As a retired professor of law and ethics who has called Santa Barbara home for the better part of 40 years, and as a progressive Jew, I am surprised and dismayed at the Independent's lack of journalistic judgment in printing the UCSB academics' piece without any effort to verify their factual allegations.
These professors allowed their opposition to a Jewish homeland in the Middle East to lead them to ignore a basic tenet of scholarly work: evaluate the evidence first (that is, don’t leap to conclusions). They jumped on the Hamas bandwagon by assuming, without any factual support, that the rocket that landed in the hospital parking lot was Israeli. The evidence from reliable sources (Associated Press, the Canadian government) has concluded otherwise: the rocket was not Israeli but was a misfire from somewhere in Gaza. What would cause otherwise solid academics to ignore a basic requirement needed to establish the very legitimacy of the academic project? They don’t state it, but it seems clearly to be their opposition to the Jewish state.
Their piece also reveals a serious moral failing. Hamas is a jihadist organization, dedicated to not only destroying Israel as a political entity but also to murdering as many Israelis as possible in the process. This homicidal mindset and political program has been rightly condemned worldwide as immoral, yet no such condemnation comes from these academics. They gave lip service to suffering in Gaza and in Israel, but could not bring themselves to condemn Hamas, or their unprecedented massacre, after invading Israeli territory in the worst pogrom since the Holocaust (of least 1,400 Jewish and some Arab and Bedouin civilians killed).