On October 7, just hours after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered some 1,400 Jews — including women, children, and 260 college-age kids who were dancing at a music festival for peace — Zareena Grewal (a professor in the ethnicity, race, and migration program and the American studies department at Yale College) had this to say on social media: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” There’s already a petition seeking Grewal’s termination that’s been making its way around the Yale alumni community (of which I’m a proud member). But that petition — which focuses mainly (and rightly) on Grewal’s support for the gruesome murders of toddlers and octogenarians — misses a more obvious point: Grewal is just wrong on the law and the facts.
Grewal’s underlying premise, after all, is that the Israelis who were butchered on October 7 were interlopers (“occupiers,” to use the fashionable term), living in some illegal settlement on Arab lands. But the people who were slaughtered were not settlers (and, even if they were, they weren’t legitimate military targets under any legal regime I’m aware of). On the contrary, under international law, they had just as much right to be where they were as an American does in New York City.
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