Opinion | The Right Way to Fight Anti-Zionism

Cornell President Mike Kotlikoff, in contrast to many other university and college leaders, knows how to cut to the heart of an issue. His approach was on display last week when he rejected two BDS-inspired resolutions passed by the Cornell Student Governance Assembly—the first calling for the termination of Cornell’s partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the second seeking to condemn the university for having hosted former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni at a university-wide panel discussion in March entitled “Pathways to Peace,” one that also featured former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad and several former U.S. ambassadors. 

These days, when manifestations of antisemitism often come cloaked in a veneer of anti-Israel arguments, and when dealing with them requires clarity, decisiveness and the willingness to explain one’s actions, Kotlikoff’s actions deserve attention beyond Cornell. His approach demonstrates that it’s possible, through clear thinking, to lay out the barrier between acceptable and hateful speech.

I teach at Cornell, and I know from speaking with my students that many of them were rattled by these resolutions. They saw them as potential inroads by the BDS movement and were afraid that they might spark and legitimize a new round of anti-Israel activities and demonstrations on campus. They were also concerned that the Cornell administration might engage with the resolutions’ proponents or try to placate them by considering their demands. They need not have worried. 

The rejection of the resolutions did not come out of nowhere. Kotlikoff had expressed reservations about a class being offered on “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” and had canceled an invitation issued last year by the student organizers of Slope Day, a campus-wide end-of-semester celebration, to the stridently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist singer Kehlani. “While any artist has the right in our country to express hateful views,” he explained in a statement, “Slope Day is about uniting our community, not dividing it.”

Kotlikoff has made sure that controversial personalities can be heard at Cornell, ranging from the conservative commentator and author Ann Coulter to the Marxist political activist and theorist Angela Davis. “What is key to our commitment to open inquiry is ensuring that all voices—from every point on the political spectrum—can be heard,” he wrote last year in The New York Times. But this commitment to a full and free exchange of ideas has guardrails. Confronted with attempted protests at the Pathways to Peace event, he noted that “the few students and staff members who had come only to disrupt were warned, warned again and then swiftly removed. They now face university discipline.”

The specifics of the two resolutions are worth examining. First, the demand to sever ties with the Technion. Cornell partnered with the Technion in 2011 to establish Cornell Tech in New York City as a graduate school for technology, engineering and applied sciences. Located on Roosevelt Island midway between Manhattan and Queens, this campus is engaged in a broad range of cutting-edge AI, health tech, urban tech, and other interdisciplinary technological research. By now, more than 2,700 students have been educated there.

The crux of the anti-Technion resolution was that the Israeli university’s purported “role as a major research and development institution for the Israeli military” rendered it complicit “in genocide, apartheid, or grave human rights violations,” that Cornell’s partnership with the Technion was consequently “inconsistent with Cornell University’s stated educational mission, ethical commitments, and core values” and that Cornell should “immediately terminate its institutional partnership with the Technion.”

Rather than dismissing the resolution with a terse, one-sentence rejection, Kotlikoff set forth his reasoning in detail. The resolution, he wrote, “fundamentally conflicts with Cornell’s principles of academic collaboration and our core commitment to academic freedom…Severing our relationship with the Technion—or with any entity affiliated with governments, institutions, or enterprises with which some of our community members disagree—as a statement of political protest, would not only hinder our research, teaching, and public engagement; it would imperil our academic principles.”  

Cornell, he pointed out, has “159 active agreements with institutions in 59 nations and regions; all of these institutions have some government affiliation, and many conduct research with military and security applications.” In addition, “Cornell also has relationships with institutions in countries whose governments have been accused of human rights violations—as our own has been.” And yet “only our partnership with an Israeli institution is targeted for erasure. The political bias evident in this selective approach is deeply disturbing, and the resolution is incompatible with both the Student Assembly’s purpose and Cornell University’s core values.”

Similarly, in vetoing the Tzipi Livni resolution that accused Livni of having been “implicated in war crimes or crimes against humanity” in a 2008-2009 military conflict in Gaza, Kotlikoff made clear why he believed the Pathways to Peace event “fell firmly within the bounds of protected speech at Cornell.”

“Exposure to controversial ideas and individuals,” he wrote, “does not ‘create a hostile and coercive academic environment.’ Neither does inviting former politicians to discuss issues within their expertise constitute exposing students, in the words of this resolution, to ‘state propaganda and moral revisionism rather than rigorous, ethical inquiry.’” 

Kotlikoff also addressed the inherent anti-Israel hypocrisy at the heart of the resolution:

“Rigorous inquiry requires exploring an issue from all sides, without a predetermined conclusion. Yet this resolution, although partially phrased in generalities, objects on ideological grounds to even exposing Cornell students, in a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the perspective of a former Israeli Foreign Minister. Here I must note that this resolution includes not only logical fallacies and unsubstantiated assertions, but also clear indications of political bias.”

The Cornell Tech and Livni resolutions were meant to disparage and ostracize Israel qua Israel as a pariah nation. Of course, neither Cornell Tech nor Tzipi Livni is in any way associated or identified with the extremist policies of the present Israeli government. On the contrary, Livni has long been one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most outspoken opponents, and in August 2025 Technion President Uri Sivan was one of five Israeli university presidents who called on Netanyahu “to instruct the IDF and other security forces to intensify efforts to address the severe hunger crisis currently afflicting the Gaza Strip, regardless of the heavy responsibility borne by Hamas and other culpable parties.” 

At a time when anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiments are surging nationwide on both extremes of the political spectrum, with far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorists such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Joe Kent seemingly on the same page as far-left Democratic Representatives Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Kotlikoff’s repudiation of these ill-conceived resolutions is a sign of academic, intellectual and moral clarity and integrity. The struggle over hateful speech on campuses has mostly disappeared from the headlines but continues to fester. Going forward, this is the way to manage anti-Zionism and antisemitism in academe. 

Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress. His most recent book is Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz.