A Spiral of Silence

How Academia Enforces Orthodoxy

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one point: Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Not a week has passed without the publication of an open letter from academics—often amassing hundreds or even thousands of signatures within days—denouncing Israel in the strongest possible terms. Across Europe, dozens of universities have now severed ties with Israeli institutions, citing alleged complicity in genocide—or at the very least, systematic war crimes—through connections with the military. In August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) adopted a resolution that appeared to clinch the case once and for all: yes, the Jewish state is guilty of the “crime of crimes.”

In reality, the accusation of genocide is as obscene as it is absurd, as I argued at length in an essay for Quillette. Netanyahu and his far-right cronies may be guilty of many things, but there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Israeli army intends to exterminate the Gazan population, and abundant evidence to the contrary. The eagerness of Western intellectuals to nonetheless accuse Israel of the “crime of crimes” continues to astonish me, as does their blindness to Hamas’s cynical war tactics and the extremely difficult circumstances under which Israel aimed to achieve its legitimate war goals of defeating Hamas and bringing back the hostages. In my latest book (The Betrayal of Enlightenment), I trace this reflex to a postcolonial ideology that casts the West as perpetual oppressor and anti-Western forces as inherently virtuous victims.

A manufactured consensus

And yet, there are clear indications that this supposed academic consensus was artificially contrived, a product of intense social pressure, ideological hectoring, and a “spiral of silence.” The IAGS resolution, for example, is not grounded in any original research conducted by the organization and offers little substantive argumentation. It reads more like a ritual incantation or declaration of faith than a scientific document.

In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the United States. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of signatories in the U.S., but only a handful in Europe—primarily in Germany and around a single London-based center for antisemitism research. In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on the Gaza war has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, the rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my views on Israel, a matter I detailed in Quillette together with my friend and fellow cancellee, the biologist Jerry Coyne.

A spiral of silence

And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarized as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet—I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel, preferably in the strongest possible terms, has become so intense that many dissidents no longer dare to speak out. After a number of such discreet messages of support, I began to grow annoyed. To the outside world, it appeared as if I was the only academic rejecting the official narrative—but in reality, many others agreed with me.

This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent. As Steven Pinker notes in his fascinating new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…, this dynamic can take hold even within institutions ostensibly committed to pursuing truth and following the evidence wherever it leads:

When people falsify their public opinions, that in turn can create a “spiral of silence” resulting in pluralistic ignorance: the combination of private knowledge and common misconception in which everyone thinks that everyone else believes something, but no one believes it.

The classic illustration of this dynamic is the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, in which a crowd sustains the illusion that everyone thinks the emperor is magnificently dressed because each person believes they are the only ones to believe otherwise—until a child, free of social inhibition, blurts out that the emperor is stark naked and everyone bursts into laughter.

In the spirit of the fable, I wanted to see whether there was a way to break the spell. What if people could anonymously explain why they believed the emperor was naked, without exposing themselves to social or professional risk? To test this, I collected anonymous testimonies from academics with dissenting views on Israel and Gaza, by putting out a call on X in Dutch. The testimonies that landed in my inbox were both sobering and chilling.

Shut up or else

A senior lecturer at a Dutch university writes: “I’m afraid to share my thoughts freely with my colleagues and feel restricted in my freedom to speak openly about this.” A philosophy professor describes academic debate on the war in Gaza as effectively “impossible”: “Critical voices are silenced through exclusion, dismissal, and sometimes even violence. In such circumstances, I don’t feel compelled to express my critical thoughts openly.” Another Dutch lecturer admits bluntly: “I certainly keep my mouth shut about my views to my colleagues.”

A colleague at my own faculty calls the accusation of genocide “sickening” and a form of “cynical manipulation,” yet she is terrified of speaking out. She avoids the topic in conversations with colleagues and students, confessing to “self-censorship” to protect herself. Another academic explains why: after signing a petition opposing the anti-Israel boycott, he was “shunned for weeks by colleagues in our department.” Yet another professor received a warning “to be careful what I say around certain colleagues.” In today’s academic climate, speaking out in support of Israel is widely regarded as tantamount to “academic suicide.”

Among the testimonies are also voices with the relevant expertise, rarely heard in mainstream media. A professor of military law stresses that “extreme caution is required” on the question of genocide and warns against “jumping to conclusions.” Some actors, he notes, “automatically assimilate the conduct of hostilities with acts of genocide, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me.” A doctor of law and former advisor to the International Court of Justice, who has pored over previous genocide dossiers for many years, writes in a lengthy email: “I am not convinced that Israel is committing genocide, but I am currently raising capital and will not risk taking this position publicly.”

Dissenting opinions can be found even at the highest levels of academic institutions. A vice-chancellor of a Belgian university observes: “The Gaza mania that is currently prevailing seems to me a collective madness. The call to declare what Israel is doing a genocide is in line with this.” Yet in official communications, universities often strike a different tone, shaping and constraining the debate. A Ghent academic notes that the election of our new rector Petra De Sutter—who is strongly anti-Israel—further worsened the atmosphere: “I saw this tendency strengthen following the rector elections. Either you were outspoken, or else you were better off keeping quiet. The election result and the political convictions of the new rector have reinforced their ideology.”

A Jewish professor who does speak out about Israel notes that not everyone enjoys the protection of tenure: “I know many young scientists with dissenting opinions, but most of them don’t dare express them. They are rightly concerned about their careers. Without tenure, they are in a precarious position. The social and professional isolation is very real.” Since making her public statements, she has stopped receiving invitations for book chapters, workshops, and conferences.

