Rafael Castro is a Yale- and Hebrew University-educated independent political analyst. An Italian Noahide, Rafael can be reached at rafaelcastro78@gmail.com
The meteoric rise and fall of Professor Jason Arday at Cambridge may seem to have very little to do with Israel. In fact, however, it provides an unusually useful lesson in understanding Israel's predicament since October 7.
Arday's ascent was irresistible. Supposedly diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay as a child, he said he was said to have been unable to speak until eleven and unable to read or write until eighteen. Yet he rose to become Cambridge's youngest Black professor. Newspapers celebrated a story that seemed almost designed to vindicate contemporary ideals about diversity and inclusion.
The difficulty is that some of the supporting details were extraordinary enough that elementary verification should have been automatic.
Arday said he had raised as much as £5.5 million for charity. He claimed feats including thirty marathons in thirty-five days, 300 miles on a treadmill in three days and 600 miles in twelve days; elsewhere he spoke of 600 miles in six days. He was described as having installed water projects overseas for WaterAid, although WaterAid says it does not send volunteers abroad. Cambridge listed him as having held visiting professorships at Glasgow and Ohio State; both institutions said they had no record of such appointments.
He once appeared to describe himself as having participated in Seven Up, the famous television documentary project that began decades before his birth; this was subsequently explained as a reference to an informal community initiative with the same name.
More seriously, questions arose about plagiarism in his academic work. Liverpool John Moores University investigated allegations concerning his doctorate and allowed the PhD to stand. By the summer of 2026 the accumulation of disputed claims had become impossible to treat as merely an eccentric CV. Arday resigned from Cambridge on August 5.
The interesting question is not simply how Arday behaved. It is how institutions behaved around him.
Cambridge initially characterized scrutiny of Arday as an attempt to tarnish his reputation. Only as the evidence accumulated did the university move toward investigation. Even after his resignation, Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice described the affair as an "aberration" and emphasized that it should not cast suspicion upon minority academics more generally. An independent inquiry was announced only after considerable pressure, including from Cambridge academics who demanded that those examining the affair be genuinely independent.
There was even disagreement about institutional responsibility: Cambridge leadership emphasized faculty appointment procedures, while critics pointed out that the appointment had also passed through a central university board. To date, only the direct culprit has resigned.
That reaction is disappointing, yet understandable. Once an individual becomes evidence for an ideology, checking the evidence becomes psychologically expensive.
Something similar can be seen in the mainstream press. There has been some serious reporting, the Guardian, Financial Times and Times have all investigated the affair, so it would be unfair to denounce a media blackout. But one revealing strand of the muted response has already shifted from the extraordinary failure of verification toward anxiety that the episode will be exploited by opponents of DEI. A Guardian commentary published after Arday's resignation is explicit about this concern: whatever happened in this extraordinary case, readers should not draw broader conclusions about diversity policies.
Notice how quickly the intellectual priority changes. The key question ought to be: How did institutions devoted to scholarship and verification become so credulous? Instead, more energy is lavished into policing which conclusions may legitimately be drawn from mind-blowing incompetence.
There is an amusing cultural comparison. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, of all places, Kamal Tabrizi could make Marmulak (The Lizard), the wonderful comedy about a fugitive criminal who escapes prison disguised as a cleric and discovers that people will believe him because he looks and sounds like the authority they expect. The movie became a sensation before the Iranian authorities curtailed its run.
It is difficult to imagine Hollywood or Europe's generously subsidized film industry making the obvious Jason Arday comedy: an audacious academic discovers that the more implausible his autobiography becomes, the more enthusiastically elite institutions celebrate him because admitting doubt would threaten their pet narrative. Such a film could be hilarious. It would also be commercially successful.
But it would violate too many ideological taboos. And now that he has died, it will never happen, of course.
And here we finally arrive at Israel.
October 7 confronted the world with evidence vastly more terrible than anything at Cambridge. Hamas-led attackers murdered approximately 1,200 people and abducted more than 250. Civilians were massacred in their homes and at a music festival, people were burned to death, and systematic gang rape occurred during the attack and afterwards against hostages. It was filmed by the perpetrators, who were proud of themselves and wanted the world to know.
The world could interpret this in one of two ways:
The interpretation that persuaded Israelis was that the assumptions underlying the peace process had failed catastrophically. Israel had already removed every community and military installation from inside Gaza in 2005. Whatever qualifications one attaches to Israel's subsequent control of Gaza's perimeter (except for the Egyptian border, closed hermetically by Egypt), airspace and maritime access, Gaza had provided Israelis with a terrifying experiment in territorial withdrawal: land entirely relinquished for the sake of reducing conflict had eventually become the launching ground for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
For most Israelis, the implication for Judea and Samaria is obvious. If Hamas or something resembling it acquired control of territory overlooking Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport, withdrawal to anything approximating the 1967 lines would gamble with national survival. Most Israelis polled recently consider it suicidal, as they do withdrawing from Gaza while Hamas exists.
