01.07.26
Editorial Note
Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks against Israel, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) experienced a significant rise in reported antisemitic incidents, protests, and ideological polarization. The campus has since become a focal point for major civil rights lawsuits, congressional investigations, and debates over academic freedom, free speech, and the boundaries between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs both filed federal lawsuits and complaints accusing MIT of allowing a “hostile environment.” The suits claim that the administration, including President Sally Kornbluth, failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from severe harassment, such as classroom disruptions, targeted doxxing of IDF veterans by faculty, and the distribution of maps marking Jewish and Israeli-affiliated buildings.
In its ruling, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by StandWithUs against MIT. The court ruled that much of the protest activity was legally protected expression and that MIT’s response to the peer harassment was not “deliberately indifferent” under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Civil rights groups appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to review this landmark case.
MIT has maintained that it seeks to balance the enforcement of conduct and anti-harassment rules with the protection of free speech. The administration has launched initiatives such as “Standing Together Against Hate,” deployed enhanced campus security measures, and implemented disciplinary and non-contact protocols to address misconduct and targeting.
MIT has been repeatedly investigated by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding the nature and handling of antisemitic incidents on campus. This has included demands for the school to adopt stricter definitions of antisemitism and provide public accounts of how it addresses discrimination.
However, Yossi Sheffi, an MIT Professor of Engineering Systems, described the MIT administration as failing to protect Jews. In his upcoming book, titled Unsafe at MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews, he details how, for Jewish and Israeli students at MIT, following October 7, the campus became “an echo chamber of hostility and intimidation. Based on dozens of interviews and drawing on administration correspondence, social media posts, and television footage, this book tells the story of that transformation through the voices of those who lived it. Some of these events made national headlines, while others unfolded quietly in classrooms, residence halls, and student spaces… This oral history chronicles the multiple fronts that Jewish and Israeli students faced, including the fight for the truth, the fight against delegitimization, the fight against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and the fight against the erosion of law and order on campus. Their stories illuminate a broader institutional failure: the erosion of MIT’s commitment to prioritizing innovation above dogma and the consequences that follow when a university abandons the standards that define it. Offering a firsthand account of a pivotal chapter in MIT’s history, the book also explores the responsibilities institutions bear when the conditions necessary for learning, inquiry, and intellectual freedom are undermined.”
So much so that the New York Times reported on Sheffi’s upcoming book, which it titled “M.I.T. ‘Embarrassed’ by New Book on Campus Antisemitism, Professor Says.”
The issue of antisemitism at MIT has kept Sheffi busy. He published articles, including “Where Are You? On Selective Outrage and Moral Credibility” in the MIT Faculty Newsletter of November/December 2025, arguing on selective outrage regarding Hamas’s reign of terror.
Michel DeGraff, a professor at MIT focusing on Creole Studies and the role of language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation, penned a response to Sheffi’s accusations, titled “Where is Your Memory? On Historical Amnesia, Selective Moral Disengagement, and Reality-Bending,” in the MIT Faculty Newsletter of January/February 2026. DeGraff accused Sheffi’s case study of being a “textbook case of genocide denial and selective moral disengagement.” DeGraff also accused Sheffi of “selective outrage,” because Prof. Sheffi might be unaware of the voluminous “horrifying reports – including videos – spanning over one hundred years of settler-colonial Zionist war on Palestine. These reports have painstakingly documented acts by Zionist terrorists, ranging from Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang of the 1920s to the 1940s in Historic Palestine, to today’s Israel’s Defense Force – which, in reality, is mostly an occupation force. These acts involve the mass murder, bombing, execution, maiming and pulverization of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children and women, in villages, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and so on. Such actions are part of a sustained campaign of genocide, scholasticide, domicide.”
DeGraff is also “puzzled that the name “Hamas” occurs 14 times in a 700-word piece while “Israel” occurs six times, and genocide occurs …. nowhere!”
For DeGraff, Sheffi’s use of “anti-Israel” and “anti-Zionism” is noteworthy as “a rhetorical maneuver,” because Shaffi is “creating fog around a genocide: these phrases seek to condemn any legitimate critique of Israel as ‘antisemitism,’ thereby conveniently diverting attention from Israel’s genocidal actions by labeling its critics as bigots.” DeGraff added that recent rulings in Federal courts in Stand With Us. v. MIT, Sussman v. MIT, and against Homeland Security have “consistently protected our First Amendment rights, including what Judge Richard G. Stearns calls ‘anti-Israel sentiment,’ against the weaponization of accusations of ‘antisemitism’.”
