SEPTEMBER 26, 2025 | OPINION | By Zara Zafar and Fiona Frankel
At Colorado College, when it comes to politics and war, especially regarding the war crimes in Gaza in particular, there is a common refrain of one not being educated enough. This is not necessarily a baseless claim, especially in this political climate: the Department of Education is currently being dismantled under the Trump administration, and there has been a constant inhibition of opportunities for community growth and pedagogical expansion by the federal government. Higher education is facing daily challenges at the federal and state levels regarding funding. Still, the concept of a lack of knowledge falls short on most college campuses, especially those with Liberal Arts curriculums.
The Political Science department, one of the most popular majors at CC, provides classes on the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Sofia Fenner’s The Arab Left, and a course called Syria’s Civil War. The FemGen department offers courses including Islamic Feminist Thought and LGBTQ+ Movements in the US. The History department offers courses on the history and philosophy of anarchism, while the Religion department teaches on protest and theology. What is the point of learning the material in these classes if you cannot synthesize it to better understand the world and its crises today? And further, to understand what action you can take to address these crises? Histories and theories are not just meant to be absorbed, but also recognized and applied.
Beyond the Palmer and Armstrong classrooms, in the last two years student activist groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, have hosted teach-ins, held screenings such as the 2023 documentary “Israelism,” hung fundraising posters, and distributed informational zines across campus. Colorado College Faculty for Palestine hosted a faculty teach-in last year, where they quoted Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and explained the intersectionality of the cause with radical Black and Indigenous movements in the United States. Last semester, the B-Side Arts Collective screened the 2024 film “No Other Land,” followed by a discussion facilitated by a student panel. The Catalyst has published numerous pieces pertaining to Palestine, including an opinion piece addressing the flaws of Zionist ‘whataboutism,’ an open letter to the CC president and a list of liberation zone demands.
The Abbott Lecture is an annual guest-lecture series that encapsulates the sheer privilege of being a CC student: the privilege of safety, access and learning. In this bubble, we come to terms with reality through narrations rather than experience. We are given trigger warnings and accommodations. We are asked to express our thoughts and opinions. We hear and learn from some of the best in the fields. In 2024, Marxist and feminist political activist Angela Davis visited campus to deliver a lecture titled “Blue Legacies and Black Feminism.” On Monday, Sept. 22, Dr. Nadia Abu El-Haj, a distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights at Columbia University, summarized the dynamics surrounding the intent behind Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In her speech, she characterized Antony Blinken as the “best representative of liberal violence.” In an episode of The Interview by the New York Times, Blinken reflected on his experience negotiating with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters in Tel Aviv to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, five days after the events of Oct. 7, 2023.
This was the starting point of a series of quotations and citations from a variety of sources, including news and media outlets, politicians, scholars and Israeli Defense Ministers. “I’m still quoting,” Abu El-Haj would remind us periodically. She covered every dimension of every discussion on the intent behind the war crimes and genocide in Gaza. This sentence, at first glance, may seem somewhat paradoxical—isn’t it clear? The motive behind genocide is genocide. But unfortunately, to many, it is not. Abu El-Haj broke it down, explaining the weaponization of trauma to justify the intent behind Israel’s actions.
“In what follows, I explore the workings of this trauma imaginary vis-à-vis Oct. 7 and the ensuing genocidal war. And I think about the work that trauma does, most decidedly among Euro-American political, cultural and economic elites in erasing the Israeli state’s intention of genocide,” she began.
The PTSD-battling IDF soldier, the Holocaust tourism, and the right to affective responses of the traumatized subject: Abu El-Haj described not just the depth and scope of the justification of the Israeli annihilation of Gaza, but also the mechanism.
There was a question from the audience following Abu El-Haj’s speech, which spoke to the heavy presence of disinformation across Israel and the deprivation of news Israeli citizens experience pertaining to the genocide and how to overcome these informational barriers. It is true that there is an immense amount of censorship regarding Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, specifically on Israel’s major news channels. Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps, a French-Israeli journalist, went on the New York Times’ The Daily podcast in August to discuss the lack of information reaching Israeli citizens. Elbaz-Phelps described the reactions following a comment she made on Channel 13 in July, simply saying, “this war is also killing a lot of Palestinians in Gaza.” Her words were met with interruptions, her co-anchors stating that they had heard enough, that she shouldn’t worry about Gaza, and generally dismissing her comments.
Elbaz-Phelps attributed these reactions to Israeli trauma following Oct. 7, 2023. Regarding the images coming out of Gaza, of starving children, civilizations decimated by bombs, and aid sites torn apart by desperate refugees, the journalist brushed off Israeli consumption of this media.
“Most of the Israelis do not see that, because the Israeli media has been failing [its] job by not showing what’s happening in Gaza…You almost have no stories, human stories on Israeli TV…mainstream media [has] been silent about it…And you would see Gaza only when you would see destruction from above, kind of to show how IDF is winning. But you wouldn’t see anything that is really human and the suffering of the population.”
After being pressed about the availability of information online via social media, Elbaz-Phelps relented on that aspect, saying that Israelis can access coverage of Gaza on X or Instagram, but that they “cannot bear the suffering of these other people.”
The ignorance of Israelis to the genocide their government is inflicting upon a neighboring population is, and likely always will be, attributed to and excused by trauma. Generational trauma is ingrained into Israeli society through, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein describes in his 2000 book “The Holocaust Industry,” the exploitation and industrialization of the Holocaust and antisemitism. It has resulted in, as Abu El-Haj explained in her lecture, the “perpetuity of victimhood” for Israeli Jews. Accordingly, this utter ignorance has bled into American society as well, influencing the same citizens whose tax dollars are bankrolling this genocide. It is the excuse used by Colorado College students constantly: that they don’t know enough, don’t see enough, and don’t know where to get information to take action.
What can be deduced about the average CC student then? What can be understood about the justification of the intent behind the dissociation and inaction of the average CC student? We will preface this conclusion by saying that in no way do we believe that there is enough being done at CC when it comes to Palestine. However, we think the narrative surrounding intent to be involved adds to this dilemma. There are, albeit not enough, many existing and accessible opportunities to learn, to understand, to engage with; what is missing is the intent to participate. The obligation to care applies to the United States arguably just as much as it does in Israel, as our tax dollars flow towards funding Lockheed Martin, the Iron Dome, and of course, the Israel Defense Forces. Whereas Israelis and the Western world have used trauma to erase the genocidal intentions of Israel against the Palestinian people, Colorado College students have found a parallel excuse in the form of ignorance to validate their cognitive dissonance.