What a perverse reframing of reality.

The tunnels in Gaza are saturated with torture, murder, hostage-taking, firing rockets. They were built with resources diverted from civilian life. They have launched missiles that invite retaliation against people who are denied shelter within them. Those functions are embedded in what those tunnels are.

When academics choose to describe that infrastructure as “decolonial land use,” they are coming uncomfortably close to actively condoning torture and murder as politically meaningful innovation. They are taking sites of captivity and execution as moral resistance.

And when a university platforms that move, it is not standing above the violence. It is participating in its rehabilitation by taking structures built to brutalise, and kill, and placing them inside its intellectual canon. Students and faculty do not float above this. Choosing to attend or legitimise such lectures is also an act. Intellectual life used to require discernment.