By platforming Ussama Makdisi as a moral voice on Israel, America’s newspaper of record handed its op-ed page to a man who publicly said he wished he had been among those who massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7.
There are editorial decisions that make you scratch your head. And then there are decisions so staggering in their moral recklessness that they demand a public accounting. The choice by editors at The New York Times to publish an op-ed on April 23 by Makdisi, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley—positioning him as a credible, sober commentator on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—falls firmly, irredeemably, in the second category.
This is not a close call. This is not a matter of reasonable people disagreeing about which voices belong in the public square. This is the Times conferring the prestige of its op-ed page—the most coveted platform in American journalism—on a man whose public record on this subject is not merely controversial, but morally indefensible. The editors who authorized this piece owe their readers an apology.
Let’s begin with the statement that, on its own, should have ended any conversation about Makdisi as a Times contributor on this topic.
In the aftermath of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—in which 1,200 Israeli men, women and children were slaughtered, babies were beheaded in their homes, elderly Holocaust survivors were dragged from kibbutzim, and young people were gunned down at a music festival—Makdisi took to social media and shared an article with this title: “I Could Have Been One of Those Who Broke Through the Siege on October 7.”
Read that again. Slowly. A tenured professor at one of America’s most prestigious public universities openly expressed that he could identify with the men who committed the deadliest mass killings of Jewish people since the Holocaust.
This statement was so alarming that it was raised explicitly during congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) confronted UC Berkeley’s chancellor directly: “On Oct. 7, Makdisi described the Hamas attacks against Israel as ‘resistance,’” Fine said. “Why would you give a position to someone who said Oct. 7 was justified?”
The chancellor’s response—that Makdisi is “a fine scholar” appointed on “academic standards”—might be a defensible answer for a university trying to protect faculty speech. It is not a defensible answer for a newspaper that presents its contributors as moral guides for millions of readers. Academic freedom and journalistic platform selection are two entirely different things.
The editors cannot claim they didn’t know who Makdisi is. His views are not hidden. They are voluminously documented, widely published and entirely consistent across years of public advocacy. This is a man who has built an academic and public career on a singular, uncompromising position: that Israel is an irredeemably illegitimate enterprise that must be destroyed.
In a 2023 podcast, Makdisi declared flatly: “Colonial Zionism has to end.” He did not qualify this. He did not suggest reform, negotiation or a two-state framework. He called for the end of the foundational ideology of the Jewish state—a state of 10 million people, including 2 million Arabs. He dismissed Israel as an “ethnoreligious settler-colonial state [born] entirely of Western imperialism,” a framing that, conveniently, leaves no room for any legitimate Jewish national claim to the land whatsoever.
In a 2014 op-ed that drew fierce criticism, Makdisi characterized Israel’s founding as born of “terrible violence” and described Zionism as a “settler-colonial enterprise”—language that, stripped of its academic veneer, reduces the entire enterprise of Jewish self-determination to an act of conquest with no more moral legitimacy than apartheid South Africa. He has repeatedly described the situation in Gaza as “genocide,” and in essays published in prominent journals has framed Israeli military operations as the deliberate, systematic destruction of Palestinian civilization.
In essays for the New Left Review, he has written that “fighting antisemitism often implies erasing Palestine,” a formulation that positions virtually any effort to combat Jew-hatred as an act of oppression against Palestinians. And he has consistently portrayed the pro-Israel community in America not as fellow citizens with sincere beliefs, but as a conspiratorial force—accusing “Zionist institutions and pro-Israel donors” of “routinely smearing” Palestinian voices, and describing congressional scrutiny of campus antisemitism as evocative of “the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s.”
Perhaps the most revealing dimension of Makdisi’s public record is not any single statement, but his consistent pattern of contextualizing Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians in ways that systematically minimize or justify it. In published writing, he has argued that “if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it”—a formulation that, applied to Oct. 7, amounts to a conditional defense of the massacre. Hamas butchered 1,200 people, his framework suggests, because Israel made them do it.
This is not historical analysis. It is moral inversion. And it is precisely the kind of framework that The New York Times, by lending Makdisi its platform, has now implicitly legitimized for its global readership of millions.
The New York Times editorial page has, for generations, prided itself on curating a diversity of serious, credentialed voices—voices that challenge readers, provoke debate, and yes, include sharp critics of Israeli policy. That is entirely legitimate. Criticism of Israeli government decisions, of settlement expansion, of military tactics—all fall within the broad, legitimate scope of democratic debate, and the Times has published plenty of it. Nobody is arguing that Israel is beyond criticism.
But there is a categorical difference between a critic of Israeli policy and a man who has declared that Zionism itself “has to end,” who frames the worst massacre of Jewish people in 80 years as “resistance” and who publicly expressed identification with the perpetrators of that massacre. Publishing such a person as a moral authority on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an act of editorial courage or intellectual diversity. It is an act of editorial negligence.
The Times would not publish an op-ed on racial justice by a man who had publicly expressed solidarity with those who bombed a black church. It wouldn’t publish a piece on women’s rights by someone who had declared their desire to have participated in an assault or rape. The editors know this. Which makes their decision here not merely a lapse in judgment, but a troubling signal about whose pain they take seriously and whose they do not.
Makdisi’s appointment as UC Berkeley’s inaugural chair in Palestinian Arab Studies—and his subsequent elevation by The New York Times—is part of a broader and deeply troubling pattern in which the American academy and media have increasingly normalized a genre of anti-Israel advocacy that would be instantly recognizable as rank extremism if directed at any other nationality or people.
Makdisi is the nephew of the late Edward Said, whose intellectual framework has shaped a generation of Middle East scholars. That lineage carries enormous prestige in certain academic circles. But prestige is not a substitute for moral accountability. And no amount of academic credentialing can launder the moral content of publicly expressing that one could have been among the murderers of 1,200 people, ranging from infants to the elderly.
Jewish Americans—and Americans of every background who were horrified by the atrocities on Oct. 7—deserve better from the newspaper that bills itself as the paper of record. They deserve editors who understand that platforming someone who wishes he had been at the fence on Oct. 7 is not “presenting a perspective.”
It is an insult to the dead.
Originally published on the Investigative Project on Terrorism site.