DeGraff observes the linguistic pattern, when Sheffi consistently uses “active-voice predicates and a dehumanizing and highly emotive lexicon – such as ‘executing,’ ‘murdered, raped, and tortured,’ and ‘reign of terror’ – only when referring to Hamas,” and not Israel. DeGraff adds, “dehumanization is a prerequisite for the atrocities committed by Israelis, which Sheffi conveniently omits”
DeGraff states, “In Prof. Sheffi’s narrative, and in contradistinction with powerless Israelis who are tortured, denounced and condemned, it’s Hamas, and Hamas alone, that has the exclusive power to execute, murder, rape, torture, filter information, and commit crimes, atrocities and terror. From the River to the Sea?”
For DeGraff, it is not surprising it was Yossi Sheffi who, during a public lecture by an Israeli reservist hosted by the MIT Israel Alliance on September 18, 2024, “accused anti-genocide students, including two women of color in the room, of ‘making up lies’ not only about Israel military’s sexual assaults against Palestinians, but about the widespread nature of sexual assault in general. This unfounded and insulting accusation came after one of these students had questioned the speaker about well-documented instances of sexual violence in Israeli prisons.”
DeGraff also noted that one of the main objectives of the students’ movement on campus has been to contribute to a “Free Palestine” by demanding accountability from “our own MIT and from MIT faculty, like Yossi Sheffi, whose work contributes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, since October 2023, the students have been asking for an end to MIT’s complicity… The MIT C4P students have alerted us to ‘MIT’s complicity with merchants of death’.”
For those who are not familiar, DeGraff is known for his harsh stand against Israel, often aligned with Noam Chomsky’s long-time egregious attacks on Israel along the line that the Palestinians can do no wrong and Israelis can do no right. Another commonality among the two scholars is their critique of American foreign policy. DeGraff blames the United States for the ills in Haiti, a notoriously mismanaged country, the same way that Chomsky accuses Washington of all the misfortunes of the Palestinians. This approach deprives the Palestinians (and Haitians) of agency, that is, the notion that they are responsible for their own acts, including the horrific massacre of October 7.
The other point is that the criticism of Israel at MIT has developed into antisemitic abuses, harassment, and intimidation, to which the authorities did not provide an adequate response. This is what Sheffi’s book is about.
REFERENCES:
by Yossi Sheffi (Author)
Format: Paperback
For Jewish and Israeli students at MIT, the days and months following October 7 profoundly changed campus life. Campus corridors, which once reverberated with the voices of researchers discussing problems and sharing solutions, became an echo chamber of hostility and intimidation. For many students, the experience reshaped not only their education but also their sense of belonging at one of the world’s leading universities.
Based on dozens of interviews and drawing on administration correspondence, social media posts, and television footage, this book tells the story of that transformation through the voices of those who lived it. Some of these events made national headlines, while others unfolded quietly in classrooms, residence halls, and student spaces. Together, they reveal how a global conflict reverberated through a campus community.
This oral history chronicles the multiple fronts that Jewish and Israeli students faced, including the fight for the truth, the fight against delegitimization, the fight against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and the fight against the erosion of law and order on campus. Their stories illuminate a broader institutional failure: the erosion of MIT’s commitment to prioritizing innovation above dogma and the consequences that follow when a university abandons the standards that define it. Offering a firsthand account of a pivotal chapter in MIT’s history, the book also explores the responsibilities institutions bear when the conditions necessary for learning, inquiry, and intellectual freedom are undermined.
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M.I.T. ‘Embarrassed’ by New Book on Campus Antisemitism, Professor Says
Now, the professor is in a fight with the university over whether he can use M.I.T. money to promote a book critical of the school.
Listen · 6:20 min
June 25, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET
After months of student protests related to the Gaza war in 2023 and 2024, some prominent schools, such as Harvard and Columbia, appointed select committees to interview students and write painful public reports about bias on campus.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where some Jews on campus said protests created a hostile environment, did not publish a lengthy committee report on antisemitism. So a professor began his own.
Yossi Sheffi, an M.I.T. faculty member for the past 48 years, said he became so angry about how Jews and Israelis were treated on campus after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that he wrote a book about antisemitism at M.I.T.
“For M.I.T., this book is the report,” said Dr. Sheffi, 78, the director of the university’s Center for Transportation and Logistics.
Now that his manuscript is ready to be published, Dr. Sheffi says M.I.T. administrators are trying to minimize its impact by denying him access to money to promote the book.
“I think they are embarrassed by what will come out in the book and worried the Trump administration will use it to cut research funding to M.I.T.,” Dr. Sheffi said of administrators.
A spokeswoman for M.I.T., Kimberly Allen, declined to comment on Dr. Sheffi’s book, but said that “M.I.T. encourages and expects independent thinking from all members of its community.” In a statement, she said that “M.I.T. leadership has in the strongest terms rejected antisemitism and taken thoughtful and steadfast action to prevent it.”
Dr. Sheffi’s center at M.I.T. is funded through research contracts as well as agreements for building academic institutions around the world, he said. He said he has used leftover money from these projects to promote previous books. After he submitted the expenses for his antisemitism project, he said M.I.T. administrators ultimately approved expenses toward producing the book but declined expenses to promote it.
