CUNY to Host Talk On Hamas Tunnels as “Resistance to Colonialization”

The professor also advocates for the "abolition" of Israel.

While many colleges have cracked down on Hamas supporters, a cell of activists at CUNY Law School in NYC are planning next month to host a talk on how “the underground in Gaza” relates to “decolonial land use.”

The event — which will be hosted by the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine group and CUNY 4 PALESTINE — will feature Professor Hadeel Assali, a Palestinian woman who is dedicated to the “abolition of the Zionist project.”

“Join us on Wednesday March 4th at 6PM for a conversation with Dr. Hadeel Assali on decolonial land use in Gaza,” the flyer states.

“This anthropologic investigation will examine the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization.”

According to Professor Assali — who claims in her diary to have been born “stateless” and to have become a naturalized citizen of the USA in 2022 — Palestinians use land in ways Americans can’t possibly understand.

“Palestinians have been colluding with the earth for survival and resistance in a multitude of ways for decades, and these ‘collusions’–or relations–are unintelligible to colonial/Western modes of grasping the land,” she writes.

“One of these modes is the discipline of geology, which emerged from the British imperial expansion and still retains the same paradigms that inform all the geo/climate sciences, lacking the intimacy of local, indigenous knowledges (sic) and relations,” she adds.

Professor Assali with ““the sheikh of al-Araqib in the #Naqab of southern Palestine.” Source: Public Instagram: “anthropologicalexchange”

Professor Assali describes her time in academia as “a journey of radical transformation and a conscious effort to, in her own words, ‘balance out my karma’.”

At this point, you might be asking what her views are on Israel. She makes it abundantely clear in a book chapter she co-wrote.

"Israel is a settler colonial project that uses multiple prongs of erasing, displacing, and dispossessing Palestinians from the land,” she writes.

She also accuses Israel of ongoing genocide, writing that Israel “as a regime.. seeks to eliminate the population [of Palestine] and appropriate the land for the exclusive use by the Zionist state project.”

“We share a political commitment to the liberation of Palestine and the abolition of the Zionist project,” she and her co-author wrote.

Meanwhile, she has visibly aligned herself with SJP, the main organization behind the tent encampents across dozens of universites that we saw last year, and has endorsed the BDS against Israel (that stands for “boycott, divest, and sanction”).

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a recognized student group at CUNY Law, according to their own club directory, meaning that the taxpayer funded university will be using the American taxpayer’s dollars to facilitate this talk.

SJP is a national organization with clubs — mostly started by students and professors — at universities across the nation. Many schools have banned their chapters, citing the campus unrest the groups caused last year by, oftentimes, recklessly protesting and hurting bystanders in the process.

Notably, immediately after the October 2023 terror attack on Israel, the National Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the massacres as a “historic win for Palestinian resistance.” All chapters fall under the umbrella organization.

This talk about the tunnels next month was advertised with this flyer, and was discovered by Jonathan Rosen on Substack today.

“The tunnels, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which could’ve been used to help the Palestinian people, but instead was spent with the purpose of launching missiles, kidnapping, torturing, murdering, and raping Jews,” Rosen wrote.

The murdering of Jews is now being taught in New York’s schools, not as a bad thing, but as a legitimate and noble act. We’re well past worrying about teachers and professors sneaking indoctrination. Jew-hate is taught out in the open. I went to a CUNY college, and am sickened to see what transpires there now.

Much of New York’s college system needs to be torn apart and rebuilt. The current iteration is unsalvageable,” Rosen added.

The March 4th talk will be held at CUNY at 6:00pm in the School of Law Community Room. The school is located at 2 Court Square in Long Island City, Queens, New York.

Email the author Mazelit Airaksinen here: HiMazelit@gmail.com. You can also join Maz on Instagram or Twitter/X or Threads, where she provides news updates related to 10/7 and Jewish life.