Woman in Love: Martha Minow and Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

2 January 2026

“‘He is not someone you can cajole in any way,’ Martha L. Minow, the current Harvard Law dean, said of Mr. Summers. ‘It’s the merits, evidence, substance. It’s not about charm, it’s not about small talk, it’s ‘Just the facts ma’am,’ and build your case and be unbelievably fair-minded about the other case, because he is going to ask you about the other side.’”

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “At Harvard, Kagan Aimed Sights Higher”, New York Times, 25 May 2010.

“CHANIN: I’d like to start just with some background. There’s a lot to talk about. I’m sure there’ll be many questions online and on-site here.

But tell us just a brief history of your position. Why does it exist? What purpose is it intended to serve?”

Question to Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. Council on Foreign Relations Interview, 24 January 2024.

היא רצתה אותי

אבל אני נמלטתי

כי הים גדול והוא הכל יכול

אז היא מצאה אחר

מסודר ומחזר

הוא פתח סוכנות

והציע לה חסות

אהוד בנאי, רוחות הצפון 1989.

על פי כמות השוטרים עוד מעט תתפוצץ פצצה.

שלמה ארצי, 2002.

Martha Minow is considered in the United States as a prolific academic with progressive liberal tendencies tantamount to the reputation gained by former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Minow, however, has developed, particularly as an administrator, into Justice Breyer’s legacy of ‘moderation’.[1] The profile is familiar to that of the American Jewish experience within the Democratic Party at least since the 1960s. Underscoring civil rights that evolved within the American political, legal, cultural, and academic framework.

Minow’s liberalism focused on expanding rights in the local context, adhering to the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. She has constantly considered the defining issue of race yet failed to reach the threshold set by Cornel West’s audacity, Charles Ogletree’s historicity, Spike Lee’s creativity, and Angela Davis’s nobility.

Bader–Ginsburg's approach to Zionism and Israel is unclear,[2] except possibly through her strong ties to American University Law Professor Herman Schwartz, who has a misguided understanding of Israel’s governance and politics.[3] Schwartz may have been informed by the spirit of Pnina Lahav’s writings, an Israeli–American legal historian. Lahav narrates a certain history depicting the characters of two American Jewish figures who realized the ‘Zionist dream’, former Prime Minister Golda Meir and Supreme Court Judge Shimon Agranat. She is the first Israeli now American academic that evoked the field of history into legal research.

Lahav’s scholarship undoubtedly appeals to Minow’s circle of epistemology, which includes the ‘consensus builder’ Elena Kagan[4] in addition to the enraged economist Summers.[5] Other than fetish empowerment of the bewildered Noah Feldman[6] and the extraordinary Gabriella Blum,[7], Minow’s attitude towards Israel remains vague. It can be categorized as unexpressed ordinary American Jewish sympathy with the Jewish State (JS) in line with Barbara Streisand’s, without projecting the vulgarity of Jerry Seinfeld, the perfect performer of a farce of Harvard’s former President.

Minow mildly absorbed the critique of the American left-oriented Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement represented by her colleagues Duncan Kennedy, Roberto Unger, and, to a certain extent, Morton Horwitz. The CLS produced other intellectual trends that utilised interdisciplinary methodology, underscored identities, considered personal experiences, and engaged in constant challenges to an unfair political and social order.

In Israel, Lahav is considered a progressive part of the country’s elusive rights model that has been attributed to Justices who strictly adhered to Mapai’s ideology and to Ben Gurion personally. Contrary to the fundamental legal indoctrinations of Amnon Rubenstein, Asa Kasher’s military justifications, Fania Oz’s Germanism 'doctrine', and Chaim Gans’s dubious philosophical abstractions, the lack of judicial constitutional tradition has been continuous since Israel’s original sin and its military regime imposed immediately after against non-externally ethnically cleansed Palestinians. It covers Haim Cohen who oversaw the property expropriation and other laws as Attorney General in the early 1950s that laid the foundation for Zionism’s apartheid maintaining its coloniality also by way of jurisprudence, through Agranat’s intense American Zionism on the bench in the 1960s ignoring Israel’s actuality, Barak’s judicial maneuvers not confined to the Kahan Commission, and 1980s Zamir’s authorization of establishing settlements in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories.

