THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND, AND THE MAN WHO DIDN’T

There is a specific kind of intellectual courage that does not get celebrated enough in academic culture, and that is the courage to look at something you wrote a decade ago and say plainly: I was wrong about that, and here is why. Craig Considine, sociologist at Rice University, displayed something close to that courage in an October 2025 piece titled “The Absurd Historical Inversion of Comparing Gaza to the Holocaust.” It is a sharp piece. It is accurate. It is the kind of thing that would have cost him social capital with a significant portion of his professional and personal network to write, and he wrote it anyway. He calls the Gaza-Holocaust comparison grotesque propaganda. He lays out the structural differences between a state-sponsored industrial extermination program targeting people for their identity and an asymmetric military conflict triggered by a terror attack on civilians. He says what needed saying clearly and without hedging it into meaninglessness. For that, he deserves genuine credit, and I am giving it to him here, plainly and without condescension, before I make the argument that follows.

Because eleven years before that piece, in the summer of 2014, Craig Considine was posting something rather different. He promoted a piece by Dennis Kucinich framing Israel’s military operations in Gaza as a land grab aimed at Palestinian annihilation and approvingly captioned an image of the shrinking map of Palestine with the single word: genocide. He celebrated the village of Kinvara in County Galway for becoming the first community in Ireland to boycott Israeli goods, described the boycott as a stand for justice, and drove through the area affectionately while reporting on the community’s moral resolve. He did not describe Hamas in either piece. He did not describe the rocket fire that preceded the 2014 operation. He described Israeli military action and the Palestinian civilian toll with the kind of language that, in his own 2025 piece, he calls sinister and calculated propaganda. The word he used in 2014, applied via image caption, was genocide. The word he used in 2025 for people who use that word is: grotesque.

I am not raising this to embarrass him, and I want to say that plainly before going any further. I am raising it because the gap between the 2014 Considine and the 2025 Considine is one of the most instructive things in his entire body of work, and it raises a question that matters far beyond him personally. The question is this: what produces that kind of drift in a serious scholar, what does it cost when it happens at the scale of someone with his platform, and what does it tell us about the broader intellectual culture in which people like Considine operate?

Let me take those in order, because they are connected but distinct.

The drift itself is not hard to explain if you have spent any time watching how Western academic culture processes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is a strong social reward structure in humanities departments and in progressive religious-studies circles for positioning Israel as the primary aggressor in the Middle East, for treating Palestinian suffering as the paradigmatic case of Western-enabled injustice, and for framing any defense of Israel’s right to military response as complicity with occupation. This reward structure does not require anyone to be dishonest in a calculating way. It operates through the much quieter mechanism of what gets amplified, what gets published, what gets cited, who invites you to panels, and how your graduate students and colleagues respond to your work. A scholar who writes sympathetically about Muslim communities, as Considine genuinely does and as I have argued elsewhere involves real insight and real value, will find himself surrounded by a social network in which the 2014 version of the Gaza framing is not just acceptable but expected. The Kucinich piece gets shared. The shrinking map image circulates. The caption writes itself. Nobody who matters to you that week pushes back.

Then October 7, 2023 happens.