Cornell University is offering a course that seems to accuse Israel of committing “genocide.”
The course, “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance,” will be offered in the Spring semester. “The first half of the course will be devoted to situating Indigenous peoples, of which there are 350,000 globally, in an international context, where we will examine the proposition that Indigenous people are involved historically in a global war against an ongoing colonialism,” the course description states.
The second half of the course “will present a specific case of this war: settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel with a particular emphasis on what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has termed a ‘plausible genocide’ in Gaza.”
One of the goals for students taking the course will be to “[d]efine and differentiate key terms such as ‘Indigeneity,’ ‘Resistance,’ ‘SettlerColonialism,’ and ‘Genocide’ in both international law and Indigenous contexts.”
The reference to a “plausible genocide” seemingly refers to a Jan. 26 ruling from the ICJ that found that “the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide,” according to former ICJ President Joan Donoghue, who oversaw the legal case against the Jewish state.
Donoghue, however, claimed that the court “did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible,” which seems to contradict the Cornell course’s description of a “plausible genocide.”
The course will be taught by Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell’s Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters.
Cheyfitz is controversial due to his anti-Israel activism work. Canary Mission, an organization that acts as a watchdog of anti-Semitism on campuses, claims that “Eric Cheyfitz has spread anti-Semitism, defended Hamas terrorists and spread hatred of Israel during a war against Hamas in late 2023 and early 2024.”
“Cheyfitz has promoted pro-Hamas professors, expressed support for violent protesters and dismissed anti-Semitism. He has also demonized Israel, spread hatred of America and engaged in anti-Israel activism,” Canary Mission notes.
As Canary Mission notes, Cheyfitz condemned Israel on the day after the Oct. 7 massacre of Jewish civilians, calling it a “terrorist state:” “The only question here is whether counter violence is a cogent strategy for resisting the overwhelming force of the terrorist state of Israel.”
“if it continues to maintain an apartheid regime, Israel is digging a hole for itself from which it will not be able to climb out, having to spend more and more of its human and material resources on repression,” he wrote later that day.
Campus Reform has reached out to Cornell and Professor Cheyfitz for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
