US academic leaders must stop coddling genocidal hatred of Israel on campus

Last weekend’s unprovoked Hamas attack against Israeli civilians in Israel, which has resulted in more than 1,000 dead and 2,000 wounded, has been greeted with widespread condemnation throughout the world. But not apparently at Harvard University, where 31 student groups signed a letter that held Israel “entirely responsible” for the carnage. A similar letter from a Columbia student group celebrated the carnage as a “historic” “counter-offensive.”

It takes an unusual amount of intellectual jujitsu to convert civilian victims of a savage surprise attack into the sole responsible party, or to praise the massacre of innocents as a brave military exercise. But these student organizations, affiliated with two of the most storied academic institutions in world history, have offered facile, self-serving, mythical narratives to marginalize Israel as a pariah state.

This cannot be allowed to happen. And yet, not a word of formal condemnation has come from either of the universities with which these students are affiliated.

The Harvard student letter insists that the events in question “did not occur in a vacuum,” only to give an outright false account of the relationship between the Palestinians and Israelis. The letter makes no mention of the 1948 invasion, organized by five Arab states to snuff out Israel after the U.N. Resolution that authorized its creation.

There’s no mention of the Arab blockades that spurred the 1967 war, during which Arab incursions from Gaza forced the Israelis to enter the territory for security purposes. Israel returned Gaza to Palestinian control in 2005. Once Hamas took over after a bloody internecine battle with Fatah, its major effort was to build a network of fortifications, bases, rockets, tunnels and armaments, from which it repeatedly initiated small-scale attacks against Israeli civilians that were beaten back only with a substantial loss of life. These proto-terrorist campaigns necessarily diverted funds from the care and attention of the civilian population that Hamas has relentlessly bombarded with a vicious hate campaign against Israel.

This state of affairs remains to this day.

Both the Harvard and Columbia resolutions drape themselves in the time-honored canard that Israel embodies a regime of occupation and apartheid. This “apartheid” refers to a situation in which Arabs are integrated into every area of Israeli civil and economic life, including the Knesset and the Israeli Supreme Court. It is bitterly ironic that the Harvard signatories “call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians,” without making a single mention of the brutal slaughter of innocent Israelis, including American citizens. The Columbia letter is no different in this regard.

What makes matters even worse is both letters’ implicit justification for the invasion, which rests on the view that Israel’s alleged provocation in forming and maintaining its own nation justifies at any time the use of deadly force against civilians. Every Israeli man, woman and child is supposedly part of some occupying army.

This deviation from the traditional law of provocation is painfully obvious. In cases of killing, the provocation defense is narrowly tailored to prevent the escalation of violence. Underlying grievances never serve as justifications for the use of deadly force. And even when provocation is present, it rarely offers a complete defense, only a reduction in the severity of charges from murder to manslaughter. The reasoning contained in these Harvard and Columbia letters would thus justify Israel were it to seek the actual annihilation of Palestinians in light of the many warlike acts of Hamas and its allies against Israel.

It is a dereliction of pedagogical duty for any academic institution to fail to at least condemn the intellectual absurdity of this position expressed by its students, to say nothing of its gross immorality, which obviously also deserves unequivocal condemnation.

The sentiments expressed by these students are horrifying. But what is perhaps even more troubling is that they are sanctioned through silence by the universities in question. It therefore comes as no surprise that these sentiments are rapidly proliferating. Stanford students hung bedsheets celebrating the Hamas massacre, as the president of NYU Law School’s Student Bar Association proudly declared that “Israel bears full responsibility” for the murders. 

By failing to condemn these student groups’ statements directly, academic institutions are fostering the notion that Israel’s mere existence is a provocation sufficient to justify the random slaughter of innocent men, women and children.

The myth of Israel’s existence as the reason for the absence of a self-governing Palestinian State is at an end. The real obstacle to Palestinian statehood isn’t Israel — it is Hamas.

Students enrolled at our nation’s most revered academic institutions shouldn’t be celebrating the mass murder of innocent civilians. It is a historic disgrace that those institutions themselves stay silent as their students do just that.

Richard Epstein is a law professor at New York University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. Alex Talel is an attorney who served as law clerk to Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Judge Sidney H. Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.