A Massacre of Thoughts
The weaponization of October 7, "antisemitism," and the ousting of Claudine Gay
The downing of Claudine Gay
Claudine Gay's resignation as president of Harvard University on January 2 was not an auspicious start to 2024. Harvard's first Black leader, who was only the second woman to head the Ivy League school, served less time in the post than any of her 29 white predecessors.
Opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have not been slow to claim credit for a significant symbolic scalp. “Better late than never," crowed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; "it was a thinly veiled exercise in race & gender when they selected Claudine Gay."
But if DEI was the ultimate target, it was not the terrain on which this ugly battle was publicly fought.
The final nail in Gay’s coffin was allegations of plagiarism, a charge whose substance she has rejected while apologizing for "citation errors" in which "some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution." I will leave it to others to judge the seriousness of the plagiarism.
I do not propose to discuss this aspect of Gay's case any further here, because whatever its merits, I believe in this context the charge of plagiarism provided the pretext rather than the reason for Gay's ousting and continues to act as a distraction from more important issues raised by the events at Harvard.
These are issues not of academic misconduct, but of academic freedom of thought and expression—the very bedrock of a university.
Notwithstanding massive support among Harvard faculty and an earlier unanimous vote of confidence by the university's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, the key faux pas that brought Claudine Gay down was what has been universally misrepresented as the inadequacy of her response to campus antisemitism after Hamas's October 7 attacks. This was compounded by the supposed evasiveness of her testimony, along with that of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and M.I.T. president Sally Kornbluth, before a congressional hearing on December 5, 2023.
Gay was the second of the three presidents to be forced out of office, following Magill's resignation on December 9. "TWO DOWN," exulted MAGA Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whose resolution calling for the resignation of Gay and Kornbluth had been passed by the House of Representatives on December 13 on a bipartisan vote of 303-126. At the time of writing Kornbluth is still in post. Stefanik predicted that "this long overdue resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president [Gay] is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any university or college in history." She may be right, but for the wrong reasons.
What is truly scandalous here is the governing bodies of some of America's top universities cravenly surrendering to naked political pressure. "Not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression," writes Robert Reich.
No less worrying is the wider coarsening of political discourse in which October 7 has been weaponized as a crude moral club with which to beat critics of Israel into submission, and the catch-all charge of "antisemitism" has become an Archimedean point from which to lever the undoing of freedom of thought and expression.
A massacre of thoughts
Across the western world, dissident speech on the Gaza War has cost people jobs, literary awards, art exhibitions, government positions, seats on research advisory boards, places in sports teams, film roles, publications, and more. The breadth of what the artist Ai Weiwei has called this "massacre of thoughts" is chilling.
Some better known cases include the cancelation of the award ceremony for Adania Shibli's Minor Detail at the Frankfurt Book Fair; the firing of editors Michael Eisen at eLife and David Velasco at Artforum; the cancelation of Ai Weiwei's own exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, the 10th German Photo Biennale, and Candice Breitz's show at the Saarland Museum; the collective resignation of the planning committee for the five-yearly German art extravaganza Documenta 16; the pulling of Mehdi Hasan's MSNBC news show; the departure of indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush from the Art Gallery of Ontario; and the Heinrich Böll Foundation's withdrawal of its sponsorship of the Hannah Arendt Prize awarded to Masha Gessen, because she dared to compare Gaza to a Nazi ghetto in an essay in The New Yorker.
Other victims penalized for speaking out in support of Palestine and/or criticizing Israel include applicants for posts in Wall Street law firms, doctors investigated for "potential professional misconduct" by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, a medical resident who was suspended by the University of Ottawa, and a pilot fired by Air Canada.
In few, if any of these cases was the speech in question pro-Hamas (as distinct from pro-Palestinian) or antisemitic (as distinct from critical of Israeli government policy), and dissident Jews themselves were not protected from the hysteria.
"Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you're a Jew who criticizes Israel," observes Deborah Feldman. "Because of the enormous power the official institutions and communities wield," she goes on, "non-affiliated voices are often silenced or discredited, replaced by the louder ones of Germans whose Holocaust-guilt complexes cause them to fetishise Jewishness to the point of obsessive-compulsive embodiment." As the literary magazine Granta sardonically puts it, "Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew."
If Germany was most draconian in its crackdown, other western countries have not been far behind. British home secretary Suella Braverman characterized protests in London and other UK cities, in which hundreds of thousands of people rallied against the scale and ferocity of Israel's response to October 7, as "hate marches ... chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map."
The US House censured its only Palestinian American member, Rashida Tlaib, for "promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel"—an accusation Tlaib vehemently denied—while the US Senate unanimously condemned"anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups" following demonstrations on campuses across America.
Columbia University—for forty years the academic home of Edward Said—suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace societies. Liz Magill's University of Pennsylvania banned a screening of the film Israelism, which led Middle East Center director Harun Küçük to submit his resignation.
At Harvard, Claudine Gay responded to a letter from 34 student organizations that held "the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence" in Gaza with a statement that began "let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas" and made no mention of Israeli reprisals at all. These actions hardly fit the narrative of Gay and Magill being soft on antisemitism.
It says a lot, then, that they were still not enough to save Gay and Magill from the ragtag "coalition of populists, rich donors, politicians known to be enemies of science and democracy and other bigots" (I quote self-described Yale professor and Israeli son of Holocaust survivors Naftali Kaminski, writing in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz) calling for their heads.
Weaponizing October 7
The political right has been able to weaponize the events of October 7 thanks to two distortions of the facts. The first distortion is to rip Hamas's atrocities out of any antecedent context. A prime example of this was when Israel's UN ambassador called for the resignation of secretary-general Antonio Guterres "because when you say those terrible words that these heinous attacks did not happen in a vacuum, you are tolerating terrorism." While this may be powerful rhetoric, it is historical nonsense.
The war did not begin on October 7. The events of that day cannot be understood without reference to Israel's blockade of Gaza since 2007 and "mowing the grass" bombardments in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021; Jewish settlement of Palestinian territories that have been illegally occupied since 1967, and the imposition of what the UN and many human rights organizations have described as an apartheid regime within the West Bank and East Jerusalem; or the atrocities of the Nakba of 1947-8, in which 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homeland.
As Hagai El-Ad writes, "Deir Yassin and Gush Etzion, Sabra and Shatila, Be'eri and Gaza. Atrocities [are] etched into the historical memory of both peoples."
The second distortion is to conflate Jews with Israel, and Israel with the policies of its governments, so that any criticism of these policies can be plausibly represented as "antisemitic." This conflation dangerously expands the meaning of the concept of antisemitism in a way that not only catches many Jewish opponents of Zionism in its net, but also gives it all the intellectual cogency of a schoolyard insult. Antisemitism is a real danger in the world—but bowdlerizing the term does not help eradicate it.
None of this is intended to condone, excuse, or justify Hamas's actions. In the wake of the horrors of October 7 and the reprisals that followed there is an undoubted need for moral clarity. Nobody should be defending war crimes—on either side.
But there is no less need for the combination of analytic rigor, respect for historical fact, and informed debate that our great universities have traditionally offered. The prerequisite for that is academic freedom. Harvard should hang its head in shame.