What distinguishes Israel’s faint civil and human rights individual activism, of which Minow’s mentee Gabriella Blum has never been a member, is their entrenched belief in Zionism that often produces unpersuasive domesticated international law perceptions and arguments, deranged historical comprehensions, and frivolous comparative research that prevent the formation of any genuine collaboration or even lenient camaraderie. Despite its preposterous international law, human rights, and civil rights violations, and in contrast to Lahav’s developmental contentions and findings, Israel’s society has never produced a meaningful human rights organization, let alone a civil rights movement. As to the traditions of anti-war, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism, the concepts are unfamiliar even to the purported ‘radical left’ of Israelis who constantly obviate opening their country’s ‘Pandora's box’.

Since the inception of Israel, Palestine and Palestinians have been non-existent in the American political and academic imagination and scholarship. Zionism’s unsubstantiated and unjust propagation for sovereignty in Palestine and Israel’s displacing and dispossessing formation, as well as its subsequent grave injustices, were part of American willful ignorance promoted by influential lobbying groups starting with Justice Lewis Brandeis[8] to today’s draconian domestic[9] and international policies.[10] Chaim Weizmann and Ben Gurion, to Golda Meir, Peres, Rabin, Barak, and Netanyahu have all been received graciously by American presidents and Congress that either admired Israel or were under the spell of its unopposed poking promotion.[11] United States local and foreign policy regularly disregarded Israel’s evil deeds in traditional self-assuring diplomacy, except for Eisenhower's withdrawal order to Ben Gurion in 1956[12] after the tripartite aggression against Egypt[13] and James Baker’s feeble messages to Shamir about settlements and guarantees.

Israel’s coloniality and apartheid[14] originated from the nefarious 1917 British Balfour Declaration that captured the centrality of Zionism to that country’s politics, which instructs its unpalatable reciting royalty. Throughout Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the mainstream British political establishment, the foreign service, and the horror-generating military joined the United States in aiding and abetting Israel’s savagery.[15] Defensless civilian population and ill-equipped but fearless resistance guided by the justness of their cause and inspired by God’s faith confronted remorseless cowardice brutality that sought and obtained the endorsement of buttressing imperial geopolitics.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Walid Khalidi, Edward Said,[16] and Rashid Khalidi tried heroically to ameliorate the Palestine ignorance condition in the limited academic field, steadily realizing intellectual and moral gains frustrated in the national political arena and international relations by America’s capitulation to powerful interest groups parroting Israel’s claims. AIPAC, JINSA, and lately also the hideously inadequate Soros heir have had hegemonic input into crucial decisions made by presidents of both parties, in Congress, and within the security establishment. This influence has accelerated the intolerable, contemptible, and international law-violating security cooperation between American intelligence agencies and their Israeli counterparts, particularly the CIA and the Mossad.[17]

Multidimensional American Jewish identity faced its difficulties as an immigrant one and managed throughout the years to secure a well-established location in the mainstream American political and cultural network to the level of unchallengable dominance. Emotional affinity with Israel has been routine that demanded the demonization of its adversaries, often by strenuous invocation of historic victimization of Jews, blaming Israel’s opponents, and ignoring Zionism’s and Israel’s glaring pitfalls.[18]

The Holocaust became a “real issue” in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with the emergence of the Palestine cause on the international stage and on American campuses. Israel began to teach about it in schools in 1979. Capturing Eichmann and his trial are most probably Cold War era spectacle statecraft between the CIA, West German intelligence services, and Israel’s. The latter two established their ties in 1956, long before the commencement of their formal relations in 1965. Israel’s accusatorial terrorism[19], among other atrocities, is an accepted behavior by political and academic American Jewish elites who often find an incredulous alibi in their government’s travesties, September 2001 being one of them. The colossal event perpetuated Russia and energy as strategic objectives, galvanizing the ‘West’s’ societal illusions. The need to maintain EUCOM, CENTCOM, and their clogging agencies relevant required ongoing military engagement, covert tensions, and a framed cultural adversary neglecting real change where it is necessary, professed as an aggressive protective ‘alliance’ with Saudi Arabia.

