Joseph Massad, professor of Modern Arab Politics at Columbia University, celebrated the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as “awesome,” “the stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” When Columbia students learned that Massad was scheduled to teach a course on “the development of Zionism,” pro-Israel students drew up a petition, calling on the university to “immediately remove him” from the faculty, while other students, faculty and alums condemned what they called the current “attacks” on Massad and praised his “rigorous scholarship.” University administrators defended the class, stressing that it’s “limited to 60 students” and Columbia seeks to provide “classrooms that promote intellectual inquiry.”
The “development of Zionism” is a subject Massad has recently elaborated on in numerous articles and podcasts, providing a view of his allegedly “rigorous scholarship” and “intellectual inquiry.”
Counterposed to the numerous scholars who recognize anti–Zionism as the modern form of antisemitism, Massad’s refrain is that there is an inextricable bond between Zionism—“a genocidal cult”—and antisemitism, claiming that antisemites originated “the concept of Zionism” and for centuries only they enacted “the Zionist project.” To Massad, “the Jewish Zionist movement,” organized by Theodor Herzl, only replicated the antisemites’ project.
Certain that Zionism has no Jewish roots, it is critically important to Massad that “Jewish Zionism” “started out as a secular project” and that, in 1897, Orthodox and Reform rabbis vehemently opposed the first Zionist congress, calling Zionism “anti-Jewish, both religiously and socially.” In short, Massad claims he can’t be antisemitic if he only shares the rabbis’ views.
Massad finds it insidious that the “Zionist movement chose to name its state ‘Israel’ … [which] means ‘the Jewish people’” because, he claims, it is “implicating all Jews … in the establishment of its settler colony on the land of the Palestinians.” To Massad, any definition of antisemitism must include expressions such as “Israel is the Jewish state.”
Massad contends that it was the Crusaders—Christian Zionists determined to “ethnically cleanse” Palestine of its Muslims and Eastern Christians—who provided the original model on which “Jewish Zionism” was based. Following in their footsteps, Massad falsely asserts that “the Zionist movement has always set out to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the country’s indigenous Palestinian population.”
It was from the second “instance of a Christian Zionism,” which began with the Reformation and culminated among Protestant millenarians in the 18th and 19th centuries, Massad maintains, that Jewish Zionists drew their ideology. According to Massad, it was the Protestants who developed the “bogus claim” that European Jews constituted not just a faith, but a nation whose people were “somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews.”
The millenarians followed this drive “to alienate European Jews from Europe” with their “insistence” that these Jews convert to Protestantism and be “dispatched to Palestine,” their alleged original homeland, “to expedite the Second Coming of Jesus.” It was in England—home to the author of the Balfour Declaration—where, Massad stresses, millenarians and evangelicals “were especially fanatic in pursuing this project.”
This, the professor of modern Arab politics instructs, is how Jewish Zionism “begins—as a Christian movement, specifically anti-Jewish, of course.”
Massad dismisses any claim that European Jews had roots in Palestine, insisting that idea was only a contrivance of Protestant millenarians, adopted by Jewish Zionists. He is adamant that the Jews of Europe were merely people who had converted to Judaism in Europe. He asserts that “Judaism had been a missionary religion since its inception” through the 13th century. He never indicates that this is contrary to the assessment of many scholars, who conclude that aside from the Macabees, Judaism has never been a missionary religion.
His false assertions about Jews don’t end there. To Massad, “the idea that the ancient Hebrews ended up leaving Palestine is … [merely] religious mythology within Judaism.” Because he doubts there ever was a second Jewish Temple, no Temple was destroyed, and thus there was no exile. He stresses that the Jewish Zionist movement, tied to its “nationalist mythology,” simply embraced the “idea that British Protestant Evangelicals created, that Palestine was ‘a land without [a] people for a people without a land.’”
Massad also situates the Zionist movement within the European colonization campaign. He maintains that Zionists “borrowed … even the idea that European Jews were quote-unquote returning to Palestine”—“a European colonial idea” deployed, for example, by the French, who after conquering Algeria claimed “that they were returning to the lands of the ancient Roman Empire.”
Dismissing that “some strange European group” of converts claimed Palestine as their ancient homeland, he argues that it is more likely “the Palestinian people today who are the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Canaanites … in Palestine.”
According to Massad, the majority of ancient Hebrews had remained in Palestine and “converted to Christianity.” That “the Palestinians are somehow descendants of Arab settlers who had come with the conquest of Palestine,” Massad underscores, is “Israeli propaganda” and, “of course, is not true at all.” (He often inserts “of course” in his comments, indicating they are indisputable.)
He avers that “very few Arabs” moved to the area and that the Palestinians simply became “Arabized and began to speak Arabic.” And, although many converted to Islam, he contends that the “conversion was very gradual.”
In short, Massad posits that it is the Palestinians of today, not the Jews, who are the indigenous people. He protests that Zionists not only denied the indigeneity of the Palestinian people but, “in the tradition of all colonial powers,” have always denied “the nationness” of the Palestinians.
