On Monday, Nov. 17, I attended an event at The Fletcher School entitled “Israel and Palestine: Assessment and Community Dialogue.” For the first time in my 36 years as a professor at Tufts University and Fletcher, I felt unwelcome as a Jew.
On March 4, 2024, in a letter to the entire Tufts community, Tufts University President Sunil Kumar wrote: “It is our responsibility as an institution of higher learning to educate our students on the complex history of the region and to provide them with the tools to have nuanced conversations rather than rely on slogans, incomplete narratives, or simple yes/no votes.”
In the over 20 months since President Kumar’s message, I have seen little progress.
At the Nov. 17 Fletcher event, I heard audience members compare Jews who oppose Hamas to Nazis and suggest that Jews appointed to posts in the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs are inherently biased. I alone, as a member of the audience, objected to these antisemitic statements.
One faculty panelist simply erased the indigenous history of Jews in the territory that comprises Israel, arguing that it is too far in the past to be considered. Israel is rooted in a biblical Jewish civilization that was partially dispersed through imperial conquest by the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans and the British, but never eliminated. Yes, Israel is an anti-colonial project. The resurgence of Jews in their home territory in the 20th century constitutes a return of a dispersed indigenous population, longed for in core Jewish religious practices. Today, the population is mostly comprised of Jews from the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa or their descendents. Many of the Arab Muslim and Christian inhabitants of Israel have ancestors who also arrived in the 20th century from elsewhere in the Middle East because of opportunities created by Jewish return. It is a complicated situation, but to say that Arabs are indigenous to Israel while Jews are not is profoundly biased against Jews and requires the proponents of that view to erase inconvenient facts. That is not proper at a university. As President Kumar’s statement above asserts, we must reject incomplete narratives.
I also observed that faculty panelists who discussed harms to children and sexual violence spoke only of the suffering of Gazan victims and simply ignored violence against Israelis, including the unspeakable sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, and the sexual abuse of hostages. Jewish suffering was erased.
Speakers did not mention that Israeli actions in this war were a defensive response to the unprovoked Oct. 7 attack explicitly intended by Hamas to terrorize Israel and precipitate cooperation from allies such as Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis. As stated in the original Hamas charter, the group expressed an intent to target and massacre Jews specifically. One of the speakers called the conflict “the war on Gaza.” Hamas’ aggression and deadly intent — and thus Israel’s defensive posture — were erased.
Instead, speakers labeled Israel’s defensive war “genocide” without addressing the many cogent counterarguments to this label. Those counterarguments most importantly include the fact that under applicable international law and precedent, criminal genocide requires not just physical harm to a specific group, but the singular intent to destroy it. Thus, Israel’s defensive actions following the Oct. 7 attack cannot be considered genocide. Labeling them as such erases the inconvenient components of the definition of genocide.
When I stated that the claim of genocide against Israel is thus an inversion, one professor on the panel sought to erase me with an ad hominem (and false) attack, calling my statement unscholarly. I am an widely respected international law professor qualified as a legal scholar to engage in this analysis.
Unfortunately, the Nov. 17 event is part of a persistent pattern of erasure — of willful ignorance — at Tufts. Across the co-curriculum of invited external and internal faculty speakers over the past several years, not to mention the curriculum, I have observed a strong bias similar to that evidenced at the Nov. 17 event, and minimal, if any, discussion of the region’s complexities. These presentations repeatedly promote the perspective that Jews and Israelis are oppressors while erasing conflicting evidence, such as the following: For nearly 17 years before 1967, Gaza was held by Egypt and the West Bank was held by Jordan, meaning a Palestinian state could have been established by those Arab states then. Israel then acquired control over those territories in the Six-Day War. In 2000, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat purportedly refused a two-state solution accepted by Israel that would have established a Palestinian state in Gaza and 96% of the West Bank (with land swaps to compensate for the other 4%). In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Hamas began the recent war with a vicious attack on Oct. 7, 2023. The oppressor-oppressed dichotomy is suitable only for those who refuse to — or cannot — deal with complexity. Tufts must educate students to confront and engage with complexity.
Since late 2023, I and other members of Tufts United Against Antisemitism have urged President Kumar, Provost Caroline Genco, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences Bárbara Brizuela, Dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life Dayna Cunningham and Dean of Fletcher Kelly Gallagher to establish a process to review and supplement Tufts’ curriculum and co-curriculum to ensure that students receive an unbiased and analytically complete education instead of one that presents a simplified, one-sided narrative and relies on selected facts. While the administration is sympathetic and seems to want to address these issues, to my knowledge, no process has been established and very little has changed. The result of this lack of action is events like the Nov. 17 panel that erase inconvenient facts and seek to indoctrinate, rather than educate. Another result is that those of us who see and feel things differently feel unwelcome at Tufts.
Joel P. Trachtman
Professor of International Law Emeritus
The Fletcher of Law and Diplomacy
