Palestine and the production of ignorance

Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge,
the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But . . .
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,
an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—
not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated
at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly
as knowledge.

– Charles Mills, “White Ignorance”

A threefold suppression of knowledge

It’s common nowadays for academics to say that they are in the business of “knowledge production.”  That way of putting things can sometimes sound a bit pretentious, since it suggests that we are laboring on the assembly line, manufacturing essential intellectual goods.  But the service of providing knowledge to a wider public in the United States has never seemed more necessary — and more threatened.  That is largely because knowledge production is being met by the Trump administration with an active attempt to produce ignorance, in a number of domains, in what may be the severest ever clampdown on universities in American history. 

Especially in political contexts, ignorance can be understood not just as the absence of knowledge, but as the product of an active process of suppressing and discrediting knowledge that threatens existing power structures and dominant elites.  Results in many areas of academic research undermine the right-wing ideology of the current US administration, including scientific research on climate change, vaccine safety, environmental protection, and alternative energy sources, and historical scholarship on race and gender, to name a few, and that goes a long way to explain the current assault on universities. 

Recent academic work on Palestine falls squarely in this category, which is why it is in the crosshairs of the federal government and has been specifically targeted in recent months.  That was clearly a major focus of the infamous Department of Education letter to Columbia University, of March 13, 2025, which singled out the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies, and demanded that it be placed in academic receivership for a minimum of five years.  It was also evident in Harvard University’s panicked response to the Trump administration, when it dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies without citing any justification, since it was a “personnel matter.” 

These institutions are being targeted to make examples of them primarily because they’ve dared to teach the truth about Palestine.  It was all right as long as knowledge was confined to the ivied halls and dusty libraries, but once it sparked a full-fledged student movement and spread to unions, non-governmental organizations, church leaders, rabbis, and other sectors of society, something had to be done.  So what the federal government is trying to do now is nothing less than the complete suppression of knowledge about Palestine.  The imposition of ignorance in this area has three aspects to it: undermining the credibility of academic researchers, suppressing and denying the results of their research, and falsely accusing the student movement fueled by this research of antisemitism.

Project Esther redux

As has already been widely observed, the playbook for this assault on universities when it comes to teaching and scholarship on Palestine is the Heritage Foundation’s report “Project Esther,” which has supposedly uncovered a complex, nefarious plot to control the minds of professors and students, turning them into Jew-hating, Israel-baiting bigots.  To read the Project Esther report is to fall into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories of the caliber of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  The report fabricates a fairy tale of global proportions, according to which the Gulf emirate of Qatar has used its oil wealth to pour money into the universities to bribe hundreds of professors who specialize in the Middle East to brainwash their students into believing antisemitic canards.  According to this warped narrative, this worldwide cabal has created the “Hamas Support Network” (HSN) to plot the destruction of the state of Israel.  The components of this shadowy HSN are a number of “Hamas Support Organizations” (HSOs), such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which are united in a nationwide network that supports Hamas.  

The report also contends that a total of 856 professors at 240 universities have been corrupted by “foreign money from wealthy supporters of the Palestinian cause” to influence curricula against Israel and Jews.  It details that: 

“these ‘professors’ in universities and colleges, often insulated in the comfortable halls of social sciences departments and Middle East/North Africa or Islamic studies programs, are decidedly antisemitic and hostile to Israel.”  

How do these corrupt professors, who have been paid by Qatar on behalf of Hamas, infect their students and mobilize other sectors of society — when they ordinarily can’t even get their own students to stop using ChatGPT?  Somehow, their influence is such that: “additional professors and teachers, social activists, and other ‘experts’ across all professional fields are indoctrinated into Hamas’s antisemitic ideology, which then trickles down and permeates our elementary and secondary education systems, proliferating their toxic tropes throughout curricula—and the minds of American youth.”

In weaving this elaborate conspiracy theory, the Project Esther report is sometimes unintentionally amusing.  For instance, instead of providing evidence of rampant antisemitism on college campuses, it contends that this evidence has somehow miraculously disappeared from the internet.  The authors lament that “finding recorded examples of the antisemitic statements and actions that America witnessed in real time has become ever more difficult.”  They go on to explain: 

“Internet searches for pictures of students and pro-Palestine protesters spouting antisemitic tropes, displaying disgusting antisemitic signs, and video capturing acts of violence against Jews return less and less relevant results.  Whether it is under the pretense of not wanting to spread antisemitic propaganda, for fear of lawsuits, or because of a desire to dull the antisemitic edge of protesters, it looks as though a deliberate sanitizing of the Internet is occurring.”  