But Western political, diplomatic and intellectual elites faced a different psychological problem.
For thirty-five years, enormous institutional prestige had been invested in the proposition that territorial partition along 1967 lines is not merely desirable but the indispensable key to peace. Governments constructed diplomacy around it. NGOs built fundraising around it. Academics advanced careers and generated scholarship around it. International organizations incorporated it into their normative institutional vocabulary.
October 7 therefore threatened more than a particular policy. It jeopardized personal and institutional existences.
So as soon as Israel's counteroffensive produced harrowing destruction in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of terrorists with a civiliian-terrorist fatality ratio so low as to be unmatched, as well as feeding its enemy, a reputation-saving narrative became more attractive: Gaza's "suffering" was presented as evidence that the fundamental problem had always been Israeli “occupation", “blockade", “apartheid", “ethnic cleansing", or even Israeli refusals to cave in to Hamas demands.
In its crudest form, this narrative came perilously close to transforming explanation into retrospective justification: Gaza’s situation was now so intolerable that October 7 could be redescribed as "resistance."
The victims of the Nova massacre posthumously became defendants in their own murder trial.
Because there is an even more uncomfortable question that hasn’t secured attention: How did Hamas manage to construct its underground state?
The tunnel system discovered beneath Gaza extended for hundreds of kilometers. It required enormous quantities of concrete, electricity, engineering expertise, labor and money. Hamas had operated for years inside a territory simultaneously receiving vast amounts of international humanitarian assistance. UNRWA itself acknowledges that armed actors placed weapons in its schools and used UN premises for military purposes. The precise relationship between international assistance, fungible resources, Hamas taxation and military construction deserves careful investigation.
European governments did not need to write cheques marked “Hamas tunnels" for their money to help make those tunnels possible. Decades of international assistance sustained an economic and institutional system which allowed Hamas to devote immense resources to warfare while foreign governments and humanitarian organizations financed civilian functions that Hamas, as Gaza's governing authority, would otherwise have had to support.
This question should have generated one of the great investigative journalism projects of our time. It was never written.
Imagine Sally, an ambitious young reporter at a major Dublin newspaper, walking into her editor's office.
"I have a story. Hamas built hundreds of kilometres of tunnels in a tiny territory under blockade. Where did the materials come from? Who paid the workers? How much did Hamas spend? How much money was freed for military purposes because foreign governments paid for schools, clinics, food and public services? What did European officials know? What did NGOs know? What warning signs did they ignore?"
Her editor need not telephone Brussels for instructions.
He merely needs to understand what the investigation could reveal.
It would show that Ireland's careless humanitarian policies had destructive consequences. It would embarrass European allies. It could implicate prestigious NGOs. It would raise troublesome questions about UN agencies. It could demonstrate that an enormous diplomatic and humanitarian establishment actually knows very little about societies and people they claim to save.
The safer story is writing up another Israeli air strike.
The mechanism is not uniquely left-wing, European or anti-Israel. It is all of those but also human.
Israel itself provides the necessary warning against human self-righteousness. The Oslo process did not produce the peace its architects expected. On the contrary, it was followed by waves of terrorism, the Second Intifada, the rise of Hamas and eventually October 7. Yet among Israel's intellectual class, very few figures engaged in serious soul-searching and gave up their ideological blinkers as a result. Benny Morris is the most famous example of someone who did; Gadi Taub and Einat Wilf too are preciously honest. Otherwise, most modified their positions as little as possible while remaining loyal to their ideological camp.
Intelligent people are unusually adept at avoiding the admission that they were wrong. Intelligence is not intellectual honesty; rhetorical sophistication readily supplies fresh arguments with which to defend mistaken beliefs in which careers, reputations and identities have been invested.
This is what Jason Arday's story can teach us about Israel.
The most consequential lies are not imposed upon institutions from outside. They are the propositions institutions desperately want to sustain because so much time, effort, and prestige have already been invested in creating and defending them.
Cambridge craved an extraordinary story of minority brilliance overcoming tremendous adversity. The Western establishment dreams that a conflict can end through unilateral territorial concessions. In both cases, discordant evidence becomes psychologically threatening because accepting it means revisiting not merely one judgment, but an entire structure of far-reaching judgments built upon it.
Cambridge is poised to investigate how Jason Arday was appointed.
Whether Western governments, universities, NGOs, newspapers and international organizations will conduct an equivalent investigation into their false assumptions about Gaza, Palestinian Arabs, and their political and religious culture, is more urgent and important.
If the reaction to Cambridge is any indication, that reckoning will not take place soon.