By Marc Sarnoff
Monday, September 14, 2026
Members of the Class of 2030: Congratulations on starting
a wonderful new chapter. College will inspire you to make the world a better
place and give you the skills to do it.
But danger lurks on campus. You will be tempted by
misguided ideologies that prey on that very yearning to make the world a better
place. Indeed, you likely encountered one such narrative even before your first
class. Nowadays many college freshmen get exposed to “Free Palestine” slogans from the moment they move into
their dorms.
In the months ahead, you will hear that Israel is an
“apartheid state” that is “occupying” the land of the dispossessed “Palestinian
people,” while committing “genocide” in Gaza. Every element of this narrative
is false, but it is a familiar and depressingly effective strategy. The Nazis
portrayed Jews as alien intruders who didn’t belong in Europe, accusing them of
heinous acts such as the medieval “blood libel” that Jews use the blood of
murdered children in religious rituals. Germans — at that time, perhaps the
most highly educated people on earth — fell for it, and the Holocaust was the
result.
The two narratives are not merely similar; they are
related. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent World War II broadcasting Nazi
propaganda in Arabic from Berlin. After the war, Arab nationalists continued
the fight for Judenrein (to be “free of Jews”). It was the genius of the
Soviet-trained propagandist and terrorist Yasser Arafat to repackage this
narrative for campus leftists in the West.
Most people with an opinion on the subject assume that
“Palestinians” are a distinct nation and therefore have a legitimate claim to a
state. But is that true? There are perhaps 500 million Arabs living in
predominantly Arab states whose borders were carved out of the Ottoman Empire
by European colonial powers. The Arabs of Palestine share with their neighbors
a common language and ethnicity; they are as culturally distinct from
Jordanians and Syrians as Texans are from New Yorkers. A Palestinian nationalist
movement was born in the late 19th century, along with scores of other national
independence movements — including Zionism — primarily in opposition to Ottoman
rule. But not every group that thinks of itself as a nation can have a state.
That is why you won’t see campus protests for the 50 million Kurds spread
across the Middle East — an actual national group with its own language and
ethnicity, but no state.
The term “Palestinian” came to have its current meaning
only recently. For thousands of years, “Palestine” was a common name for the
Holy Land, a region with many ethnicities. Even in the decades before Israel’s
creation, Jews who lived in Palestine were identified as “Palestinian” on
passports. Look up “Palestine” in an early 20th century edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and you will see a long article that mentions Arabs, Jews, and
many others, but not “Palestinians.” Only after World War II and the creation
of Israel did Palestinian Jews begin identifying as “Israeli,” while local
Arabs appropriated “Palestinian” for themselves to reinforce their claim of
primacy in the land.
The accusation that Israel is “occupying” Palestinian
territory has equally dubious historical roots. Today’s “two-state solution”
focuses on the West Bank and Gaza — which were captured from Jordan and Egypt,
respectively, in 1967, in one of many wars launched by Arabs explicitly to
exterminate Israel. “Occupation” under international law implies that some
state has a settled claim to the land in question, but there was never a
Palestinian state. Jordan and Egypt have formally relinquished their claims, so
the status of Gaza and the West Bank under international law is most accurately
described as “disputed” or, if you like, “TBD.”
The idea of an Israeli “occupation” has a more sinister
origin. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 — before Gaza
or the West Bank were even “occupied.” To Arafat, the PLO’s founder,
“occupation” meant the existence of any Jewish state in the Middle East. Arafat
appropriated the language of decolonization to cast Jews — an indigenous people
returning to their native land, refugees fleeing persecution and genocide in
Europe — as European colonists whose state must be extinguished. That is the
meaning of the phrase, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
You will hear that Israel is an “apartheid state.” Yet 20 percent of Israelis are Palestinian Arabs, living freely
in Israel with full civil rights. Israel is a multicultural exception in a
region full of apartheid. Surrounding Arab states stripped ancient Jewish
communities of civil rights and drove them into exile, but you won’t hear
anyone clamoring for their “right of return.” Turkey — a NATO ally — has
oppressed its Kurdish minority for decades, but you likely won’t hear about
that during your time in college.
As for Gaza and the West Bank, the Arabs there have been
offered a state of their own multiple times and rejected it each time because
their leaders couldn’t accept the existence of a Jewish state anywhere in
Palestine. Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely in 2005, but security measures
continued because Hamas took over and turned Gaza into a platform for missile
terrorism against Israel.
The results came on the early morning of October 7, 2023,
when thousands of Hamas fighters and young Palestinian men crossed into Israel
to murder 1,200 Israelis and take more than 200 hostages. Attacking defenseless
kibbutzim and young revelers at a music festival, Hamas then hunted down
terrified women, children, and the elderly. They were given no evacuation
warnings, no opportunity to surrender, and not the slightest sign of human
mercy.
