The New York Times Sees Ussama Makdisi’s Murderous Vaporings as Fit to Print

Ussama Makdisi is a longtime Palestinian-American scholar-cum-propagandist for the cause of Palestine. He routinely describes Israel — piling on the malignant adjectives — as a “colonial-settler apartheid genocidal state.” He has now been appointed as the first professor of Palestinian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he will now have a bully pulpit from which to fill young minds with hatred of Israel. And now the New York Times in its wisdom has chosen, as fit to print, an op-ed by Makdisi in which he explains how, if he had had the chance, he would gladly have joined in the Hamas attacks carried out on October 7, 2023, when 1,200 Israelis were raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered, with whole families tied together with wire and then burned alive, babies were beheaded, girls were mass raped, had their vaginas stabbed and cut open, before being killed, women had their breasts sliced off, men had their genitalia cut off and their eyes gouged out while they were still alive.

More on Makdisi’s squalid little piece, and theNew York Times’ decision to publish it, can be found here: “The New York Times has some serious explaining to do,” by Steven Emerson, Israel National News, April 26, 2026:

There are editorial decisions that make you scratch your head. And then there are decisions so staggering in their moral recklessness that they demand a public accounting. The New York Times’ choice to publish an op-ed on April 23, 2026 by University of California, Berkeley history professor Ussama Makdisi – positioning him as a credible, sober commentator on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – falls firmly, irredeemably, in the second category.

This is not a close call. This is not a matter of reasonable people disagreeing about which voices belong in the public square. This is the Times conferring the prestige of its op-ed page – the most coveted platform in American journalism – on a man whose public record on this subject is not merely controversial, but morally indefensible. The editors who authorized this piece owe their readers an apology….

The Times‘ editors cannot claim they didn’t know who Ussama Makdisi is. His views are not hidden. They are voluminously documented, widely published, and entirely consistent across years of public advocacy. This is a man who has built an academic and public career on a singular, uncompromising position: that Israel is an irredeemably illegitimate enterprise that must be destroyed.

In a 2023 podcast, Makdisi declared flatly: “Colonial Zionism has to end.” He did not qualify this. He did not suggest reform, negotiation, or a two-state framework. He called for the end of the foundational ideology of the Jewish state – a state of 10 million people. He dismissed Israel as an “ethnoreligious settler-colonial state [born] entirely of Western imperialism,’ a framing that, conveniently, leaves no room for any legitimate Jewish national claim to the land whatsoever.

In a 2014 op-ed that drew fierce criticism, Makdisi characterized Israel’s founding as born of “terrible violence” and described Zionism as a “settler-colonial enterprise” – language that, stripped of its academic veneer, falsely reduces the entire enterprise of Jewish self-determination to an act of conquest with no more moral legitimacy than apartheid South Africa. He has repeatedly described the situation in Gaza as a “genocide,” and in essays published in prominent journals has framed Israeli military operations as the deliberate, systematic destruction of “Palestinian civilization”.

In essays for the New Left Review, he has written that “fighting antisemitism often implies erasing Palestine” – a formulation that positions virtually any effort to combat Jew-hatred as an act of oppression against Palestinian Arabs. And he has consistently portrayed the pro-Israel community in America not as fellow citizens with sincere beliefs, but as a conspiratorial force – accusing “Zionist institutions and pro-Israel donors” of “routinely smearing” Palestinian Arab voices, and describing Congressional scrutiny of campus antisemitism as evocative of “the McCarthy show trials of the 1950s.”

There is no comparison between the Red-baiting Joseph McCarthy and the Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism that the House Committee on Education and the Workforce conducted. McCarthy’s charges were false, beginning with his claim to have a list of hundreds of Communists in the State Department, while the House Committee’s scrupulous investigation of various campuses has revealed copious evidence of college administrators doing nothing to make Jewish students and faculty on their campuses feel secure from attack.

Contextualizing Mass Murder as “Resistance”

Perhaps the most revealing dimension of Makdisi’s public record is not any single statement but his consistent pattern of contextualizing Palestinian Arab violence against Israeli civilians in ways that systematically minimize or justify it. In published writing, he has argued that “if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it” – a formulation that, applied to October 7, amounts to a conditional defense of the massacre. Hamas killed 1,200 people, his framework suggests, because Israel made them do it.

Hamas’ rape and mutilation can only be stopped by ending the “conditions that produced” them? And what are those “conditions,” or, rather, “condition”? Why, it’s the very existence of the Jewish state. That is the primal sin, that has to be undone. No Jewish state would mean an end to Palestinian violence. And what, Ussama Makdisi clearly wants us to agree, is wrong with that?

The Times doesn’t think it has to answer to anyone about its choice of op-ed contributors. It will likely say nothing in response to Steve Emerson, the author of this piece. The motto of the Grey Lady is the famously arrogant maxim “Never apologize. Never explain.” But if it does reply to Steve Emerson that response should go like this: “You don’t like us publishing an oped by someone who openly identifies with Hamas, and would have loved to join in the murderous fun the terror group unleashed on October 7, 2023? Tough.”