In September 1944, as the genocide of European Jews continued and the violence of World War II reached its peak, Max Horkheimer, co-founder of the Institute for Social Research – also known as the Frankfurt School – and the methodology of “Critical Theory” discovered it and declared that “Jews have become, knowingly or unknowingly, martyrs of civilization.”…The protection of Jews has become a symbol of everything humanity stands for. Their survival is the survival of the culture itself.”

It is telling that 80 years later, with the forced resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, so many of the same issues that then preoccupied the Frankfurt School are at the center of a culture war that could decide fate as the 2024 presidential election approaches of democracy in the United States – just as the founders of critical theory predicted. Only now it is the Palestinians, not the Jews, who are martyrs and symbols, whose survival as a national community on their land has become, more than any other contemporary conflict, the indicator of the possibility of addressing humanity’s increasingly intractable problems.

Critics of Gay’s forced resignation, even when considering her admittedly sloppy quoting practices, point to her race; advocacy for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies; and, most importantly, her overly legalistic response to questions about the “call for genocide against the Jews” during the now infamous congressional hearing on anti-Semitism on campus on December 5 as reasons for her departure. But her position was doomed, and rightly so, before she distorted her contextual response to Rep. Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calls for genocide on campus would count as hate speech.

It was Gay’s moral cowardice in the face of Stefanik’s blatantly mendacious stance on the genocide question that revealed not only Gay’s unsuitability to lead the world’s leading research university but also the deeper intellectual and political decay in the highest echelons of American academia.

The congresswoman claimed that just by singing the phrases “River to the sea” And “Globalization of the IntifadaIn fact, the protesters are calling for “violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.” “Are you aware of that?” Stefanik asked Gay.

Here Stefanik brazenly used the tried-and-tested fascist tactic that Donald Trump had recently revived to great effect: the “big lie.” It couldn’t have worked better; Before Stefanik could even finish her accusation, Gay interjected that she found those sentences “hateful, reckless, offensive speech.” [that] is abhorrent to me personally.” Soon-to-be-fired University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who just months earlier had worked overtime to prevent the Palestine Writers Literature Festival from taking place at UPenn, also bowed to Stefanik’s trumped-up accusations rabid anti-Semitism on their campus.

Gay might have a problem quoting colleagues, but it’s simply inconceivable that the now-former president of Harvard is so ignorant and ill-informed that he believes these two sentences amount to a call for genocide (it’s worth noting that “River to…” “Sea” has been used by Zionists for over a century, most recently by Netanyahu, to declare that there will be “no Palestinian state from the river to the sea.” Her rush to support Stefanik’s accusation of racism in the most “personal” way represented both a complete denial of what she and her colleagues needed to know was reality, and the kind of subservience of academic leaders to state officials who support totalitarian systems and are not characteristic of functioning democracies.

If ever there was a moment when academic integrity showed its face, this is it. If ever there was a turning point in the fight against fascist propaganda in the halls of Congress, this was it. The only ethical response to Stefanik’s use of such blatant falsehoods in the service of repressive politics was that given by another Harvard graduate, Joseph Nye Welch, to Senator Joseph McCarthy some 70 years ago, after McCarthy accused a young man during a nationally televised hearing A colleague from Welch’s law firm accused him of being a communist and suggested that the man be fired. “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch had said before refusing to answer any further questions on the subject.

Only clear courage and hard truth can defeat “the big lie”. Welch’s shaming of McCarthy’s “cruelty and ruthlessness” overnight changed public and media opinion of McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade against him. It has inspired congressional witnesses ever since, though clearly not Gay and her colleagues. And the price for her cowardice came right with the punch line of Stefanik’s interrogation: demanding that she explain whether chanting “genocide against the Jews” was acceptable speech on her campus.

The question stunned the three Ivy League presidents precisely because no such phrase was chanted on their campus or on any other. Instead, in another deployment of tall lies accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza – plausible, it must be emphasized – by Israel’s long-formidable hasbara, or propaganda machine, were deliberately and falsely transformed into chants calling for genocide against the Jews, viral in the spread on social media and then spontaneously seized upon by Stefanik as the basis for her self-righteous investigation of Gay, Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.

Perhaps the three university presidents of a generation ago could have been forgiven for not having an answer to such a fantastical accusation, since it existed outside the reality-based universe in which academics are accustomed to operate. Back then, as Karl Rove famously declared in the opening statement – Until the US invasion of Iraq (another big lie that shaped American politics for a generation), the imperial United States was so powerful that “we create our own reality.” But at least scientists and journalists were allowed to “study this reality… judiciously as you please.”

Today, even this courtesy is no longer extended to the intellectual class as the Empire moves closer to ruin and its realities become increasingly difficult to maintain. The “reality-based community” in academia, journalism and social media is under unprecedented attack, not just from hardcore conservatives but also from the guardians of mainstream political, economic and cultural power – particularly when it comes to criticism of Israel.

Be it Columbia University banning both “Students for Justice and Palestine” and “Jewish Voice for Peace,” Harvard and UPenn fighting against Palestinian solidarity at every turn, the University of California focusing on “viewpoint-neutral history “ urges as their campuses increase pressure on Palestinian solidarity activities, or The campaign against Palestinian solidarity is inseparable from conservative attacks with its outright criminalization and relentless threats, harassment, (self-)censorship and punishment of professors, students and staff supposedly “woke” academic disciplines and their attempts to expand them and are in fact the spearhead of the measure of justice and social power for long-marginalized communities.

In this context, it is important to emphasize that despite their subservient loyalty to Israel, Magill and Gay were sacrificed at the moment when it served the interests of the system they protected, in this case by demonstrating the power of even a young congresswoman to demonstrably enforce a law false narrative about the leaders of America’s elite centers of knowledge production. Tony Soprano would agree.

For more than half a century, the strange alchemy known as Israeli hasbara has produced so much political gold and with it unprecedented power for the Israel lobby and carte blanche for Israel to push ever deeper as the world’s last active settler-colonial occupation. But this conversion of money and connections into political power has poisoned American domestic and foreign policy alike, scuttling a truly progressive agenda in favor of global empire and settler colonialism that has repeatedly had repercussions as the neoliberal order has become more damaging into an increasingly militarized domestic one Sphere.

Today, the idea that supporting Israeli colonialism can go hand in hand with racial, economic, gender or climate justice seems hollow to a generation that sees through the propaganda to see the massive violence and injustice it has long obscured. Palestinians may not enjoy the cultural, economic and political prominence that Jews achieved before the Shoah, and therefore their “survival” or “martyrdom” may not appear to some as consequential as the Frankfurt School saw the fate of the Jews, but Palestine has it has long “bridged the gap” between progressive youth rebellion in the West and liberation movements in the Global South, the very coalition reforming through the burgeoning global movements for climate, racial, economic, gender, and other forms of social justice has.

Universities, the news media, the cultural industries – the institutions that were at the center of the analytical gaze and practice of critical theory a century ago – are, like the Frankfurt School itself, once again at the center of culture and therefore of political war. As leaders remain trapped by the system, artists and academics, journalists as well as students and even government officials are creating unprecedentedly broad networks of solidarity that can withstand intense pressure from those in power to enforce loyalty and silence dissent.

Through these networks of solidarity, the struggle for the future of the university is increasingly linked to campus struggles for Palestine.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.