A Columbia University “environmental justice” lecturer endorsed Palestinian “resistance in ALL its forms” shortly after the Oct. 7 terror attack and called for an end to Zionism, a Washington Free Beacon review of her social media posts found. She also described Hamas’s underground tunnels as “an essential form of resistance.”
The lecturer, Hadeel Assali, runs Columbia’s “Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice” seminar. She’s also a postdoctoral research scholar—a position supported by a grant from the university’s Graduate Equity Initiative, according to her Columbia bio. Her work focuses on the “ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine.”
“Keep fighting for #ceasefire keep fighting for #Palestine to be free from the river to the sea, keep supporting our resistance in ALL its forms,” Assali wrote in an Instagram post on Dec. 6, 2023, just two months after Hamas massacred over 1,200 Israeli civilians. Just over a year later, Assali wrote in a Jan. 14, 2025, post, “May we see the end of Zionism and the liberation of Palestine within our lifetime.” She’s also used her Instagram account, which has nearly 3,400 followers, to fundraise for Palestinians in Gaza.
Assali’s radical rhetoric underscores Columbia’s struggle to rein in campus anti-Semitism, which has caused leadership instability and cost the university $430 million in federal funding.
Then-interim president Katrina Armstrong announced a series of policy reforms in March that the Trump administration demanded in an effort to curb campus anti-Semitism, such as placing restrictions on masking and protests that disrupt academic activities. But the next day, faculty members condemned those measures in a private Zoom meeting, during which Armstrong downplayed or denied that change was underway, suggesting the faculty is largely opposed to any reforms to address anti-Semitism.
Armstrong resigned days later, with the school appointing Claire Shipman, a former ABC and CNN journalist, to lead the Ivy League institution. In her first public message as acting president on Monday, Shipman provided little clarity on how she intends to navigate Columbia’s mounting challenges, saying she would “build on” the “plan outlined to move our community forward.”
Assali also published an essay in October glorifying the “underground war” in Gaza, calling it “an essential form of resistance.” Hamas, in its war against the Jewish state, has used a vast network of underground tunnels to store and shield weapons, facilitate its militants’ movements, and hide Israeli hostages.
“Underground war has been an essential form of resistance in Palestine” and the tunnels serve as “sovereign zones that have shifted the power balance between the colonizer and the colonized,” Assali, who’s had family living in Gaza, wrote. “In Gaza, tunnels reveal the subterranean to be a space that evades colonial capture, despite Israel’s claims of military prowess. The only way Israel has been able to contend with the tunnels is through brute force and a policy of extermination.”
“Israel attempts to sever the relations between the people and their land through the removal of the people themselves,” she continued. “After decades of attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, they have now resorted to genocidal annihilation.”
Last month, Assali, alongside Columbia University Apartheid Divest—the school’s most notorious anti-Semitic student group—signed a letter committing to a boycott of Columbia “in solidarity with students, faculty, and staff targeted by the U.S. Government and university administration for their principled opposition to the genocide in Gaza and support for Palestinian liberation.”
“We call on Columbia University to reinstate disenrolled, suspended, and expelled students, and reverse all changes made in compliance with the Trump administration’s harmful and illegitimate demands,” the letter reads. Signatories promise not to collaborate with Columbia administrators or attend university-sponsored events and are encouraged to boycott individual faculty “based on their complicity” with Columbia’s “repression.”
The letter also accuses the university of “repeated failure to defend and protect Mahmoud Khalil,” the Columbia student activist and foreign national apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the State Department revoked his visa and green card over his pro-Hamas organizing on campus.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the letter had garnered over 1,800 signatories. Among them were several other Columbia faculty and staff, including School of the Arts adjunct associate professor of writing Matvei Yankelevich, School of Social Work “community organizing” adjunct lecturer Susan Lob, Teachers College professor emerita of English education Janet Miller, and Naomi Thompson, a development coordinator at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians.
Yankelevich signed several letters in the weeks following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack accusing Israel of “genocide,” supporting the Palestinian “right to resist occupation,” and calling for an end to “Israel’s ongoing occupation.” His anti-Israel stance traces back to at least May 2021 when he signed a letter supporting the “Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonial rule and its apartheid system” after Hamas fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state.
Columbia students also signed onto the boycott, including history department doctoral candidate Nancy Ko, Mailman School of Public Health graduate student Hunter Grogan, and Climate School graduate student Kyra Sadat Ruben.
Ko, who holds a scholarship from the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, which was started by the late older brother of liberal billionaire George Soros, has been an outspoken anti-Israel advocate. During the illegal encampments that plagued Columbia’s campus last spring, Ko asked for donations “to help students get: fed; dry; outta jail” and called for a boycott of Columbia until it divested from Israel. She also accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” in an article published on Oct. 25, 2023.
Folks asking how to help. Great. For starters, anyone can donate to @bcacabolitioncollective on Venmo to help students get: fed; dry; outta jail.
But if you’re a faculty member, esp tenured ESP Columbia?? U better do a whole lot more gurlie! Walk out, speak out, join @Fsjp_cbt https://t.co/2MyNwuDGpJ
— Nancy Ko (@nancykorifera) April 19, 2024
According to her university bio, one of Ko’s thesis advisers was former Columbia history professor Rashid Khalidi, who blamed Hamas’s Oct. attack on Israel’s “settler colonialism” and “apartheid.”
Columbia, Assali, Yankelevich, and Ko did not respond to requests for comment.
