The Anti-Zionist Master's Thesis That Says It Doesn't Need to Prove Its Thesis

There is a peculiar epistemic move at the center of the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Genocide is one of the gravest accusations imaginable, so ordinarily it should require an extraordinary amount of proof. Instead, the moral force of the word is often used to reverse the burden. “Genocide” is treated not as a conclusion to be established but as an obvious fact that decent people are expected to recognize. Anyone who questions the evidence risks being treated as morally suspect merely for asking.

Once that happens, counterevidence loses its normal force. Evidence inconsistent with genocidal intent can be dismissed as irrelevant, deceptive or insufficient. The accusation is morally privileged before it is empirically demonstrated. Emotion is substituted for proof. The outrage attached to the word overwhelms the ordinary process by which evidence is supposed to test a claim.

A 2026 University of Lethbridge master's thesis, Palestinian Erasure in Alberta Schools, offers an unusually explicit example of the same epistemic method in a very different context. Deema Abushaban argues that Palestinian “erasure” has come to “dominate school and curricular discourse in alberta” and attributes this to dehumanization and “Zionist settler colonialism.” 

That is a major empirical claim. One would expect such a claim to be based on evidence: a survey of school materials and websites, interviews with principals and curriculum designers, systematic examination of textbooks, lesson plans, teacher materials, board policies, classroom observations or comparisons with how other foreign conflicts are treated.

This paper has none of that.

Instead, the thesis is centered on interviews with only three people, two former students and one teacher. All of them are Palestinian. One teacher says she was told not to teach about Palestine, but we are not told whether the same rule would have applied to other contentious topics. One student says “Free Palestine” was omitted from her yearbook quote, but even she wonders whether other political slogans like "Trump 2020"  would also have been barred. Another says Palestine was barely discussed in class, but the same interviews indicate that all international current events generally received little attention.

That is about it. A sample of three Palestinian participants, with no control group and no comparative curricular analysis, is close to useless for establishing the thesis that Palestinian erasure “dominates” Alberta schools. 

Also, how does not teaching something be considered "dominant?" If the schools also didn't teach about Belgium, does that mean that Belgian erasure "dominates" the curriculum?

But Abushaban does claim that “Zionist propaganda” dominates Alberta schooling. Again, no evidence is given. She does not establish that Alberta schools teach Israel positively—or even that they teach much about Israel at all. Her own evidence more often suggests that the subject is avoided.

But the real point is that she actually defends her lack of evidence! 

In the abstract she writes:

“The purpose of the thesis is not to prove Palestinian erasure, as facts speak for themselves.”

Later she is even more explicit:

“This is not a thesis in the general sense, in that it is not a hypothesis I have to prove.”

She describes her claims instead as “nonnegotiable truths.”

And when introducing her analysis of anti-Palestinian racism in schools, she again says she does not intend to prove its existence because it is an “undeniable, non-negotiable truth.” 

This is the epistemic playbook in unusually pure form. The strongest claim, the very title of the paper itself, is placed outside the realm of proof. Evidence does not test the thesis; it is gathered afterward to illustrate a conclusion already declared true.

That is exactly what happens in much of the genocide discourse. Ordinarily, the greater the accusation, the greater the burden of proof. Here the relationship is inverted: the greater the moral gravity of the accusation, the less acceptable it becomes to demand proof.

It isn't remarkable that an activist graduate student thinks this way. Activists are free to begin with whatever convictions they like.

The remarkable part is that a university accepted a paper that explicitly claims it does not need to prove its argument as a master's thesis.

What does it say about modern academia when a thesis can explicitly state that its central proposition does not need to be proven—and still satisfy the requirements of scholarship?

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