“The only difference is that this book is about antisemitism,” he said.
The Trump administration has seized on reports of campus antisemitism to pressure colleges with the loss of federal research grants. In antisemitism lawsuits filed this year against Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, the Trump administration used those schools’ antisemitism reports against them in its lawsuits.
Dr. Sheffi, a professor of engineering, acknowledged that he could bring new scrutiny from the federal government, but said colleagues still urged him to publish his book, titled “Unsafe at M.I.T.: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews.” The book will be self-published on July 7, he said.
In it, he is sharply critical of M.I.T. leadership, chronicling reports of harassment and neglect toward Jews on campus after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
“I wanted to create a historical record of what happened, so people later could not say that it was not so bad,” said Dr. Sheffi, who was born in Jerusalem.
Like many U.S. universities, M.I.T. saw intense student protests around the war in Gaza, including a pro-Palestinian tent encampment.
Protesters demanded that the university sever ties with Israel. M.I.T. asked the students to leave voluntarily but permitted the encampment protest to continue for about three weeks. M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, warned protesters that they would be suspended if they did not leave, and then had the encampment cleared by the police. Dr. Kornbluth was one of three prominent college presidents who were called to testify about campus antisemitism before Congress in December 2023.
While M.I.T. did not publish a lengthy formal report, the school has noted that it responded to complaints of antisemitism with a number of measures, including more security and training, updated policies on demonstrations, and disciplinary proceedings against rule breakers. It also established a team to address reports of antisemitism and other forms of bias relating to the conflict in the Middle East, according to a statement on the M.I.T. website.
Ms. Allen, the university spokeswoman, cited a 2026 M.I.T. quality of life survey, in which 96 percent of Jewish undergraduates who responded and 93 percent of Jewish graduate students reported feeling satisfied at M.I.T., up from 84 percent of Jewish undergrads and 75 percent of Jewish graduate students in 2024.
Or Hen, an M.I.T. professor of physics who is from Israel, said the climate for Jews and Israelis on campus “is very different from a few years back, when it was very vocal and in-your-face.” But he is seeing a push at M.I.T. and across the nation to avoid controversy by not collaborating with Israel, which he rejects.
A big change since late 2023, he said, is that the Jewish community on campus has become far more cohesive, which he credited to faculty-led efforts, such as ongoing weekly lunches.
Susan Silbey, a professor of sociology and anthropology, said that in all her years at M.I.T., “being Jewish was just not something relevant” to her experience there. The Gaza protests were infused with “a great deal of energy,” she said, but “once the protests were over, it went away, with one or two exceptions here and there from people who like to make noise. It’s quieter than usual.”
Dr. Sheffi used interviews with M.I.T. students and faculty to fashion a version of recent campus history. The book includes accounts from roughly 40 people, he said, as well as his own observations.
He will pay some $20,000 from his own pocket for a marketing firm to help promote the book, he said. He expects there will be additional expenses, such as travel to give book talks.
Mark Arsenault covers higher education for The Times.
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April 2024
Is Antisemitism One of MIT’s Values?
President Sally Kornbluth’s testimony at the widely viewed congressional hearing on campus antisemitism prompted an outcry, including bipartisan condemnation. Responding to this, MIT’s Associate Chair of the Faculty was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education as saying: “We all understand that there are problems that have to be worked out, and I think everybody’s ready to roll up their sleeves and work them out [. . .] I don’t think we’re the kind of community where we will just hand responsibility off to the administration.” Unfortunately, the MIT faculty have not worked out the problem of antisemitism plaguing the MIT community, and too many of the faculty have rolled up their sleeves to perpetuate antisemitism.
Jewish and Israeli members of the MIT community have tried to help, but they and their efforts have largely been ignored. The anti-Zionist authors who dominate the MIT Faculty Newsletter have disregarded the articles published in its pages by Professor Yossi Sheffi and by the MIT Israel Alliance. They have averted their eyes from the resignation statement of Professor Mauricio Karchmer. They have discounted the multiple open letters signed by alumni. They have taken no notice of the material compiled by Professor Lionel Kimerling. They have not listened to the voice of graduate student Liyam Chitayat, or the testimony to Congress by graduate student Talia Khan. They have brushed aside the numerous social media posts by Professor Retsef Levi.
The October 7 attack on Israel was perpetrated by Hamas pursuant to their genocidal antisemitic ideology. Shani Louk’s mangled body was seen being hauled away in a pickup truck and paraded around to jubilant crowds in Gaza; her decapitated skull was later found. Captured terrorists, who confessed to necrophilia, said their Hamas commanders ordered decapitations and offered bounties for kidnapping. With this as context, the MIT Women’s and Gender Studies Program announced a reading group on the writings of a Palestinian who has said, “we will slaughter you and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke, we will drink your blood and eat your skulls.”
