City Journal June 3, 2025
In my fight against critical race theory in American institutions, I, Christopher F. Rufo should acknowledge that I’m no expert on Israel and Palestine.

I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic. I haven’t visited either territory.
For that reason, I’ve written little about the conflict and don’t claim to grasp all its intricacies.

Intellectuals, rarely short on opinions, often fall back on a familiar dodge when confronted with a controversy they’d rather avoid: calling the issue “complex.” The war in Gaza is one such case.

To be sure, the tangled history, religion, and culture behind the Israel–Palestine conflict make it genuinely complicated.
Partisans on both sides accuse their opponents of ignorance while promoting their own preferred narratives and facts to claim authority over the subject.

But I do understand American domestic politics. And I can see the shadows the Gaza war has cast here at home.

On one side stand Palestine’s domestic proxies:
1. the decolonization theorists,
2. keffiyeh-clad campus leftists,
3. and, increasingly, the radicalized individuals now out for blood.

These elements are connected. The ideology is hatched at places like Harvard, where it trickles down to student activists who occupy campus buildings and make lithographs of Hamas paragliders.

It then gets refracted on social media, flipping the switch within the minds of those predisposed to violence, giving them a rationale to lash out at Jews.
1. Consider the recent spate of property bombings,
2. the cold-blooded murder of two Israeli embassy employees,
3. and the injuries inflicted by Molotov cocktails on a dozen people in Boulder, Colorado.