MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi’s article in the November/December issue of the MIT Faculty Newsletter is a spectacular case study in the use and mis-use of language for reality-bending mirror accusations – yet another “textbook case of genocide denial and selective moral disengagement,” to quote from a recent article in the Lancet by Roberto De Vogli, Jonathan Montomoli, Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Ilan Pappé.

Sheffi’s article is titled: “Where Are You? On Selective Outrage and Moral Credibility” and is a clear demonstration of Sheffi’s own selective outrage and lack of moral credibility. Every accusation there is a confession.

Take, say, the very first sentence of the article: “The recent videos of Hamas executing Palestinians in Gaza were horrifying.” Indeed, they were, and so is the history leading to these executions.

But, given the title’s reference to “selective outrage,” one must question whether Professor Sheffi could genuinely be unaware of the voluminous, horrifying reports – including videos – spanning over one hundred years of settler-colonial Zionist war on Palestine. These reports have painstakingly documented acts by Zionist terrorists, ranging from Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang of the 1920s to the 1940s in Historic Palestine, to today’s Israel’s Defense Force – which, in reality, is mostly an occupation force. These acts involve the mass murder, bombing, execution, maiming and pulverization of thousands of Palestinians, predominantly children and women, in villages, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, and so on. Such actions are part of a sustained campaign of genocide, scholasticide, domicide…

Having flown planes for the Israel’s Occupation Forces for six years, Prof. Sheffi certainly has had a front-row seat to observe firsthand, or at the very least hear about, some of the horrors that constitute what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, in his book Ten Myths about Israel, has called an “incremental genocide” over decades of an ongoing Nakba. Yet, looking again at the “selective outrage” part of Sheffi’s title, one has got to be puzzled that the name “Hamas” occurs 14 times in a 700-word piece while “Israel” occurs six times, and genocide occurs …. nowhere! How selective is such moral engagement on the part of Yossi Sheffi? It’s as if there had been no ICJ case, no UN report, no Amnesty International warnings about Israel’s “live-streamed genocide” of Palestinians in Gaza – not even a plausible case for said genocide.

Even more striking, at least to a linguist, is the fact that, of the six occurrences of “Israel” and its derivatives or larger phrases that contain them (“Israeli civilians,” “Israel’s every move”…),

• four are in object positions, undergoing actions denoted by verbs such as “tortured,” “denounce,” “[outrage] directed at,” “condemns”;
• one is part of the compound adjective “anti-Israel” in “anti-Israel outlets”; and
• one is in a symmetric position vis-à-vis Palestinians in “the right of all civilians – Israeli and Palestinian alike – to live free from terror.”

The core linguistic strategy throughout Sheffi’s piece is for him to consistently place “Israel” and “Israelis” in the grammatical role of object (as the patient at the receiving end of some adverse action) while foregrounding anti-Israel critics and Hamas as the active agents of the corresponding events. This rhetorical positioning – making Israel the object of verbs like “torture,” “denounce,” “condemns,” etc. – systematically obscures Israeli agency and reinforces the narrative of Israelis, not Palestinians, as “perfect victims” while simultaneously rendering Palestinian suffering as an agentless event occurring in (quasi) happenstance. To wit, Sheffi’s strategic use of the passive verbal form “caught” in “Gazans caught in the crossfire,” as if the Israeli occupation forces’ innumerable crimes against humanity (genocide, scholasticide, domicide…) were all collateral damage of “crossfire” in which Palestinians are inadvertently “caught.”

In effect, Sheffi manages a linguistic tour de force that puts all but one occurrences of “Israel” and its word- and phrase-level derivatives in propositions that describe Israelis as utterly powerless victims who helplessly suffer the impact of negative actions by Palestinians and their allies near and far. The one exception is the proposition whereby Israelis and Palestinians are claimed to equally share the right “to live free from terror” – as if, it’s Israelis, and not Palestinians, who are being decimated in an ongoing genocide by a racist supremacist ethno-state.

In a related vein, Sheffi’s use of “anti-Israel” and “anti-Zionism” is particularly noteworthy as a rhetorical maneuver, as it represents what I’ve called the “most insidious manipulation of words and concepts” in creating fog around a genocide: these phrases seek to condemn any legitimate critique of Israel as “antisemitism,” thereby conveniently diverting attention from Israel’s genocidal actions by labeling its critics as bigots. Here it’s fortunate that recent rulings in Federal courts in Stand With Us. v. MIT, Sussman v. MIT, and against Homeland Security have consistently protected our First Amendment rights, including what Judge Richard G. Stearns calls “anti-Israel sentiment,” against the weaponization of accusations of “antisemitism.”

Now let’s look at the 14 occurrences of “Hamas” and phrases that contain “Hamas.” These occurrences denote the agent of actions such as:

• “executing”
• “murdered, raped, and tortured”
• “firing […] and carrying out public executions […]”
• “control”
• “Perpetrators”
• “reign of terror”
• “information filters”
• “Crimes”
• “Atrocities”

Then there are two occurrences where Hamas is in object position – object of “demanding accountability from” and “excuses” (as in “A double standard that condemns Israel, but excuses Hamas”).

Inspired by MIT alum Holly Jackson’s analysis of “anti-Palestinian bias in US news coverage” (a topic discussed in my Fall 2024 People’s Seminar on “Language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation in Haiti, Palestine and Israel“), I observe that Sheffi consistently uses active-voice predicates and a dehumanizing and highly emotive lexicon – such as “executing,” “murdered, raped, and tortured,” and “reign of terror” – only when referring to Hamas. This linguistic pattern is a textbook example of what I have analyzed as the “weaponization of language.” In their systematic denial of Palestinian humanity, Israeli leaders and their allies have employed terms like “beasts walking on two legs” and “children of darkness.” Such dehumanization is a prerequisite for the atrocities committed by Israelis, which Sheffi conveniently omits from his account, which amounts to a phenomenon that psychoanalysts Lara and Stephen Sheehi have called the “Zionist reality-bending” of mirror-accusations.

In Prof. Sheffi’s narrative, and in contradistinction with powerless Israelis who are tortured, denounced and condemned, it’s Hamas, and Hamas alone, that has the exclusive power to execute, murder, rape, torture, filter information, and commit crimes, atrocities and terror. From the River to the Sea?

How selective is that when talking about an organization like Hamas that’s been called, controversially, “a creation of Israel” whose goal was to counter the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) and undermine Palestinian unity and its resistance to Israel’s occupation? The latter’s endgame is a Greater Israel where Gaza might be turned into some sort of Riviera ethnically-cleansed of these inconvenient Palestinians who refuse to forget their native homeland. Meanwhile it’s the Hamas terrorists who are asking for an independent investigation of the war since October 7, 2023, while Israel’s army (the so called “most moral army in the world”) has banned all journalists from entering Gaza since that date and, even worse yet, this army has killed the highest number of journalists in the recent history of armed conflicts. It’s also Israel that’s committing, advertising and covering up unspeakable abuses against Palestinians, with seemingly absolute impunity – in the West Bank as well, far away from Hamas “crossfire.” But none of that is mentioned by Sheffi.

These examples of linguistic trumpery illustrate the sort of erasure of history that anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History and philosopher Jason Stanley in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future have analyzed as tools in the intellectual arsenal of colonization and fascism.

Moral credibility, anyone?

None of that should come as a surprise in light of the fact that it was Yossi Sheffi himself who, during a public lecture by an Israeli reservist hosted by the MIT Israel Alliance on September 18, 2024, accused anti-genocide students, including two women of color in the room, of “making up lies” not only about Israel military’s sexual assaults against Palestinians, but about the widespread nature of sexual assault in general. This unfounded and insulting accusation came after one of these students had questioned the speaker about well-documented instances of sexual violence in Israeli prisons. The two students of color, myself and at least one other faculty reported this incident to MIT’s Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office. I myself felt compelled to file this report after watching a video of the incident.

Sheffi’s denial of sexual violence by Israeli occupation forces against Palestinians aligns with his earlier insistence that MIT faculty should not regret collaborating with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. As documented in the MIT Faculty Meeting minutes, Sheffi’s ethical calculus suggests that multiple wrongs make one right, and that the end (or the bottom line?) justifies the means (Epstein’s gifts), based on Sheffi’s premise that “there are very few angels among big-time donors and other organizations who fund research.”

However, it is particularly egregious that he would accuse an entire generation of MIT students – some of them under his instruction – of “making up lies” about sexual violence. This accusation is leveled despite the fact that these two female students at the IDF soldier’s lecture were accurately reporting violence that has been thoroughly documented by prominent human rights organizations, both within and outside Israel.

In yet another feat of reality-bending mirror accusations, Sheffi also misrepresents campus movements such as the MIT Coalition for Palestine (MIT C4P) when he describes their movement as “selective outrage that weakens moral credibility” and “a double-standard that condemns Israel” and when he writes:

“If the campus movements that mobilized under banners of ‘liberation,’ ‘human rights,’ and ‘resistance’ truly cared for Gazans, they would be protesting now. They would be demanding accountability from Hamas.”

This is yet another classic example of “language as weapon” where the students’ ethical use of terms like “liberation,” “human rights,” and “resistance” are tendentiously overloaded with inflammatory, eliminationist interpretations in order to manufacture psychological discomfort and to silence legitimate pro-Palestine advocacy and anti-genocide and anti-apartheid political dissent. Sheffi misrepresents MIT C4P students’, including MIT Jews for Collective Liberation’s, agenda toward freedom and justice for all – Palestinians and Israeli Jews alike – from the River to the Sea.