Professor Daniel Jackson has explained that “[a]ntisemitic attitudes have practical consequences.” MIT faculty and staff have, together with students, fostered a climate of Jew-hatred on campus that has led to the eruption of antisemitic activity on campus following the October 7 massacre in Israel. Starting with a statement blaming Israel for the attack against it by Hamas, and with photos glorifying Hamas’ attack used in social media posts against Israel, faculty have supported the rallies on October 13 and November 9; respectively, the “day of action” called for by Hamas, and the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass).
Vandalism of a Holocaust memorial and the Hillel center at MIT are not only acts of hatred against Zionists, they are acts of hatred against all Jews. Given MIT’s Values Statement, it should be unacceptable to bully or intimidate anybody for their views on Zionism, however unfashionable they may presently be on campus; just as it should be unacceptable to discriminate against anybody for their religious beliefs, ethnicity, or ancestry. But it has been observed that MIT adopts a completely different standard for groups other than Jews, Israelis, and Zionists, when those other groups are treated in ways they deem hostile, or when their members are portrayed in a disparaging manner.
The MIT Faculty Newsletter Editorial Subcommittee ignore all the pro-Hamas and pro-Nazi messages and symbolism, and instead blame the victims for this antisemitic abuse. The same Editorial Subcommittee have inquired why MIT is not working toward peace. As Daniel Jackson and David Dolev have replied, the MIT MISTI program aims to promote peace through cross-cultural understanding. However, the office of the MIT MISTI program was targeted by a contingent of anti-Israel protestors, who rattled doors and accosted the program director.
The antisemitic disruptions of the MIT campus do not occur in a vacuum. At UC Berkeley, rioters broke through a glass door at an event with an Israeli speaker, physically assaulting students while shouting “Jew.” (Coincidentally, this happened on the same day that the Berkeley law school Dean was at MIT speaking on campus free expression in the Dialogue Across Difference program.) As argued by FIRE, a leading organization for campus free speech, rioters must be expelled in order for campuses to be environments where all may speak freely.
Although a group of faculty and staff are critical of the administration’s token efforts to address the campus disruptions, there is one point where they agree with MIT leadership and with the MIT Corporation: the antisemitic activity is protected free speech. Indeed, the recent Report of the MIT Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression (FEWG) paved the way for the current antisemitic climate, by highlighting Nazi marches in a Jewish community as an example of acceptable hate speech. But MIT is no Harvey Silverglate, as demonstrated by that same FEWG report giving priority to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) over free speech, especially when it comes to requiring DEI loyalty oaths from administrators.
The Chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has exposed the hypocrisy of MIT’s “free speech” excuse for antisemitism, as revealed by the cancelled speeches by Professor Dorian Abbot and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Additionally, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has noted publicly the bias of the MIT leadership in its selection of invited speakers for Standing Together Against Hate. This double standard reflects institutional antisemitism.
How can MIT claim free speech for interruptions of multiple MIT classes, while forbidding the display of the Israeli flag and attempting to block the screening of video footage of the horrific October 7 attack on Israel? Even libertarians recognize that MIT staff cannot espouse antisemitic or anti-Zionist bias while engaging in their professional work as an interfaith chaplain. A fortiori, such biases should be forbidden for staff responding to complaints of discrimination and harassment; MIT DEI or IDHR staff who refuse to acknowledge that antisemitism is covered under Title VI have failed in their responsibilities under the law.
In order for MIT to clarify the murky understanding of antisemitism in its community, the Institute can avail itself of the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). This definition is a simple one, whose interpretation is guided by a set of examples which “could, taking into account the overall context,” be antisemitic. As the standard employed by both the Federal government and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the IHRA definition of antisemitism could provide guidance to MIT for matters such as the Title VI Federal Civil Rights lawsuit the Institute now faces from some of its Jewish students.
The IHRA definition of antisemitism might even assist the Institute in incorporating Jews into MIT’s Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition. MIT’s failure to grasp the problem of “Antisemitism and Jewish Inclusion on Campus” is exhibited in this blurb from a DEI event held during Independent Activities Period: “Jewish students, as a minority group, are encountering much of the same discomfort that other minorities face on campus and in the world, in that they don’t feel heard or acknowledged.”
No, the discomfort Jews are facing is unlike anything faced by anybody else on campus or in the world. Nobody but the Jews are facing regular calls for “intifada” and genocide “from the river to the sea”, whether on the streets, on the campus, or within the pages of the MIT Faculty Newsletter. MIT needs to do better if it wants to build a better world.
David Etlin is an MIT PhD 2008, Course XXIV, Philosophy (etlin@alum.mit.edu).
