On Halloween night, a few dozen Georgetown law students gathered stealthily to listen in rapt silence to a live-streamed defense of Hamas’s Oct. 7 mass slaughter of Jews.
The speaker, a fashionably scruffy, dark-haired 25-year-old named Mohammed El-Kurd, wore a tight black T and a leather jacket. He celebrated Hamas as a “liberation movement” and called its Oct. 7 orgy of rape, murder and torture a “resistance tactic.”
Outrage over Oct. 7, he said, was a “discursive crisis” created by “Zionist propaganda” to “disrupt” opposition to Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Hamas’s hostage-taking had good “political reasons,” he said. “Contrary to the western popular imagination,” he added, the hostages are “treated relatively well” — “giv[en] nice dresses and food.” Hostages have said so themselves, in Hamas-issued videos, he told his audience, but Western media aren’t reporting it.
Two years ago, Time Magazine named El-Kurd “one of the world’s 100 most influential people.” His Georgetown Law sponsor, “Students for Justice in Palestine” (which calls Israel a “settler colony”), billed him as a “journalist,” but he leaned in to more direct action. Condemning CNN and The New York Times for “aiding and abetting…genocide,” he urged students to “think of ways that we can tangibly destroy these organizations.”
“We are at war,” he said, “and we have a duty to engage and participate in that war.”
I had learned about El-Kurd from his appearance at Georgetown Law a year and a half earlier. It set off a firestorm. He had previously written that “Zionists” are ”fascists” and “terrorists,” “harvest organs” from Palestinian “martyrs,” and have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.” Our dean, William Treanor, had allowed his appearance. Dozens of my colleagues joined in a statement calling out the dean for failing to condemn “the vilest of antisemitic hate.”
So on Halloween night, I expected rhetorical ferocity, but El-Kurd didn’t deliver. On a big screen, streamed from New York City, he was soft-spoken, self-effacing and chill.
What should his listeners say when queried about what happened on Oct. 7? How are they to explain the beheaded children? “You don’t have to answer the question,” El-Kurd said. “The best approach to these kinds of things…is to be dismissive of these claims outright, is to ridicule these claims, is to not give them the time of day, is to treat them as outrageous.”
“The average viewer of the news has a distrust for the news,” he reassured his audience. “Some people believe Pizzagate.”
Our dean also approved El-Kurd’s October appearance, this time keeping it on the down-low. My colleagues who had raised alarms about his “antisemitic hate” a year earlier weren’t told. Nor was El-Kurd’s appearance announced to students. Word spread informally, via social networks. A moderator told attendees that they’d be subject to “discipline” if they recorded him. To my knowledge, no news outlet reported on the event.
But several hours before the start time, someone tipped me off. I showed up uninvited. The only colleague I saw was the dean’s representative, who had praised El-Kurd a year and a half earlier for having “condemned racism and colonialism.”
The next day, I asked this colleague his impressions. El-Kurd, he said, was “wholly appropriate,” even “endearing.” El-Kurd’s (and the event moderators’) euphemisms for Israel’s eradication — “from the river to the sea,” Jews as “settler-colonialists,” and Israel as the “Zionist entity” — were “standard academic jargon,” he assured me.
Unfortunately, he’s right — they have become commonplace. Hours before El-Kurd spoke, Georgetown’s Centers for “Muslim-Christian Understanding” and “Contemporary Arab Studies” had co-sponsored a “Collaborative Teach-In” that promised “the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that depict Palestinians as the culprits” for Oct. 7, “despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid.” Middle Eastern Studies programs at Harvard, Brown, and the University of Chicago co-sponsored the event.
Then there’s this tweet, from the holder of an endowed professorship at the University of Michigan: “From the Jordan to the Coast, Apartheid will be toast”
How did this “jargon” become “standard,” despite its call for a people’s destruction? And how did the dean of an elite law school come to condone, by his silence, an apologist for the slaughter of Jews, in sharp contrast to his quickness to condemn faculty and staff for mere words perceived as hurtful to other minorities?
Antisemitism, some say — ancient hatred. But this misses America’s crucial and contradictory narratives of Jewish weakness and strength.
Jews have experienced hiring discrimination, college-admissions quotas, the threat of violence, and, of course, the Holocaust. Israel, born as our post-Holocaust redoubt against annihilation, has survived serial attempts to destroy it, and faces a new menace in the form of Iran and its heavily-armed proxies.
And Oct. 7 brought our nightmares to life.
This makes it difficult for some of us to see another narrative — that of Jewish safety or even power. By the mid-20th century, American Jews had, as some scholars put it, “become White” — able to “pass” well enough to escape relentless discrimination. Jews advanced in the arts and sciences, business, and public affairs. And Israel’s image morphed, in the eyes of many, from imperiled underdog to “startup nation” and regional superpower.
So it is understandable that some who aren’t outright antisemites — who aren’t seized by tropes of Jewish malevolence — nevertheless disregard Jewish vulnerability. Israel’s far-right leaders haven’t helped: Their anti-Arab bigotry and efforts to stymie a two-state solution invite perceptions of the country as an abuser of its power. For some, so has the carnage wrought by Israel’s fierce military response to Oct 7.
I get this. But the condoning of Hamas’s mass-slaughter, rape and kidnapping of hundreds is a morally revolting response.
Academic leaders should not quietly accept such savagery. They should instead rise to the challenge of recognizing both Palestinian and Jewish peril and loss, and of creating opportunities for all on their campuses to see both.
Disregard for “the other’s” experience of loss is powering the Israel-Palestine tragedy. Universities can contribute to stopping the tragic cycle by pushing back against this disregard. That’s the work they should do — to nurture acceptance for the shared humanity of all who live “from the river to the sea.”
M. Gregg Bloche is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Health Law, Policy, and Ethics at Georgetown University.