how they control the media narrative, and also Matti Friedman’s famous 2014 piece on the subject here.) Al-Arian did not mention that fact, instead insisting, again, that her documentary evidence was “irrefutable.” Is it? Maybe. But how can she be sure, if she is not on the ground herself? See here for an exposé of a professional Gaza-based media company that “features Hamas-glorifying ‘journalists.’” How is a neutral, third party observer, to know what to believe?

Meanwhile Al-Arian also defamed organizations such as HonestReporting and CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis). Despite insisting her evidence is “irrefutable” she condemns the fact-checkers who ought to be unable to refute it, claiming that they “malign and intimidate journalists who see the humanity of Palestinians.” In fact what these media watchdogs do is expose, and correct, the tsunami of anti-Israel media misinformation and lies. They “malign” nobody, except those who promulgate anti-Israel lies, and “intimidate” nobody, as far as I am aware, unless one is intimidated by detailed, factual exposés of one’s anti-Israel lies. I invite all readers to consult their websites, examine their analyses of the work of anti-Israel “journalists” (including their many, many entries on Al Jazeera), and make up their own minds. As for the “humanity of Palestinians,” one might think that is best served by committing oneself to telling the truth.

There is terrible suffering in Gaza. Yet somehow in an hour-long discussion of the subject the word “Hamas” was only mentioned once—and then only to deny the accusation of their using “human shields” as being a Zionist “talking point.” One hardly knows what to say there, except to (a) suspect they didn’t read the fatwa above confirming the “human shields,” and (b) suggest that that might be a “talking point” because it is true, heavily documented, openly admitted by Hamas, and exceptionally important. Just start with the fact that Hamas has militarized every part of the Gaza strip, building hundreds of miles of tunnels under nearly every building, using hospitals, schools, UNRWA facilities, and civilian residences as command-and-control centers, to store weapons, and to keep hostages. That fact alone makes nearly the entire population of Gaza one large human shield, even apart from the many filmed incidents where Hamas has fired upon their own civilians to keep them from evacuating neighborhoods the IDF gave forewarnings about and the incidents of firing from “safe zones” mentioned above. And it is exceptionally important insofar as it entirely refutes the “genocide” allegation, because it (a) explains the unavoidability of incidental civilian casualties from targeting combatants and military assets and (b) shifts the responsibility for all such casualties, by International Humanitarian Law, by ordinary morality, and by common sense, directly to the party that militarizes what should be protected civilian sites. If you care about Gazan suffering, if you care about the “humanity of Palestinians,” how do you not even mention—and condemn, vigorously, angrily—the role that Hamas played in starting this war, in persisting in fighting it, in rejecting ceasefires, and (per the fatwa) in stealing aid from its civilian population and in using civilians to protect itself?

Remember: this war could end instantly if Hamas surrenders and returns the hostages. It could have ended yesterday, last week, last month, any day in the past four hundred, by Hamas surrendering and returning the hostages. It never even needed to start at all, if Hamas hadn’t started it. Israel left Gaza in 2005. It had no claims on Gaza. It didn’t want to come back.

Those one hundred remaining hostages are apparently so important that Hamas is willing to sacrifice the entire population of Gaza for them. I’m not making that up. Hamas has explicitly said as much, for example here and here.

If you care about Gazans, how are you not furious with Hamas?

If you really believe a “genocide” is occurring, then why aren’t you screaming for Hamas to surrender immediately and stop the madness?

If you really seek “Palestinian liberation,” then how is the first step not liberating them from Hamas and its genocidal, perpetual war ideology?

And if you care about “educating,” if you care about people coming to actually understand this situation—how do you leave Hamas entirely out of the story? Not even mention them once, except to falsely minimize their culpability?

That only makes sense, again, if this series in fact agrees with Hamas, supports Hamas, with its various aims, including presumably the aim of genociding the Jews, that being Hamas’s most important, foundational, and motivating aim. And it only makes sense if the series is interested not in “education” but in activism, in incentivizing and inspiring hatred, for the Israelis (and thus for the Jews, who support Israel)—Israelis who, in their view of things, are just waltzing into Gaza blowing things, and people, up for no reason. Because when you remove Hamas from the picture, when you don’t even mention them during the entire hour, that’s what it looks like.

