By: Nathan Elway

In the febrile climate of contemporary discourse on the Middle East, where the vocabulary of resistance and the lexicon of terror are often contested with ferocious intensity, a dispute has erupted on the campus of the City University of New York that has reverberated far beyond the seminar rooms in which it was conceived.

On Wednesday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, the Consul General of Israel in New York, dispatched a sharply worded letter to the president of CUNY and to the chancellor of the university system, demanding the cancellation of an event entitled “The Underground in Gaza,” scheduled to take place in early March. The intervention, framed in the language of moral urgency and institutional responsibility, has cast a searching light upon the uneasy boundary between freedom of expression and what Akunis describes as the normalization of terror within a respected academic institution.

At the heart of the controversy lies the symbolic and political freight of Gaza’s subterranean tunnel network, a phenomenon that, in Akunis’s telling, cannot be disentangled from the violent history of Hamas. In his letter, the Israeli diplomat articulated a profound unease with the framing of the planned event, which he said presented the terror tunnels in Gaza “in a positive light and as a legitimate struggle.”

Such a portrayal, he argued, risks sanitizing an infrastructure that has been employed not as a neutral feat of engineering or an abstract emblem of resistance, but as a practical apparatus of violence. These tunnels, Akunis wrote, are integral to the underground architecture of Hamas and have been used to carry out murders, kidnappings, and brutal attacks against innocent civilians.

The ambassador’s letter situates his objections within the legal and moral frameworks that govern public life in the United States. Hamas, he reminded the university leadership, is a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law. An event that valorizes or legitimizes elements of Hamas’s operational infrastructure thus crosses from the realm of critical inquiry into the territory of promotion and support for reprehensible actions.

The charge is not merely rhetorical. It invokes the weight of legal classification and the ethical stigma attached to organizations whose tactics are defined by the deliberate targeting of civilians. By anchoring his argument in this designation, Akunis seeks to elevate the dispute from a question of taste or political disagreement to one of institutional complicity in the normalization of violence.

Yet the letter is careful to acknowledge, at least in principle, the sanctity of free expression. “I am a strong believer in freedom of expression,” Akunis wrote, signaling an awareness of the sensitivities that attend any attempt by a foreign diplomat to influence programming at an American university. The invocation of free speech is not perfunctory.

It is an attempt to preempt the familiar rejoinder that universities must serve as arenas for the contestation of ideas, including those that offend or unsettle. But Akunis draws a sharp boundary: support for a murderous terrorist organization, he contends, does not fall within the ambit of protected expression, particularly when it is given a platform by a public institution with a reputation to uphold.