Meet the professor who wanted Israel 'to accept the terms of truce presented by Hamas'

The University of Washington Stroum Center for Jewish Studies recently hosted Ivy Sichel, a critic of the State of Israel, for a Hebrew linguistics lecture. 

Sichel, a professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Cruz, lectured on “The Rise of Modern Vernacular Hebrew: How Language Shapes Identity (and Vice Versa).” 

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During the Apr. 12 talk, she discussed the “rise of modern vernacular Hebrew in the 1950s” and “the construction of a modern Jewish masculinity, rooted in nation and sovereignty.”  

 Sichel said that the Hebrew language appropriated words as part of “a broader process of cultural appropriation, which extends to dance, dress, cuisine, and other forms of cultural expression.”  

Sichel is a signatory of the “Palestine & Praxis” petition. The document refers to Israel as a “colonial state power” whose policies “constitute apartheid.”

During the 2014 Gaza War, Sichel signed a petition calling on the European Council to pressure Isreal into accepting the demands of Hamas, an organization on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

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”We fully endorse these conditions,” the petition reads in reference to “accept the terms of truce presented by Hamas.”

The same year she signed on to a statement calling Israel’s actions in Gaza against Hamas the “slaughter of large numbers of wholly innocent people.”

Sichel told Campus Reform that “we are all entitled to freedom of speech, and that includes university professors.”

Campus Reform reached out to the University of Washington for comment; this article will be updated accordingly.