Romanticizing Zionism at Harvard began long before Al Gore.[20]Martin Peretz’s triumphalist preaching attributed to Jewish accomplishment a leading role in shaping the important university.[21]Indeed, Harvard is a primary setting for misunderstanding Palestine and Palestinians with or without Alan Dershowitz. Infuriated Summers is an activist against the presence of Palestinian research and advocacy on American campuses before Israel’s genocide in Gaza,[22]a stance echoed in a more nuanced methodology by former Dean of Yale Law School Robert Post.[23] Summers recently joined the effort to oust Dr. Mary T. Basset, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, because of her work that ‘fomented antisemitism’.[24]Harvard’s opposition to and negotiation with the Trump administration under Alan Garber’s leadership provided the gestures that the vindictive administration requested, including regarding Palestine.[25]

It is not surprising that Harvard was a central thinking hub that could not grasp the act of resistance from Gaza on 7 October 2023, an occupied and besieged area of Palestine, systematically and sadistically abused by Israel for decades.[26] Israel’s proponents at Harvard and other American academic institutions echoed its falsehoods about raping of women, blurred the distinction between civilians and military personnel who were killed or captured that day, and denied the censored fact by Israel’s government and military that Israel targeted and killed at least most of the Israeli civilians that day, according to existing military procedure. The resistance operation, on the other hand, is comfortably anchored in law and morality. Harvard’s ontology, its donation paradigm, and Israel-centered political hype at Congress secured the resignation of the Ivy League’s President Claudine Gay a few months into Israel’s genocide.

Martha Minow’s silence on Palestine in general, and during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, aided militarily and shielded internationally by an American administration of her choosing, is emblematic of the character of the American legal scholar. She also crystallizes what is known in American rights discourse as the Israel exception.[27] Her survey of certain transformative oppressions while hurdling Palestine, coupled with fraternity bondage with Blum, reveals a disturbed belief in one of Zionism’s awkward postulations that it forms a ‘light unto the nations’.

But Minow’s muteness ought to be considered as a blessing. After all, an intellectual of her stature who would positively defend Israel might constitute a more serious challenge to the campaign of Palestine liberation. Nevertheless, the opportunity to do so endures. Minow and her fellows should be thankful for their many writings and the stimulating intellectual environment that Harvard has to offer. They are at the right place at the appropriate time, precisely the way they were. 

 Lawrence Summers (right) and Alan Dershowitz (left). Source: Boston Globe, 11 July 2019.

Deborah Lipstadt. Source: Times of Israel, 30 July 2021.

From left to right: Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess, Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault, FBI Director Christopher Wray, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Director-General of Security and Chief Executive Andrew Hampton, and MI5 Director General Ken McCallum pose for a group photo. Source: FBI website, 16 October 2023.

[1] See Adam Liptack, “Justice Breyer’s legacy: a liberal who rejected labels like ‘liberal’”, New York Times, 26 January 2022; Stephen Breyer, “Choosing Pragmatism Over Textualism”, New York Review of Books, 23 May 2024.  

[2] See Jacob Rader Marcus, “Zionism and the American Jew”, 2(3) The American Scholar, pp.279-292 (1933).

[3] Herman Schwartz initiated a civil rights scholarship administered by the American Jewish Zionist organization New Israel Fund (NIF). Hikmah’s originator participated in this program in 1998 - 1999, only to become more aware of American society. He also increased his animosity towards Zionism. NIF has been funding about half of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s annual budget for decades, while most of the remaining half is derived from other foreign donors.   

[4] Jason Zengerle, “Judging Kagan”, New York Magazine, 30 October 2009.

[5] See, Sean Coughlin, “West Recounts Conflict with Summers”, The Harvard Crimson, 10 October 2002; William Marra et al, “Lack of Confidence”, The Harvard Crimson, 16 March 2005; Sam Sutton, “Larry Summers steps down from Open AI”, Politico, 19 November 2025; James Franey, “Larry Summers forced out of consulting gig at ‘woke’ hedge fund DE Shaw after Jeffrey Epstein scandal”, New York Post, 21 November 2025.   

