This is the course description as published in the Cornell online catalog:
AIIS 3500Adjunct Professor of Law Menachem Rosensaft just published an opinion article in the Cornell Daily Sun (the student newspaper) criticizing this course.
Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance
Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.
The first half of the course will be devoted to situating Indigenous peoples, of which there are 476,000,000 globally, in an international context, where we will examine the proposition that Indigenous people are involved historically in a global resistance against an ongoing colonialism. The second half will present a specific case of this war: settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel with a particular emphasis on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) finding "plausible" the South African assertion of "genocide" in Gaza.
Outcomes
- Identify and analyze key components of Indigenous perspectives on political, social, and environmental systems(this can be observed/assessed through written reflections and discussions).
- Define and differentiate key terms such as "Indigeneity," "Resistance," "Settler Colonialism," and "Genocide" in both international law and Indigenous contexts(this can be observed/assessed through writing assignments and presentations).
- Conduct a historical analysis of Indigenous peoples' current situations(this can be observed/assessed by researching and presenting findings in a paper).
- Conceptualize your idea of a just society through the comparison of Western and Indigenous epistemologies (this can be observed/assessed through argumentative essays and class debates based on insights gained from the previous outcomes).
- Apply these outcomes to an understanding of the history of Israel/Palestine with a focus on the history of Gaza and the current Gaza war (this can be observed/assessed by researching and presenting findings in a paper).
When I first learned last month that Professor Eric Cheyfitz will be offering a course this coming spring entitled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” I wrote to Interim President Mike Kotlikoff expressing my concern that it would “promote and inflame political divisiveness at Cornell and encourage antisemitic manifestations against Israeli and Jewish students.”
My principal objection to this course is not that it has a decidedly and unabashedly pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bent. What I find most problematic and unacceptable about it is that it is firmly rooted in shoddy, selectively and inflamingly biased pseudo-scholarship. The course description leaves no doubt that Cheyfitz intends to convey a narrative that casts Palestinians writ large as protagonists while Israelis and, by extension, Jews will be portrayed as villainous antagonists perpetrating “settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel” against a background of “plausible genocide.” Not only is such a narrative historically false — more importantly, it also constitutes antisemitism on steroids, and is likely to incite antisemitic rhetoric and worse against Israeli and Jewish students and faculty at Cornell.
By way of context, I write as a Zionist who has been supportive of and engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement for over 40 years. I believe that Israel has every right to exist in security free of terrorist attacks and at the same time support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict that will provide the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza with independence and self-determination. I am also sharply critical of many of the policies of the present Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and believe that voicing such criticism, as I have done frequently, is entirely appropriate.
By premising his course in the context of a “global war against an ongoing colonialism,” however, Prof. Cheyfitz goes much further than that. His course description implies not too subtly that Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians can be an acceptable, even justifiable, means in such a “global war.” The course description’s references to “ongoing colonialism” and “settler colonialism” also call into question the very legitimacy of the State of Israel which, it bears recalling, was established pursuant to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of November 29, 1947, that partitioned then British mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.
I am quite certain that no faculty curriculum committee at Cornell would ever even consider approving a course predicated on the premise that Jews alone had preeminent rights over the territories between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. I am equally certain that no such faculty committee would countenance a course whose formal description contained a dog whistle to the effect that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians on the West Bank was somehow justified or justifiable....
In his course description, Prof. Cheyfitz totally ignores the savage pogrom perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli civilians on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, 2023, including the brutal killing of close to 1,200 men, women and children, the rapes and brutal violation of Jewish women and girls, and the taking of hostages into captivity in Gaza. This deliberate omission alone of the horrific events that sparked the present Israel-Hamas war in Gaza casts serious doubts about the course’s academic and intellectual integrity, let alone legitimacy.
To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Prof. Cheyfitz is entitled to his opinions, however controversial or even offensive such opinions may be, but he is not entitled to promulgate his own alternative facts to his students. Those of us who reject Prof. Cheyfitz’s premises as inflammatory and dangerously misguided have an obligation to make our negative assessment of his Gaza course crystal clear. And I am grateful to Interim President Kotlikoff for expressing his disappointment with Prof. Cheyfitz’s course clearly and unambiguously in his reply to my letter to him.
Simply put, academic freedom and First Amendment rights apply and must be deemed to apply every bit as much to those of us who consider Prof. Cheyfitz’s skewed anti-Israel views to be abhorrent as they do to those who believe that he should not be publicly taken to task or in any way criticized for wanting to promulgate these views to students in his classroom.
More articles on the course:
Three weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack in Israel, a Jewish professor at Cornell University named Eric Cheyfitz offered a “teach-in” titled “Gaza, Settler Colonialism, and the Global War Against Indigenous People.”
Just before the teach-in, the school’s Jewish provost called him and asked if he wanted extra security.
Like other scholars of settler colonialism, Cheyfitz has long viewed Israel since its founding as a colonizer of indigenous Palestinian land, an argument that has gained increasing prominence in pro-Palestinian activism and that supporters of Israel reject. Now, Cheyfitz is turning that teach-in into a full-on course titled “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” which he’ll teach next term.
And that same provost, who has since become Cornell’s interim president, is opposed to the idea.
From Inside Higher Education (December 5, 2024): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/12/05/cornell-president-accused-violating-academic#
Cornell University’s interim president is facing public accusations that he suppressed academic freedom after he criticized a pro-Palestinian professor’s planned course in an email and that email was shared with a reporter.
The fracas started with a Nov. 6 email from a Cornell adjunct law professor, who wrote to interim president Michael I. Kotlikoff that a course set for the spring was antisemitic and could cause violence against Israeli and Jewish students. The course, Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance, is going to be taught by Eric Cheyfitz, who is Jewish.
From the Times of Israel (December 7, 2024): https://www.timesofisrael.com/cornell-presidents-leaked-criticism-of-gaza-class-prompts-new-row-over-academic-freedom
JTA — Cornell University’s Jewish interim president is facing growing blowback from higher education groups over emails published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month, in which he raised objections to an upcoming class on Gaza.
Michael Kotlikoff’s remarks, which JTA reported on November 11, were a violation of academic freedom, say representatives of the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. The episode is the latest instance of campus scrutiny over Israel shifting from protests to the classroom, more than a year removed from the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught that launched the war in Gaza.
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