We law students aren’t surprised campuses are so pro-Hamas

By Jill Jacobson and Rachel Chiu. Jill Jacobson is a Boston College Law School student. Rachel Chiu is a Blume Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Both are Young Voices contributors.

"Americans are shocked and horrified as university and law-school students nationwide show support for the terrorist group Hamas after its heinous attacks against the Jewish people.

“Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life,” declared the NYU Student Bar Association president.

Israel is “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” more than 30 Harvard student groups stated.

“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

These statements do not feature geopolitical commentary, just brazen support for terrorism.

As law students who have witnessed firsthand the ideological takeover of American universities, we aren’t surprised — not by the statements or administrations’ slow response to them.

Admissions offices have prioritized demonstrations of activism from potential applicants, and professors teach power struggle among groups as the primary analytical lens through which to view the world.

The end result is an ideological pressure cooker where students, armed with misapplied academic theory, support terrorist groups and expect to be praised for their views.

Make no mistake, students’ behavior should not be excused — it is repugnant and paints a frightening image of the future of academic institutions and our country.

But surely these statements exist because those making them felt confident their views would be accepted, if not praised.

Those outside academia should know these students are likely shocked that wider society is not applauding their actions.

They don’t see these statements as particularly heterodox — in fact, the opposite.

Why?

Schools have, by their own design, become devoid of free inquiry and exchange, adopting instead a homogenous set of viewpoints, many of them extremely radical.

An elite American institution’s average student body is no longer a representative sample of adolescents with top GPAs and test scores.

For years, admissions offices across the country have deliberately prioritized passion for social justice and activism in potential applicants — to their detriment.

While community engagement is a worthwhile pursuit, at 17 years old, zealous activism for any complex cause is too often accompanied by a lack of intellectual curiosity and misplaced confidence in one’s point of view.

Have you changed your mind on fundamental issues since the age of 17? We sure have.

Yet increasingly, these young “activists” have neither the opportunity nor the incentive to allow their thinking to evolve.

Their views are rewarded by admissions offices around the country, then encouraged and intensified by like-minded students and faculty members.

The cycle repeats in law schools.

At elite institutions particularly, good jobs are nearly guaranteed, irrespective of students’ ability to display intellectual curiosity and exercise good judgment.

Curious students without such convictions who secure spots at top universities are generally in the minority.

They must be careful articulating their views lest they commit a “microaggression” against their peers.

All the while, students proudly support terrorists, ostracize their Jewish peers and espouse views nothing short of moral degradation under the guise of the “activism” institutions have so loudly praised.

Why are such gifted students so willing to go along, especially when the end result is antisemitism?

While the wider population wonders in horror, the explanation is simple, albeit anticlimactic: They are doing precisely what the educational system rewards — applying the logic they have learned, even if it leads them to immoral ends.

The dominant frameworks taught today feature rigid boundaries that do not translate when applied to real-world situations.

Take, for instance, the NYU law student’s letter, which expressed solidarity with “Palestinians in their resistance against oppression towards liberation.”

Her statement used common rhetoric of revolution and resistance: superficial solidarity with the designated victim profile and condemnation of the designated oppressor.

It is not a nuanced take on foreign relations but rather an attempt to map a complex situation onto a clear-cut “oppressor vs. oppressed” or “colonizer vs. colonized” template. 

Paradoxically, terrorism does not fit into these students’ definition of oppression.

“Decolonization,” especially as it is applied to Israel, is ubiquitous in the student toolkit.

Signatories of these statements readily adopt the colonization narrative without the slightest nod to the history of Jewish people in the region, enabling them to rationalize brutality against Israelis and Jews more broadly.

They get it from their professors, like Yale’s Zareena Grewal, who tweeted, “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity,” and Cornell’s Russell Rickford, who called Hamas’ brutal attacks “exhilarating” because they “shifted the balance of power” in the region.

Academia flippantly calls for “decolonization,” failing to grasp the gravity of the serious violence that will inevitably befall the region’s residents.

In contrast to immediate heartfelt statements issued in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, George Floyd’s death and other recent events, university administrators remained silent on this issue, seemingly unconcerned by their students’ and faculty’s inhumane reactions to these attacks.

That is until the private sector and media forced their hand.

Law firm Winston & Strawn revoked its offer to the NYU student and publicly condemned her actions.

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman and others urged the private sector to refuse to hire those who signed the Harvard statement.

Board members, like Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer, and donors at schools such as University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have stepped down and ended donations.

Only then did university administrators start to speak up.

The private sector’s ability to so quickly elicit a response is a sign of just how far we have fallen: The moral case against Hamas is not a difficult one.

We must return to an American academia characterized by intellectualism and free thought — for the health of our country and, at a minimum, for the safety of our students."