[6] Jewish Telegraph Agency, “Harvard Law School dean, initiator of Israeli program, to step down”, Times of Israel, 6 January 2017.

[7] Sophy Bishop, “In chair lecture, Blum cuts through the ‘fog of victory’”, Harvard Law Today, 19 April 2012.

[8] Stuart Geller, “Brandeis’s role in Balfour”, Jerusalem Post, 2 November 2017; Allon Gal, “In Search of a New Zion: New Light on Brandeis’ Road to Zionism”, 68(1) American Jewish History, pp.19-31 (1978); Richard Ned Lebow, “Woodrow Wilson and the Balfour Declaration”, 40(4) Journal of Modern History, pp.501-523 (1968).

[9] Saree Makdisi, “Trump’s War on the Palestine Movement is Something Entirely New”, The Nation, 17 April 2025.

[10] Kanishka Singh, “Israel consulted US on its strike in Gaza, White House told Fox News”, Reuters, 18 March 2025.

[11] See, for example, “A welcome to Ben-Gurion”, New York Times, 4 May 1951; Martha Wenger, “US Aid to Israel”, MERIP, 4 May 1990.

[12] Homer Bigart, “Ben Gurion Tells of Withdrawals”, New York Times, 9 November 1956.

[13] Avi Shlaim, “The Protocol of Sèvres, 1956: Anatomy of a War Plot”, 73(3) International Affairs, pp.509-530 (1997). The events that led to the establishment of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and its functioning could be considered a multipronged attack against Lebanon and Syria by the ugly aspect of American foreign policy and its allies in NATO and the Five Eyes, enjoying traditional Lebanese political immaturity and third-world economic dependency. U.S. forces committed the Hariri assassination, and Israel perpetrated the other political assassinations. One indicative recent example of America’s explosive foreign policy is in Venezuela: Julian Barnes et al, “Trump Administration Authorizes Covert C.I.A. Action in Venezuela”, New York Times, 15 October 2025; “Oil facility hit by large explosion in Venezuela”, HazardEx, 21 November 2025. Israel’s political assassinations in Lebanon have a long history, directed at all sides during the country’s civil war, including its allies. See Ramona Wadi, “What Ghassan Kanafani’s writing on the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle tells us about Gaza’s resistance today”, Mondoweiss, 12 April 2025; Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, Statement on the Murder of Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon, 18 September 1982, (“"They were thwarted in this effort by the Israeli occupation that took place beginning on Wednesday. We strongly opposed Israel's move into west Beirut following the assassination of President-elect Gemayel...Israel, by yesterday in military control of Beirut, claimed that its moves would prevent the kind of tragedy which has now occurred."); Loren Jenkins, “Embattled U.S. Policy in Lebanon Banked Heavily on Slain Gemayel”, Washington Post, 1 October 1982 (“"Amin Gemayel thus far has proven unable to command his dead brother's vengeful troops, who have vowed to remain an independent force in the country to ensure the execution of the policies of their mentor. "). These assertions alone trample the process and conclusions of the Israeli Kahan Commission that absolved Israel’s government, military, and Mossad of direct responsibility for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres. See also Daniel Sobelman, “Anti–Syria Lebanese Group Says It Killed Former Militia Leader”, Haaretz, 24 January 2002; Daniel Sobelman, “Lebanon Solidly Blames Israel for Elie Hobeika Murder”, Haaretz, 27 January 2002.  Lebanon Tribunal’s foreign officials from NATO and Five Eye countries, in addition to securing a job opportunity, are undoubtedly aware of America’s vicious foreign policy and their countries’ geopolitical location in its orbit. They include Darryl Mundis (US, Prosecution and subsequently Registrar); Detlev Mehlis (Germany, investigator); Daniel Bellemare (Canada, investigator and subsequently Prosecutor); Norman Farrell (Canada, Prosecutor); David Re (Australia, Judge); and David Baragwanath (New Zealand, Judge). France contributed an investigator and Britain supplied the Tribunal with an investigator and a Deputy Prosecutor. See “‘Five Eyes’ intelligence leaders warn”, 60 Minutes – CBS, 22 October 2023. Given U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and its backing of Israel, the fact that American embassies are not being protested throughout the region betrays basic human, Arab, and Muslim values.  

