The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter of the City University of New York’s School of Law is promoting a campus event described as an “anthropologic investigation” that characterizes Hamas’s tunnel network in Gaza as “social organization in resistance to colonization.”
In a social media post shared on Feb. 7, CUNY Law SJP invited students to attend a March 5 discussion with Hadeel Assali, an anthropologist affiliated with Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, on “decolonial land use in Gaza” and “the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza.”
Assali, whose work “looks at the ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine,” has a history of radical activism, particularly against Israel.
In 2024, Assali wrote the essay “Notes on the Underground in Gaza,” calling the tunnels “an essential form of resistance in Palestine.” She reframes Hamas’s use of underground tunnels to commit acts of terrorism as a relationship “between indigenous people and the land.”
Columbia Faculty and Staff Supporting Israel criticized Assali’s invitation to speak at CUNY.
“This is the same lecturer named in the Kasowitz lawsuit for canceling her class multiple times to encourage attendance at anti-Israel protests,” the group stated, sharing a section of the 2024 complaint filed against Columbia University and Barnard College alleging they failed to protect Jewish students.
The Columbia Jewish Alumni Association also objected to the event, stating, “This is how it happens.”
“First, radical faculty at Columbia replace scholarship with political advocacy in their own classrooms, and the administration does nothing,” the group wrote. “Then, they leverage Columbia’s prestige to export this poisonous model to other campuses.”
Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and national security at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, condemned the event, stating that it is “reframing the terror tunnels that held dozens of Israelis hostage, where many were tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered.”
“No number of ‘teach-ins’ can erase the atrocities committed by Gazan terrorists,” she wrote. “Terror tunnels are not a form of ‘decolonial land use.’”
CUNY Law has faced repeated controversy tied to anti-Israel activism, including backlash over a 2023 commencement speech that prompted condemnation from the university’s chancellor and board of trustees.