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- January/February 2026|Vol. XXXVIII No. 4
Where is Your Memory? On Historical Amnesia, Selective Moral Disengagement, and Reality-Bending
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MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi’s article in the November/December issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter is a spectacular case study in the use and mis-use of language for reality-bending mirror accusations – yet another “textbook case of genocide denial and selective moral disengagement,” to quote from a recent article in the Lancet by Roberto De Vogli, Jonathan Montomoli, Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Ilan Pappé.
Sheffi’s article is titled: “Where Are You? On Selective Outrage and Moral Credibility” and is a clear demonstration of Sheffi’s own selective outrage and lack of moral credibility. Every accusation there is a confession.
Take, say, the very first sentence of the article: “The recent videos of Hamas executing Palestinians in Gaza were horrifying.” Indeed, they were, and so is the history leading to these executions.
But, given the title’s reference to “selective outrage,” one must question whether Professor Sheffi could genuinely be unaware of the voluminous, horrifying reports – including videos – spanning over one hundred years of settler-colonial Zionist war on Palestine. These reports have painstakingly documented acts by Zionist terrorists, ranging from Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang of the 1920s to the 1940s in Historic Palestine, to today’s Israel’s Defense Force – which, in reality, is mostly an occupation force. These acts involve the mass murder, bombing, execution, maiming and pulverization of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children and women, in villages, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and so on. Such actions are part of a sustained campaign of genocide, scholasticide, domicide…
Having flown planes for the Israel’s Occupation Forces for six years, Prof. Sheffi certainly has had a front-row seat to observe firsthand, or at the very least hear about, some of the horrors that constitute what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in his book Ten Myths about Israel, has called an “incremental genocide” over decades of an ongoing Nakba. Yet, looking again at the “selective outrage” part of Sheffi’s title, one has got to be puzzled that the name “Hamas” occurs 14 times in a 700-word piece while “Israel” occurs six times, and genocide occurs …. nowhere! How selective is such moral engagement on the part of Yossi Sheffi? It’s as if there had been no ICJ case, no UN report, no Amnesty International warnings about Israel’s “live-streamed genocide” of Palestinians in Gaza – not even a plausible case for said genocide.
Even more striking, at least to a linguist, is the fact that, of the six occurrences of “Israel” and its derivatives or larger phrases that contain them (“Israeli civilians,” “Israel’s every move”…),
- four are in object positions, undergoing actions denoted by verbs such as “tortured,” “denounce,” “[outrage] directed at,” “condemns”;
- one is part of the compound adjective “anti-Israel” in “anti-Israel outlets”; and
- one is in a symmetric position vis-à-vis Palestinians in “the right of all civilians – Israeli and Palestinian alike – to live free from terror.”
The core linguistic strategy throughout Sheffi’s piece is for him to consistently place “Israel” and “Israelis” in the grammatical role of object (as the patient at the receiving end of some adverse action) while foregrounding anti-Israel critics and Hamas as the active agents of the corresponding events. This rhetorical positioning – making Israel the object of verbs like “torture,” “denounce,” “condemns,” etc. – systematically obscures Israeli agency and reinforces the narrative of Israelis, not Palestinians, as “perfect victims” while simultaneously rendering Palestinian suffering as an agentless event occurring in (quasi) happenstance. To wit, Sheffi’s strategic use of the passive verbal form “caught” in “Gazans caught in the crossfire,” as if the Israeli occupation forces’ innumerable crimes against humanity (genocide, scholasticide, domicide…) were all collateral damage of “crossfire” in which Palestinians are inadvertently “caught.”
In effect, Sheffi manages a linguistic tour de force that puts all but one occurrences of “Israel” and its word- and phrase-level derivatives in propositions that describe Israelis as utterly powerless victims who helplessly suffer the impact of negative actions by Palestinians and their allies near and far. The one exception is the proposition whereby Israelis and Palestinians are claimed to equally share the right “to live free from terror” – as if, it’s Israelis, and not Palestinians, who are being decimated in an ongoing genocide by a racist supremacist ethno-state.
In a related vein, Sheffi’s use of “anti-Israel” and “anti-Zionism” is particularly noteworthy as a rhetorical maneuver, as it represents what I’ve called the “most insidious manipulation of words and concepts” in creating fog around a genocide: these phrases seek to condemn any legitimate critique of Israel as “antisemitism,” thereby conveniently diverting attention from Israel’s genocidal actions by labeling its critics as bigots. Here it’s fortunate that recent rulings in Federal courts in Stand With Us. v. MIT, Sussman v. MIT, and against Homeland Security have consistently protected our First Amendment rights, including what Judge Richard G. Stearns calls “anti-Israel sentiment,” against the weaponization of accusations of “antisemitism.”