[14] See, for example, P.W. Wilson, “Dr. Weizmann Sees Zionism Advancing”, New York Times, 2 July 1933.

[15] Major forces in the Labour and Conservative parties expressed support for Israel’s heinous brutality. See, most recently, Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ speech to Labour Friends of Israel’s 2025 Annual Lunch, 8 December 2025.

[16] Edward Said, “The Burdens of Interpretation and the Question of Palestine”, 16(1) Journal of Palestine Studies, pp.29-37 (1986).

[17] See, for example, Wolf Blitzer, “Mossad-CIA Ties Legacy of Casey and Angleton”, Wall Street Journal, 22 May 1987; Ephraim Kahana, “Mossad-CIA Cooperation”, 14(3) International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, pp.409-420 (2001); Jennifer Szalai, “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations”, New York Times, 31 January 2018.

[18] See Jacob Magid, “Biden to nominate Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt as US antisemitism envoy”, Times of Israel, 30 July 2021; Lauren Markoe, “Deborah Lipstadt, exiting as US antisemitism envoy, is hoping for the best under Trump”, Times of Israel, 17 January 2025; Deborah Lipstadt, “Why I Won’t Teach at Columbia”, The Free Press, 2 March 2025.

[19] James Feron, “Jerusalem Blast Kills 11, Hurts 50”, New York Times, 23 November 1968; James Feron, “Bomb Explosion in Jerusalem’s Largest Supermarket Kills 2, Injures 9”, New York Times, 22 February 1969; Alan Cowell, “3 Bombers in Suicide Attack Kill 4 on Jerusalem Street in Another Blow to Peace”, New York Times, 5 September 1997.

[20] See Kemper Fullerton, “Zionism”, 10(4) Harvard Theological Review, pp.313-335 (1917).

[21] Martin Peretz, “Christians and Jews at Harvard”, Tablet, 11 July 2023.

[22] Luke Tress, “‘disrespectful of Jews’: 70 Harvard faculty reject student paper’s BDS endorsement’”, Times of Israel, 9 May 2022.

[23] Robert Post, “There is no 1^st Amendment right to speak on a college campus”, Vox, 31 December 2017.

[24] Eric Reinhart, "A Harvard scholar’s ouster exposes a crisis of institutional integrity", The Guardian, 17 December 2025.

[25] See Hugo Chiasson et al, “Garber Granted an ‘Open–Ended Runaway’ with Term Extension”, The Harvard Crimson, 17 December 2025; Barry Trachenberg et al, “Harvard appears to think all Jews support Israel. That is discriminatory”, The Guardian, 12 June 2025.

[26] “American Diplomats Are Said to Report Israeli Use of Torture”, New York Times, 7 February 1979; Joel Brinkley, “Killings of Palestinians Dipped in June”, New York Times, 3 July 1990; James Bennet, “Leader of Hamas Killed by Missile in Israeli Strike”, New York Times, 22 March 2004; Greg Myre, “Leader of Hamas Killed by Israel in Missile Attack”, New York Times, 18 April 2004; Human Rights Watch, Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip, October 2004; Amnesty International, Under the rubble: House demolitions and destruction of land and property, May 2004; Taghreed El-Khodary et al, “Israeli Shells Kill 40 at Gaza U.N. School”, New York Times, 6 January 2009; “Israel rejects blame for deaths, damage to U.N. facilities in Gaza”, CNN, 5 May 2009; Peter Beamount et al, “Gaza’s bloodiest day as at least 100 Palestinians are killed”, The Guardian, 20 July 2014; Hazem Balousha et al, “The U.N. once predicted Gaza would be ‘uninhabitable’ by 2020. Two million people still live there”, Washington Post, 2 January 2020; Hazem Balousha et al, “Israel – Gaza conflict: 200 Palestinians killed in a week, say officials”, The Independent, 17 May 2021.

[27] See Robert Bernstein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Middle East”, New York Times, 19 October 2009; Michael Walzer, “The Legal Codes of Ancient Israel”, 36 Nomos, pp.101-119 (1994).