On March 25, Connecticut College’s hosted the 16th installment of its “Understanding Israel/Palestine” series, featuring Professor Maha Nassar examining Palestinian “sumud” or steadfastness. Ultimately, it offered a revealing case study in how academic theory can blur into political advocacy – without meaningful challenge.

I am a 1976 graduate of the school.

Sumud is the Arabic term to describe the steadfastness of the Palestinian cause.  But her talk also showed why this steadfastness has consistently derailed attempts to achieve peace in the region.

Nassar articulated the belief that the Palestinians were unjustly denied statehood in 1947 when the UN proposed partitioning the Palestine Mandate into Jewish and Arab states. That is an odd view because Palestinian Arabs were in fact being offered statehood in that plan. While Israel accepted the plan, the Arab states rejected it and declared war against Israel. She believes everything since then should be undone, giving those 1947 Arab residents and their generations of descendants the “right to return” to reclaim their land and property in Israel.

It is this steadfastness – the uncompromising insistence on undoing history, on undoing a war, and on returning to the 1947 borders and property ownership – that has left the Palestinian people stateless and exploited by its corrupt leadership.

But Nassar wants more than just setting the clock back to 1947.  She wants all of Israel to be under Palestinian control.

Before assessing the implications of this framework, it is worth examining how Nassar defines it.

In her talk, Nassar explained how she conceptualizes the “spheres of sumud” to understand how Palestinian steadfastness operates across multiple, overlapping levels of life, rather than as a single form of resistance. She defines sumud not simply as individual resilience, but as a collective, proactive practice of resisting oppression and maintaining identity, enacted both within historic Israel/Palestine and across the global diaspora.

Her framework identifies five interconnected spheres: the personal (enduring and asserting Palestinian existence), the place-based (maintaining connection to land and physical presence), the community (preserving culture, memory, and knowledge), the civic (engaging in activism, media, and public expression), and the international (advocating globally for Palestinian rights).

A key point in Nassar’s argument is that sumud is both localized and transnational, especially among younger Palestinians who connect lived experiences of survival with global networks of solidarity. Through examples like activist movements, artistic expression, and international campaigns, she shows how these spheres transform Palestinian struggle into a shared global cause. At the same time, she emphasizes that sumud should not be romanticized as passive endurance; rather, it is an active, evolving strategy that combines survival with resistance and demands structural change.

An analytical innovation – or a relabeling?

While Nassar presents the “spheres of sumud” as a novel analytical framework, the concept does not constitute a significant scholarly innovation. At its core, the framework restates an obvious point: that a political condition – here, Palestinian steadfastness – manifests across multiple domains of life (personal, communal, civic, and international). This kind of multidimensional extension is common to virtually all social and political movements, which routinely operate simultaneously at individual, local, and global levels. As such, labeling these domains as distinct “spheres” risks giving conceptual weight to what is essentially a descriptive categorization rather than a new explanatory insight.

The notion of “spheres of sumud” is trivial in analytical terms, offering a reorganization of familiar observations rather than a substantive advance in how we understand the history or dynamics of the conflict.

If the framework itself is unremarkable, its underlying assumptions are more consequential – and more troubling. During her talk, she repeatedly referred to Israel as a “settler-colonial” state.  In her view, the Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of the land, and Israel – in other words, the Jews – are guilty of “colonizing” them.

But the settler-colonial framework inverts the actual history of the Middle East. As I wrote in a previous article on this series: “From the first establishment of the Jewish state in the land of Israel more than three thousand years ago, it has been subject to invasion, colonization, and control by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, various Arab Caliphates, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks, and the British. Its reestablishment as an independent state in 1948 was the ultimate expression of decolonization – an indigenous people regaining sovereignty over its ancestral homeland – and deserves praise by the ‘progressive’ activists who sling the defamatory libel of colonizer against it.”

Let there be no mistake about what Nassar believes is the rightful solution to the conflict given her assumptions about settler-colonialism.  One slide, shown midway through the talk, depicted all of Israel, plus the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza, under the Palestinian flag, along with the statement (in Arabic), “This is my land”:

This is what is meant by, “From the river to the sea,” widely considered to be an antisemitic call for the expulsion of the Jews from Israel and their extermination.

The 1947-1948 Israel-Arab war, initiated by the Arabs, resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.  Some of them were forced to leave by the fighting that took place, either directly or indirectly.  Some left on their own, to support the Arab war to exterminate the Jews. In addition, approximately 850,000 Jews were displaced from Arab countries beginning in the early 1940s and running through the 1950s. Regrettable and tragic as refugeedom is, it happens in every war. (World War II produced some 60 million refugees. The 1947 India-Pakistan partition produced between 12-15 million refugees.) Few of those displaced in 1948 are still alive, and none of their descendants have a legal claim – the misnamed “right” of return – to repossess their ancestors’ homes.

In short, Nassar’s thesis rests on the false assertion of settler colonialism, the incorrect claim of a right to return, and the unjust and hateful belief in the “river to the sea.”  No one should be surprised that her work is academically flawed.

The Connecticut College faculty moderating and participating in the discussion did not attempt to challenge any of Nassar’s presentation.  They praised her work, calling it “mind blowing.”

The college’s students deserve better.  I have previously referred to these lectures as the “hate” series, because that describes their content. Our students are our future leaders, and they should be educated, not exposed to a single interpretive framework and inspired to hate and activism.

The Palestinian people deserve better.  They have been betrayed by a succession of corrupt leaders, who have amplified the false hope of a right of return and the vision of destroying Israel and removing the Jews “from the river to the sea,” and thus inspired them to violence and terrorism. Valorizing sumud is one thing, but valorizing negotiation and compromise would be more useful.

Colleges are meant to cultivate inquiry, not consensus. When complex conflicts are presented through a single interpretive lens – unchallenged and unexamined – students are left with indoctrination and advocacy rather than education.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict demands rigor, humility and historical precision. Institutions that aspire to shape future leaders should insist on nothing less.

It is time for the college’s leadership – its president and board of trustees – to end the embarrassing hate series.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)