To represent Israelis that way is to demonize them, dehumanize them. They’re not ordinary human beings fighting an existential war to preserve their right to live in their ancestral homeland, to defend themselves from an enemy that openly and repeatedly declares its intention to murder them all and regularly acts on that intention, an enemy that in contravention of the laws of war and all morality embeds itself in a civilian population. Instead they are demons just waltzing in to engage in “deliberate starvation” and “mass slaughter” of innocent Palestinian civilians, pretty much just because they feel like it. That is pretty evil, and that is the message that this series, and in particular this component of it, is openly trying to convey. These demonizing lies are also, again, straightforward incitement, marking those who behave this way and those who support them for persecution and even violence.

Impresarios of hate, indeed.

That all came right out in the open toward the end of the session, during the Q&A. Someone asked Al-Arian why she thought that Israelis “devalue Palestinian lives,” to which she answered: “Well, how do you explain racism in general? They dehumanize Palestinians to justify the unjustifiable…” If that is not straightforward projection then I don’t know what is. The same people who justify the October 7 mass slaughter that targeted non-combatants, where both the slaughter and its justification are literally the ultimate acts of dehumanization, accuse the victims of being dehumanizers! That inversion of reality is simple, straightforward, anti-Jewish hate and racism. It’s what you get when you entirely erase all the relevant context, throw in a few lies, and tell an offensively one-sided story.

And yet there is more—I could do similar analyses of all eleven (eleven!) speakers in this series, but we’ll have to be satisfied with a final quick look only at the first speaker from this semester.

On October 23 our pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah series brought in writer, journalist, and activist Hadas Thier. Thier had interesting things to say about the history of the region, about Israel-U.S. relations historical and current, and especially about today’s “Uncommitted Movement,” and I’m happy to say I learned quite a bit. She did drop some whoppers into the conversation, but I can’t say I blamed her: when you’re invited into an echo chamber like this one, where it’s assumed that everyone shares your view of things, you feel less of a need to be fair or even accurate.

She noted, for example, that Biden-Harris have “spoken out about the mass civilian death in Gaza,” but that Israel doesn’t share Biden-Harris’s interests because it has been “chomping at the bit to expand the war to Lebanon” and because “no civilian casualties are too many for Israel,” with its “deliberate bombings of hospitals and schools.” Give Thier credit for efficiency, because that is about as high a falsehoods:words ratio as one can achieve. Anyone who follows the casualty issue honestly knows that casualty numbers, reported by Hamas itself, are not reliable, but that even with Hamas’s reported numbers there has been no “mass civilian death.” Thier cited their current official number (then of about 42,000), but called them all “civilians, majority being women and children.” But that is a strange thing to claim, because Hamas itself does not distinguish between civilians and militants, and the IDF meanwhile estimated it had killed about 18,000 Hamas militants at that time. Furthermore, Hamas often fights in civilian clothing (another war crime), so when they are killed they can get wrongly counted as civilians. Detailed analyses suggest that the civilian:militant ratio may be as low as 1:1, or even lower, unprecedented in modern urban warfare. Every civilian casualty is a tragedy, absolutely. But there has never been a war without them, and right now there is an active war going on in a sometimes dense urban environment in which Hamas has militarized almost all infrastructure and embeds itself among the civilian population, a war that Hamas started and continues to fight. And that low ratio above is no accident: it is an easily documentable fact that Israel has done more than any modern army to minimize civilian casualties, often at great cost to its own soldiers’ lives, and it is an obscenely defamatory libel to make that accusation.

Military expert Andrew Fox put it concisely just last week:

All but the antisemitic, disingenuous and stupidly gullible understand that civilians die in war without that sad fact meaning that they are being targeted. The astonishingly low civilian death toll in Gaza (somewhere between 16-20k civilians have died, remarkable for the amount of munitions dropped) stands as a tragic but notable testimony to the effectiveness of Israeli targeting.

“Deliberate bombings of hospitals and schools” sounds good, until you realize that Hamas takes over those institutions for its war efforts (a war crime) and that Israel takes measures to evacuate them of civilians before attacking them—and for the record an abandoned building being used only by militants is no longer actually a hospital or a school, though it may have formerly been one before Hamas militarized it. Moreover, one cannot know what Israel is “deliberately” doing without access to the intelligence on the basis of which Israel acts, which Thier certainly does not have.

