Yes, It’s Genocide. Time to Back Divestment.
Solomon: “The Tech should stop publishing pieces denying the reality of genocide and ongoing mass atrocities against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Instead, it should embrace divestment”
In Jabalia camp, a mother collects her daughter’s
flesh in a piggy bank,
hoping to buy her a plot
on a river in a faraway land.
- Mosab Abu Toha, from “Under the Rubble”
As a political scientist, I’m troubled by The Tech’s decision to publish recent pieces denying the reality of genocide and ongoing mass atrocities against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. A column published on June 12th dismisses the genocide reference in Megha Vemuri’s speech as “bombastic language” that gives no room for pro-Israel students’ own “moral reasoning.” A column published on June 5th alleges that the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure is “the result of military objectives” because there are Hamas tunnels beneath them, and so it cannot be a genocide. The author then denies that Israeli authorities have blocked the flow of “food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine” into Gaza.
A column on September 5, 2024 devotes extensive attention to denying the genocide, claiming that Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza because it is not targeting “Palestinians in Jordan, Chile, Saudi Arabia, [and] Egypt” and because the “population of Gaza is growing.” The author makes discredited and misleading claims about the civilian-to-combatant ratio being “2:1” and alleges, against the humanitarian consensus both at the time and since, that Israel “is allowing more than sufficient food into Gaza.” A column on May 30, 2024 similarly claims there is “a ratio of roughly 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. Given Hamas’ likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”
Newspapers are not obliged to give voice to the full range of opinions on an issue. Would The Tech, for instance, give a platform to the significant share of Americans who believe that vaccines cause autism, that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, and that Native Americans no longer exist? I hope not. Holocaust denial and pseudoscience like homeopathy, eugenics, and phrenology remain at the margins of discourse partly because newspapers refuse to platform those ideologies. This is a good thing.
In the case of occupied Palestine, newspapers should represent the truth. The consensus position of genocide scholars is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. It is the point of departure for the field’s top journal, Journal of Genocide Research as well as the president of the International Association for Genocide Scholars. Perhaps surprisingly for some readers, these academic authorities include Jewish and Israeli scholars of genocide: Raz Segal, Shmuel Lederman, Omer Bartov, Debórah Dwork, Barry Trachtenberg, Nitzan Lebovic, William Schabas, Amos Goldberg, Aryeh Neier, and Daniel Blatman. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both released detailed reports concluding Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocidal, as has the United Nations’ top expert on Palestine, Francesca Albanese. In December 2023, the International Court of Justice ruled 15-2 in South Africa v. Israel that the charge of genocide was plausible, and the court issued emergency orders to Israel to avoid the further loss of Palestinian life and infrastructure, which Israel promptly ignored.
Evidence for the genocide characterization is overwhelming. Over 21 months, Israeli forces have dropped about 100,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, a coastal enclave about two-thirds the size of Chicago. It is one of most impoverished places in the world, where 2.2 million people, half of them children, have lived under blockade by air, land, and sea for 18 years. By April 2024, UN rapporteurs reported that Israeli forces have destroyed 80% of the schools, 70% of the housing stock, leveled all 12 universities in Gaza, and damaged or destroyed 31 of the 36 hospitals, along with 195 heritage sites, 13 public libraries, 227 mosques, three churches, and the Central Archives. By January 2025, Israel had reportedly destroyed 92% of all housing units and 88% of Gaza’s infrastructure, including roads, electric grids, and sewage lines. The destruction has since continued: hospitals restored to partial capacity are then bombed again.
The scale and indiscriminate nature of the destruction indicates a manifest intent to erase the presence of Palestinians and render the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip unable to support life. In the words of one IOF commander to his troops, “Before you leave, you burn down the house — every house. This is backed up at the battalion commander level. It’s so that they won’t be able to return.” Or as the director general of one of Israel’s governing parties acknowledged after returning from active duty in Gaza: “Yes, we set fire to houses. To as many as possible. And we are proud of it.” A Palestinian survivor in Beit Lahiya described it thus: “The city has been subjected to massive destruction of buildings and infrastructure, in an attempt to force the remaining residents to leave. There is no food or water, and we currently face a real famine. It’s a genocide against the residents and the displaced people who are sheltering here.” Private contractors are reportedly being paid $1,500 per house they demolish.