Massad insists that “as early as the late 1920s” the Zionists drew up plans for the “mass expulsion” of Palestinians, and that by late 1948, “they had expelled 90 percent of the … population in the Palestinian areas they conquered.” In his script, none of the Palestinians fled their homes, expecting to return once Arab armies had annihilated the Jews.
By contrast, Massad characterizes as “outrageous” and “Israeli propaganda” claims that Arab Jews were expelled from Arab countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He insists that it was only “Israeli criminal actions and conspiracies” that “forced” the Jews in Arab countries to leave for Israel. Indeed, he underscores that in 1975, Arab countries even issued “invitations” for Arab Jews to return, as they sought to rescue them from the “institutionalized Ashkenazic racist discrimination to which they had been subjected in Israel.”
For some reason, none of the Jews from Arab countries “heeded the calls.”
Thus, Massad celebrates Oct. 7 as a “Palestinian resistance offensive” and a “prison break by people who were living in a concentration camp.” He characterizes the “offensive” as “of course … legitimate,” a response to “Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, [which] began seven decades ago.”
“It was unable to kill all the Palestinians,” Massad proclaims, “[So] it’s trying to do that now.”
Massad dismisses all the testimony about the savage attacks committed by Hamas and other Palestinian Arabs on Oct. 7. Charging that “the Palestinian Resistance Fighters killed babies … is nothing short of gruesome propaganda,” Massad declares.
As for the “allegations of rape,” Massad labels them “fabrications by the Israelis,” as are the accusations that workers of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) are also members of Hamas. Those “allegations,” Massad insists, are “of course, … yet another lie.”
By contrast, he professes that since Oct. 8, Israel has been continuing its “genocidal war against the Palestinian people” and that its main success “is, in fact, genocidal acts against civilians,” which, he alleges, “the Israeli military … has always been proud of.”
He ignores the findings of outside military experts who have praised the low ratio of civilians to terrorists killed.
He is also careful to omit that Hamas utilizes hospitals, universities, schools and mosques as weapons depots or terrorist bases, claiming that Israel targets these institutions “all, of course, … to eliminate the possibility of an afterlife for the civilian population of Gaza.”
He repeats the allegation that Israel is perpetrating “a deliberate starvation campaign” against the people of Gaza, “which, of course, everyone sees.” In fact, Israel facilitated the transport of thousands of tons of food into Gaza.
Massad also dismisses—more accurately, mocks—any effort by Israel, the Zionist “colonizers,” to solve the conflict with the Palestinians.
According to Massad, from 1947-49, Israelis “massacred” and expelled 90% of the “indigenous” Palestinians, establishing “a master-race democracy” in the areas it “conquered and occupied,” which resembled the “white-supremacist states” created by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In 1967, he continues, after Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem, “the demographics changed,” and Israel adopted “the apartheid South African … style of rule,” trapping the colonized in a collection of “Palestinian Bantustans.”
In the Bantustans, he avers, Palestinians were allowed control of only “their sewage system, their garbage collection” and “some control over education and transportation.” Massad instructs that this was the “autonomy plan,” “dubbed the ‘two-state solution,’ [which was] formalized at Oslo” in 1993. “The Oslo deal,” he emphasizes, was “a public relations stunt” calling “these collections of Bantustans a state … is a joke.”
He dismisses the Palestinian Authority as the “collaborator regime in the West Bank.”
Yet all is not lost. Massad professes that “the survival of Israel as a settler-colonial, apartheid, Jewish supremacist racist state is no longer guaranteed.” This is because “indigenous Palestinians” in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel now “outnumber their colonizers.”
In addition, he avows that there is a “major” move “internationally and amongst the Palestinians” that Israel/Palestine must “be replaced by a state that offers equality and democracy to all.” Tellingly, Massad, who identifies as a Palestinian Christian, avoids addressing Hamas’s designation of “Palestine” as an “Islamic land,” which the Jews have “usurped” and therefore jihad is “the duty of every Muslim.”
Massad remains sanguine because, “as we know, democracy and equality are a fate worse than death” to the Jewish colonizers, who will live in Israel only so long as it “offers them colonial, racial and religious privileges.” He is certain that if these “privileges are threatened,” millions “would definitely go to Europe, the United States, Canada or Australia, where white privilege continues to be respected.”
Thus, Massad foretells “the possible end of the Jewish settler-colonial project.”
In its defense of Massad, Columbia has stated that the university is committed to the “exchange of viewpoints and perspectives” and “classrooms that promote intellectual inquiry and analytical thinking along with … tolerance.” Yet, in his recent array of articles and lectures, Massad devotes virtually no attention to the vast amount of serious scholarship that challenges and undermines his narrative.
The protesters on Columbia’s campus chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine is all you’ll see,” and shouting at Jewish students, “Go back to Poland,” were likely star students in Massad’s classes.
Columbia University’s administrators should recognize that Massad is a crude polemicist, and acknowledge that the professor, like the emperor of the fairy tale, has no clothes.