Once again, Professor Neri Oxman has come to public attention during highly disturbing circumstances. The last time was because it became public knowledge that her workplace, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab, was partly funded by convicted sex offender, paedophile, and alleged sexual blackmailer, multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein. In the course of her tenure, Oxman was to lavish her workplace’s financier with an award, which after being made public she later apologised for. This time, it was after her husband, the billionaire hedge fund owner, Bill Ackman waged a sustained campaign against certain pillars of academia during the Zionist army’s genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians of Gaza.

As the genocide commenced in Gaza, some pro-Palestinian student groups, among them at Harvard University, Ackman’s alma mater, issued a statement denouncing the Apartheid Zionist regime, and rightly announced the October 7 resistance operation out of Gaza was not rooted in some unspoken random act of violence but had historical roots.

The group’s statement correctly noted that “events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to 'open the gates of hell,' and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel's violence.”

Ackman was so enraged by this basic outpouring of solidarity with the downtrodden and dispossessed from Harvard University student groups that he selflessly took it upon himself to retaliate, push back, and eventually declared that CEOs like himself should in effect bar these students from future employment at their companies. He therefore called upon the University to release the names behind the university groups so, “as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” Clearly he wanted to create a blacklist. 

Needless to say, Zionists like Ackman are at the very least clearly concerned with anyone who argues for resistance to Zionist occupation and ethnic cleansing, and that settler-colonialism has historical and colonialist roots. Ackman’s campaign against academia, which he holds partly responsible for student support for the Palestinian cause for liberation, has so far culminated in the sacking of Harvard University President Dr. Claudine Gay. One of the other reasons Gay was sacked besides for allowing students to demonstrate against genocide is because of allegations of plagiarism in her PhD thesis. No sooner had Gay resigned that allegations of plagiarism were levelled at Ackman’s wife, Professor Oxman.

Two months into the current genocide on Gaza, whereupon thousands of women and children had already been killed, Oxman treated her X followers to blather about the ubiquitousness of pain, which according to her social media post, hinders the development of peace or as she says, “there is pain everywhere of the kind that impedes wholesome intensions for healing, hope, peace, and prosperity for all.” As is typical of a Zionist tricknologist, there is no mention of justice for Palestinians, the implementation of United Nations resolutions, or even the end of Apartheid and occupation. But what’s most perversely interesting is that her X post begins with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian peace activist and National independence campaigner. She quotes him as saying a “small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”

One can take an educated guess that Oxman, born to Zionist settler-colonisers in Haifa, is far from familiar with Gandhi’s position on the creation of the Zionist-colonial entity in Palestine. Writing in late 1938, Gandhi was asked his opinion about the “Arab-Jew question in Palestine and the persecution of Jews in Germany”. He clearly wasn’t oblivious to the pain and calamity that European Jewish people were going through in 1930s Europe, but for him, this didn’t necessitate that a solution to their tragedy lies in the colonisation of Palestine or as he says, “the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me.” The “national home for the Jews” was the mealy-mouthed expression used by the British Empire in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to denote creating a Zionist colonial state in Palestine.

Gandhi’s reason is succinct and uncomplicated, “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.” As such, it would be more sensible of European Jewry to adopt the “nobler course” and insist on “just treatment…wherever they are born and bred.” The imposition Gandhi speaks of was militarily enforced by the British Empire. When the Empire issued the Balfour Declaration, the Jewish population was no more than 80 thousand. At the time of Gandhi writing in 1938, it had grown to upwards of 400,000, mostly from Europe. The writing was on the wall for the indigenous Palestinian population. 

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The most interesting aspect of the Mahatma’s essay is that it was written during the British crushing of the Palestinian Arab revolt against settler-colonialism in the late 1930s. The Palestinian Arabs had risen up against the British Empire and its Zionist colonial settlers after all peaceful and democratic avenues had been exhausted. British imperial forces were now in the midst of crushing the indigenous Palestinians to make way for the Zionist state and its attendant ethnic cleansing. But even during this moment, Gandhi wasn’t so much against European Jewish people settling in Palestine, but more the manner it was conducted or as he decries, Jews are entering Palestine “under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb.”

In late 1930s, the Zionist colonial settlers in Palestine were in cahoots with the British Empire. Indeed, they were the Empire’s proteges, and some in the British military were literally training the newly arrived Jewish settlers on how to crush and pacify Palestinians. British soldiers such as Orde Wingate, Humphrey Bedin, and the much-feted Bernard Montgomery played central roles in crushing the Palestinian revolt and simultaneously militarily training the Zionist colonial-settler forces.

Zionists such as Moshe Dagan and Yigal Allon were trained by the British Army during these years. By crushing the indigenous Palestinians, the British Empire was fulfilling the part of the Balfour Declaration which committed to “use their [the Empire's] best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object” i.e. a Jewish national home. According to Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, it was the British imperial forces crushing of the Palestinian leadership and its defence capabilities in the late 1930s that decidedly and ultimately paved the way for the Zionist colonisers takeover of most of Palestine after World War Two. 

Curiously and indeed perversely, Gandhi’s plea is not to end Jewish settlers arriving in Palestine per se. He argues that if European Jews were to seek a solution to their tragic European situation by migrating and settling in Palestine, then it should be done non-violently. They can only “settle in Palestine…by the goodwill of the Arabs” and Jewish settlers should “discard the help of the British bayonet.” Instead, according to Gandhi, the Jewish settlers are “co-shares with the British in despoiling a people [indigenous Palestinians] who have done no wrong to them.”

There are two points that need to be emphasised in Gandhi’s essay. Firstly, Gandhi naturally opposed Britain’s evil colonial Balfour Declaration and its attendant imperial violence. He didn’t think a solution to the European Jewish predicament lies in creating a settler colonial state in Palestine against the wishes of the indigenous population. Secondly, he wished Palestinians had chosen non-violence to agitate against the implementation of the Empire’s Declaration or to use his words the “unwarrantable encroachment upon their country.” One could argue that there is naivety and wishful thinking in Gandhi’s position. A year and a half before Gandhi wrote his piece, the arch-imperialist and white supremacist, Winston Churchill had declared what was in store for the indigenous population of Palestine. He confided to the Empire’s Parliament’s Peel Commission that:

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time...I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia...I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, ‘The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here’. They had not the right, nor had they the power.” 

The British Empire was in the process of making Palestinians powerless to make way for a future akin to the “Red Indians” or “black people of Australia”. That is to be dispossessed, stripped off their land and herded into reservations.

Interestingly, a month before Oxman wrote her Gandhi X post, she and Ackman hosted a dinner for select and elite members of their “World Minds” group wherein former CIA Director, David Petraeus, gave a talk about the Zionist genocide in Gaza.     

In conclusion, Gandhi dedicated his life to free the Indian subcontinent from oppressive British imperial boot, or as he says the “British bayonet”. If Professor Oxman is serious about being inspired by Gandhi’s lead, then she is in a fine position to greatly assist in the dismantling of Zionism in Palestine, which is rooted in the colonialization, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, which in turn are the real obstacles to “healing, hope, peace and prosperity for all.”

On the other hand, Oxman may think her invocation of Gandhi’s “small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission” is to be unashamedly and politically appropriated to refer to her billionaire husband and his 50 billionaire CEO buddies on his WhatsApp group, so they can create a McCarthyite blacklist of pro-Palestinian students who oppose the genocide in Gaza.