The Faculty of Resistance

Columbia University did not become a command center for the American intifada by accident. It was built that way. Tenured position by tenured position, department by department, over decades. The Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department became a production facility for anti-Israel ideology so thoroughly that by the time the encampments went up in April 2024, the faculty infrastructure was already in place. All it needed was a trigger.

The trigger was October 7. The infrastructure put on orange vests and walked into the encampment.

Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. He holds a joint appointment in Anthropology, Political Science, and Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. He has been at Columbia since the 1990s. He is the father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. These facts belong in the same sentence because they explain how ideology moves from a faculty office on Morningside Heights into the governance of the largest city in the United States.

When the Gaza Solidarity Encampment went up on Columbia's south lawn at 4 a.m. on April 17, 2024, Mahmood Mamdani was the first faculty member to address the crowd. The encampment was illegal. The university's administration would call the NYPD to dismantle it. They called police three times before it was cleared. Mamdani went anyway. He spoke about "lessons of the divestment movement in South Africa," framing the illegal occupation as the natural heir to the anti-apartheid movement. The Times of Israel

He returned multiple times. He held teach-in sessions inside the encampment for students who were trespassing on their own university's property, at the same institution that was simultaneously dispatching police to remove them.

His views on Israel predate the encampment by decades. He has promoted BDS since 2002. He promoted BDS initiatives at Columbia in 2002, 2009 and 2016 and was an activist with the Columbia Palestine Forum. Canary Mission

In 2011, he delivered the keynote address at the first national Students for Justice in Palestine conference, hosted at Columbia, where SJP adopted points of unity including the so-called right of return. In 2022, he argued in a lecture at the University of Virginia that the only way forward in the region was an "epistemic revolution" in Israel, one where Israelis accepted that "the flourishing of Jews and Jewish life does not require a Zionist state." The Times of Israel

In January 2024, months before the encampments, Mamdani wrote a letter to the Columbia Spectator criticizing the university for discouraging the use of the words "intifada" and "from the river to the sea," arguing that excluding them would undermine legitimate discourse. The Times of Israel

He framed chants that Congress would later condemn as genocidal as protected academic speech. At the encampment itself, he described charges of antisemitism as "part of the currency the administration uses to demonize protests like this." The Times of Israel

He faced no professional consequences. He has medical leave. He has tenure. He has the chair named after Herbert Lehman. And he has a son who now sits in Gracie Mansion and hosts Mahmoud Khalil, the deported Columbia activist, for iftar on the anniversary of his detention.

When the New York Times asked Mahmood Mamdani whether his politics had shaped his son's worldview, he demurred: "He's his own person." Mira Nair, his wife and Zohran's mother, immediately disagreed, telling the Times her son had "very much absorbed" his parents' politics. The Times of Israel

The Herbert Lehman Professor of Government shaped the worldview of the man who runs New York City. He conducted teach-ins inside an illegal encampment. He suffered nothing. That is the Columbia story in a single biography.

Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad has been teaching modern Arab politics and history at Columbia for 25 years. He earned his PhD there in 1998 and never left. He holds tenure in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. He has spent that quarter-century building a scholarly framework in which Israel has no legitimate existence and Palestinian violence against Israelis requires no moral accounting.

The record goes back decades. Massad has called Israel "a racist state" and previously drew sustained criticism for comparing Hamas aggression against Israel to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis. Middle East Forum He has described Israel as a "Jewish supremacist and racist state" and argued that "every racist state should be threatened." These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were published, delivered at rallies, and taught in classrooms at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

On October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas murdered 1,200 people at kibbutzim, at a music festival, and in the streets of southern Israeli towns, Massad published a 1,800-word essay in Electronic Intifada. He called the attack "awesome" and "a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance," writing that "the sight of the Palestinian resistance fighters storming Israeli checkpoints separating Gaza from Israel was astounding." Middle East Forum

He did not call it a massacre. He did not acknowledge the dead. He called it a stunning victory and published it under his Columbia affiliation.

