“We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.” Recent official and institutional claims about combatting antisemitism in higher education routinely efface a key group implicated and harmed by this discourse: Palestinians.
While pernicious forms of antisemitism surely exist in US society, the Trump administration has weaponized the charge of antisemitism to crush dissent and to crack down on independent higher education in an unprecedented manner. Its principal target is not the anti-Jewish hatred promulgated by right-wing, racist, xenophobic individuals and forces, but the students, staff, teachers, faculty, and individuals from all walks of life who advocate for Palestinian liberation. Hence the US government unjustly imprisoning Mahmoud Khalil for 104 days in the name of combatting antisemitism.
But the Trump administration does not work alone in this campaign of intimidation. It has been preceded, aided, and abetted by a host of organizations from the anti-Palestinian Canary Mission, to the Anti-Defamation League (which hailed Khalil’s arrest), and to outfits such as the Brandeis Center (led by former Trump administration official Kenneth Marcus) that constantly engage in complaints and lawfare against public school districts and universities. Senior Democratic politicians like Chuck Schumer, who might oppose Trump’s extraordinary weaponization of charges of antisemitism to cripple universities, have nevertheless conceded the premise that pro-Palestinian activism is tantamount to antisemitism, and thus that there is an escalating problem in schools and universities across this country. One prominent Democratic politician even compared students protesting the Gaza genocide to Ku Klux Klan members.
The fight against alleged antisemitism has morphed into a concerted effort to contain and crush the outpouring of support for Palestinian freedom by students of all backgrounds amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza. In other words, the current mantra of fighting antisemitism in higher education is not a good-faith effort — it is a backlash. It dramatically intensifies long-standing attempts to smear critics of Israel and Zionism as harbingers of a “new antisemitism.”
Anti-Palestinian forces on both sides of the aisle are waging parallel, though not necessarily coordinated, wars on basic academic freedoms and the right to critical inquiry. Rather than joining forces to combat anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Jewish racism, instead we have seen pro-Israel lobbies, donors, organizations, partisans, and legislative caucuses cynically brand Palestinian history and advocacy as themselves antisemitic.
Because they are unable to defend Israel on intellectual or ethical grounds in academic circles, they seek to suppress basic knowledge about Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. Historian Rashid Khalidi has noted that university administrations at prestigious institutions such as Columbia University have also played anti-Palestinian ball, making it impossible for him to teach a course on the modern Middle East because of the university’s adoption of an anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism.
At the heart of this censorship is the deliberate conflation of anti-Zionism (and criticism of Israel) with antisemitism. The controversial 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism suggested that criticism of Israel’s foundational ideology as racist was tantamount to antisemitism. But as any historian will attest, Zionism is a specific political ideology that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century.
After 1897, its goal was to resolve European antisemitism by colonizing Palestine in order to create a Jewish state. The British-backed Zionist project to transform multireligious Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state has been copiously documented for a century. Many scholars describe this form of colonization as “settler colonialism.” I discussed the implications that colonial Zionism has had for the long history of coexistence in the Middle East in my most recent book, Age of Coexistence.
After the Nakba of 1948, Zionism became the ideology of the new state of Israel, which has continued for decades to dispossess, exile, colonize, and subordinate indigenous Palestinians. In 2018, Israel’s Knesset passed the so-called Nation-State Law, explicitly declaring that Palestinian citizens of Israel (nearly 20 percent of the population) were not entitled to self-determination by virtue of not being Jewish. “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” the law declares. By 2022, major international, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights organizations had explicitly decried the apartheid of the state of Israel.
Yet as the recent documentary Israelism explores in detail, Zionists commonly propose a mythologized Zionism that has little relation to its actual history. They are either in total denial of Israel’s systematically oppressive treatment of non-Jewish Palestinians during and after 1948, or they treat Palestinians as a fundamentally irrelevant footnote to the story of modern Zionism. So-called Christian Zionists, in turn, are told that the Bible is not only literally true, but that it applies to the modern state of Israel, which they must cherish and defend.
Yet many people around the world, including Jews (who have, of course, had a long, diverse, and unbroken history of anti-Zionism), refuse to pretend that the ideology of Zionism can be separated from its actual history in modern Palestine. Hans Kohn was a prominent Zionist who broke with the movement in 1929 by saying that his commitment to ethical Judaism compelled him to abandon a nationalist movement that had so little regard for the Arab natives of Palestine.
Like Kohn, many contemporary American Jews increasingly grapple with Zionism “from the standpoint of its [Palestinian] victims” in the memorable phrase of Edward Said. The more they learn, the more they are disturbed, because the actual history of Israel is deeply disturbing when Palestinians are considered. The current Israeli genocide in Gaza has increased this disillusionment with Zionism and the state of Israel. In California, where I teach, students have demanded to learn about Palestine at schools and universities in which they are enrolled.
While Republican lawmakers in Congress continue to carry out notorious hearings that have targeted universities across the United States, ostensibly in the name of combatting antisemitism, in California some Democratic lawmakers in the state assembly have pushed to censor the essence of modern Palestinian history. They recently proposed the extraordinary AB-715.
Using the premise that there is a crisis of rising antisemitism in California schools that schoolteachers and administrators across the state have not responded to adequately, the draft assembly bill is part of a long-standing hostility to the teaching of a rigorous ethnic studies curriculum because the latter acknowledges the Palestinian experience of colonization and injustice.
AB-715 establishes an “Office of the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator.” This coordinator would be appointed by the governor, “may employ any necessary clerical or expert assistants,” and would be empowered, among other things, to provide training, track, report, “recommend strategies,” and be consulted on “corrective actions” to combat alleged cases of antisemitism across the state’s K-12 educational system.
The bill seeks to strip agency away from schools and teachers and put it in the hands of ideologues and politicians. No other ethnic or minority group has such a “coordinator,” including blacks, indigenous (Native American) Californians, Asian Americans, and Latinos — all of whom have experienced vast levels of historic racism in California.
AB-715 also seeks to amend the state education code to redefine nationality to suggest that the political ideology of Zionism is a protected identity. Rather than encouraging our teachers to teach and our students to learn, the bill threatens our teachers in K-12 with being disciplined for fostering an “antisemitic learning environment” that might contradict the “lived experience of Jewish pupils and the Jewish community” and that expresses, among other things, “language or images directly or indirectly denying the right of Israel to exist, demonizing Jewish people, or saying that Jewish people do not belong in a country or community.”
The bill also says that “when adopting instructional materials regarding Jews, Israel, or the Israel-Palestine conflict for use in schools, the governing board or body of a local educational agency shall include only instructional materials” that “do not introduce or promote antisemitic content, including inaccurate historical narratives such as labeling Israel a settler colonial state.”
By muddying the water so deliberately between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, the bill in essence says: don’t you dare teach Palestinian history; and if you do, you are liable to be disciplined for being antisemitic!
This bill has been pulled for now. The real problem was that it was introduced at all — and a new version of this bill has been promised. Such legislation reflects an alarming trend of nationwide pro-Israel censorship in the name of combating antisemitism, and is clearly designed to shield Israel and Zionism from critical inquiry. It risks further marginalizing and effacing Palestinians in the darkest period of their modern history — undermining basic academic freedom and intellectual and ethical integrity for all.
Great Job Ussama Makdisi & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
