Panicked university administrators are making a major blunder if they think they can appease rightwing inquisitors by unleashing the police on students protesting the Israeli war against Palestine.
In the last two days, over 2000 students have been arrested, and many more will face expulsion from their schools for their “disruptive activities.”
University officials claim that they are not violating the students’ (and faculty’s) free speech rights by doing so. Instead, they–like the rightwing McCarthyists in Congress and the police–are depicting the demonstrators as violent antisemites.
Some university administrators argue that the presence of a single student who uttered extremist language about Zionists on a widely circulated video (leaked from one Columbia student’s supposedly confidential disciplinary hearing) proves that the encampments are antisemitic. Some pro-Zionist students and faculty also claim that the encampment makes them “uncomfortable” and “unsafe,” and that the encampment’s presence therefore interferes with their right to an education.
Free speech experts largely agree. Paul French, a First Amendment scholar, maintains that anti-Israeli speech, like all speech, is always conditional, and that universities are obliged to protect it only if it does not interfere with the normal functioning of the institution. The ACLU, in an advisory memo it sent to universities, makes the same argument.
According to university leaders, the right to free speech means that “both sides” have the responsibility of conducting themselves in a civilized manner, by which they mean the Cambridge debate model’s ‘exchange of ideas.’ To them, the presence of the encampments on their campuses has created an unjustifiable disruption of the educational process.
The students who are risking everything by occupying encampments and university buildings see it differently. They believe that their institutions are derelict in their lack of concern for a massive human rights violation in which they (through their investments) are directly complicit. The protestors refuse to allow the ‘normal functioning’ of universities to render Palestinians invisible continue under these dire circumstances.
The fact that pro-Zionist students (and some faculty) feel uncomfortable is in no way evidence of universities allowing an antisemitic climate to fester on their campuses. Their discomfort is a sign of the success of the protests at insisting that their schools acknowledge the Palestinian peoples’ plight and Israel’s responsibility for it. Pro-Zionists are outraged that the silent support for Israel’s war has been broken.
The protestors correctly call out a double standard in the concern about antisemitism. While school administrators are being hammered by Republicans in Congress for allowing “antisemitic protests” to take over the universities, there has been virtually no concern raised for the many people on these campuses who feel that continued silence in the face of the staggering human rights violations of the Palestinian people makes them feel marginalized and unsafe. This is especially the case for the many students of color who see the parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and racism in America.
Let’s be honest here: in their effort to showcase antisemitism on campuses, almost all the major media outlets have failed to cover the sorrow expressed by most protestors for the Israelis who lost their lives or were raped or were taken hostage in Hamas’ October 7 attack. The media has been quick to cover extreme statements made by individual participants, such as the videoed Columbia student saying Zionists have no right to live. The same mainstream media routinely ignore the widespread anti-Palestinian statements often made by supporters of Israel’s war, many of which are overtly racist.
But, much to my surprise, the New York Times has done an excellent job refuting the canard that the protesters were prone to violence. Their reporting–with videos, no less–show that all the violence that happened at UCLA on May 2 was instigated by pro-Israeli thugs who physically attacked students in the encampment for five hours before police were called in only to arrest students and break up the encampment. Similarly, the TImes interviewed “outsiders” arrested at Columbia, and showed that almost all of them were neighbors who rushed to defend the students when the NYPD showed up.
The protests have already achieved a major victory by legitimizing the idea that anti-Zionism is not by itself antisemitic. And, for the many Jewish students and faculty who are participating in the encampments, a really radical idea is now being discussed: that Zionism itself is, in the words of Naomi Klein, “a false idol” that betrays the foundational values of Judaism. Here’s a link to Klein’s speech at a New York rally on April 26. (Readers of my blog can look at my discussion of this idea in earlier posts, which I attributed to Shaul Magid.)
The universities’ self-righteous notion of protestors’ violation of ‘free speech’ is obscene. The protest movement was necessitated by the universities’ complete marginalization of Palestinian voices, as well as students’ concerns about racism, colonialism and militarism that were triggered by Israel’s war against Palestine. And when students raise their point of view, they have been met by complete resistance, and now, with violence. Universities do not want a real exchange of ideas: they want conformity to their notions of education, with all of their race, class and gender biases.
These schools’ problem is that they do not understand or value the importance of conflict in for the creation of new ideas.
The current battle on college campuses certainly is about a conflict over Israel and Palestine but its also about core educational values. Student protesters are demanding that their institutions change their curricula and their behavior. It’s about students’ refusal to allow their schools to turn a blind eye while Israel, with U.S. backing, commits massive human rights violations against Palestinians (not only in Gaza but on the West Bank and inside Israel itself). But it’s also about their schools’ continuing shortcomings on creating a diverse and inclusive curriculum and campus climate. It remains to be seen if these students have the fortitude and political savvy to force their schools to acknowledge the justice of their cause, and whether they can counter the blood-thirsty calls of rightwing Republicans and increasingly militant Zionists for the violent repression of their movement.
This battle is not the first of its kind. The anti-Vietnam War and civil rights/Black and brown power movements battled their colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s and succeeded at creating space for ethnic studies programs, bringing the study of globalization, race and ethnicity into the social sciences, and forcing universities to institute affirmative action programs in hiring faculty and admitting students.
What we who stayed in academia learned in the long, hard struggles of the 1960s-1990s is that institutions do not change quickly, or voluntarily, especially when the demand for changes is coming from marginalized people. But we did make difference, and so can students today.
I am betting on the students: once people have developed the commitment to social justice that they have shown, they do not back down when times get tough. And do not forget: the war still rages, and as Israel commits new atrocities, the students’ call to action will grow even more insistent.
The long view 