The Battle Over Narrative: Tufts University’s Struggle with Complexity in the Israel-Palestine Debate 

In a December 2025 op-ed, Tufts Professor of International Law Emeritus Joel Trachtman criticized a university panel on Israel and Palestine for promoting what he described as a one-sided narrative that “erased inconvenient facts,” making him feel unwelcome as a Jew for the first time in his 36-year career. He argued the event ignored Jewish indigeneity and historical context, omitted Hamas’s atrocities and the defensive nature of Israel’s war—which he contends legally cannot constitute genocide due to the lack of specific intent—and presented an oversimplified oppressor-oppressed framework while overlooking complex history like rejected peace offers. Trachtman called on Tufts administration to fulfill its promise of nuanced education by establishing a formal process to review curriculum and ensure analytical completeness, warning that without such action, the university risks indoctrination rather than education.

The Battle Over Narrative: Tufts University’s Struggle with Complexity in the Israel-Palestine Debate 

The recent controversy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has ignited a fundamental debate about academic responsibility, historical truth, and the very purpose of a university in an era of intense polarization. An op-ed by Professor of International Law Emeritus Joel Trachtman, published on December 5, 2025, describes his profound alienation at a November 17 campus event titled “Israel and Palestine: Assessment and Community Dialogue”. This personal account, from a 36-year veteran of the institution, serves as a stark case study of how academic discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can devolve into a battle over which historical facts are deemed “convenient” enough to be included in the conversation. 

A Professor’s Account: When Dialogue Becomes Exclusion 

For the first time in his long career at Tufts, Professor Trachtman felt unwelcome as a Jew on his own campus. He attended the Fletcher School event expecting the nuanced discussion that university leadership had promised. Instead, he witnessed what he describes as a pattern of erasure—a systematic omission of facts that contradicted a singular narrative casting Israelis as oppressors and Jews as colonial interlopers. 

The evening was marked by what Trachtman labels antisemitic statements from the audience, including comparisons of Jews who oppose Hamas to Nazis and claims that Jewish appointees in the U.S. State Department are inherently biased. As a member of the audience, he found himself as the sole objector to these remarks. More troubling to him, however, was the conduct of the faculty panel itself. He alleges that panelists engaged in historical revisionism by erasing the indigenous history of Jews in the land of Israel, dismissing it as “too far in the past to be considered”. 

This framework of erasure, according to Trachtman, extended to discussions of current violence. When panelists spoke of harms to children and sexual violence, they focused exclusively on Gazan victims, completely ignoring the documented atrocities committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7, 2023, including what he terms “unspeakable sexual violence”. The war itself was framed not as a defensive response to a massive terrorist attack but simply as “the war on Gaza,” erasing Hamas’s aggression and stated intent to massacre Jews as articulated in its original charter. 

Conflicting Narratives: What Was Said vs. What Was Omitted 

The table below contrasts the narratives Trachtman criticizes with the historical and legal facts he argues were erased. 

A Campus Divided: The Broader Context at Tufts 

Trachtman’s experience is not an isolated incident but part of a persistent and bitter divide on the Tufts campus, reflecting a national trend. The conflict has spilled out of classrooms and into quads and administrative buildings, creating an environment many students describe as hostile. 

On one side, pro-Palestinian activism has been vigorous. On November 17, 2023—exactly one year before the panel Trachtman attended—student demonstrators blocked entrances to Ballou Hall, demanding the university cut ties with Israel and denounce its actions in Gaza. The protest ended with tense confrontations with the Tufts University Police Department, allegations of physical aggression by officers, and 18 students receiving disciplinary violations. Student groups like the Coalition for Palestinian Liberation at Tufts have rejected calls for dialogue from President Sunil Kumar, labeling them a “reductive” substitute for the direct action needed to stop what they term an “ongoing genocide”. 

On the other side, Jewish and pro-Israel students report feeling targeted and unsafe. In a May 2024 Letter to the Editor, students Hannah Ascher and Guy Gottlieb described a campus physically plastered with graffiti and posters bearing slogans they interpret as calls for Israel’s destruction: “Globalize Intifada,” “From the River to the Sea,” and imagery equating the Israeli flag with the Ku Klux Klan. They argue that the constant visual assault and the dismissive attitude toward Jewish pain—such as the upset caused by merely discussing the sexual violence of October 7—create an “unfriendly environment” that administration statements do little to remedy. 