Now let’s look at the 14 occurrences of “Hamas” and phrases that contain “Hamas.” These occurrences denote the agent of actions such as:
- “executing”
- “murdered, raped, and tortured”
- “firing […] and carrying out public executions […]”
- “control”
- “Perpetrators”
- “reign of terror”
- “information filters”
- “Crimes”
- “Atrocities”
Then there are two occurrences where Hamas is in object position – object of “demanding accountability from” and “excuses” (as in “A double standard that condemns Israel, but excuses Hamas”).
Inspired by MIT alum Holly Jackson’s analysis of “anti-Palestinian bias in US news coverage” (a topic discussed in my Fall 2024 People’s Seminar on “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel“), I observe that Sheffi consistently uses active-voice predicates and a dehumanizing and highly emotive lexicon – such as “executing,” “murdered, raped, and tortured,” and “reign of terror” – only when referring to Hamas. This linguistic pattern is a textbook example of what I have analyzed as the “weaponization of language.” In their systematic denial of Palestinian humanity, Israeli leaders and their allies have employed terms like “beasts walking on two legs” and “children of darkness.” Such dehumanization is a prerequisite for the atrocities committed by Israelis, which Sheffi conveniently omits from his account, which amounts to a phenomenon that psychoanalysts Lara and Stephen Sheehi have called the “Zionist reality-bending” of mirror-accusations.
In Prof. Sheffi’s narrative, and in contradistinction with powerless Israelis who are tortured, denounced and condemned, it’s Hamas, and Hamas alone, that has the exclusive power to execute, murder, rape, torture, filter information, and commit crimes, atrocities and terror. From the River to the Sea?
How selective is that when talking about an organization like Hamas that’s been called, controversially, “a creation of Israel” whose goal was to counter the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) and undermine Palestinian unity and its resistance to Israel’s occupation? The latter’s endgame is a Greater Israel where Gaza might be turned into some sort of Riviera ethnically-cleansed of these inconvenient Palestinians who refuse to forget their native homeland. Meanwhile it’s the Hamas terrorists who are asking for an independent investigation of the war since October 7, 2023, while Israel’s army (the so called “most moral army in the world”) has banned all journalists from entering Gaza since that date and, even worse yet, this army has killed the highest number of journalists in the recent history of armed conflicts. It’s also Israel that’s committing, advertisingandcovering up unspeakable abuses against Palestinians, with seemingly absoluteimpunity – in the West Bank as well, far away from Hamas “crossfire.” But none of that is mentioned by Sheffi.
These examples of linguistic trumpery illustrate the sort of erasure of history that anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History and philosopher Jason Stanley in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future have analyzed as tools in the intellectual arsenal of colonization and fascism.
Moral credibility, anyone?
None of that should come as a surprise in light of the fact that it was Yossi Sheffi himself who, during a public lecture by an Israeli reservist hosted by the MIT Israel Alliance on September 18, 2024, accused anti-genocide students, including two women of color in the room, of “making up lies” not only about Israel military’s sexual assaults against Palestinians, but about the widespread nature of sexual assault in general. This unfounded and insulting accusation came after one of these students had questioned the speaker about well-documented instances of sexual violence in Israeli prisons. The two students of color, myself and at least one other faculty reported this incident to MIT’s Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office. I myself felt compelled to file this report after watching a video of the incident.
Sheffi’s denial of sexual violence by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians aligns with his earlier insistence that MIT faculty should not regret collaborating with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. As documented in the MIT Faculty Meeting minutes, Sheffi’s ethical calculus suggests that multiple wrongs make one right, and that the end (or the bottom line?) justifies the means (Epstein’s gifts), based on Sheffi’s premise that “there are very few angels among big-time donors and other organizations who fund research.”
[See Editor’s Note, below.]
However, it is particularly egregious that he would accuse an entire generation of MIT students – some of them under his instruction – of “making up lies” about sexual violence. This accusation is leveled despite the fact that these two female students at the IDF soldier’s lecture were accurately reporting violence that has been thoroughly documented by prominent human rights organizations, both within and outside Israel.
In yet another feat of reality-bending mirror accusations, Sheffi also misrepresents campus movements such as the MIT Coalition for Palestine (MIT C4P) when he describes their movement as “selective outrage that weakens moral credibility” and “a double-standard that condemns Israel” and when he writes:
“If the campus movements that mobilized under banners of ‘liberation,’ ‘human rights,’ and ‘resistance’ truly cared for Gazans, they would be protesting now. They would be demanding accountability from Hamas.”
This is yet another classic example of “language as weapon” where the students’ ethical use of terms like “liberation,” “human rights,” and “resistance” are tendentiously overloaded with inflammatory, eliminationist interpretations in order to manufacture psychological discomfort and to silence legitimate pro-Palestine advocacy and anti-genocide and anti-apartheid political dissent. Sheffi misrepresents MIT C4P students’, including MIT Jews for Collective Liberation’s, agenda toward freedom and justice for all – Palestinians and Israeli Jews alike – from the River to the Sea.
