I have been asked to speak about strategies to combat bias against Israel among professors. This is Jewish organization-speak. Advocacy organizations have strategies, and I am not an advocacy organization. I am an academic and an intellectual. My strategy, if you want to call it that, is simple: it is to identify and speak truth. It is also to acknowledge when truth is elusive, as it sometimes is, and to try to uncover it. So I will leave it to the pro-Israel professionals to give you strategies, if they have any. I don't have any, unless it is telling the truth.

Edward Said, who was a professor at this university, always used to say that the role of the intellectual is to "speak truth to power." I could never understand what that addition of "to power" meant. It placed an obvious reservation on the truth-speaking obligation of intellectuals: they should tell the truth, but this truth-speaking should be selective. The powerful deserve the truth, and the powerless ... well, what do they get? For Said, the powerful meant the United States, Israel, the West, Arab governments. But the truth is indivisible, and to withhold it from those who have less power, such as the Palestinians, is not only a disservice to them, it places them in jeopardy.

There is one lie that has been told to the Palestinians by a variety of people, and that has done them an immense amount of harm. The failure of intellectuals, and especially of academics supportive of the Palestinians, is that they have become disseminators of this lie. On some campuses, like this one, it has been taught. I would call it the root lie - a lie from which grow many other lies.

It is this: Zionism is a form of colonialism...