At a congressional hearing on 5 December, Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman, asked Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, if she agreed that the ‘call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally’. The university presidents’ tepid, legalistic responses to Stefanik’s questions were widely criticised, but the most harmful outcome of the hearing was the failure to contest her bogus premise. Conflating intifada with genocide makes both terms unintelligible.
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