And “chomping at the bit to expand the war”? That is offensive and literally delusional, as we saw above. Hezbollah began bombing Israel on October 8, 2023, and has bombed Israel relentlessly now for over a year, some 20,000 missiles etc. by the time of Thier’s talk, murdering dozens, injuring hundreds, etc. But somehow Israel’s finally deciding after a year, in which it’s already battling on six other fronts, that it finally needs to remove this lethal threat from its borders, is “chomping at the bit to expand”? Israel didn’t want this war, not with Hamas, nor with Hezbollah, nor with Iran, but they all brought the war to Israel. One has to be a truly committed dehumanizing Israel-hater to see in Israel’s clearly justified self-defense an aggressive desire to expand war.

Jews defending themselves from genocidal jihad, in other words, are aggressors in those hater eyes.

Thier next offered some valuable political analysis, of Harris v. Biden, of the Arab-American vote, of Trump, a bit of Netanyahu, and some useful information about the Palestinian solidarity movement, speculating about the different ramifications for the movement of the different election outcomes. But here she followed Rep. Ilhan Omar’s dark precedent from a few months back, who, touring the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia University, distinguished between the “pro-genocide” students and “anti-genocide” students. In another incredible inversion of reality Omar meant, by the former, the pro-Israel students, and by the latter the pro-Hamas students. Again, the mouth drops open. Remember it was Hamas, with its literally genocidal agenda, that started this war with an act of attempted genocide. They desired and attempted genocide, limited only by their inability to complete it. Among the people they slaughtered in southern Israel were many “peaceniks,” people who advocated tirelessly for peace between Israelis and the Palestinians, even worked to support their Gazan neighbors in various ways, including driving them for the free medical care they received in Israel. That is the side that seeks “peace,” peace between the two peoples, while Hamas, and the several thousand “civilians” who joined them on their murderous rampage, seek genocide. Indeed Israel with its mighty army could perpetrate genocide very quickly if it desired; in contrast to Hamas, Israel has the ability to perpetrate genocide but is limited only by its desire not to. Suffice to say then that campus activists supporting Hamas support its genocidal agenda, which somehow is transformed, in Omar’s contorted mind, as being “anti-genocide,” while the campus pro-Israel crowd, the large majority of whom support a “two-state solution,” i.e. peace between the peoples, are transformed into “pro-genocide.”

Credit Thier for not using the “g-word” in her talk, I think. But she repeatedly referred to her side, the pro-Palestinian side, which, in the endless rallies on campuses and elsewhere over the past year, is de facto the pro-Hamas side, as the “pro-peace” camp, with a “pro-peace” agenda. Funny, because Hamas is not pro-peace: they are for perpetual war until Israel is “obliterated” and the Jews are ethnically cleansed or murdered. They don’t hide this. They say it openly, repeatedly, in their foundational charter and constantly since, and make regular efforts to accomplish this. Thier helps herself to the “pro-peace” label, of course, because she wants the Islamist-Israel war, or at least the portion in Gaza, to end. But she wants it to end with Hamas still in power, able to rebuild and fight again another day which, given their genocidal pro-war agenda, they certainly will. But that is not “pro-peace.” It is pro-preserve-Hamas, thus deeply, profoundly, pro-war, and pro-genocide. The abuse of language, with which this article started, continues apace.

I don’t mean to pick on Thier. She gave the talk she was asked to give, to an audience that shares her view of the world. But her talk, and this series of talks, reflects a deep problem here and throughout much of academia. The echo chamber, the group-think, the lack of interest in a genuine diversity of opinions on the major issues of the day, all producing what might most gently be described as a fairly tangential relation to the truth, should be inconsistent with the theoretical ideals of a liberal arts education, where even those pretty confident of their opinions should be interested in hearing, and welcoming, dissenters. But an environment where precious few objected to using the word “educational” for an entirely one-sided propaganda series devoted to dehumanizing Israelis (and thus Jews) and supporting, and inciting, hate and violence against them, is pretty clearly, and sadly, not that kind of place.

If you wonder why so many people have begun to push back against the institution of higher education, with its absurdly bloated price tag and with, in the minds of many, its systematic propagation of hateful propaganda, look no further.

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[1] This seems to generalize: if someone goes out and physically attacks some Jew anywhere in the world and says it’s “for Palestine,” then all too many think the attacker here is not an aggressor but merely “resisting,” while the Jew attacked is the aggressor.

[2] Even more absurdly, the main problem of white phosphorus is that it can burn people, and HRW, in a June 2024 report that quotes Kaiss himself, admitted that it “did not obtain evidence of any burn injuries resulting from the use of white phosphorus.”