Those that want to deny the Gaza genocide that’s been unfolding before our eyes would rather speak about anything else. In the pages of the Orient, Neil Urwitz and Alan Christenfeld double down on genocide denial and add some defamatory personal attacks for good measure.

Urwitz claims that I “restated dogma” and did not “address complexity” in making no mention of his claims about Hamas or Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in my reply to his op-ed. He does this to shift the subject away from the real issue at hand: the genocide and its denial. Neither he nor Christenfeld have absolutely anything to say about the consensus in the human rights world and among genocide scholars that this is unequivocally genocide.

The best Christenfeld can do is contest the numbers of the dead. He leans on Gaza’s Health Ministry figures to dispute The Lancet’s figures. But he must know that the Ministry’s figures only account for bodies brought to barely functioning morgues. Tens of thousands, including over 20,000 children, remain missing, presumably entombed in the rubble of their homes. Nor do the Ministry’s figures account for the indirect deaths of genocide. It’s not clear what he hopes to achieve with this line of argument, since genocide hinges on intent and has no numerical threshold. But it’s revealing: Imagine not being outraged at the slaughter of 20,000 children, but at the possibility that the numbers may be imprecise.

Nor do either of them have anything to say about the intent and patterns of violence that are constitutive of genocide, and which I listed. They have nothing to say about the systematic destruction of the public health system and the bombing and invasion of countless hospitals that the UN described as tantamount to “the crime against humanity of extermination.” They have nothing to say about the campaign of forced starvation inflicted on two million people that Amnesty International said was implemented “to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their [Palestinians’] physical destruction as part of [Israel’s] ongoing genocide.” Nor do they have anything to say about the open record of genocidal intent that goes to the top of the Israeli political establishment; that is the fact that as an independent UN commission of inquiry found “the Israeli President, Prime Minister and former Defence Minister have incited the commission of genocide.” Presumably this is the “dogma” Urwitz speaks of because there isn’t a whiff of counterargument here.

They have nothing to say about this because it’s indefensible. And so Urwitz pivots to deflections about Hamas and student and faculty organizing in the US, and Christenfeld wades into full defamation and racist slander. What does Urwitz think a discussion of Hamas will absolve exactly? Hamas committed war crimes on October 7, but this does not absolve Israel’s military occupation (the longest running occupation in the world) or its genocide of anything. Did the war crimes of the Nat Turner Rebellion absolve American slavery of anything? Did the war crimes of the Haitian or Algerian revolutions absolve French colonialism of anything? Did the war crimes of anti-fascist forces in Europe (of which there were plenty) absolve fascism of anything?

Urwitz is keen on throwing around the word “complexity.” It’s not only an empty signifier; it’s also a crude alibi for moral abdication. There’s a lot of historical and social complexity in the question of Palestine. But it isn’t a morally complex question. You don’t need a PhD in Middle Eastern history to know that the mass slaughter of 20,000 kids is heinous. Or that the forced starvation of two million people is unjustifiable. Or that apartheid regimes are illegitimate. But moral obfuscation is precisely the point. Genocides have perpetrators and victims. As do apartheid and military occupation. The peddling of empty words like “complexity” is designed to obscure responsibility and causality.

Urwitz and Chistenfeld take umbrage with the claim that the Gaza genocide is at least one logical outcome of the course of the Zionist project. This is historically demonstrable. Zionism, like any settler colonial project, was premised on the elimination of the native population, one way or another, from the start. It’s hardly unique in this respect. There’s a reason that native populations were subject to genocide in large parts of the Americas and Australia. A reason why genocidal violence was twice unleashed on the Algerian people. It’s the same reason that saw Palestine systematically ethnically cleansed in the 1948 Nakba—the near total destruction of a society that was, according to arguably the world’s leading genocide scholar, a case of genocide. And it’s why not a single Palestinian refugee has ever been allowed to return to their homes. Israel was quite literally built on the ruins of another society.

This expulsion was the condition of possibility for a Jewish state in Palestine, and, again, there wasn’t a single Zionist leader of note that didn’t face this necessity. If Urwitz and Christenfeld don’t like my saying it, maybe they’d prefer to hear it from the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who said, “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” Or perhaps they’d rather listen to Yossef Weitz, another perpetrator of the Nakba, then head of the Jewish National Fund’s Settlement Department, who said, “There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them…. Not one village must be left, not one tribe.” This is the actual history of Zionism.

Christenfeld’s response peaks in defamation. When you can’t refute genocide, or apartheid, or ethnic cleansing, then screeching “blood libel” seems to be the move. Anti-Palestinian racism in the US is so ingrained that it’s common to smear Palestinians as antisemites for the mere temerity of narrating their own history and refusing their extermination. It remains, however, as cynical a sleight of hand as there is. I don’t know if anyone still falls for this limp conflation of Zionism and Judaism, but that doesn’t matter. This is not a politics of persuasion; it’s a politics of censure and smearing. Those opposed to settler colonialism and genocide, Urwitz and Christenfeld effectively say, should not be allowed to teach. Are Palestinians not allowed to teach their own history? If there’s a threat to the university, it comes from precisely this kind of crass assault on academic freedom.

Indeed, Urwitz and Christenfeld seem to think that remaining neutral in the face of history’s greatest moral atrocities is somehow a prerequisite for teaching. Professors can either be activists or teachers, writes Urwitz. A point of order is necessary here. Classrooms are not activist spaces, nor should they be. Classrooms strive toward insight; they are spaces for the honing of critical thought in dissensus and discussion. None of us teach our students what to think. We teach them how to think critically.

But this is never premised on the pernicious fiction that we are neutral observers of the world. For one, there is really no such thing, and the myth of detached neutrality is itself activism—does Urwitz seriously think his consistent attacks on a Palestinian member of faculty and denial of genocide in a college newspaper are not activism? As Howard Zinn once said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. When that train is a live-streamed genocide, then taking a stand is not only a moral obligation, and not only the bare minimum of a responsibility to the common good; it’s also the only guarantee of remaining human in this world.

Nasser Abourahme is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies.