Most of the 40-plus activist Bowdoin professors in Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP), and dozens more like-minded activist faculty, dutifully parrot the accusation of “settler colonialism” against Israel. What makes the theory of settler colonialism so potent is its hierarchical structure. One group of people moves to a place for the purpose of conquering the land, with the intent to displace the indigenous population. As a result of the ensuing hierarchy, and the oppression inflicted by one group onto the other, the settler colonial lens suggests that the oppressing group is wholly unjust, while the oppressed group are victims, capable of no wrongdoing. That last part is key: The victim group has carte blanche to overthrow their oppressor by “any and all means”—a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) mantra.

It’s a beautiful framework. And when there are professors who endorse this framework in just about every department at the College (including those settler colonialist savants in the mathematics and chemistry departments), it becomes hard to unsee. The elegant equation of fixed hierarchy plus structural oppression plus justified resistance equating to moral certainty is so convincing that anyone who doesn’t view the world through this lens is told they’re amoral and on the wrong side of history.

But what happens to the settler colonialist paradigm when a complete examination of history threatens the idea of a clean hierarchy? What happens when morality and reality aren’t assessed based on a rigid oppressor/oppressed structure, but instead based on the fullness of a group’s aims, decisions and behaviors? What happens when it’s not so obvious whose—or what—“resistance” is justified or which groups did the colonizing or are Indigenous? What if the so-called “settlers” were the Indigenous people?

Were the thousands of powerless, 20th-century Jews who fled for their lives to British Mandate Palestine from Arab and European lands, their communities forever decimated and loved ones viciously murdered, settler invaders or refugees? Are the Jews who have lived in Israel for generations considered Indigenous or are they settlers? Were the Jews of Hebron, who had lived there for centuries (including Rabbi Haim Carigal, who traveled from Hebron to New England in 1773 and tutored future Yale president Ezra Stiles in Hebrew) and then massacred by their Arab neighbors in 1929, justifiably murdered—an example of “by any and all means”?

Fifty percent of Israelis today are descendants of the 800,000 refugees who were ejected from Muslim-majority lands in the Middle East. This includes Iraq. A history lesson deliberately not taught at Bowdoin: The Iraqi Jewish community dates to 597 BCE, when the Babylonians conquered Jewish Jerusalem and exiled the Jewish community to Baghdad. What we now know as Iraq was a creation of the British, placed under its mandate through World War II. In the 1930’s, Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was translated into Arabic and published in an Iraqi  newspaper. In 1941, a military coup overthrew the monarchy and declared allegiance to Germany and Hitler’s antisemitic policies. Almost immediately, there were anti-Jewish riots in Basra and Baghdad. The 1941 Baghdad “farhud” (pogrom in Arabic) erupted without intervention by the army or police, resulting in the murder of approximately 150 Jews. In the aftermath, the Jewish community began to escape Iraq, as leaving legally was not permitted. For those who remained, “Zionism” was a capital crime, and there were public hangings in Baghdad. In 1951, the prime minister sold the remaining Jews on a per-head basis and publicly declared that he had “forcibly evicted” them, leaving their passports and assets behind.

Now, if you’re a Bowdoin student, your professors’ lectures, Instagram posts, Orient op-eds and public lectures have made it clear that no such history exists. You’re cheated out of a liberal arts education because these faculty have liberation work to do. Their lectures and syllabi purposefully and systematically omit scholarship that could challenge their neatly packaged theories of colonialism and oppression.

What if these 40-plus Bowdoin professors instead prioritized scholarship over activism? What might Bowdoin students learn about the world—and themselves—if they were taught to complement one lens with others? What if they insisted on that nuance? Maybe then they would be able to build bridges, appreciate difference, grasp complexity and evaluate bias. Maybe then graduates of Bowdoin might be recognized and valued as perceptive observers and interpreters of their world, rather than reflections of their professors’ uninformed ideologies.

Saul Greenfield is a member of the Class of 1973. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of The Bowdoin Orient.