Congress convened a hearing. Republican members pressed Columbia President Minouche Shafik on what the university intended to do. Shafik said there were "very complex issues" around firing a tenured professor but acknowledged she would not have approved Massad's tenure if he were applying today. Jewish Insider An investigation was opened. The investigation did not produce a termination. Massad remained on faculty. He continued teaching. His name remained on the university's academic review committee even after Shafik claimed he had been removed from it.

The lesson Massad's case teaches is simple. At Columbia, calling a massacre of Jews "awesome" is a fireable offense in theory and a tenured position in practice.

Mohamed Abdou

Mohamed Abdou was brought to Columbia as a visiting scholar for the spring 2024 semester. He did not have tenure. That distinction matters because it is the only reason his case ended differently from Massad's.

His Columbia bio described him as "a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization." His course was titled "Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition." Middle East Forum Columbia hired him to teach this course to graduate students in the spring semester of the year the encampments happened.

Just days after October 7, Abdou posted on social media: "Yes, I'm with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad." Middle East Forum

He published this on Facebook under his own name while employed by Columbia University. He published it three days after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. He expressed solidarity with three US-designated foreign terrorist organizations in a single sentence.

When congressional Republicans pressed Shafik on Abdou at the April 2024 hearing, she did not hedge the way she had with Massad. She said Abdou "has written and said things that are in support of Hamas, which I find very problematic," and announced he would finish grading his students' papers but would never teach at Columbia again. Jewish Insider

Abdou lost his position. Massad, who called the same attack "awesome," kept his.

The variable was not the content of the statement. It was the institutional protection. Visiting scholars can be removed. Tenured professors cannot, or will not, at Columbia. Abdou said the quiet part out loud without the armor of tenure. The next visiting scholar at Columbia who holds the same views will know to wait.

Katherine Franke

Katherine Franke taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years. She held a chair as the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law. She was founder and faculty director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project. She described herself throughout her career as an "activist academic," and she meant it. She was a BDS supporter, a former board chair of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a vocal defender of the student encampments from the moment they appeared.

In January 2024, she appeared on Democracy Now and made comments about Columbia's joint degree program with Tel Aviv University. She said that Israeli exchange students at Columbia who had recently completed military service "have been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus." The Times of Israel

Two of her colleagues filed a formal discrimination complaint. The complaint went to Columbia's Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. At the April congressional hearing, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik quoted the comment in a sharpened form and asked Shafik whether she agreed those remarks were unacceptable. Shafik said: "Those comments are completely unacceptable and discriminatory." The Times of Israel She said this while Franke was still a tenured member of her faculty and while knowing, according to Franke's own account, that Stefanik's characterization of the remarks was not fully accurate.

The investigation was conducted by an outside law firm. Investigators determined that Franke had violated Columbia's anti-discrimination policy during the Democracy Now interview. She also violated university policies by providing the name of a complainant to a reporter and for social media activity targeting the people who had filed complaints against her. The Times of Israel

There is a further detail that did not receive sufficient coverage. The underlying incident that prompted Franke's remarks, the alleged chemical spraying of pro-Palestinian students by Israeli veterans, was false. The "chemical attack" was fart spray purchased from Amazon. Columbia paid the Jewish student who had been accused $395,000 in a settlement. The Times of Israel

Franke had amplified a false story, attributed it to Israeli military veterans, and used it to cast doubt on whether those students should be on campus at all. The story was fabricated.

Franke retired in January 2025. She described the environment at Columbia as "toxic and hostile." Fifty Columbia law faculty signed a letter demanding an investigation into her treatment. Anadolu Ajansı

The Center for Constitutional Rights issued a statement calling her departure "an egregious attack on both academic freedom and Palestinian rights advocacy."

None of the fifty signatories appear to have addressed the $395,000 settlement paid to the student whose reputation Franke had damaged with a false story.