On campus, you may hear that anti-Zionism isn’t the same
as antisemitism. But in practice, it almost always is, just as it was for
Arafat. No sooner had Hamas’s atrocities come to light than scores of
university student groups publicly and solely blamed Israel, expressing
solidarity with Hamas. The rape and torture of Jewish women was documented, but
campus activists denied it and tore down posters recognizing the victims.
Prominent Ivy League academics framed the murder of 1,200 Jews as legitimate
“resistance.” Yale and Columbia professors defended the attack, dismissing Israeli victims as “settlers.” It didn’t matter
that some of those communities were socialist peacenik kibbutzim that predated
Israel itself: What made them illegitimate to those professors was not their
connection to Israel, but that they were Jewish.
None of Free Palestine’s lies is more poisonous than the
accusation of “genocide” in Gaza. This depraved calumny is the ancient blood
libel updated for today’s leftists. The war that resulted from October 7 has
been horrific, but it was Hamas that chose the war. By drawing Israel into
densely packed urban areas, refusing to surrender, and often refusing to let
civilians escape, Hamas chose the way the war unfolded and bears responsibility
for the result, as surely as the Nazis bore responsibility for the devastation
of Europe.
Perhaps 70,000 Gazans have died — far more than the
number of Israelis killed on October 7. That is shocking, until you consider
Allied bombing killed 500,000 German civilians in World War II, while the
number of American civilians killed on American soil was zero. Much of Gaza
lies in ruins, but the same was true of Germany in 1945. Yet only a Nazi would
say Germany was the victim of genocide.
The ratio of civilian to combatant casualties in Gaza has
been about 1.5:1 at most by the most reliable accounts. That is in keeping with urban
counterinsurgency operations of this scale and remarkably low considering
Hamas’s strategy of fighting from schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings.
Why does Hamas use human shields? Because it knows many people will blame
Israel.
What makes the genocide libel most despicable is the
lengths to which Israel has gone to protect Gaza’s civilian population. Israel
has issued evacuation warnings before major military operations, even sending
text messages to evacuate specific buildings about to be struck. It has given
Hamas fighters opportunities to surrender, as required by the Geneva
Conventions, which Hamas systematically violates.
You will hear that Israel “indiscriminately targets”
civilians. This is false. International law provides that Hamas’s placement of
military assets in or under civilian infrastructure can strip those sites of
their protected status. You will hear that Israel uses “disproportionate
force.” Proportionality under international law is not determined by whether
opposing sides use equal force; the force used must be proportional to military
necessity. Here, that necessity is the disarmament of Hamas and the end of its
rule in Gaza.
Gaza’s death toll is perhaps 3 percent of its pre-war
population and is composed heavily of combatants. Actual genocides look like
the Nazis murdering 60 percent of Europe’s Jews, the Khmer Rouge slaughtering
30 percent of Cambodians, or the Turks killing 75 percent of Armenians. Those
millions were intentionally murdered, not merely civilian casualties of war.
Under international law, genocide is the attempt to
destroy a national, ethnic, or religious group. Israel is doing no such thing,
and saying otherwise trivializes the real genocides of the past, as well as the
genocide Hamas and its terrorist allies have pursued for decades.
Hamas leaders boast they would repeat October 7 “a
thousand times.” Yet they get a pass on campus because “resistance to
occupation” is framed as the noblest cause. By excusing its double war crime —
the murder of Israelis and the callous sacrifice of Palestinian civilians —
campus protesters unwittingly aid terror. Watching protesters’ routine
intimidation of Jewish students, Hamas rightly brags, “We have our own people
everywhere.”
In June 2026, eight students, alumni, and former employees of the
University of Michigan were arrested for targeting university officials and
Jewish businesses with intimidation and destruction of property. Once you
connect the dots, you may realize that behind the veneer of justice and
liberation, the slogans of “Free Palestine” are an incitement to genocide
against Israelis and violence against Jews everywhere. And if you believe
Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, many activists and sympathizers
will not merely disagree with you. They will try to bully, intimidate, and
silence you.
The campus left prides itself on fighting hate but
ignores — and indeed often shares — the all-consuming hatred that Israel’s
neighbors have shown the Jewish state since its founding. Campus activists who
claim to stand for the rights of women, gays, and other minorities make common
cause with Islamists who persecute those same minorities. The world is full of
minorities facing persecution on a massive scale without a single banner being
raised on their behalf on campus. Around 32,000 pro-democracy protesters were murdered in Iran in just a
few days this year, but activists mostly blamed the U.S. and Israel, when they
could be bothered to care at all.
There is a simple lesson here: Don’t believe something
simply because “everyone says” it’s true. The Israel–Palestine conflict will
test your ability to distinguish cause and effect, right and wrong, victim and
aggressor. A dismaying number of your classmates will fail that test. Don’t be
one of them. Read, think, and decide for yourself — and stand up for what you
believe.
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