Be that as it may, what we need to ask, in light of Sheffi’s reproach to the students, is: What reasonable demands can students make of Hamas leadership fighting a nuclear-powered genocidal empire bent on infiltrating and weakening Palestinian resistance and to sew division from the inside? Sheffi seems to have forgotten the claims that Israel too contributed to the emergence and ascendance of Hamas in order to undermine Palestinian unity. This divide-and-conquer strategy failed since, as noted by Rashid Khalidi in his essay “The neck and the sword,” Palestinian solidarity, in Palestine and beyond, has now become stronger than ever.
Meanwhile, one of the main objectives of the students’ movement has always been to contribute to a Free Palestine by “demanding accountability” locally from our own MIT and from MIT faculty, like Yossi Sheffi, whose work contributes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, since October 2023, the students have been asking for an end to MIT’s complicity with what Amnesty International has called a “live-streamed genocide.” To that end, the students have published a most comprehensive research primer on said complicity, MIT Science for Genocide, and a recent article “Engineering for Genocide” – to help document this complicity. The MIT C4P students have alerted us to “MIT’s complicity with merchants of death”:
“Firms that sell and transport weapons to Israel also recruit from MIT and enter institutional collaborations with the university – Lockheed Martin, Maersk, Boeing, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, and L3Harris.
MIT C4P is certainly not the only group worried about Maersk delivering military cargo to Israel. So Sheffi’s long-standing collaboration with Maersk to help optimize its operations, including a collaboration with the port of Ashdod, stands in stark contrast to his unsubstantiated accusation that the students don’t really care for Gazans. Maersk is among the “merchants of death” that, according to U.N. Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, derive immense profits from “the economy of genocide” in Gaza by “sustaining a steady flow of US-supplied military equipment post-October 2023.” Unlike the students, who have no collaboration whatsoever with Hamas (despite slander from Israeli propagandist historians like Ute Deichmann of Ben-Gurion University), Sheffi maintains, and is even proud of, his relationship with a company that aids and abets genocide. His collaboration with Maersk quite literally speeds up the shipment of weapons to Israel. This complicity is particularly notable given MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s use of the adjective “vibrant” to describe this sort of collaboration, seemingly ignoring MIT’s own “red lights” and “elevated risks” principles intended to prevent complicity with entities engaged in human-rights violations.
Sheffi, thus, seems to have failed to notice that his own title applies much more so to himself than to those he aims at critiquing. His is “selective outrage” on steroids – better known as “implicatory denial” or “cognitive dissonance” or, more simply, “historical amnesia,” “selective empathy” and “selective moral disengagement.” In order to help cure these, I’d like to recommend these texts which I’ve used in analyzing the reality-bending allegations against me in the Sussman v. MIT lawsuit:
- Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s “Education or Mind Infection”
- Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering on different levels of denial
- Benjamin Lieberman’s Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe on cognitive dissonance among those who commit atrocities
- Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine on “reality-bending” in settler-colonial Zionism.
In closing, let’s adapt and transform a sentence from Sheffi’s article into one that seems more urgent than the original:
“Outrage that ignores [Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and our own complicity in this genocide] is ideology [and greed] masquerading as empathy.”
In his book, Selected Empathy: The West through the Gaze of Gaza, Roberto de Vogli argues that the West’s indifference to Gazan suffering is not due to a lack of knowledge or a universal failure of empathy. Instead, it is a “self-serving, tribal, and parochial” emotional response –“selective empathy” – that reserves compassion for the “in-group” based on factors like race or nationality, while denying it to the “out-group.” This biased, prejudiced, and exceptionalist “us versus them” mentality explains the absence of collective outrage at the ongoing genocide.
If Sheffi does care about universal empathy, universal morality and so on, without self-serving reality-bending, then it’s time for him to join the MIT C4P students’ high ground of moral credibility and to muster “the courage to confront evil wherever it occurs and to speak out, even when it challenges one’s preferred narratives [and bottom-line].”
Sheffi might well respond to me as he did to the students who are protesting his complicity with merchants of death. He might appeal to “academic freedom” and tell me “Go fly a kite!” To this I’ll respond: How about academic freedom denied by Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza? How about Gazan children’s freedom to be children? Why can’t they too fly kites without any risk of being martyred by Israeli snipers, drones, missiles or bombs? Their kites should not be final tales of martyrdom, but hopeful images of angels bringing back love, as in the poem “If I must die,” written by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer before he, his brother Salah Alareer, Salah’s son, Muhammad, his sister, Asmaa Alareer, and her three children, Alaa, Yahia and Mohammad, were all murdered in Gazea City in December 2023 – “caught in the crossfire” (?) of yet another targeted criminal airstrike by Israel’s occupation forces.
