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this seems to relate to a number of issues; among other things, there was an article in the NYT last week about a book accusing israeli was influencing US foreign policy, and how various public meetings with the authors kept getting cancelled... on the one hand, this book may have just been another variation on the propaganda the nazis & czarist secret police used to support some case that the jews have some secret plan to take over the world; on the other, as the authors were arguing in the article, and some people who wrote letters to the NYT agreed, any criticism of israel, however justified, seems to be automatically discounted as "anti-semitism" this can get ridiculous: i remember a small article in the "jerusalem post" years ago which accused the BBC of "anti-semitism" because a food review article said something along the lines of "israeli cuisine is not that great"... which is more or less true: if israeli cuisine was as good as classical french, the best italian or chinese, etc., then i'm sure we would see more israeli restaurants around the world... in this case, it seems that pointing out something fairly obvious (to the extent that it is probably used as a text-book example), i.e. isreal's use of archaeology (i.e. massada, hebrew inscriptions, early synagogues, etc.) as a means for establishing their right to occupy or exist within a given geographical space, is causing controversy; that pointing this out is equated with "anti-semitism"... there may be legitimate reasons for disagreeing with this argument/belief, but that isn't the issue here... & if this was just the usual academic fight, fine; but it looks like the limits of academic discourse have already been left far behind... there may be more to this: maybe the research really is flawed; but that should be for the dep't or someone's scientific peers to decide, not a pile of ill-informed alumni blindly waving possibly unjustified accusations of "anti-semitism"...