Mass evacuation orders, such as the October 2023 order to 1.1 million Palestinians to leave the north, are another tactic designed to force civilians to flee, often multiple times, under threat of being designated a combatant and killed. As of May 2025, some 70% of Gaza is currently under forced displacement orders or ‘no-go’ zones. As one soldier admitted last year “it’s permissible to shoot everyone [in there], a young girl, an old woman.” Palestinian survivors describe hellish conditions of trying to flee the tanks and airstrikes: “It felt like the entire city was dying.” According to another Israeli officer, “the idea is ultimately to push everyone into Al-Mawasi and turn a single neighborhood into the home of two million people, fenced in and controlled by the military, with access only through checkpoints, and the only place where humanitarian aid is brought in… The army doesn’t use the words ‘ghetto’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ [but] it’s a de facto ghetto.”
This campaign to inflict conditions of life intended to bring about the ethnic or national group’s physical destruction is reinforced by the humanitarian siege on Gaza, which cut off water, food, gas, medicine, and has led to well-documented starvation. The siege was imposed at its most extreme levels first in October 2023 and ratcheted again in March 2025. In between, Israel has also severely restricted supplies. Most electricity has been cut, and the army has turned aid distribution points into what one soldier calls “a killing field” where senior commanders give orders to fire into unarmed crowds: “They're treated like a hostile force — no crowd-control measures, no tear gas — just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” On February 28, 2024, Israel committed the “flour massacre” when at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 injured after Israeli forces opened fire while the Palestinians were seeking food from aid trucks. Last week, on June 17, 2025 Israeli tanks opened fire into a crowd trying to get aid from trucks, killing at least 59 people.
These are not isolated incidents but part of a broader pattern of conduct by the Israeli government to induce famine and disease epidemics: the destruction of agricultural lands that could feed the population, the criminalization and defunding of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, routine targeting of bakeries, food kitchens and aid convoys, closures of the northern Erez, Al-Muntar, Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossing, cascading logistic and permitting bottlenecks, and the creation of new ‘aid sites’ run by U.S. mercenaries, which witnesses describe as the “hunger games” and soldiers describe as a “red light, green light” with machine guns. The horrors of this starvation campaign have been recounted in detail by Palestinians themselves as well as scholars of famine.
Newspapers have a duty to bear witness to mass atrocities and contribute to their remedy, not to trivialize or deny they are happening. As the poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote recently about his companion, “what Sabir wants is food, medicine, diapers, and a decent home rather than a tent. He wants what all Palestinians want — not to line up for aid packages, not to fight over flour, but to eat the foods that our own hands grow.” The alternative to this humanizing endeavor is that the public develops a warped view of reality or becomes increasingly jaded to mass violence. As one Israeli lawmaker Zvi Sukkot bragged recently, “tonight we killed nearly 100 people in Gaza, and no one cares. Because everyone has become used to the fact that 100 Palestinians can be killed in a single night.” In the words of an Israeli soldier, “Gaza doesn't interest anyone anymore… The loss of human life means nothing.” A grieving father Jabir Abu Leila who survived the executions in Gaza’s north repeated this sentiment: “My sons died, and the majority of the people died. No one cares about our death. No one cares about ending this genocide. What is our fault?”
Genocide is a crime of intent. It is revealed not simply by the pattern of conduct by Israeli forces but by the stated desires of Israeli officials. Expressions are made at all levels of the Israeli government advocating for the destruction of Gaza, its starvation, the annihilation of its people and their memory, their collective guilt and sub-human nature, the coercion of people into fleeing without the possibility of return, and Gaza’s eventual repopulation by Israeli Jewish settlers. This includes statements made by the Israeli President, Prime Minister, both Defense Ministers, Ministers of National Security, Finance, Energy, Settlements, and other members of cabinet. It includes parliament lawmakers and major opinion shapers in the press and television.
