When I first learned last month that Professor Eric Cheyfitz will be offering a course this coming spring entitled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I wrote to Interim President Mike Kotlikoff expressing my concern that it would “promote and inflame political divisiveness at Cornell and encourage antisemitic manifestations against Israeli and Jewish students.”

My principal objection to this course is not that it has a decidedly and unabashedly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bent. What I find most problematic and unacceptable about it is that it is firmly rooted in shoddy, selectively and inflamingly biased pseudo-scholarship. The course description leaves no doubt that Cheyfitz intends to convey a narrative that casts Palestinians writ large as protagonists while Israelis and, by extension, Jews will be portrayed as villainous antagonists perpetrating “settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel” against a background of “plausible genocide.” Not only is such a narrative historically false — more importantly, it also constitutes antisemitism on steroids, and is likely to incite antisemitic rhetoric and worse against Israeli and Jewish students and faculty at Cornell.

By way of context, I write as a Zionist who has been supportive of and engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement for over 40 years. I believe that Israel has every right to exist in security free of terrorist attacks and at the same time support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict that will provide the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza........

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