Maura Finkelstein never hid her support for Palestinian liberation during her nine years working as a professor of anthropology at Muhlenberg College, a small liberal arts school in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I have always had an ethical practice of making sure that I include Palestine in my teaching,” Finkelstein told me. “It was never outside the bounds of what I do.” For Finkelstein, who is Jewish, this was not always easy. More than 30 percent of Muhlenberg’s 2,200 students are Jewish, many of them vocal supporters of Israel.
In late May, however, Muhlenberg told Finkelstein that she was fired. The reason? She had shared, on her personal Instagram account, in a temporary story slide, a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.
“Do not cower to Zionists,” Kanazi wrote on January 16. “Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist.” At the time, Israel had already killed over 22,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom were women and children.
There’s a historical precedent to convict war criminals. It’s called the Nuremberg trials.
I was asking your opinion. To my knowledge, none of the types of genocide enablers I mentioned were prosecuted in Nuremberg. You think the Jewish coeds from rural PA deserve a trip to the Hague?
The Nuremberg trials established that a person was responsible for their own actions and that if an organization was found to be criminal, then you could bring forward individuals part of the organization to be charged. Now tell me, if someone has all the evidence in the world thrown at them and chooses to ignore it all and advocate for an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing. Would you deem them innocent or guilty?