On military policy, intent to destroy Gaza is vocalized by the Commander-in-Chief of the IDF, the Army Spokesman, the Chief of the Military Rabbinate, as well as scores of field commanders and soldiers. For instance, one Brigadier General Yehuda Vach says that “there are no innocents in Gaza… Every woman is a scout, or a man in disguise.” Making good on that policy, he attempted to drive out 250,000 Palestinians from the north and set-up “kill zones” in the Netzarim corridor, where anyone can be labeled a terrorist and killed. In the words of Major General Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council and adviser to the defense minister, the goal of the war is “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable” so that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
This expressed intent, which shapes the evolving pattern of state violence, represents the Israeli populace. According to recent polling, about 80% of Israeli Jews believe that Palestinians from Gaza should be ‘transferred’ to other countries, and about half believe that the Israeli army should “kill all its inhabitants.” The recent proposal by President Trump to kill or expel all Palestinians in Gaza to make room for beach resorts has undoubtedly added fuel to these desires. As Netanyahu flatly stated in May 2025, “We are demolishing more and more houses, they have nowhere to return to…The only logical outcome would be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate abroad. Our main problem is finding countries willing to receive them.” As the war deepens, the prospect of further war-time radicalization within the Israeli military apparatus concerns me deeply. Those students of history may recall that the stories of the Holocaust and Armenian genocide get much darker after Operation Barbarossa and the loss of Sarikamish respectively.
But one does not have to look to history to understand the horrors Palestinians face now. I will give you examples from my own small witness. I saw the black charred body of a young man trembling in agony and shock, who had taken shelter at a school that was hit by Israeli airstrikes. I watched displaced children gather leftover pasta shells in the dirt to fill their empty bellies. I then watched a tearful Palestinian father describe surviving a massacre at an aid site in Khan Younis. Another child from Rafah shared about his own mother who was martyred searching for a sack of flour: “either aid comes with dignity or we don’t want it. My mother was martyred. Before her, my brother was killed in this war.” On Father’s Day, I saw a young man carrying his dead father on a bike after he was shot trying to secure a bag of flour. I thought of my own father and how deeply I love him, and how distressed I would be to carry his body on my bicycle. On June 16, I saw the bloodied, unconscious bodies of children bombed in a refugee tent.
One day last month, I saw Israeli bulldozers destroy Gaza’s last kidney dialysis center. Then I saw dozens of small corpses litter the ground as Israeli tanks and gunmen fired on starving refugees. I listened to the final words of a paramedic before he was executed. I saw an apartment building destroyed by air to surface missiles, and Israeli bulldozers destroy a house in Khan Younis and a hospital. I saw journalist Wadea Abu al-Saoud hold up a plastic bag with the blood-soaked brains of a human being. I watched an aerial video of a small child dragging an empty water tank as a drone operator pressed the trigger and killed him. I saw images of an emaciated child, skin on bones. I saw a girl’s corpse pulled from the rubble without a skull, and then I watched US mercenaries oversee thousands of starving people running in the dust and fighting over aid packages like the hunger games. This was one day, and it has only become worse. Recently, another 17 were killed in Deir Al-Balah in airstrikes, their entrails littering the street.
It is chillingly common to see confusion about this violence and its scale. I will mention two such confusions and connect it to my own field of political science. One claim published in other places as well as The Tech is that the civilian to combatant ratio is low, potentially 1.5:1 or 1:1. As a political scientist, I’d say three things about this. First, Palestinian combatants, as members of an occupied people, have the right in international law to resist their occupiers by force of arms, provided they follow the laws of war. Protocol I to the Geneva Convention is clear about this. Israel has no right to kill them even if they are combatants. It has the right and the duty to accept a ceasefire, end the occupation, and recognize the equal rights of Palestinians.
Second, the fact that tens of thousands of people are being directly killed, even if “only” half or 60% of them are civilians, is still a heinous crime and should not be trivialized, to say nothing of the tens of thousands injured, and the many more dying of malnutrition, disease, and despair. This is especially true when the path to a permanent ceasefire is straightforward and only requires U.S. political commitment. The claim that the civilian casualty rate is “historically low for modern urban warfare” is also not true. In fact, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health records, which have been repeatedly vetted and deemed a reliable baseline by demographers and public health authorities, over 50% of those killed by violent death in Gaza are women or under the age of 18. This is already more than double the proportion in almost every other conflict in the 21st century and possibly since the second world war.
Third, the claim about ratios is untrue. It is not possible to know precisely how many of the dead were killed during combat. The Ministry of Health in Gaza does not indicate the military status of those killed, and their data of course are known to be vast undercounts of violent deaths because the ministry requires identifiable bodies to be brought to a hospital, and many bodies are unidentifiable, still under rubble, or were buried by families separately. Mortality studies based on phone surveys and Facebook obituaries separately find that the ministry is under-estimating violent deaths by 40%. Nevertheless, the most recent release of martyrs documents 55,202 people killed between October 7, 2023 and June 15, 2025. Of those, 17,120 (31%) are children below the age of eighteen, 9,636 (17.5%) are women aged 18-64, and 2,736 (4.9%) are ages 65 and older. What about civilian men aged 18-64? If we assume that civilian men are killed at the same rate as women, then based on 2025 age structure estimates for the Gaza Strip by the U.S. census, 9,690 men or 17.6% of those 55,202 people killed are also civilians. The civilian share comes up to 71%.