Another lecturer’s testimony illustrates how subtle yet pervasive the professional and social repercussions can be, even for tenured staff: “I stopped reposting and commenting about Israel on X after noticing that my university suddenly stopped sharing any of my achievements. While colleagues were receiving retweets and links to their projects, mine went unnoticed, whereas this had never happened before.” The pressure extended to the social realm, with colleagues unfollowing him or no longer responding to messages. Ultimately, he gave up the fight for family-related reasons: “The decisive factor came when my wife asked me to leave the fight to others. We simply cannot afford to lose our jobs.” Several colleagues describe struggling with guilt for remaining silent, scolding themselves as “cowards” or “sell-outs.”

Not all the academics who testified necessarily agree with my position on every point, but some are even more resolute in their pro-Israel stance than I am. For example, a Dutch scholar states that the IDF “must be considered one of the most humane armies in world history on all counts,” citing its systematic pre-attack warnings and the extreme precision of its strikes—a claim I would hesitate to endorse.

Antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Several colleagues explicitly argue that the academic hostility towards Israel stems from antisemitism. A Dutch professor of philosophy argues that “the excessive attention—obsession, even—with Gaza is inherently antisemitic, because the same scrutiny is rarely applied to other complex conflicts in which Jews are not the perpetrators.” Another professor observes that “academic discourse is increasingly degenerating into gratuitous Jew-hatred.” A Belgian professor at a French university is often reminded of his Jewish mentor, who fled Baghdad after the pogroms: “That the anti-Israel mob, composed mainly of white and extremely privileged youth, portrays him as a ‘white settler’ and seeks to exclude him and his fellow survivors from all international forums fills me with incredible anger and frustration.”

A Canadian academic describes the precarious situation of Jewish faculty on his campus: “I have spoken to three Jewish faculty members. They are in a state of anxiety, depression, and real insecurity. It is clear that the university will not defend them, and a majority of faculty members see them as ‘the problem,’ interpreting core academic values as reprehensible.” Even before October 7, an Israeli academic working at a European university relates how he moved his tutorials off campus, because the threat of physical violence was constantly on his mind, even though his academic field was completely unrelated to Israel or the Middle East: “I always worried about being known as an Israeli and outspoken about my views that someone could just show up and attack me.” After the October 7 massacre and the ensuing Gaza war, of course the situation became far worse. An anti-Zionist website hosted on a server in the Netherlands even placed bounties for assassination as high as $100,000 on the heads of Israeli academics.

Ideological madrassas

An important caveat: these testimonies are self-selected and therefore not representative of academia as a whole. I harbour no illusions—these dissenting voices remain a minority. What they do reveal, however, is that serious debate about Israel and Gaza has been rendered impossible within university walls. When researchers with dissident views bite their tongues for fear of repercussions, the majority position is never subjected to critical scrutiny. And without intellectual challenge, even the truth becomes stale, as John Stuart Mill knew: “if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”

The aforementioned IAGS resolution, for instance, treats the war as if it has only one belligerent party (Israel), rendering Hamas’s agency completely invisible. In fact, the word “Hamas” appears only once in the document, in a sentence declaring (without any substantiation) that Israel’s operations have “not only been directed against the Hamas group [...] but have also targeted the entire Gazan population.” As a result, all the destruction and suffering in Gaza is attributed to Israel by default. The resolution accepts the casualty numbers from the Gazan Ministry of Health without any reservation, and fails to discriminate between combatant and civilian deaths, or between deaths caused by Israel and caused by Hamas. It contains hardly any serious argumentation, and it lists the same litany of distorted and fabricated quotes from Israeli leaders that NGOs have repeated ad nauseam, without citing sources. How was the “consensus” achieved? Only 28 per cent of the group’s members voted on the resolution, and membership is open to anyone willing to pay the fee. Unsurprisingly, the membership includes numerous artists and activists, as well as 80 “researchers” from Iraq out of a total of 600 (data from Salo Aizenberg).

The academic consensus on Israel is, therefore, partly a mirage. Pluralistic ignorance, suppression of dissent and fear of professional and social reprisal have produced an artificial unanimity that is untethered from evidence and reasoned debate. In particular, the “Gaza genocide” accusation has become the Left’s equivalent of the stolen election hoax on the American Right—a baseless claim that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. It functions much like mantras such as “men can get pregnant” or “scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing are equally valid”: deep down everyone understands that it’s nonsense, but that is precisely what allows it to serve as an ideological litmus test. Breaking the spiral of silence will require more people to step forward and call out such nonsense, thereby lowering the social cost of dissent.

If academics fail to do so, they may come to regret it. In the anthology The War on Science edited by physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, thirty-eight academics (myself included) argue that such ideological incursions in science seriously undermine public trust in universities and tend to provoke an inevitable backlash. As Donald Trump’s full-frontal attack on American academia shows, at some point the chickens will come home to roost. As one professor from Leuven University told me: “Why would external policymakers, who increasingly view universities as activist strongholds, continue allocating resources for serious scientific research?”

Even in countries where such a populist backlash has yet to materialize, the damage to science and to society at large is still substantial. When a university stifles free debate, it is “betraying the privileges” society has bestowed upon it, as Steven Pinker notes, and “is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality.” When academic institutions function as ideological madrassas enforcing left-wing orthodoxies on contentious issues, it is unsurprising that public trust plummets. The spiral of silence surrounding the war in Gaza is the most dramatic, though by no means the only, illustration of this phenomenon.

[A condensed version of this piece appeared in The Jewish Chronicle]