Derek Peterson, a professor of history and African studies and chair of the Faculty Senate at the University of Michigan, hit a nerve at the school’s graduation ceremony earlier this month with his praise for the “pro-Palestinian activists who have … opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”
One rarely searches for wisdom in commencement addresses, but to ignore the libels embedded in these words risks bestowing on them an academic respectability they do not merit. And the entirely predictable and programmed response from the University of Michigan president, who apologized for words causing pain during a celebration, only discloses the distance today between university activities and what should be their core mission: teaching students how to think, not what to feel.
Examining Peterson’s statement in the context of his entire speech on May 2 is even more revealing and speaks volumes of the state of the academy post-Oct. 7, 2023.
He opens his talk with a focus on the unsuccessful attempts by women to gain admission to the university. He celebrates their persistence. He moves on to note that the first Jewish professor appointed to the faculty brought Jewish students denied admission to elite Ivy League institutions on the East Coast to the university and to the Midwest.
Righteous battles to gain an education or to expand the curriculum are enrolled as precedent for denouncing what he names as “Israel’s unjust and inhumane war in Gaza.” Without mentioning Hamas’s savagery on Oct. 7, when 1,200 men, women and children in southern Israel were slaughtered—many in their homes—by thousands of terrorists who infiltrated the border, he has effectively endorsed the idea of turning the campus into the staging ground for holding butchered Israelis responsible for the horrors perpetuated on them.
Ironically, Peterson’s views of Palestinian campus activism are more akin to the reasoning used by the university’s first president, Henry Tappen, who denied women their rights to an education because it would “disturb God’s order … and produce monstrosities.” Just as it took great courage in 1858 for Sarah Burger to apply for university admission, it now takes intellectual resilience to take on Peterson’s scurrilous remarks because they have become entrenched across so many educational institutions.
Singing for the pro-Palestinian protesters as warriors for social justice is as ludicrous as the narrative from which it emerges. Devoid of intellectual credibility, applauding these protests might be deemed, with apologies to Hannah Arendt, the banality of the algorithm.
The narrative woven around the barbarism of Oct. 7 comes adorned with corrupt political theories and fictional data. That narrative has been deconstructed by a careful collection of statistics about casualties available either in books like that of our own, October 7: The Wars over Words and Deeds. Or from recently published accounts that have, in fact, confirmed and strengthened the trends discussed in our collection.
There is ample information on the many reporters with the ranks of Hamas and on the scores of UNRWA employees with the U.N. Relief Works and Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) involved in the Oct. 7 massacre and in holding hostages for two years afterwards. UNRWA facilities, including hospitals, served as critical headquarters for Hamas.
It is impossible to imagine any rightly ruled country not responding militarily to such brutal assaults that violated the foundational principles of government to protect citizens.
Since gaining power in Gaza, Hamas has attacked Israel many times, garnering international support and following a formulaic pattern. The terrorist organization fires missiles; Israel responds to end the murderous assaults, blunting them with the Iron Dome, bombing rocket-launchers and sending troops over, but not too far over, the border. Israel is typically stopped short of achieving its strategic goals by demands from international organizations, endorsed by the United States, for a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power with sufficient capacity to rebuild and expand its arsenal, and to continue its efforts to turn the Jewish state into Arab Palestine.
Remaking Palestine “from the river to the sea” is, however, not an achievable political aim. Pursuing it has brought Palestinians material devastation and human suffering, even if it has sustained their image as the innocent victims of a historic injustice.
That 1948 is now associated less with a military defeat than with a first cause of suffering has indelibly stamped Palestinian identity as a metaphor for displacement, alienation and indignity. It has also instilled in Palestinian Arabs the belief that they are fighting for pure and sacred goals. But that very same national narrative prevents them from acknowledging that what is promised in the struggle can never be attained.
To suppose that turning southern Israel into an abattoir can deliver Palestinians from defeat and displacement—and reset a history gone wrong in 1948—propels a fantasy, not a historical analysis.
The critical problem with Peterson waving the banner for those who opened hearts to Palestinian suffering is that it misses the true cause of the population’s maladies. The conviction that Palestinians cannot control their own destiny because they confront an enmity so implacable and evil in character that they will never be given the independence enjoyed by other nations is false.
Palestinians preferred to turn their confrontation with Zionism into a clash of civilizations, rejecting the many options put before them to build a state and forge their own national future. Thus did the atrocity currency of Oct. 7 have to be quickly drained in order not to complicate the familiar template of Palestinians as having no agency. The Gaza war on campus has been rewritten as a landscape of destruction filled only with Palestinian innocents washing away attention from the barbarism of Oct. 7.
This is a narrative that banishes Palestinians from their past while immersing them in its historical distortions—namely, that Palestinians have been denied the possibility of engaging in any ordinary peaceful political process. Such a perspective has closed off access to the real options available for advancing Palestinian political interests by ruling out of consideration whether total opposition to Zionism became a self-fulfilling strategy for failure and subordination.
Engendering fatalism about politics as the art of the possible while making an icon of the impossible may satisfy the conceit of leaders, but does nothing to improve the lives of ordinary men and women. Those entrenched in a narrative so devoid of fact and logic must be confronted—not to save Israel or Palestine, but rather, to rescue the academy.
