Who Is Hadeel Assali?
Hadeel Assali is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar and Lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University in New York. Raised in Houston, Texas, she prefers to identify as being “from Gaza”. Her postdoctoral position was funded through Columbia’s Graduate Equity Initiative, meaning American academic institutional money is underwriting her work. That work, theoretically about geology and the environment, has a funny way of always arriving at the same political destination: Palestinian “resistance” good, and terror tunnels are poetry.
With a conclusion like that, real questions arise about where her scholarship ends and her activism begins.
What Has Hadeel Assali Said About Palestinian “Resistance”?
If you’re wondering whether Hadeel Assali has a consistent political viewpoint baked into her academic output, wonder no more. Across years of essays, interviews, dissertations, and podcast appearances, she has framed Palestinian armed activity as legitimate, historically grounded resistance.
- March 2025 – in an appearance on the “Makdisi Street” podcast, Assali repeatedly described the situation in Gaza as “genocide,” and questioned the U.S. government’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization – a designation supported by decades of Hamas’s own public statements and actions, not to mention their kidnapping of Israeli children and elderly on October 7th.
- October 2024 – in “Notes on the Underground in Gaza,” she stated that “underground warfare has been an essential form of resistance in Palestine” and cited scholarship describing tunnels as “sovereign zones” shifting power from colonizer to colonized. Those very tunnels were used to house – and murder – Israeli civilian hostages.
- December 2023 – on her personal social media, Assali outright supported October 7th, posting “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.”
- October 2023 – in an essay published weeks after the October 7th massacre, Assali blatantly justified Hamas, saying that “the legal criminalization of Palestinian resistance movements has led to a total misunderstanding and non-engagement with them on the behalf of the US. Of course, Hamas is on the list and has by now been turned into a total bogeyman.”
- 2021 – in her doctoral dissertation, “Prophecies of Palestine: Geology and Intimate Knowledge of the Subterranean,” Assali declared, “I detail how the ‘purity’ of resistance and its intimate knowledge is contained and captured in the different nation-states dividing the region of southern Palestine.” Her language that romanticizes terrorism is more suited to a manifesto than a dissertation.
- 2018 – In contributing to the “Form N-X00” series, Assali described Gaza’s tunnel networks as the “lungs” through which Gazans breathe and that they create “new possibilities for those excluded from recognized forms of citizenship.” Is October 7th the “new possibility” Assali meant?
How Has Hadeel Assali Been Involved In Legal Suits?
Hadeel Assali has been named in multiple lawsuits relating to anti-Israel activism, showing that her personal commitment to the Palestinian cause extends far beyond her personal opinion.
- December 2024 – she was named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is Jewish, alleging violations of the Leahy Law related to military aid to Israel.
- June 2024 – Assali was named in a federal civil rights complaint alleging that she repeatedly canceled or relocated her class sessions to accommodate pro-Palestinian rallies, coordinated off-campus activism through her course (including writing “If you can, try to join a protest” to her students), and refused to provide a Jewish student observing Passover with virtual learning accommodations.
Assali has proven herself to be unable to teach or conduct classes in a neutral way. Her failure to accommodate a Jewish student is in violation of Columbia’s own religious accommodations policy.
How Has Hadeel Assali Used Her Columbia University Affiliation?
Assali’s political commitments haven’t stayed neatly in the op-ed section. They’ve shown up on campus and, by some accounts, inside her classroom.
- February 2026 – Assali spoke at Georgetown University “on the long relationship between the people of southern Palestine (Gaza) and the land itself.” In her speaker profile, she wrote that she had “uncovered and written about the secret Israeli transfer scheme to ethnically cleanse 60,000 Palestinians from Gaza in 1969.”
- March 2025 – Assali defended student activism, including that of Mahmoud Khalil, when she signed a Columbia alumni letter calling for divestment from entities tied to what signatories called “Israeli apartheid.”
- April 2024 – when signing an open letter from “untenured faculty standing in solidarity with our students,” Assali publicly aligned herself with student protesters during the Columbia campus encampment – a moment that not only put many Jewish students on campus in a hostile environment but required law enforcement involvement as students barricaded themselves in and vandalized university buildings.
- 2023 – Assali contributed to Columbia’s “Gaza on Screen” project by co-authoring analysis of resistance-group media, including materials produced by Hamas’s Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades. In doing so, she directly used Columbia’s name to legitimize terrorist content.
- October 15, 2023 – Assali signed a letter supporting fellow Columbia faculty member Joseph Massad after a petition was circulated to remove him due to his comments applauding October 7th.
Conclusion: Does Hadeel Assali’s Record Raise Legitimate Concerns About Her Role at Columbia?
Hadeel Assali is not hiding. Her views are published, her affiliations are public, and her record is extensive. The concern is that her opinions appear to have followed her into the classroom in ways that discriminated against and created a hostile environment for Jewish students.
Columbia’s Graduate Equity Initiative funded this postdoc. Columbia’s classrooms host her students. And Columbia’s Jewish community has now spent years navigating a campus environment in which faculty like Hadeel Assali have made their sympathies loudly and institutionally clear. At some point, the question stops being about academic freedom and starts being about whose academic experience is actually being protected.
