Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.
That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of the Arab world’s vilification of Jews — now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations.
But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has shown itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, in order to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship.
The fruits of this academic malpractice are used to further the ongoing campaign of the demonization of Israel, and the intellectual capital oozing out of campuses in the thrall of a neo-Marxist worldview of oppression and victimology has as its goal to substantiate Israel’s moral and existential inferiority in an attempt to make it a pariah in the world community.
Part of achieving that malicious objective is scholarship designed to reveal every real or imagined sinister aspect of Israel’s culture, society, politics, and military, and to confirm that the Jewish state’s behavior is singularly perverse, sinister, and murderous, and, since Israel’s incursion into Gaza after October 7th, those accusations have widened to include the charge of committing genocide in defending its state.
The charge of genocide against Israel in its behavior in Gaza is clearly not only odious but counter-factual, and the accusation, though hurled promiscuously and recklessly at Israel for the past two years, is baseless by any rational measure. That no actual genocide has occurred in Gaza, of course, has not stopped supposed scholars from reaffirming that libel, both in scholarly papers and in coursework—both designed to be effective tools in the ongoing cognitive war against Israel.
One grotesque example of this calumny dressed up in academic garb is a current Princeton University course, “Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide,” which ludicrously contends that the Gazan-Israeli conflict is analogous to various other genocides, including the Holocaust itself. Taught by the malicious academic, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the course involves “situating Gaza within comparative histories of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and genocide against Black and Indigenous populations.”
A former professor and the Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology at Israel’s Hebrew University. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has constructed the Princeton offering ripe with intersectionality—a pseudo-academic concoction of issues of gender, race, colonialism, and here, genocide, to draw together topics which share various modes of oppression, all focused on the predations of Israel. “Drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist thought,” the course description reads, “we examine how genocidal projects target reproductive life, sexual and familial structures, and community survival.”
That all sounds very inclusive, which academia clearly adores, but Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s purpose here is to further her primary mission of defaming the Jewish state, once more characterizing it as murderous, brutal, subhuman, and, according to her, genocidal.
This is not new intellectual territory for Shalhoub-Kevorkian, particularly since, after October 7th, she very publicly denied that any atrocities had occurred during Hamas’s barbaric slaughter of Israelis, and, in fact, expressed her belief that Israel and Zionism should eliminated from existence altogether. “It’s time to abolish Zionism,” she said in a 2014 Channel 14 podcast interview. “It can’t continue, it’s criminal. Only by abolishing Zionism can we continue . . . They will use any lie. They started with babies, they continued with rape, and they will continue with a million other lies. We stopped believing them, I hope the world stops believing them.”
Princeton clearly knew the tone and content of Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s academic output and corrosive ideology before she was appointed as a visiting professor, since the toxicity of her views was so extreme that Hebrew University finally dismissed her and she was actually arrested in 2024 by Israeli authorities for “suspicion of incitement.”
Her entire academic career, in fact, has involved the unrelenting demonization of Israel and Jews, unsurprising for someone who describes herself as a scholar who “studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control.” But given the fact that she proudly announces that she is “a prominent local activist . . . [who] engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives . . . [and] spaces of death . . ,” the subject and tone of her spurious research clearly has as its sole purpose to slander and demonize the IDF.
In two visits to Columbia University, in 2016 and 2019, for example, Shalhoub-Kevorkian promoted her grisly though unfounded belief that Israel uses Palestinian children to test military weapons, that “Palestinian spaces are laboratories.” In fact, she claimed, “The invention of products and services of state-sponsored security corporations are fueled by long-term curfews and Palestinian oppression by the Israeli army,” and the “Israeli security industry [is] using them as showcases” for promoting this technology for global adoption and use.
What is Israel’s, and Zionism’s, strategy of oppression, according to Shalhoub-Kevorkian? Zionism “invades our everydayness,” she claimed, “on the way to school for kids, during birth for women, during funerals, through home evictions and demolitions, to ethnically cleanse.”
Sound academic research is one thing, but Shalhoub-Kevorkian formulates her theories about Israel’s predations based on notoriously unreliable, and likely non-existent, accounts she gathers, not from other scholars or actual research data, but from the accounts given to her by Palestinian children—“narratives” as she refers to them. Of course, narratives are not facts, so this data and research have little value as reliable academic output, especially when the testimony she records comes from children inculcated since birth to loathe Israel and Jews. In a 2018 article published by the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, “Arrested Childhood in Spaces of Indifference: The Criminalized Children of Occupied East Jerusalem,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her co-author made her regular mendacious claim about how “Israel’s policy of targeting Palestinian children and childhood through the criminal justice system is fundamental to the state’s mechanism of colonial dispossession.”
In a 2021 co-authored article, “Colonial Necrocapitalism, State Secrecy and the Palestinian Freedom Tunnel,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduced another accusation incorporating a classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews are not only motivated by money and profit but will murder innocent civilians in pursuit of it, something she calls “necrocapitalism.” Necrocapitalism, according to her, is the “means of accumulating capital and profit from the death” of Palestinians. In necrocapitalism, “profit flows from visible and invisible violence, as well as the killing of the colonized, as a state of fear generates continuous insecurity, which in turn generates a demand for security goods.”
In other words, the occupation, the oppression of an innocent indigenous people, and each of Israel’s purported efforts to thwart terrorism and keep its citizenry from being murdered are all merely pretexts; the actual motivation for this malign behavior is Jewish profit, a grotesque accusation that Israel is only interested in “accumulating capital and profit from death,” even the death of children. “The very existence of the Palestinian endangers the colonial state” of Israel, she concluded, and “their death is necessary for the survival” of Israel. “Necrocapitalism” is “operationalized through violent policing of Palestinians.”
When she spoke as one of the participants in a grossly-biased, anti-Israel June 2021 webinar entitled “Said’s Palestine,” and hosted by The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), Shalhoub-Kevorkian regurgitated some of her wild claims, suggesting that “When Palestinians refuse and resist, Israel always kills Palestinian civilians,” and Israel’s “viciousness now includes a startling amount of arrests in the last month in historic Palestine . . . and attacks on Palestinian livability because Palestinians resist, watching the attacks on children alone as my work on unchilding [sic] clearly reveals, we see that our children became a political capital in the hands of the state, to further unchild [sic] them, arrest them and kill them and govern their hopes . . . .”
Supporters of the Palestinian cause have come to accept the fact that Israel will not be defeated through the use of traditional tools of warfare. Instead, the Jewish state’s enemies, abetted by the academic and political elites in the West, have begun to use different, but equally dangerous, tactics to delegitimize and eventually destroy Israel in a cognitive war. By dressing up old hatreds against Jews, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian does, combined with a purported goal of seeking social justice for the oppressed, and repackaging ugly biases as seemingly pure scholarship, she and Israel’s other ideological foes have found an effective, but odious, way to ensure that the Jewish state is still libeled for bringing harm and death to non-Jews.
That an elite academic institution like Princeton would give a prominent platform to someone who regularly commits academic malpractice in her quest to defame Israel and Jews is shocking, but, sadly, unsurprising.
This is another example of the continuation of a vicious and ugly trope in the centuries-old history of the world’s oldest hatred: that Jews still harbor murderous, sadistic, and inhuman impulses against non-Jews and wish to injure or murder them — in the current day with the Palestinian Arabs as long-suffering victims of the Jew of nations, Israel.
Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of the forthcoming book, The Slow Suicide of the University: How Radicalism, Israel-Hatred & Race Obsession Are Destroying Academia.