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Tracy McNulty
Tracy McNulty is a professor who spread hatred of Israel and defended an anti-Israel encampment leader at Cornell University (Cornell), in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. Cornell is located in Ithaca, New York.
Tracy McNulty is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
On December 2, 2024, the Cornell Daily Sun reported that McNulty expressed support for a course titled: "Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance," slated to be taught in the Spring 2025 term by anti-Israel professor Eric Cheyfitz.
In 2024, McNulty served as a faculty advisor for a Cornell student who had been suspended for disrupting a Cornell career fair in order to pressure Cornell to divest from companies tied to Israel.
The suspension followed a prior suspension and no-trespass order barring him from entering campus for his role as one of the leaders of the anti-Israel encampment at Cornell. For more information on the encampment, see the section below titled: “Cornell Encampment April and May 2024.”
As of December 2024, Tracy McNulty was listed on the Cornell website as a professor of Comparative Literature, French, and Romance Studies.
As of the same date, McNulty was listed online as a psychoanalyst in private practice.
Tracy McNulty received a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 1998.
On February 15, 2024, McNulty co-authored an Op-Ed for the Cornell Daily Sun titled: “Disguising Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism Harms Students and the Community.”
McNulty’s op-ed accused Israel of "colonialist policies of occupation, apartheid, annexation, ethnic cleansing and violence.” The article also defended the Palestinian “right of return.”
The “right of return” is a Palestinian demand discredited as a means to eliminate Israel.
The op-ed accused Israel of a “genocidal assault on Palestinians and…apartheid” in its war against Hamas and said: “Opposition to Israeli apartheid and violence is not an identitarian [sic] cause; people of all colors and creeds must resist ethnonationalism and colonial occupation.”
The op-ed asserted that Israel was an “avowed ethnostate…[which] carries out a genocidal assault on a colonized population of refugees in Gaza, the largest open-air prison on the planet.”
Referring to Gaza as an “open-air prison” is a way to delegitimize the UN-approved [pp. 39–41] joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed in 2011 to prevent Hamas from acquiring more sophisticated rockets. Following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli military discovered that Hamas went around the blockade by smuggling weaponry through tunnels under the Philadelphi corridor separating Gaza from Egypt.
On May 6, 2018, McNulty signed a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun,titled: “Cornell community members denounce Israeli military actions.”
The letter declared: “We, the undersigned members of the Cornell University community, call on Cornellians of conscience to denounce the Israeli military’s recent massacre of unarmed Palestinian protesters participating in the Great March of Return in the Gaza Strip.”
During the 2018 March of Return, Hamas routinely directed its members to infiltrate the border between Gaza and Israel to train for an attack on Israeli communities in the area, leading to the October 7, 2023 massacre. For more information, see the Canary Mission page on Hamas.
The 2018 letter McNulty signed also read: “This massacre is the latest injustice in a 50-year occupation, and 70-year ethnic cleansing, endured by the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israeli government. The current wave of protests marks the 70th anniversary of the Nakba…”
The modern State of Israel was founded 70 years earlier, in 1948.
The term “Nakba” is generally translated as “catastrophe” in Arabic, referring to the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It is a term used to delegitimize the creation of the State of Israel by drawing a comparison to the Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, meaning “catastrophe.”
On April 25, 2024, Cornell students established an encampment on a campus lawn, organized by the Coalition for Mutual Liberation (cmlcornell).
The group posted on Instagram: "The Coalition for Mutual Liberation...has begun its occupation of the Arts Quad. We will not leave until our demands are met..." Included in the post was a photo of the tent camp captioned: "...CORNELL STUDENTS ESTABLISH A LIBERATED ZONE..."
Encampment participants demanded [slide 4] that Cornell divest from companies and institutions linked with Israel and called [slide 5] for an “unconditional, permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
Protesters also demanded [slide 6] the establishment of a Palestinian studies program, developed by representatives of the Cornell chapter of the anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) serving on the “committees that oversee the hiring of the program’s faculty.”
Protesters also demanded [slide 7] public acknowledgment and protection of “anti-Zionist speech, viewpoints, and histories in both religious and academic contexts.”
On April 25, 2024, a Cornell administrator met [00:00:15] with students and told them they did not have permission to set up the encampment where it was. The Ithaca Voice reported that Cornell set up a deadline for protesters to dismantle the encampment by night, or risk arrest. Students reacted [00:00:36] by forming a human chain surrounding the encampment to resist arrest.
During the encampment, anti-Israel protesters chanted [00:00:01]: “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop! We will not rest!”
On April 25, 2024, the Cornell Sun identified [photo 4] one of the encampment speakers as anti-Israel professor Russell Rickford. The article reported: "...Prof. Russell Rickford...took a voluntary leave of absence following criticism over labeling Hamas' initial Oct. 7 attack on Israel 'exhilarating' and 'energizing...'"
On April 25, 2024, the Cornell Daily Sun also reported that some students found their classes canceled “in face [sic] of the student protests, with some professors joining the encampment.”
On May 13, 2024, the Cornell encampment ended on the students’ initiative.
The Cornell encampment was one of many such encampments set up to protest Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
Close to 200 anti-Israel college encampments were set up in North America in the spring of 2024. The first took place at Columbia University. Protesters harassed Jewish students, blocked Jews from campus facilities, used anti-Semitic language in their activism, promoted BDS and protested Israel’s war against Hamas.
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement was founded by pro-terror activist Omar Barghouti in 2005 to turn “Israel into a pariah state, as South Africa once was.” Barghouti has also called for Israel's destruction and the BDS movement demands would result in that same goal.
BDS initiatives include calling on institutions and individuals to divest from Israeli-affiliated companies, promoting academic and cultural boycotts of Israel, and organizing anti-Israel rallies, protests and campaigns.
The movement’s most notable achievement has been infiltrating university campuses through lobbying for “BDS resolutions.” In these cases, student governments propose resolutions to boycott or divestment from Israel or Israeli-affiliated entities. BDS activity is often aggressive and disruptive. It has been noted that universities that pass BDS resolutions see a marked increase in anti-Semitic incidents and pro-terror activism on campus.