However, this equal rate assumption is wrong. Men are more likely to be labeled as targets, more likely to leave shelter in search of food, water, or fuel, and more likely to work in dangerous roles like aid workers or first responders. Ministry of Health data reinforce this assumption, showing adolescent boys are more likely to be killed than girls the same age, and elderly men are more likely to be killed than women the same age. In fact, if adult civilian men are 1.5 - 2.2x more likely to be killed than adult civilian women, then the list comprises anywhere from 80% - 92% civilians. This is in the ballpark of peer-reviewed epidemiological models, as well as one estimate by Israeli forces themselves which, despite their incentives to downplay mass civilian death, still admitted in May 2025 that 82% of people killed in Gaza since Israel broke the ceasefire were uninvolved in fighting. Israeli forces have reportedly authorized strikes on targets where the “allowed” ratio of collateral damage to combatant is up to 300:1. In many incidents, hundreds of civilians have been killed in massacres where no apparent military activity was taking place.
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Why is Israel doing this? It’s commonly argued that, since Hamas uses a widespread network of tunnels under Gaza’s civilian population, civilian casualties are unintentional consequences of military actions, and therefore not genocidal. Instead of dismissing this claim, we should take it seriously: it can help us understand the nature of mass violence. Students of the Holocaust will note that similar pretexts were offered by the Nazis to justify the destruction of the ghettos of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, where Jewish fighting groups had made extensive use of subterranean tunnels and sewers. For instance, the German governor of Warsaw Ludwig Fischer issued a proclamation on May 13, 1943 for the destruction of Warsaw Ghetto, arguing that the “Jewish quarter has thus been turned into a nest for all supporters of the Bolshevik ideology” and that Bolshevism “reveals its true face with typical terrorist attacks against Warsaw.” In the proclamation, he was referring to the recent discovery of 22,000 Polish officers massacred by the Soviets and buried in mass graves in Katyn. The SS commander Jürgen Stroop noted in his journal that the ghetto’s resistance to “voluntary resettlement” reinforced the need to take a heavy hand against the “terrorists.”
No two genocides are completely alike, but the Holocaust can teach us lessons about the nature of genocide relevant to the present. One lesson is that Nazi claims about the Jewish population supporting the Bolshevik Party or approving of Soviet crimes such as the Katyn massacre were lies, similar to the lie that all or even the majority of Gaza’s population supported Hamas on the eve of the October 7 attack or were involved in its planning. The majority of Jews in eastern Europe were not Bolsheviks, and the majority of Bolshevik party members (over 93% of party members) were not Jews. But there was a grain of truth in the Judeo-Bolshevik myth, central to White Russian and later Nazi propaganda, that was exploited in the racial anxieties and siege mentality of the Germans and their accomplices. In a similar way, Palestinian support for Hamas, which is in some places significant, is interpreted in the mind of the Zionist leaders as evidence for the need to oversee a people’s destruction. This destruction is characterized as necessary for Jewish safety.
From our vantage point, the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices are obvious. The Judeo-Bolshevik propaganda that linked an event like the Katyn massacre to the need to cleanse the ghettos of the supposedly pro-Soviet Jewry seems ludicrous to us because we have no guilt or shame over the events in question. No emotional stake in being innocent. But for those living in Germany in 1943, it was tempting to think that the liquidation of the Ghetto was unpleasant but necessary for public safety. After all, the stereotype of the Soviet-aligned Jew was not a complete hallucination. In the lead-up and aftermath of Jewish emancipation, many Jews in the Pale of Settlement found opportunities for visible political leadership only on the Left, where the promise of participation in revolutionary movements based on universal human values, instead of caste, religion, or ethnicity, held a certain appeal.