Administrative Response: Words vs. Action 

University President Sunil Kumar has attempted to navigate this chasm. In a March 2024 letter, he asserted the university’s responsibility to educate on “complex history” and promote “nuanced conversations rather than rely on slogans, incomplete narratives, or simple yes/no votes”. In a January 2024 video address, he called for empathy, stating it is possible to denounce Hamas’s attacks, sympathize with Palestinian suffering, demand the return of hostages, and support the self-determination of both peoples simultaneously. 

However, for many, these statements feel disconnected from reality. Trachtman notes that in the 20 months since Kumar’s March 2024 message, he has seen “little progress”. He and other members of Tufts United Against Antisemitism have urged the administration to establish a formal process to review curriculum and speaker events for bias and completeness. While he believes the administration is sympathetic, he states that “no process has been established and very little has changed”. The result, in his view, is that one-sided events continue to “indoctrinate, rather than educate”. 

The Fletcher School’s Mission vs. Reality 

The setting of this incident is particularly significant. The Fletcher School is not an undergraduate liberal arts college but a premier graduate institution for international affairs, where students are trained to be future diplomats, lawyers, and global leaders. Its curriculum, as listed on its website, is built on interdisciplinary rigor, with core divisions in International Law and Organization, Diplomacy, History and Politics, and Economics and International Business. Courses like “International Law and International Organizations,” “International Human Rights Law,” and “International Humanitarian Law” are designed to equip students with the tools to analyze exactly the kind of complex, morally fraught situations exemplified by the Israel-Hamas war. 

This context makes the alleged failures of the November 17 panel more consequential. Trachtman, an international law scholar, took specific issue with the panel’s casual use of the term “genocide,” arguing it erased the legal requirement of specific intent. When he raised this point, a professor on the panel dismissed his analysis as “unscholarly”—an ad hominem attack that silenced legal debate in a school dedicated to producing legal and diplomatic experts. The incident suggests a gap between the school’s stated mission of rigorous, multidisciplinary analysis and the reality of its co-curricular programming. 

This tension is not new. A 2017 op-ed defending the Fletcher “Israel Trek” argued against a “single narrative,” highlighting how trips funded by various groups aim to expose students to the region’s complexity, including meetings with both Israelis and Palestinians. The author of that piece argued that understanding requires acknowledging difficult truths on all sides, such as the role of Arab states in the 1948 Palestinian displacement or the nature of Hamas’s governance in Gaza. The current controversy reveals that eight years later, the battle over which narratives are permissible is more intense than ever. 

Conclusion: The University’s Fundamental Responsibility 

The clash at Tufts transcends the specifics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It strikes at the heart of what a university is for. Is its role to be a battleground for competing activisms, where the loudest or most morally confident voice wins? Or is it a sanctuary for reasoned inquiry, where complexity is embraced, uncomfortable facts are confronted, and students are taught not what to think, but how to think? 

President Kumar’s words point toward the latter ideal. Yet, Professor Trachtman’s experience and the testimonies of students from across the spectrum suggest the institution is failing to live up to it. The “erasure” Trachtman describes is a form of intellectual dishonesty. Whether it is the erasure of Jewish indigeneity, Jewish suffering, the legal definition of genocide, or the historical record of missed Palestinian statehood opportunities, each omission simplifies a tragic reality into a morality play. 

For a university, and especially a school of international diplomacy, this simplification is a dereliction of duty. The future negotiators, policymakers, and human rights advocates trained at Fletcher will not graduate into a world of simple oppressor-oppressed dichotomies. They will inherit a world of paralyzing complexity, where good and evil are rarely clear-cut, and where solutions require understanding the historical claims and profound traumas of all sides. 

The path forward for Tufts, and universities like it, is not to stifle speech or enforce a false equivalence. It is to courageously insist on the integrity of discourse. This means creating forums where legal definitions are debated by law professors, historical claims are scrutinized by historians, and empathy is extended to all human suffering without caveat. It requires administrators to move beyond sympathetic words and create the institutional processes—for speaker review, curriculum development, and conflict mediation—that make good intentions real. 

The events of November 17 show what is at stake. When a professor of 36 years feels unwelcome and when students from all backgrounds feel unheard or threatened, the university has lost its way. Restoring its purpose begins with a renewed commitment to a single, inconvenient fact: that truth is complex, and our understanding of it must be, too.