Be that as it may, what we need to ask, in light of Sheffi’s reproach to the students, is: What reasonable demands can students make of Hamas leadership fighting a nuclear-powered genocidal empire bent on infiltrating and weakening Palestinian resistance and to sew division from the inside? Sheffi seems to have forgotten the claims that Israel too contributed to the emergence and ascendance of Hamas in order to undermine Palestinian unity. This divide-and-conquer strategy failed since, as noted by Rashid Khalidi in his essay “The neck and the sword,” Palestinian solidarity, in Palestine and beyond, has now become stronger than ever.

Meanwhile, one of the main objectives of the students’ movement has always been to contribute to a Free Palestine by “demanding accountability” locally from our own MIT and from MIT faculty, like Yossi Sheffi, whose work contributes to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, since October 2023, the students have been asking for an end to MIT’s complicity with what Amnesty International has called a “live-streamed genocide.” To that end, the students have published a most comprehensive research primer on said complicity, MIT Science for Genocide, and a recent article “Engineering for Genocide” – to help document this complicity. The MIT C4P students have alerted us to “MIT’s complicity with merchants of death”:

“Firms that sell and transport weapons to Israel also recruit from MIT and enter institutional collaborations with the university – Lockheed Martin, Maersk, Boeing, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, and L3Harris.

MIT C4P is certainly not the only group worried about Maersk delivering military cargo to Israel. So Sheffi’s long-standing collaboration with Maersk to help optimize its operations, including a collaboration with the port of Ashdod, stands in stark contrast to his unsubstantiated accusation that the students don’t really care for Gazans. Maersk is among the “merchants of death” that, according to U.N. Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, derive immense profits from “the economy of genocide” in Gaza by “sustaining a steady flow of US-supplied military equipment post-October 2023.” Unlike the students, who have no collaboration whatsoever with Hamas (despite slander from Israeli propagandist historians like Ute Deichmann of Ben-Gurion University), Sheffi maintains, and is even proud of, his relationship with a company that aids and abets genocide. His collaboration with Maersk quite literally speeds up the shipment of weapons to Israel. This complicity is particularly notable given MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s use of the adjective “vibrant” to describe this sort of collaboration, seemingly ignoring MIT’s own “red lights” and “elevated risks” principles intended to prevent complicity with entities engaged in human-rights violations.

Sheffi, thus, seems to have failed to notice that his own title applies much more so to himself than to those he aims at critiquing. His is “selective outrage” on steroids – better known as “implicatory denial” or “cognitive dissonance” or, more simply, “historical amnesia,” “selective empathy” and “selective moral disengagement.” In order to help cure these, I’d like to recommend these texts which I’ve used in analyzing the reality-bending allegations against me in the Sussman v. MIT lawsuit:

• Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s “Education or Mind Infection”
• Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial. Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering on different levels of denial
• Benjamin Lieberman’s Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe on cognitive dissonance among those who commit atrocities
• Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine on “reality-bending” in settler-colonial Zionism.

In closing, let’s adapt and transform a sentence from Sheffi’s article into one that seems more urgent than the original:

“Outrage that ignores [Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and our own complicity in this genocide] is ideology [and greed] masquerading as empathy.”

In his book, Selected Empathy: The West through the Gaze of Gaza, Roberto de Vogli argues that the West’s indifference to Gazan suffering is not due to a lack of knowledge or a universal failure of empathy. Instead, it is a “self-serving, tribal, and parochial” emotional response –“selective empathy” – that reserves compassion for the “in-group” based on factors like race or nationality, while denying it to the “out-group.” This biased, prejudiced, and exceptionalist “us versus them” mentality explains the absence of collective outrage at the ongoing genocide.

If Sheffi does care about universal empathy, universal morality and so on, without self-serving reality-bending, then it’s time for him to join the MIT C4P students’ high ground of moral credibility and to muster “the courage to confront evil wherever it occurs and to speak out, even when it challenges one’s preferred narratives [and bottom-line].”

Sheffi might well respond to me as he did to the students who are protesting his complicity with merchants of death. He might appeal to “academic freedom” and tell me “Go fly a kite!” To this I’ll respond: How about academic freedom denied by Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza? How about Gazan children’s freedom to be children? Why can’t they too fly kites without any risk of being martyred by Israeli snipers, drones, missiles or bombs? Their kites should not be final tales of martyrdom, but hopeful images of angels bringing back love, as in the poem “If I must die,” written by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer before he, his brother Salah Alareer, Salah’s son, Muhammad, his sister, Asmaa Alareer, and her three children, Alaa, Yahia and Mohammad, were all murdered in Gazea City in December 2023 – “caught in the crossfire” (?) of yet another targeted criminal airstrike by Israel’s occupation forces.

Please, Prof. Sheffi, now is time for you too to speak up against the genocide and to cut your ties with Maersk, a company whose hands are red from the blood of the thousands and thousands of innocent civilians who have been martyred in Gaza by military hardware whose components Maersk helps transport.

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