Please, Prof. Sheffi, now is time for you too to speak up against the genocide and to cut your ties with Maersk, a company whose hands are red from the blood of the thousands and thousands of innocent civilians who have been martyred in Gaza by military hardware whose componentsMaerskhelpstransport.
Editor’s Note: The full text of Professor Sheffi’s remarks as recorded in the minutes of the September 18, 2019 MIT Institute Faculty Meeting is reproduced below for context.
“Colleagues argue that there is a “money problem” at MIT. Surely, taking money from Epstein and inviting him on campus was wrong but this is an obvious judgement knowing what we know now (and should have known earlier). The moral and pragmatic question is where to raise the money that it takes to conduct state-of-the-art research and subsidize MIT’s education. US universities and MIT take money from Russia (which murders journalists and influences elections in the West), China (which holds a million Muslims in concentration camps), Singapore (with autocratic regime), and the US (enabling the bombing of Yemen children and separating families at the Mexican border), among others. While Epstein’s doing is disgustingly beyond the pale, there are very few angels among big-time donors and other organizations who fund research. So the question of where is the line, assuming that money is needed, is something that each one of us on the faculty, as well as MIT, have to answer.”
[Minutes of the September 18, 2019 Institute Faculty Meeting]
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- November/December 2025|Vol. XXXVIII No. 3
Where Are You? On Selective Outrage and Moral Credibility
The recent videos of Hamas executing Palestinians in Gaza were horrifying. Yet anyone who witnessed the terror attacks of October 7, 2023 – when Hamas militants murdered, raped, and tortured Israeli civilians – should not have been surprised. The cruelty and joy of killing on display then are now turned inward, against their own people. Even the BBC,1 CNN,2 and other anti-Israel outlets have reported Hamas gunmen firing on unarmed men and carrying out public executions without trial or due process.
This is not new. During the war, Hamas executed Palestinians who tried to get food directly from American humanitarian convoys rather than through Hamas’s control.3 Long before the current conflict, it murdered dissenters – often by throwing them from rooftops – for refusing to submit to its rule.4 These acts of terror are not anomalies; they are central to the organization’s culture of violence and repression.
Predictably, UNRWA and the so-called “Palestinian Health Authorities” have issued no condemnation, no report, and no expression of outrage regarding Hamas’s reign of terror. The same institutions that loudly denounce Israel’s every move fall silent when the perpetrators are Hamas. Their credibility erodes each time moral judgment is applied selectively. Only now, as journalists gain direct access to Gaza and bypass Hamas’s information filters, are the world’s media beginning to report the truth.
Here on campus, that same selective morality has become painfully visible. The passionate protests that once filled MIT’s courtyards and lecture halls have vanished. No vigils, no open letters, no outrage over the summary execution of Gazans by Hamas. Even the recent ceasefire agreement, which offered a rare moment of relief for civilians on both sides, passed without comment. Where are the same voices that demanded “justice for Gaza”? are public executions not worthy of campus outrage?
It may be uncomfortable for the slogan-shouting students and their faculty and staff enablers to look in the mirror and recognize who all their demonstrations were really supporting. The absence of any reaction to Hamas’s crimes suggests that the movement was never truly about sympathy for Gazans caught in the crossfire. Instead, it was an outlet for age-old antisemitism and its current anti-Zionism incarnation – an exercise in moral posturing by uninformed students and staff who practiced the age-old convictions directed at Jews. (The point is even more pronounced when one realizes the lack of campus demonstrations against the Chinese treatment of the (Muslim) Uyghurs, the gassing of hundreds of thousand Syrians by the Asad regimes, the genocide of Christians in Nigeria, and other atrocities.)
If outrage is expressed only when it can be directed at Israel, then it ceases to be moral at all. Outrage that ignores Hamas’s atrocities with silence is not solidarity. It is ideology masquerading as empathy. To condemn one set of crimes while excusing another undermines the very language of justice and compassion that our community claims to uphold.
At MIT, a place that prizes evidence and truth, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. Moral consistency is not a political position – it is the foundation of integrity. Condemning Hamas’s crimes does not diminish concern for Palestinian suffering; it affirms it. It asserts that no movement can claim the mantle of human rights while turning a blind eye to murder and repression when committed by those it once championed.
If the campus movements that mobilized under banners of “liberation,” “human rights,” and “resistance” truly cared for Gazans, they would be protesting now. They would be demanding accountability from Hamas, welcoming the ceasefire (despite the fact that it was brokered by the “villain in DC”), and standing for the right of all civilians – Israeli and Palestinian alike – to live free from terror.
Instead, their silence exposes a deeper problem: selective outrage that weakens moral credibility. A double standard that condemns Israel, but excuses Hamas diminishes every genuine claim to justice.
True solidarity is not determined by who the victim is or who the perpetrator is. It is measured by the courage to confront evil wherever it occurs and to speak out, even when it challenges one’s preferred narratives.
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