In 2021, University of Memphis undergraduate Balqiss Alattiyat wrote a philosophy paper accusing Israel of “cultural genocide” and “cultural gaslighting.”
It reads less like a serious piece of research than the sort of polemic one sees all the time in anti-Israel activist circles. Israel is simply assumed to be a white-supremacist settler-colonial state. Palestinians are simply assumed to be the Indigenous people and Zionists the colonizers. Jewish claims of indigeneity are dismissed because most Jews are assumed to have originated in Europe and nowhere earlier. Judaism supposedly cannot support a claim to nationhood because people can convert to it. Discrimination against non-Ashkenazi Jews from the 1950s somehow becomes evidence that Zionism itself is white supremacist.
From those assumptions, the paper builds an increasingly elaborate catalog of accusations. Israelis enjoying hummus becomes evidence of cultural theft. Replacing recent Arab place names with their original Biblical place names become “memoricide.” Tatreez and the Jaffa orange become evidence of appropriation. The falsely reported Ethiopian contraception controversy becomes evidence of a eugenics project. “Cultural genocide” is treated as an established fact rather than a highly contested concept, and “cultural gaslighting,” a framework published only the previous year, is imported almost wholesale and applied to Israel. The paper eventually announces, without serious citations or evidence, that Palestinian cultural genocide proceeds in four stages: “Memoricide, Renaming, Appropriation, and a move to Innocence.”
Even the most basic premise is never really established. The author speaks repeatedly of Israel erasing a preexisting “Palestinian culture,” but never seriously establishes what constituted a distinct Palestinian national culture before Zionism, when it emerged as such, or how it differed from the broader Arab, Levantine, Ottoman, Muslim, Christian, village and urban cultures of the area. A quick search for the term "Palestinian Culture" in the years before 1948 indicate pre-Biblical Levantine culture, biblical and post-biblical Jewish culture, and Zionist Jewish culture in Ottoman and British Mandate times.
That does not mean there is no such thing as Palestinian culture today. Judging from a Google Ngram, the terms "Palestinian Culture" is used far more after it has suffered this supposed "genocide" than beforehand. It appears to exist as a result of the "nakba," not a casualty of it.
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There's lots more: A serious treatment of “cultural genocide” would at least acknowledge that the concept has been debated since Raphael Lemkin and was not incorporated as a separate crime into the final Genocide Convention. A serious paper arguing that Israel systematically erases the cultural past would have to address abundant counterexamples of Israeli archaeologists excavating, documenting and preserving Islamic, Christian, Byzantine, Ottoman and other non-Jewish remains. A serious philosophy paper might even ask what evidence would falsify the theory. This one does not.
Normally, I wouldn't waste my time writing about a dopey undergraduate paper that does not fulfill basic requirements for argumentation or fact-checking. But this is not an ordinary paper written by an overeager student.
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The prize rules say that their first criterion was “Credible Case”: “Does the essay make a substantive and persuasive case for its conclusions?” The second was “Validity”: “Do the arguments and evidence support the essay’s conclusions?”
Those are exactly the areas where this paper is weakest.
There was something about this poorly argued paper that made the philosophy department's referees think it was the best undergraduate philosophy paper of the year.
I have no idea what the other submissions looked like. I do not know who the referees were, and I certainly cannot prove that they preferred this essay because it attacked Israel. Perhaps they did; perhaps they did not.
But that is not necessary to make the result disturbing.
I recently wrote about the epistemic environment that has been built around Israel: an environment in which accusations that once would have required proof increasingly arrive as established background knowledge. Israel is “settler colonial.” Israel practices “apartheid.” Palestinians are undergoing “ethnic cleansing.” Israel is committing “genocide.” Each conclusion then becomes a premise for the next argument. As I put it there, “The verdict came first.”
The result is a kind of intellectual ratchet. A weak accusation gets repeated by academics or NGOs. It acquires institutional authority. The next scholar cites that authority rather than reexamining the original claim. Eventually a proposition that was never well established no longer feels like a proposition at all. It becomes part of the scenery.
This undergraduate paper looks like a miniature version of exactly that process.
The author does not really have to prove that Zionism is settler colonialism, that Israel is white supremacist, that Palestinians possess an ancient and clearly bounded national culture, or that Israel is engaged in cultural genocide. Those propositions largely arrive pre-approved. The entire department lives in an epistemic environment where these are not arguments, but accepted facts. The intellectual work begins using them as obviously true.
Then everything starts reinforcing everything else. Israel is a settler-colonial state, so Israeli actions are interpreted through settler-colonial theory. Those actions are labeled appropriation, memoricide or cultural gaslighting. Their appearance then becomes evidence that Israel is carrying out settler-colonial cultural genocide.
The conclusion is buried in the premises.
Which raises a possibility that is perhaps more troubling than saying that the referees are anti-Israel. Maybe the assumptions that built the paper's argument were not recognized as assumptions to begin with, but as facts.
If “Israel is settler colonial,” “Zionism is white supremacy” and “Palestinians are victims of cultural genocide” have become accepted parts of the academic environment, then a student no longer needs to establish them. She can simply start there, pile theory on top, add citations and receive credit for the sophistication of the structure she has built.
At that point, academic quality control stops doing its job. The framework determines which claims require evidence and which ones can simply be assumed.
We have seen versions of this dynamic repeatedly used in academic, media, NGO and political environments. Definitions stretch, contrary evidence disappears, assertions become citations, citations become consensus, and consensus becomes the premise for the next accusation.
A philosophy department explicitly said it would reward a paper for making a credible case and for demonstrating that its arguments and evidence support its conclusions.
Then it gave first prize to a paper whose most important conclusions rest on assumptions it never seriously establishes.
The undergraduate is not really the story. The university is.
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