The most dangerous political movements rarely begin with mobs. They begin with professors.

In 1930s Germany, scholars provided intellectual scaffolding for persecution. Today, a different academic campaign seeks to redefine the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The parallel is not one of identity, but of method.

The role of academics in Germany’s persecution of Jews was methodically documented by Max Weinreich in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People, which was published in 1946.  German academics found that pre-Nazi literature was not sufficiently antisemitic, and Weinreich showed how they streamlined the theory to delegitimize Jews and ultimately justify their extermination.

Nearly a century later, Hitler’s professors have become Hamas’s professors.

Peter Beinart, a prominent figure in that campaign, is a professor at the City University of New York and contributes articles to the New York Times.

Delegitimization is a cornerstone of what Beinart preaches.  He does not support the right for Israel to exist as a Jewish state in the traditional sense – meaning a state defined primarily by Jewish ethno-national character.

But Beinart’s hostility toward Israel and the Jews goes much deeper.  Much of his rhetoric is rooted in falsehoods.  In his most recent book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, he states that Israel “denies most of its Palestinian residents citizenship and denies all of them legal equality.”  But the truth is that Palestinian citizens of Israel – who largely identify as Arab Israelis, not as “Palestinian” – have full rights and fewer obligations, as they are not required to serve in the Israeli military.  Similarly, Beinart accuses Israel of apartheid. But apartheid is defined as racially discriminatory policies, and no Israel policy or law is based on race or religion, except for the Law of Return (to make “aliya,” which doesn’t apply to citizens but to foreigners).  There are policies based on whether someone is an Israeli citizen or a Palestinian resident of the West Bank, but that does not meet the definition of apartheid.

In the mid-1920s, Hitler was aware of the need to present anti-Jewish ideology in a scholarly coating.  Academics placed special emphasis on promoting racial “science,” eugenics and “political biology.”  The aim was to legitimize discrimination in research and purge Jews from universities and academic positions.  Curricula were modified to conform with Nazi ideology, books were burned, and in 1933, 900 professors signed a statement of allegiance to Nazi ideology; Hitler brought these academics together through a process known as Gleichschaltung (coordination). By the mid-1930s, Hitler had succeeded and his ideas were appearing in the respectable academic world of Germany.

Today, the rhetorical shift has not remained confined to books and opinion pages. It has migrated into institutions. Academics are advancing a similar pattern of claims that lack scientific backing to, at best, attack pro-Israeli views and, at worst, silence scholarship through boycotts.  In August 2024, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) rejected its long-standing opposition to boycotts.  While not specifically referencing Israel, the timing was not coincidental. It stated that boycotts can be considered “legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.”

Beinart supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and supports boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) of Israeli products made in the West Bank.  This is a limited version of the BDS policies that are advocated by many academics.

The most consequential escalation, however, is the charge of genocide, which has an important parallel in the 1930s.  The Nazis rose to power as academics blamed the Jews for nearly every political, economic and cultural problem in Germany.  As Weinreich documents, Jews were blamed by academics for causing World War I, the Great Depression, and promoting Bolshevism and communism.  On multiple occasions, Hitler and the Nazis openly (and falsely) accused the Jews of genocide against the Germans. This propaganda was then used to justify the genocide of the Jews that followed.

The Nazis had inverted the crime of genocide, falsely accusing Jews and then using this as justification for their own crimes.

The parallel to October 7 is clear.  On October 18, 2023, before Israel’s ground operations in Gaza began, a group of academics warned that there was the potential of genocide.  By April of 2024, academics were directly accusing Israel of genocide. Beinart’s genocide accusation came in 2025.  He is among a group of academics who have falsely claimed that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.  (Genocide, as defined by the United Nations, requires intent, and there is no evidence that Israel has intentionally targeted civilians during the war in Gaza. There is plenty of counterevidence, including humanitarian aid and precautions taken to protect civilians, to reject the charge of genocide against Israel.)

Beinart has not accused Hamas of genocide, even though Hamas’s founding charter and October 7 attack targeted Israeli civilians and invoked explicitly genocidal language.  Indeed, there are few if any academics who have accused Israel and Hamas of genocide.  This double standard – holding Israel to a different standard than other entities – meets the definition of antisemitism.  Both the IHRA working definition of antisemitism or the Nexus definition preferred by many critics of Israel identify certain double standards applied uniquely to Israel as antisemitic.

The genocide charge joins a cascade of terms – apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing – that are deployed with increasing frequency and decreasing precision. They transit from academia into a disinformation amplifier, as NGOs (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International), supranational organizations (the UN, International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice), political organizations (the Democratic Socialists of America, J Street and “progressive” political coalitions), think tanks, social media and the news media spread defamatory lies about Israel.

The pressures of this new orthodoxy became visible in November 2025. If you have any doubt about Beinart’s culpability, consider what happened after he gave a speech at Tel Aviv University (TAU).  He faced a backlash, led by Noura Erakat, a lawyer and Palestinian advocate.  She and other BDS supporters claimed that TAU was complicit in support of Israeli policies and Beinart’s presence there was undermining support for Palestinians and their cause.  Beinart relented and issued an apology, saying he “made a mistake.”  He said he hoped to communicate that “Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and why I believe Jewish supremacy is fundamentally wrong.”  The term “Jewish supremacy” traces directly to Nazi antisemitic rhetoric and is part of the Nazi claims that Jews were engaged in a “global conspiracy for domination.”

Beinart accused the U.S. and Israel of the “supreme international crime” in its attack on Iran on February 28, directly comparing it to the Nazi aggression against the Jews in World War II.  The comparison of Jews to Nazis is widely considered to be antisemitic.

Beinart is a critic of Israel whose arguments rely on maximalist claims and whose rhetoric contains antisemitic statements. He lacks moral clarity and leads the academic assault against Jews and the Jewish state.  He is one of Hamas’s professors.

The stakes extend beyond one columnist or one controversy.

The point is not that today’s academics are Nazis. While there is a strong parallel to Germany of the 1930s, we don’t live in the totalitarian state that the Jews faced then, and there is no parallel (yet) to the 1940s and the extermination of the Jews. But intellectual climates can normalize radical claims long before policymakers act on them.

The arguments advanced by these academics are resistant to contrary evidence. No amount of logic, reason and facts will change their views.  They pose a danger to society and our governance.  The next Democratic candidate may be someone who believes there was a genocide in Gaza.  This will increase polarization and erode trust in our government among those who value our relationship with Israel.  It will lead to conditioning or halting military aid to Israel.  That will threaten stability in the Middle East and weaken U.S. influence in the region.

But the greatest threat posed by Hamas’s professors is their influence on American universities.  Critics of Israel should not be silenced. Democracy relies on debate.  But universities exist to test claims against evidence, not to baptize them in ideology.

When accusations as grave as genocide are advanced without rigorous scrutiny, they do more than inflame debate. They erode the moral vocabulary on which human rights law depends.

If American universities cannot distinguish between scholarship and activism, they risk producing graduates fluent in slogans but indifferent to facts. That is a cost the country cannot afford.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)