GUEST ROOM | Why Cornell's Silent Majority Must Speak

For five years, I’ve navigated Cornell as a Ph.D. student in the Geological Sciences. Throughout this time, I have seen the University’s mission — "... any person ... any study" — eroded by performative outrage. The night the Cornell Undergraduate Student Assembly took up Resolutions 55 and 61, that tension reached a boiling point.

I am a Jewish American, veteran and researcher. I do not speak for a multitude, but as one of few Jewish students who actually showed up to the Student Assembly meeting. On a campus with thousands of Jewish students, our absence from these proceedings is a symptom of widespread fear and a campus culture that socially excommunicates any dissident. We saw this during the Cornell Graduate Students United unionization drive, when many Jewish students who opposed the union’s political positions felt compelled to voice their objections anonymously — apprehensive that standing for their own freedom of conscience would ruin their social standing, threaten their personal safety and imperil their professional futures.

The Assembly proceedings were a farce. As I sat in the Student Assembly meeting on March 12, President Kotlikoff presented a principled defense of University policy and institutional neutrality, yet was met with the mocking laughter of those who no longer recognized any authority but their own. When the ‘adult in the room’ departed, the facade fell. The hecklers were allowed to remain, making a mockery of a purportedly deliberative process.

These resolutions represent an intellectual surrender. Resolution 61 calls for terminating Cornell’s partnership with the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, a world-class research institution. Resolution 55 condemns the University for hosting speakers accused of "war crimes," a rebranding that uses unsubstantiated allegations as a political pretext to exclude Israeli voices without due process. These activists weaponize current United Nations rhetoric to demand a boycott, yet ignore the U.N.’s original role in sanctioning the sovereignty of both Arab and Jewish states in 1947.

This isn't organic activism; it’s a disturbing echo of the past. We are witnessing the rise of a new vanguard of ideological enforcement. Like the student-led purges of the 20th century, these representatives are drunk on hubris, convinced they are moral arbiters of a conflict they only understand through 30-second social media clips. They’ve fallen prey to a grand manipulation — an infiltration of American academia by anti-Israeli actors seeking to win on campus what they cannot win on the battlefield.

The selective nature of their ‘justice’ tells the whole story. Where are the resolutions for the Christians being slaughtered in Nigeria? Where’s the outrage for upwards of a million Muslim Uyghurs in Chinese "re-education" camps today? Their silence on these atrocities proves the Assembly's moral compass points true north only when the Jewish state is involved.

Furthermore, there is a staggering cognitive dissonance here. These students champion gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights while supporting a regime that would persecute them for those very values. They attack Israel — the Middle East’s most prominent liberal democracy, where women and minorities enjoy legal protections that do not exist in most of the region. In their ‘intersectional blindness,’ they have allied with a strategy of cynical sacrifice: Hamas has been documented operating within civilian infrastructure, a practice that increases the risk of civilian casualties, weaponizing the blood of their own people to fuel a global propaganda war.

They claim anti-Zionism is not antisemitism but this is pure misdirection. In practice, anti-Zionism frequently functions as a vehicle for anti-Jewish hostility. Its logical endpoint is the denial of Jewish self-determination, outcomes that have historically meant the systemic erasure of Jewish safety and sovereignty.

They default to screaming "genocide" without adequate basis — ignoring the strict legal definitions and the fact that no international body has issued such a ruling. This disinformation was first spread by the Soviet Union when they began deploying the term against Israel in the late 1960s and 1970s as a part of Operation SIG, a KGB-led campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. 

When a country is attacked and its people slaughtered, it has a right to defend itself. If genocide were the objective, a regional superpower like Israel could have concluded such a campaign in days. Instead, the Student Assembly parrots the ‘genocide’ narrative without engaging with the legal or factual complexity of the claim. 

In 2006, Hamas won a parliamentary majority in elections that international monitors deemed free and fair. While that result was partly driven by internal dissatisfaction with Fatah's corruption, no parliamentary elections have been held since. That said, to frame an entire population as passive victims with no political agency is its own form of condescension. Political choices carry consequences. The question of accountability does not demand collective punishment, but it does demand honesty: Hamas did not seize power in a vacuum, and the celebratory rallies in several West Bank cities on Oct. 7 cannot be explained away as mere coercion. To deny this reality is to ignore the active support that has sanctioned the movement’s rise.

Cornell students have won the ‘academic super lottery,’ yet they choose to bite the hand that feeds them. If you truly believe Cornell is complicit in genocide, why are you still subsidizing it with your tuition? Why accept the degree? By staying, you admit your desire for a Cornell-branded resume outweighs your alleged convictions.

History is a cruel teacher. Those acting as foot soldiers of ideological upheaval are often discarded once their chaos has served its purpose. To the Assembly members who voted for these measures: You are not the vanguards of justice. You have become the unwitting instruments of a proxy war that treats your passion as a disposable resource that values volume over truth.

Cornell is gradually becoming a place of surrender. Like the proverbial frog in the pot, we are being slowly boiled by an incremental abandonment of our core values. Months ago, I stood on the street corners of Ithaca holding banners of kidnapped Israeli civilians. I was one of only two Cornell students who showed up. We were met with vitriolic verbal assaults from passersby. We stood our ground even as "Run for Their Lives" marchers in Boulder, Colorado, were firebombed with Molotov cocktails. We took actual risks; the Assembly only takes votes.

To my fellow Jewish students who support Israel: Our traditional Hasbara approach — the belief we can win through quiet explanation and facts — is no longer enough. Facts and logic alone cannot defeat primal hatred. We must be as passionate and vocal in our defense of the truth as they are in their promotion of lies.

The water is getting hotter. It is time for the silent majority to jump out of the pot before it is too late.

Derek A. Berman is a fifth year Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University and a student collaborator on the NASA Mars 2020 mission. He is a 22-year veteran of the United States military with eight overseas deployments and operational assignments across Europe, the Middle East and Far East, including service in Afghanistan and Qatar. He can be reached at dab444@cornell.edu. 

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