This will come as news to anyone who has tried to have anything scrubbed from the web, especially something even mildly sensationalist.  But apparently, signs of antisemitism have vanished from the online record and so can no longer be proffered as evidence.  When it comes to the production of ignorance, the absence of evidence can itself be evidence.

Research and teaching about Israel and Palestine

The reason that Project Esther has to go to such lengths to posit an evil Qatar-funded, Hamas-led plot to poison the hearts and minds of American professors and students is that the truth is far harder for Zionists to stomach, if more mundane and less sensational.  Gradually, over the past few decades, Western scholarship and research on the Middle East in general and on Israel-Palestine in particular has undergone an internal sea change.  It started with a few Israeli historians who, by accessing declassified Israeli archives, began relaying historical facts about the birth of the state of Israel that challenged the standard Israeli and US Zionist narrative.  Simha Flapan’s book, The Birth of Israel (1987), was a forerunner in this regard, though it’s often neglected by comparison with the works of Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Zeev Sternhell, and several others. 

Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these “new historians” started to dig into the Israeli archives to document in detail how Palestine was transformed into a Jewish state, including premeditated ethnic cleansing, elaborate “transfer” plans of the native inhabitants, and widespread massacres of unarmed civilians, in a manner characteristic of the worst injustices of settler colonialism.  Ironically, there was little genuinely new in these “discoveries,” since Palestinian historians had already thoroughly exposed and documented what Palestinians call al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) and situated it within the framework of settler colonialism.  Still, this wave of Israeli scholarship served to mainstream the reinterpretation of Palestinian and Israeli history in the Western world and cast the Zionist movement in a different light.  For more than a generation now, that’s the version that has been taught at US universities and it’s the account that students have learned.  Little wonder that, when confronted with the “ongoing Nakba” in Gaza and the worst ever genocidal campaign against Palestinians in the past century, these well-informed university students could not contain their outrage. 

Alongside this historical research, scholarship on the current Israeli reality in political science, sociology, urban planning, anthropology, and other disciplines has painstakingly documented the apartheid nature of the Israeli state.  This work demonstrates that successive Israeli governments have worked relentlessly, with the full support of the United States, to ensure that there would be no “land for peace” or any chance of sovereignty and self-determination for the Palestinian people.  Academic experts have effectively established that Israel is now an apartheid regime committed to a racist future in which it occupies the entire land “from the river to the sea,” while at the same time preventing the Palestinians that live inside the borders of the state from exercising their basic rights, notably the right to self-determination.  

The impact of scholarship

The collective impact of this teaching and scholarship has been transformative on universities but it has also begun to filter out from students to activists and to society at large.  And this means that a well-informed public, particularly the younger generation, is expressing increasing opposition to Israel and demanding an explanation for the blind support that is given to it by every successive US administration regardless of party or political orientation.  This righteous anger concerning its closest ally is what the Trump administration and its right-wing supporters are now busy suppressing.  Indeed, the war on academic scholarship extends to the field of Israeli studies itself, where donors have been frustrated to find that their millions are being used to fund research that is critical of Israel and Zionism (which is to say, serious and rigorous research), leading them in some cases to pull their donations in response.

The current effort to extinguish knowledge about Palestine and Israel is aimed at preventing the results of this research from reaching a wider audience and informing public discourse and policy.  In this respect, denialism with respect to the ongoing Palestinian Nakba and Israeli apartheid is on a par with climate change denialism, creationism, the miasma theory of disease, and mercantilist economics.  As such, it requires claiming that the conclusions of recent academic research are tainted by bias and can therefore be dismissed as bunk.  The accusation that almost all US-based academic experts are antisemitic, is on a par with the charge that the vast majority of climate scientists have been bribed by environmental organizations, and that their scientific research is therefore completely discredited and can be ignored.

