|
Trending Topics
|
Israel and Palestine at Tufts/Fletcher: Erasing Inconvenient Facts
(Tufts Daily) Joel Trachtman - On Nov. 17, I attended an event at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. For the first time in my 36 years as a professor at Tufts University and Fletcher, I felt unwelcome as a Jew. I heard audience members compare Jews who oppose Hamas to Nazis and suggest that Jews appointed to posts in the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs are inherently biased. I alone, as a member of the audience, objected to these antisemitic statements. To say that Arabs are indigenous to Israel while Jews are not is profoundly biased against Jews and requires the proponents of that view to erase inconvenient facts. That is not proper at a university. I observed that faculty panelists who discussed harms to children and sexual violence spoke only of the suffering of Gazan victims and simply ignored violence against Israelis, including the unspeakable sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, and the sexual abuse of hostages. Jewish suffering was erased. Speakers did not mention that Israeli actions in this war were a defensive response to the unprovoked Oct. 7 attack. Speakers labeled Israel's defensive war "genocide," while erasing the inconvenient components of the definition of genocide. The writer is Professor of International Law Emeritus at the Fletcher School.