On Oct. 1, the Biden-Harris administration awarded $60,000 to anti-Israel scholar Seth Anziska to write a book about "Palestinian self-determination." One day later, the University College London professor criticized the Jewish state for fighting Hamas, condemned Israel's assassination of Hezbollah's leader, and called U.S. officials "merchants of death."
The National Endowment for the Humanities granted Anziska the taxpayer-funded award on Oct. 1 for his book project focused on the "1982 invasion of Lebanon by Israel," also known as the First Lebanon War. The conflict, according to the grant description, "influenced movements for Palestinian self-determination."
The war began with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a terrorist group, conducting a series of strikes on Israel from Lebanon. Israel eventually invaded its northern neighbor to expel the PLO after a terrorist cell attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, leaving him paralyzed for life. The Jewish state withdrew after successfully driving out the terrorist organization, but Hezbollah grew in the PLO's place.
"My book project offers the first publicly accessible international history of the war, which has been elided in public discourse. At a moment of profound rupture for Israel, Palestine, and the wider region, how can the historian make sense of this contested past and its multiple legacies?" Anziska wrote in the description of his project, which he said "seeks to deepen public engagement with the past while underscoring the vital urgency of historical thinking to make sense of violence unfolding today."
But Anziska, an associate professor of Jewish-Muslim relations focused on "Israeli and Palestinian society and culture," has a history of pushing an anti-Israel bias and sympathizing with the terror groups that look to destroy it. On Oct. 2, Anziska published an essay blaming the Jewish state for Hamas's and Hezbollah's rise and criticized the United States for supporting Israel's retaliation against the terror groups.
"Decades of repeated efforts to destroy Palestinian political aspirations through recurring violence have not succeeded in stamping out the liberation struggle, nor has the Israeli army managed to contain Hezbollah absent a reckoning with Palestinian demands for self-determination," Anziska wrote in a Jewish Currents essay. "On the contrary, militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have emerged as byproducts of successive invasions; Israeli violence breeds military resistance like a 'cure' producing the 'disease.'"
Anziska called Biden-Harris administration officials who backed Israel's recent retaliations against Hamas and Hezbollah "American enablers."
"These are just some of our modern-day merchants of death; they have nothing to offer us but more violence," he wrote. "Israel is now a rogue state consumed by a forever war—weak where it appears strong, and dragging a constellation of Western powers with it into a battle of folly."
He also criticized Israel's assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, calling it an "extrajudicial killing," and worried that "such vigilante violence … might engender long-term instability for the entire Middle East and well beyond its borders."
Hezbollah kicked up its aggression against Israel following Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. Nasrallah threatened additional violence against the Jewish state about a month before his assassination.
"Across the country, the Israeli government and its supporters basked in their triumph—the orgasmic climax of a frustrated 11-month war against Hamas," Anziska added. He said the Israeli public is consumed "by its totalizing narrative of victimization and its corollary of justified violence. Genocidal language and ideology now run rampant, normalizing the abnormal for generations of young Israeli Jews, addled by an increasingly toxic culture of mass militarization."
In March 2023, Anziska argued that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and opposing Zionism are not forms of anti-Semitism.
"Boycott, divestment, and sanctions are commonplace, nonviolent forms of political protest against states," he said during a panel discussion in Pisa, Italy. "In the Israeli case, they are not in and of themselves anti-Semitic."
But the BDS movement is rooted in anti-Semitism, with critics calling it a form of economic warfare against the Jewish state. Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs found the effort has at least 100 links to terrorist organizations, including Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Anziska wrote in his 2022 book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, that the Camp David Accords—the historic 1978 peace treaty that former president Jimmy Carter negotiated between Israel and Egypt—did little to advance "the Palestinian quest for self-determination," led to the First Lebanon War, and "shaped the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada."
"This result did not appear out of the blue, nor was it inevitable," Anziska wrote. "A non-statist outcome emerged directly from the diplomatic negotiations meant to resolve their political fate, in line with what Israeli officials intended."
This is not the first time the Biden-Harris administration bankrolled an anti-Israel professor's research. Amira Jarmakani similarly received a grant of $60,000 to research and write a project that addresses Islamophobic stereotypes in memes and images on the internet. Jarmakani, in the grant description, argued such memes have the ability to perpetuate "domestic surveillance that can also lead to the capture and incarceration of innocent people, framed as terrorists or enemy combatants in the War on Terror."
Jarmakani, whose research began in September, also argued that stories of Jewish students who felt unsafe on college campuses due to the spike in anti-Semitic incidents were false, the Washington Free Beacon reported in April.
Anziska and the University College London did not return a request for comment.
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