Despite the patent absurdity of the Project Esther conspiracy theory, large swaths of American punditry, including much of the Democratic Party seem to have bought some of its basic claims.  The mediascape is full of commentators and pundits – on both the right and the nominal left – who effectively subscribe to the absurd contention that campuses have been taken over by pernicious antisemitic ideas, yet insist, somewhat feebly, that the Trumpian clampdown has gone too far.  The line seems to be something like: we agree that antisemitism is running rampant at American universities, but you should let Harvard, Columbia, and others deal with it on their own without heavy-handed federal oversight.  As Harvard professor Steven Pinker recently wrote in the New York Times, “some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned,” voicing the familiar gripes about what he considers wokeness or political correctness, such as courses on (horror of horrors!) Queer Ethnography and Decolonizing the Gaze.  Yet, Pinker himself, alongside numerous Jewish faculty members at Harvard and other targeted institutions, attests that he has never experienced antisemitism at his university. 

Antisemitism as cudgel

There should be no doubt that the charge of antisemitism is a misrepresentation and a smear, if for no other reason than the large presence of non- or anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty at the forefront of the movement for Palestinian rights.  Jewish Americans are intellectually diverse and harbor a spectrum of views about Israel, and younger Jews (like younger Americans in general) are especially critical.  In a poll conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute of registered Jewish voters in June-July 2023, 38% of 18-40 year olds agreed that “Israel is an apartheid state,” and 33% assented to the statement that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians” – and that was several months before the start of the war in Gaza.  This corroborates my own experience at numerous universities: in conversations with dozens of students and faculty members, some of the most passionate critics of Israel identify as Jewish by religion, culture, or both.  This makes the frequent charge that anti-Israel protests have led to the discomfort or unease of Jewish students – as though they were a monolith – particularly offensive.

While antisemitism is being used as a cudgel to stifle dissent on Israel and Palestine, there is scarce mention of the fact that Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias are demonstrably bigger problems on every campus where these things have been measured.  To cite just one example, a survey of Harvard students, which asked about their sense of safety noted that: “Muslim respondents reported the most negative outcomes, with 47% feeling physically unsafe on campus, compared to 15% of Jewish respondents, 6% of Christians, and 6% of individuals who identify as Atheist/Agnostic/No Religious Affiliation.”  In other words, over three times as many Muslim students than Jewish students report feeling physically unsafe, yet there is no outcry about Islamophobia or anti-Muslim bias on American university campuses, much less anti-Palestinian racism or other forms of prejudice, such as anti-Black and Latinx racism, sexism, classism, and ableism.

The idea that elite American universities, all of whom have healthy representations of Jewish students and faculty, where people sometimes study the Hebrew bible as a curricular requirement, and painstakingly learn about the moral turpitude of all forms of racism and bigotry, are hotbeds of antisemitism is ridiculous.  Indeed, almost all antisemitism in the US is on the political right, as shown both by rigorous academic research as well as by recent polling.  A refereed academic paper on the subject from 2022 summarizes it very well: 

“We find overt antisemitic attitudes are rare on the left but common on the right, particularly among young adults on the right. Even when primed with information that most U.S. Jews have favorable views toward Israel—a country disfavored by the ideological left—respondents on the left rarely support statements such as that Jews have too much power or should be boycotted.”  

As Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote more recently in the New York Daily News: “Although campuses witnessed a spike in antisemitic incidents after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, people who attend universities are significantly less prejudiced against Jews than the overall population is.”  To be sure, we all have a duty to call out antisemitism and other forms of racism wherever it surfaces, but that is not what we are witnessing in the assault on universities.  It is more aptly described as the “cynical weaponization of antisemitism by powerful forces who seek to intimidate and ultimately silence legitimate criticism of Israel and of American policy on Israel,” to quote the former executive director of Hillel at Harvard, Bernie Steinberg.

Production of ignorance

The production of ignorance on Palestine requires a three-fold suppression of knowledge.  First, the actual historical and social scientific research that establishes the deliberate dispossession of Palestinians and the historic injustice done to them must be smothered, as well as the fact that the entire existence of the state of Israel continues to be premised on the denial of self-determination to the Palestinian people.  At the same time, a false narrative has to be disseminated, with no evidence provided, of a mythical network of “HSOs” and university professors who are being bribed by Qatar to support Hamas, to explain why academia is producing research that is highly critical of Zionism and the state of Israel.  And finally, the movement for peace and justice in Palestine, which is dominated by the younger generation, must be deliberately misrepresented as an antisemitic mob.  This threefold attempt to suppress knowledge and replace it with ignorance shows the lengths that Zionist groups must go to today to hide the truth and counteract a popular revolt on the harrowing injustices and ongoing horrors in Palestine.