Yet another unprinted letter of mine below, this one (like the last) submitted to The Daily Princetonian. The letter, dated March 29, contains a direct challenge to Professor Daniel Kurtzer, currently Professor of the Practice in International Relations and Professor of Middle East Studies at Princeton, and previously U.S. Ambassador to both Israel and Egypt.

To the Editor:

I read with interest the following claim of Professor Daniel Kurtzer’s in a recent article about anti Iran War protests on campus:

During the Gaza war, a lot of campuses were quite active in opposition. It’s been surprising to me how there’s been no campus activity about Ukraine, no campus activity about the famine in the war in Sudan, and now we have Iran,” Kurtzer said. “I’m not advocating anything—it’s not my role—but it’s curious how political activism has become so focused on one issue, right to the exclusion of everything else” (“What professors and Princetonians have to say about the Iran war,” Daily Princetonian, March 26).

One determinant of activism is the degree to which an institution is complicit in wrongdoing. And one obstacle to determining the degree of an institution’s complicity in wrongdoing is the degree to which the institution discloses or conceals the nature of its complicity-relevant actions, for instance discloses or conceals the nature and type of the investments it holds. So far, there has been no such disclosure from the University. So we can at best surmise the degree of its complicity in various acts of wrongdoing around the world. That said, I don’t think Princeton’s activist community has made guesses that are very far off the mark in this respect.

 PIAD Divestment Proposal, released June 2024 (64 page PDF)

In any case, I have a proposal for Professor Kurtzer. Though he disclaims advocacy, he seems to be avowing curiosity: I would think that a person who found something “curious” should express personal curiosity about it. Given that, I think it would be appropriate for Prof. Kurtzer to demand, along with so many of the rest of us, that the University disclose its investment holdings in all military-related affairs in a comprehensive way, inclusive of all of the places he names, and all of the places he declines to name. How else is curiosity to be satisfied except through the disclosure of relevant information? And how else is a demand for disclosure to be made except by those curious for information and with the standing to make it? Ex hypothesi, Prof. Kurtzer satisfies both of the preceding descriptors.

No campus activity about Sudan? Sure about that?

Since 2024, there’s been a standing request on the table, ratified by student vote, for full disclosure of the University’s investments relevant to the matters Prof. Kurtzer describes. Given this, I would call on him to sign on, in a public way, to the activist community’s request to the University to disclose the nature of its investments. What he’s done instead is to make sly insinuations about the activist community in advance of any such disclosures. Alas, as a famous ambassador once put it, “no man can serve two masters”—which means that Prof. Kurtzer has to choose between the imperatives of curiosity and those of insinuation. It shouldn’t be a hard choice to make. It’s sad that it so often is.

Irfan Khawaja ’91
Princeton, New Jersey