Duke University Press Is an Anti-Israel Defamation Machine

In 2024, the Critical Times journal, a Duke publication, printed Layal Ftouni’s article that concluded, “For a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

In April of 2025, the South Atlantic Quarterly, another Duke publication, carried an anonymous article that similarly concluded, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) explains:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an antisemitic slogan commonly featured in anti-Israel campaigns and chanted at demonstrations.

This rallying cry has long been used by anti-Israel voices, including supporters of terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], which seek Israel’s destruction through violent means. It is fundamentally a call for a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, territory that includes the State of Israel, which would mean the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.

A doctor at the Duke School of Medicine, alarmed by these publications, told me these Duke Press articles are a form of academic support for terrorism.

In addition to calling for the destruction of Israel, the 2025 article is attributed to anonymous authors. Duke Press has essentially concealed this “scholarship” so the public can’t see who is calling for the destruction of Israel. Would Duke Press ever publish an anonymous article — or any article — calling for the violent destruction of the Palestinian-controlled territories? I highly doubt it.

The Ftouni article states: “I would like to thank the editorial team, Samera Esmeir, Susana Draper, and Ramsey McGlazer.”

All three editors are anti-Israel activists. Esmeir signed a letter “calling on scholars and librarians within Middle East studies to boycott Israeli academic institutions.” Draper and McGlazer signed a letter titled “Academics Boycott Columbia University,” stating, “We endorse and reiterate the demands of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment: divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine.”

Judith Butler is a member of the Critical Times Executive Editorial Board. Butler outraged many when, according to The JC, she publicly described the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led pogrom — in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered and many others were taken hostage and sexually assaulted — as “an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack.”

In a 2023 Duke Press book, The Cunning of Gender Violence, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes:

Israeli ideology treats the colonized Palestinians as a demographic threat to be eliminated. Andrea Smith (2003) writes in her work on the sexual colonization of native peoples that the native Other is rendered “sexually violable and ‘rapeable’” within the framework of colonialism. The treatment of schoolgirls within the Israeli biopolitical colonial regime similarly can be read as constructing them not just as disposable but also penetrable ‘Others,’ especially through the use of guns.

She adds, Israelis “carry their rifles as an extension of phallic power.”

The language clearly portrays Israelis as sexual predators or sexual monsters. Given the longstanding perceived connection between Jewish people worldwide and Israel, this is even more problematic.

The book is part of a Duke Press series. The series editors are Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman.

Grewal and Kaplan both pledged in 2021 to promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel “in the classroom and on campus.”

All three editors signed a “Scholars Against the War on Palestine” 2023 letter calling for a “permanent ceasefire now,” stating, “We stand with Palestinians everywhere.” The letter relentlessly attacked Israel and did not mention — a single time — Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack, or the hundreds of hostages being held at the time by Hamas-led terrorists. Some of these hostages remain today in Gaza in horrendous conditions. The words “Hamas” and “hostages” did not even appear one time in the letter.

Such severe anti-Israel bias helps explain how Duke University Press apparently found no problem with a journal article stating that Israelis view Palestinians as rapeable.

In 2024, the Transgender Studies Quarterly journal, a Duke Press publication, published an article in which the authors explain, “the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) [are] referred to by resistance movements as the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF).” The authors then immediately used the term “IOF” twice in the column. For example, the authors discuss what they call “an IOF missile ostensibly on its way to destroy lives in Gaza.”

This article makes it clear that Duke University Press is being used as part of the “resistance movement” against Israel.

Duke University Press has a long history of publishing antisemitic works. For example, “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability” by Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar, published in 2017, updated blood libels against the Jewish people. She states Israel specifically targets Palestinian children to maim them and then profit from their incurred disabilities. Like other Duke University Press authors, she compares Israelis to Nazis.

In 2018, I reported that seven members of the Duke University Press Editorial Advisory Board signed initiatives related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

The Duke University Press website explains that during the peer review process, the publisher “performs an intellectual gatekeeping function, ensuring that only scholarship of the highest quality receives the imprimatur of Duke University.”

The Duke University Press peer review process is apparently a colossal failure that puts hateful, antisemitic content into the world, year after year after year.

Duke University Press is functioning at times more as an advocacy organization for promoting anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian positions than as a scholarly publisher. Perhaps Duke Press should change its name to “The Palestinian Point of View Publishing House.”

Peter Reitzes writes about issues related to antisemitism and Israel.

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