Consequently, Jews constituted a quarter of the Bolshevik Party central committee between 1919 and 1921, about a third of the first two Soviet Congresses, half of the Cheka’s office for combating counter-revolution, 15 percent of all “leading” officials of the OGPU (the Cheka’s successor) and 50 percent of its top brass. The first Bolshevik commandants of the Winter Palace and the Moscow Kremlin were Jews, as were the heads of the Soviet delegation at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, the first party bosses of Moscow and Petrograd, the chairman of the Communist International, the head of the Party Secretariat, and the leader of the Red Army. Jewish names, or names perceived to be Jewish, were prominently associated with the Red Terror: Sverdlov, Yurovsky, Zemliachka, Uritsky. So too with the fathers of communism: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Kautsky, Zinoviev, etc.
Elsewhere in eastern Europe, Jews were overrepresented in the Polish Communist Party’s central committee (32%), district activists (53.8%), publication apparatus (75%), international department (100%), and Home Secretariat. The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919) also had conspicuous Jewish leaders like Béla Kun, and German occupiers in Warsaw were correct to a certain degree that many Jews in the ghettos harbored socialist sympathies and that the Jewish and Polish underground did occasionally coordinate with the Soviet front. It is moreover unsurprising that members of the most literate and urbanized minority in the Russian Empire, which had suffered greatly under Tsarist pogroms, would see in the defeat of the Romanovs and the radical promise of equality something worth fighting for. Ambitious members of another minority in their position would have behaved similarly, like the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the leadup to 1915.
Again, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth was a lie: the vast majority of Cheka and Bolshevik party members were non-Jewish Russians; other minorities like the Latvians overshadowed the Jews in representation within many soviets; Poland's parliamentary elections in the 1920s indicate that the Jewish share of support for the Communists was less than their share in the population, and Jews in the Soviet leadership did not survive the purges of Joseph Stalin. And yet the status reversals set in motion by the Russian revolution, as well as the unprecedented visibility of Jews in the communist administrations fed into the stereotype of pro-Soviet Jewry as well as the burning resentments of other Eastern Europeans. This shaped the genocidal violence that followed.
Why am I telling you this and what does it have to do with Gaza? By taking the Judeo-Bolshevik myth seriously, we can understand genocide better. Genocide as a crime in international law is haunted by the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the archetype of genocide, and it persists in the popular imagination as a hate crime driven primarily by an irrational racial supremacist ideology. Hollywood cinema, like Schindler’s List (1993) or the Diary of Anne Frank (1959), reinforces this notion. The objects of its hate crimes are, in Mohammed El-Kurd’s terms, ‘perfect victims’ — passive and agentless. They are also apolitical: Jewish political activity is characterized as a reaction to, and not precursor for, mass perpetrator violence. Thus the Holocaust in its imagined prototype is removed from ‘real’ issues of ‘normal’ ethnic conflict like land, political power, and national security.
International law gives weight to that simplistic archetype. The 1951 Genocide Convention, which the American and Soviet delegations crafted to exclude language that could implicate Jim Crow or the Stalinist purges, did not outlaw mass killing on the basis of political identity. It required that genocidal acts target a national, ethnical, racial or religious group “as such,” meaning not for any other reason than their membership in that group. The ‘only reasonable inference’ standard of ICJ jurisprudence — that a pattern of behavior can only be genocidal if genocidal aims are the only reasonable inference and not simultaneous with war aims — is a legacy of that restriction. And yet, when I think of depictions of mass atrocities in art, I think of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. The painting commemorates the Nazi aerial bombing of the Basques in 1937 and is perhaps the most famous anti-war artwork in history. However to date, no state power or official has ever been convicted of genocide for carpet bombing cities during war. To do so would have threatened the legitimacy of the victorious Allied powers, who engaged in massive bombing campaigns in Tokyo, Dresden, and Hiroshima, among others.
Consequently, for those genocides that do not appear to fit this unrealistic standard or idealized model of victimhood, or for those settings of mass violence like Gaza where readers are constantly primed by the media to remember the Hamas attack of October 7, the question of genocide can appear to them morally more complex or ‘nuanced’ than the Holocaust. What about Hamas? What about October 7th and the many hundreds of Israeli civilians who were killed on that day? Doesn’t the legitimacy of Israeli security concerns complicate the picture?
The truth is many genocides, especially those in colonial or frontier societies, begin with precipitating events like October 7th. For example, the genocide of the Herero in Namibia began with the Herero massacre of 123-150 German settlers. The genocides of the Yuki in California and the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego were preceded by what the white perpetrators considered ‘predatory warfare’ and robbery of settler property. The Rohingya genocide at the hands of the Burmese army and the mass expulsion of a million Rohingya from Rakhine State in 2016-2017 was preceded by deadly attacks by Rohingya insurgents on border guards in October 2016, as well as possible massacres of Hindus, Buddhists, and Mro following the crackdown.
Gaza fits that pattern. A long history of settler expansion and persecution, in this case in the form of the ongoing Nakba, culminates in a border raid by native militants. That raid, which can itself be bloody, inflames the ethno-nationalist paranoia and vengeance of the perpetrator group, which uses it as a pretext to inflict callous and overwhelming mass violence. The past 20 years of Holocaust scholarship has actually moved in this analytic direction, toward interpreting the Judeocide within such a framework of political paranoia and ethnic ‘security,’ not just as a mass hate crime based on racial prejudice. For scholars of Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, like the genocides on colonial frontiers, did not start with an instigating event by the natives but is part of a pattern of conflict over land and demography. “The question of genocide,” theorist Patrick Wolfe once wrote, “is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.”
By taking the Judeo-Bolshevik myth seriously, we can understand how the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto after the discovery of the Soviet massacre at Katyn and the ghetto’s embeddedness within the underground resistance made sense as natural and inevitable to many Germans and Poles, the same way the destruction of Gaza after October 7th makes sense as natural and inevitable to many Americans and Israelis. In both cases, the victim’s behavior and the resulting genocidal response are linked in the minds of the perpetrator on the basis of a hysterical and paranoid threat assessment. In no real sense was the Soviet massacre of 22,000 unarmed Polish officers — 8% of whom were Polish Jews — the work of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, even if many were friendly to socialism and the Soviet cause, even if they harbored Soviet partisans, even if Jews were overrepresented in the Stalinist security directorate, and even if some of them were even hiding in the ghetto.
Similarly, in no real sense was the killing of 725 Israeli civilians on October 7th — 9% of whom were Arab Muslims — the work of Palestinians in Gaza, even if support for Hamas and its military actions against the occupation is high, and even if there were somehow Hamas tunnels under every hospital, school, and house. For those who believe in the sacredness of all human life, the destruction of Gaza is wrong for the same reason that the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was wrong. The path forward requires a permanent ceasefire and the release of all captives, Israeli and Palestinian. It requires the prosecution of the Israeli leadership for crimes against humanity as well as reparations and land reform. In the wake of the Holocaust and South African apartheid, a whole set of mechanisms called transitional justice was pioneered to help traumatized societies recover from mass violence. Why not use it in the Holy Land? To do so, we should first work to end the war so that everyone in Palestine and the diaspora can live freely, in peace and in dignity, with a state that values all human life.
The Tech has a role to play in the birth of that brighter future. As MIT students, we should take seriously Noam Chomsky’s invitation that the duty of the intellectual is to speak the truth and expose lies. How can The Tech do this? First, it can decline to publish any more pieces that deny the reality of the genocide. Second, it can report faithfully the struggles of the student movement here, which future generations of students will hopefully be inspired by and will learn about thanks in part to this paper’s reporting. Finally, the Editorial Board can write its own editorial calling for MIT to end its research engagements with the Israeli military and its arms suppliers.
Such a bold position would not go unnoticed. It would follow MIT students’ own recent votes calling for such divestment in the Undergraduate Association, Graduate Student Union, and Graduate Student Council as well as the two other votes in the Undergraduate Association and GSC calling for solidarity with Palestine solidarity activists. After 21 months of genocide, MIT continues to actively approve and renew sponsorships by the Israeli Ministry of Defense; students can verify that for themselves in the Brown Books and the Kuali Coeus grant-management tracker. In fact, the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, recently named MIT in her own report to the Human Rights Council on the issue of institutional complicity.
The Tech has taken bold positions before. In 1975 for example, The Tech editorial board wrote a bold statement backing the student movement to end MIT’s training program for Iranian nuclear scientists, which students considered supportive of the dictatorship of the Shah and harmful for the cause of peace. “The possibility of MIT training engineers to build bombs is not so remote… MIT can try to think of other, less reprehensible ways to make ends meet which will not involve the moral abdication implied by this plan.” Palestinians today endure the iron rain of our bombs, guided by our algorithms, supported by our MIT research, and directed by an MIT alumnus, the butcher Benjamin Netanyahu. We can find less reprehensible ways of making ends meet than aiding and abetting a genocide in Gaza.
Richard Solomon is a doctoral student in political science and a member of the MIT Coalition for Palestine.