Since Oct. 7, 2023, scholars and members of the broader public have debated whether Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza actually constitutes a genocide of Palestinians. Fights have erupted over scholarly association resolutions, course descriptions and assignments calling it such.
Ramsi Woodcock, a University of Kentucky law professor, says it’s a genocide. On his website, antizionist.net, he says that the ongoing genocide—combined with his expectation that Israel would violate any future ceasefire and continue killing—creates a “moral duty” for the world’s nations.
That duty, he writes in the “Petition for Military Action Against Israel,” is to wage war on Israel until it “has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” He asks fellow law scholars to sign the petition, adding that Israel is a colony and war is needed to decolonize.
This month—just after Woodcock says he was promoted to full professor—the university removed him from teaching. In a July 18 message to campus that doesn’t specifically name Woodcock, UK president Eli Capilouto wrote that legal counsel was investigating whether an employee’s “conduct may violate federal and state guidance as well as university policies.”
“We have been made aware of allegations of disturbing conduct, including an online petition calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin,” Capilouto wrote. Woodcock told Inside Higher Ed that characterization of his petition is “obviously defamatory, creates a hostile environment for me and makes me potentially physically unsafe.” He said he’s considering suing Capilouto and the university for defamation.
Capilouto further wrote that the petition, which the unnamed university employee seemed to be “broadly” circulating online, “can be interpreted as antisemitic in accordance with state and federal guidance.” Woodcock responded that “what Palestinians resist, and what those who advocate for them resist, is colonization, apartheid and a currently unfolding genocide—they are not opposed to any particular religion or any particular people.”
But Shlomo Litvin, chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council and rabbi for the Chabad at UK Jewish Student Center, told Inside Higher Ed that “calling for the establishment of a state that is free of Jews in a land that currently has seven million Jews is calling for the death of seven million Jews,” including “families and relatives of [Woodcock’s] students.”
“What he’s calling for is a second Holocaust,” Litvin said, adding that “this idea that there is a possibility of the Jews coming to some imaginary country and being safe there is a fantasy that not even he believes.”
Woodcock countered, “Rabbi Litvin is trying to distract us from an actual second Holocaust that Israel is committing right now in Gaza and which only immediate military intervention will stop.”
Woodcock has become another example of pro-Palestine faculty across the country being investigated for their writing or speech about the conflict while they aren’t teaching. During the Biden era, investigations at other universities led to discipline and terminations. The current Trump administration has stripped universities of federal funding and punished them in other ways for allegedly failing to address campus antisemitism. And Woodcock’s case continues the debate about when denunciations of Israel or Zionism are or aren’t antisemitic.
But why UK began investigating Woodcock now remains unclear.
‘Not Academic Discourse’
In a July 18 email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, UK’s general counsel, William E. Thro, wrote to Woodcock that “recently, the university became aware of your writings on certain websites, your conduct at academic conferences, and your postings on American Association of Law Schools [sic] list serves [sic], and other actions.”
“These activities may create a hostile environment for Jewish members of the university community or otherwise constitute harassment as defined by the Supreme Court,” Thro wrote. “The university has concerns that your actions may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the equivalent state laws, and various university policies.”
Title VI prohibits discrimination based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.
But the letter didn’t provide further details, such as what conference conduct or writings the university was concerned about, or how university officials became aware of this expression. A UK spokesperson said, “At this time, we are not going to comment beyond [Capilouto’s] statement, as there is an active investigation.”
Woodcock said he made a statement about “Israel’s genocide of Palestinians” at a conference over a year ago. He later shared a link to his antizionist.net site on Association of American Law Schools online discussion forums, triggering “really lively debate about whether Israel has a right to exist.”
“Nobody wants to talk about that question, and as soon as you bring it up, you see how hungry people are to debate it,” Woodcock said.
He says he created the antizionist.net website late last year but didn’t share it broadly until the start of this month. It’s a site for what he dubs the Antizionist legal studies movement.
“Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Woodcock wrote on the site in December. “No genocide in the 20th century ended without armed intervention. For more than a year now, the international community has been in denial about the implication of these two facts.”
He listed various failed international efforts to stop the genocide, ending with “Even the most outspoken international lawyers dare not speak the name of the only thing that history suggests might actually stop Israel. That is, of course, war—by the international community against Israel.”
Woodcock says he wants Israel defeated and replaced with a Palestinian state, and he doesn’t insist the vast majority of Jews be automatically allowed to remain. He says Palestinians should get to decide. His definition of “antizionist legal scholars” includes that they oppose “any right of self-determination for Jewish people as such in Palestine.” He does say that “the tiny minority of Jewish people whose ancestors lived in Palestine immediately prior to the arrival of the first Zionist colonizers in Palestine in 1882 … share in the right of Palestinians to self determination.”
“Palestinian people alone should decide how Palestine should be governed after independence, including the legal status of the colonizer population,” he says.
The Kentucky Jewish Council and State Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, a co-chair of the state General Assembly’s Kentucky-Israel Caucus, praised the decision to remove Woodcock from the classroom. In a statement, Tichenor wrote that the “reports coming out of our taxpayer-funded flagship university are incredibly disturbing. A law professor calling for the destruction of Israel and against the right for the Jewish people to have self-determination is not a policy disagreement, but a call to violence.”
“That is not academic discourse. It’s antisemitism and racism and abuse of his power, plain and simple,” Tichenor wrote. She thanked Capilouto “for his strong and unequivocal condemnation of this hateful message” and for reinforcing “the importance of moral clarity and swift institutional accountability.”
But Capilouto’s message also hinted at the academic freedom concerns at play. He wrote that the situation “compels us to address questions other campuses are grappling with as well—chiefly, where and when does conduct and the freedom to express views in a community compromise the safety and well-being of people in that community?”
In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, Connor Murnane, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s campus advocacy chief of staff, said, “FIRE is actively investigating this case, and we’re concerned that Professor Woodcock may have been punished for protected activities.”
Jennifer Cramer, president of UK’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said that “assuming he did not pose a threat in any meaningful way to our campus, I think that the treatment of this case seems outside of the bounds of the norm.” She said that “whether we agree with what he says or not shouldn’t matter, because that’s the point of academic freedom.”
Woodcock hasn’t stopped calling for war on Israel, posting on X, “Zionists are frustrated that their intimidation campaign hasn’t shut me up.”
