Shai Davidai: The Jewish professor targetting students protesting Gaza war

From being just another Israeli-American professor with little recognition beyond the sedate academic circles, Shai Davidai shot to global notoriety in a matter of weeks when he demanded—among many other things—that the US National Guard be called in to forcibly remove pro-Palestine demonstrators from the Manhattan campus of Columbia University in New York.

An assistant professor at Columbia Business School, Davidai has had a strange bee in his bonnet for many months. He hates the anti-war protesters—many of them his own students—so much so that he’s called them “terrorists” and “Nazis”.

The particular target of his hate are the hundreds of student-activists who’ve been protesting on and around the Columbia campus against Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, since October.

The student-led protests have now spread to a number of university campuses across the country.

For Davidai, these student-activists aren’t merely anti-war campaigners who want an immediate end to the indiscriminate bombing of densely populated Gaza.

He claims the student protesters are out there to egg on Hamas to “harm Jewish students on campus”—just like Adolf Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who pushed the anti-Semitic ideology but “never held a gun”.

He is, however, conspicuously silent on Israeli bombs and bullets which have devastated Gaza, besides killing a staggering number of civilians who have nothing to do with the gun.

His claim that student-activists are anti-Semites is demonstrably false because many of them belong to the Jewish faith.

From their Gaza Solidarity Encampment on campus, all they’ve been demanding is that the university pull out its investments from Israeli companies to pressure the Zionist state into ending the brutal war in Palestine. Not a single anti-Jewish demonstration has taken place on campus, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik told a Congress committee last week.

In fact, one of the organisations actively participating in the protests is called the Jewish Voice for Peace. Davidai has called for a ban on the organisation for holding “unauthorised” protests on campus, even though the very name of the organisation has “Jewish” in it.

Scion of the Zion

Born in Israel, Davidai comes from a prominent Zionist family. One online account puts his grandfather as a founding executive of El Al, Israel’s national airline.

The hospital wing in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received heart treatment last year is named after Davidai’s parents.

Like every able-bodied Israeli citizen over the age of 18, he served his mandatory time in the Israeli military. By his own account, he opted to work as a medic in the naval branch to avoid service in the occupied West Bank.

His PhD thesis adviser called him a “peacenik” and a “firm believer” in the two-state solution.

He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel in 2009 and moved to the United States subsequently for a doctorate in the same subject. After completing his PhD from Cornell University in 2015, he spent another year as a post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University.

As an untenured assistant professor of management, Davidai has been teaching at Columbia Business School since 2019.

Antics: borderline crazy

In the latest public outburst last week, Davidai demanded that Columbia University summon a police detail of at least ten officers so he could safely hold a counter-protest next to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on campus.

In response, the chief operating officer of Columbia University asked him politely to carry out his counter-protest on the Math Lawn in the presence of public safety officers so they could protect him and any students who might join him.

Accusing the university official of “gaslighting and degrading the Jewish community,” Davidai dropped a four-letter cussword on social media platform X, advising him in all-caps to “read something f*****g history”.

The unhinged public outburst is the latest in a string of on-camera meltdowns that have endeared him to pro-Israeli US media houses like Fox News. He’s also been tagged and promoted by official handles of the Israeli government on social media.

His proneness to public displays of bigotry against young, anti-war protesters is most surprising given that his academic research is centred around those psychological forces that “shape, distort, and bias people’s perceptions of the world”.

According to Columbia University's website, his main expertise is the psychology of judgement and decision-making, along with zero-sum thinking.

He's been known to sneak into anti-war protests in disguise to secretly film student-protesters. Such antics have resulted in an ongoing inquiry against him after the university received more than 50 harassment-related complaints from students.

“I know, he’s staging pictures to make it look like an anti-genocide protest is a Hamas-support rally. It's not. Shai Davidai is a child,” wrote a Columbia student on the social media platform Reddit five days ago.