Israel-hating academics can't even interpret their own studies accurately ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Israel-hating academics can't even interpret their own studies accurately

A new paper in Critical Education claims that college students who know more about Israel and Palestinians become more supportive of Palestinians and less supportive of Israel. The title states the claim directly: “Empowered Resistance Explains the Relationship Between Historical Knowledge and Support for Palestine Among College Students.”

Here's the abstract:

College students’ calls and demonstrations for Palestine Liberation in universities across the United States have increased exponentially after October 7, 2023. However, little is known about the dynamic relationship between historical knowledge and support for Palestine. We use critical consciousness theory to frame our study and hypothesize that students’ knowledge of the history of occupied Palestine will predict college students’ support for Palestine Liberation. In addition, this relationship between historical knowledge and support will be explained by college students’ experiences of empowered resistance against oppression. Mediation analyses suggest that college students’ (N = 250; Mage = 20.45, SD = 4.07) historical knowledge about the occupation and colonization of Palestine increased their empowerment and resistance, which increased their support for Palestine Liberation. We conclude with recommendations to support college students during times of crisis, fostering their education of Palestine, supporting other oppressed peoples, and resisting oppressive and racist systems.

Their actual study is almost laughably flawed.

First, the students surveyed didn't represent a cross-section of students across the nation. They chose 250 students from a single university, almost certainly University of Nevada Las Vegas, and 65% of the respondents are minorities - 36% Latino, 23% Asian. To generalize from this group to all college students, as they do in the abstract, is pretty strange.

Much worse is how they measured the students' historical knowledge of the conflict: they asked them, “How knowledgeable are you about the historical context of the Israel-Palestine conflict?”

Students rated themselves from 1, “Not knowledgeable at all,” to 5, “Extremely knowledgeable.”

So they base the study on what the students believe, not what they actually know. In fact, there have been other studies that show that pro-Palestinian activists are ignorant of the basics: only 25% of the Berkeley students who said they "care deeply" about the conflict could locate where the Palestinian territories on the map. Less than half of the students who said they supported "from the river to the sea" could name which river and which sea.

A survey of Canadians showed that 50% felt they were well informed on the topic. Yet consistently far less than 50% could answer basic questions accurately.

To ask students how much they know about the region as proof of their knowledge is, to put it simply, stupid.

The correlation that the researchers found was very weak, r=.18. The average respondent rated his knowledge at only 2.54 out of 5, yet the sample already averaged 62.3 out of 100 in support for Palestine and only 26.3 for Israel.

We do not know how support broke down across the five knowledge categories because the authors do not publish those results. The least knowledgeable students could themselves have been strongly pro-Palestinian, with the most confident students only somewhat more so. Roughly 96.6% of the differences in Palestine support were associated with something other than this self-assessed knowledge score that the authors present as the key finding.

Finally, correlation does not imply causation. Students who self reported as pro-Palestinian could simply be more likely to also report themselves as more knowledgeable, even if the entirely of their knowledge was from watching anti-Israel TikTok videos.

Then, after the authors present their curated description of the raw data (the entire survey results are not published), they change the goalposts on what they pretend to conclude, changing self-reported "historical context of the Israel-Palestine conflict" in the Methodology section to "knowledge about the socio-political history of the ongoing colonization and genocide of Palestine and Palestinians" in their Results section.

A Zionist student who knows the history extremely well and rejects the authors’ description of Israel as colonial and genocidal could answer, accurately, that his knowledge was a 5. The researchers would then count that answer as a high score for knowledge of colonization and genocide.

How could Critical Education publish such obvious garbage?

The context helps. This was the second of two issues devoted to “Palestinian Liberation in Education: Solidarities and Activism for a Free Palestine.” Perhaps the stronger correlation is between a journal’s anti-Israel position and its willingness to mistake self-confidence for knowledge, correlation for causation, and the researchers’ political assumptions for something their data actually measures.

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