'Palestinian Studies' is Jew-hate made academically acceptable.

The entire field is centered around attacking Israel — not around studying Palestinians. If Israel did not exist, neither would “Palestinian Studies.”

The Palestinian flag (photo: Ömer Faruk Yıldız/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written under the pen name, Elder of Ziyon.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Editor’s Note: Hunter College, a public university in New York which makes up one of City University of New York’s (CUNY) 25 campuses, advertised it was seeking a “Palestinian Studies” faculty member. New York Governor Kathy Hochul then ordered CUNY to immediately remove the job posting and called for probe into “antisemitic theories.”

I thought I was the perfect candidate for the “Palestinian Studies” professorship at Hunter College.

I have written extensively on the topic for over 20 years; I’ve authored books, articles and given lectures and podcasts on these topics. My ideas have been taught at Ivy League universities and quoted in numerous scholarly works.

Of course I am being tongue-in-cheek, but the description of the job itself points to a very uncomfortable fact: The entire field of “Palestinian Studies” should really be called “Anti-Zionism” — and its obsession with Israel makes it a truly antisemitic field.

Let’s review the topics that Hunter College wanted candidates to be familiar with:

“We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender and sexuality.”

Notice what is missing. Nothing about Palestinian politics, or culture, or history. Nothing about how Palestinian women or children or gays live outside the prism of “occupation.” Nothing about how Palestinians treat animals or the environment. Nothing about how Palestinian Arabs live outside the territories, and the challenges they face as second-class residents in the Arab world for generations.

Most glaringly, nothing about Palestinian terror or “resistance,” which is a fundamental part of Palestinian psyche. Many, many Palestinians support murdering Jews, in poll after poll taken after specific terror attacks. Palestinians consider salaries for terrorists to be the most important budget item for their government. They name schools and sports contests after murderers.

If “Palestinian Studies” was a legitimate, objective field, why is it so centered on slandering Israel?

All of the listed issues, without exception, are mainly about attacking Israel, not studying Arab Palestine. (I have sometimes seen papers on topics like Palestinian women’s health or other issues that don’t revolve around blaming Israel, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

This job description shows that there is no room in “Palestinian Studies” for debate on its core tenets. The field postulates that Israel is guilty of apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism. One cannot advance in the field of “Palestinian Studies” without accepting those lies as axioms.

And yes, they are lies. But even if you do not accept that they are lies, you must admit that there are some excellent arguments on the other side of those issues.

Within the bubble of “Palestinian Studies,” however, these are settled issues. Any other opinion is not only unthinkable; anyone in the field who dares contradict the orthodoxy would be canceled and lose their jobs. “Palestinian Studies” is as objective as a Yemenite Studies program where the only valid point of view is that of the Houthis.

“Palestinian Studies” exists as merely an excuse for putting a scholarly façade on old-fashioned Israel bashing. It is not an organic yearning to study Arab Palestine but purely a reaction to, and forum for attacking, Israel.

If you think that I am overly generalizing from Hunter College’s job description, let's look at how the field is described in the website of Istiqlal University in Jericho. The “Educational Objectives and Outcomes” include:

“Finding a Palestinian elite capable of engaging in a sharp, serious, scientific, academic, and cognitive engagement with Israel’s political, intellectual, religious, and historical system and its narratives that target the Palestinian cause.”

“Strengthening the Palestinian presence in the Arab collective memory, which Israel has begun to target through cultural normalization, and filling this void only through a solid and academic Palestinian presence.”

The truth is not a goal. Countering Zionist narratives is.

And what kind of job can one expect to get after achieving a master’s degree in “Palestinian Studies”? Among others, according to the site, is working on boycott campaigns against Israel!

Or look at how the Centre for Palestine Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London chooses to illustrate its program — with a picture of a defensive barrier Israel constructed to limit Palestinian terror attacks against Jews, but framing it as prison walls.

Their description of their fields of study is, again, Israel-centered — and also inaccurate:

“The question of Palestine and the lack of resolution to the so-called conflict with Israel has implicated various countries across the Middle East and North Africa and further afield.”

“Palestinian refugees remain the largest body of refugees in the world, Palestine is the theatre of the longest ongoing illegal occupation recognised as such in international law, Palestinian holders of Israeli citizenship have been permanently engaged in fighting for their rights, and a wide range of social and political movements locally and globally claim to represent the Palestinian voice.”

The best known purveyor of “Palestinian Studies” is the Institute for Palestine Studies, supposedly the oldest independent nonprofit public service research institute in the Arab world. It was established and incorporated in Beirut in 1963.

This institute held their third annual “Palestine Forum” in Doha last month. The forum featured more than a hundred presentations over three days. Virtually every paper features or centers on an anti-Israel component; even a lecture on Palestinian graffiti is based around the artwork drawn regarding the separation barrier.

If the field has nothing to say about Palestinians without referring to Israel, that is a strong indication that “Palestinian Studies” — and indeed Palestinian nationalism as a whole — is a reaction and counter to Zionism that has little to do with “Palestine.” In “Palestinian Studies,” Palestinians themselves become bit players in a grand anti-Israel narrative. They are defined purely in relation to Israel.

If Israel did not exist, neither would “Palestinian Studies.”

Let’s compare it with Israel Studies. There are lots of people in Israel Studies programs who are “anti-Zionist,” who are passionate critics of Israel, even professors who would accuse Israel of apartheid or genocide. Being an “anti-Zionist” does not automatically disqualify someone from the field of Israel Studies.

Do you think there is a single Zionist instructor in “Palestinian Studies”? The very idea is laughable.

All of this makes “Palestinian Studies” a dogma, not an academic field. It is as scholarly as a Flat Earth Society that debates whether the Earth is shaped like a circle or a square.

Since “Palestinian Studies” is wholly congruent with “anti-Zionism,” that makes it effectively antisemitic. As Jews worldwide can feel in their bones, “anti-Zionism” is largely a form of antisemitism. They are both characterized by the irrationality and obsessive hate of their believers.

There is one major difference between how antisemitism infiltrated German universities in the 1930s and how modern antisemitism disguised as “anti-Zionism” has invaded Western academia. That difference is not complimentary towards today’s academic antisemites.

The Nazis fired all professors who were Jewish or who didn’t accept the racial purity beliefs of the Third Reich. They imposed antisemitism into all academic fields from the top down.

Today, no government is forcing the antisemitism/“anti-Zionism” that is rife in academia now. It is the academics themselves who are embracing a fundamentally hateful, anti-intellectual philosophy and imposing a set of beliefs that are utterly at odds with both the truth and with free inquiry.

“Palestinian Studies” may have been designed to make “anti-Zionism” (and therefore antisemitism) acceptable, but its false ideas have infected the rest of the social sciences and is moving into every conceivable academic field. It is almost comical to see how students and academics try to find new, novel crimes to accuse Israel of.

The German professors had no choice but to embrace antisemitic philosophy. Today’s Western academics are too often the trendsetters for modern antisemitism.

Any objective review of “Palestinian Studies” leads one to that conclusion.

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