Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
As the genocide in Gaza rages on, U.S. universities welcomed students, faculty and staff back this fall by rolling out a red carpet of repression.
The dedication to stifling pro-Palestine speech and action comes amidst unfathomable death and destruction brought by the siege on Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon. While official Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics report over 42,126 dead in Gaza with more than 10,000 more missing, given the massive destruction of health care infrastructure, these numbers are a vast underestimate. The Lancet projects the genocide may have already caused up to 186,000 deaths in Gaza alone. This is to say nothing of the unprecedented bloodshed and massive displacement in the West Bank.
What’s more, Israel is committing scholasticide in Gaza and throughout Palestine. In Gaza alone, more than 625,000 students have no access to education because 85 percent of schools have been directly hit or damaged, all universities have been destroyed and entire pathways of knowledge and wisdom have been annihilated. Given this context, it is particularly egregious that U.S. universities resume classes this fall more determined than ever to silence and repress speech and action in support of Palestine.
In a climate of repressive governmental oversight not seen since the McCarthy era, universities across the U.S. have unveiled what appears to be a two-pronged strategy aimed at curtailing the movement for Palestinian liberation through policies that prevent action and organizing on the one hand and installing a plan for overt repression of the movement on the other.
Alongside outright bans on encampments at virtually every university come a coordinated set of campus policies, including mask bans, mandatory ID policies, bans on chalking, new protest guidelines and even curricula and syllabi review, all of which promise to severely undermine academic freedom and free speech. On some campuses, as in the California State University system, these restrictions are enacted through “Time, Place, and Manner” policies, which — while they claim to be “content-neutral” — are clearly a direct response to the student movements that transformed campuses last spring, as they explicitly prohibit “vandalism, property damage, trespass, [and] occupation of a building or facility.”
Even more chilling is the fact that these policies seem to presumptively assume that “unlawful discrimination, harassment, and defamation” are the goal of the prohibited activities, specifying that they are “not protected by the First Amendment,” and setting them up for punitive action, even though the right to protest is a central pillar of the First Amendment. Of course, no university should tolerate discrimination, harassment and defamation on its campus, but amid a new “red scare” driven by contrived charges of antisemitism, in which outside Israel advocacy groups weaponize Title VI to argue that criticism of Israel constitutes discrimination and harassment, we must be clear that the actual purpose of such policies is to penalize pro-Palestine speech.
These policies codify the silencing tactics that had already proliferated last spring, when universities blocked scores of events through a variety of administrative measures — like rescinding funding based on dishonest claims that an invited speaker is antisemitic, or drafting new policies on the fly without faculty governance input or open discussion. Recourse to policy implementation is a useful tactic of administrative violence, because it works behind the scenes through the banal register of bureaucracy. It can mask repression as a simple result of failure to follow guidelines — like at Case Western, where Students for Justice in Palestine was suspended for using glue to post fliers — while offering flexibility for administrations to selectively enforce those guidelines.
For example, after a coordinated campaign by groups like Mothers Against College Antisemitism (among many others) some universities blocked screenings of the documentary film Israelism on campuses across the U.S. Some high profile cases made waves in the news — the University of Pennsylvania refused to allow the film to screen, and followed up by threatening disciplinary action against students who organized screenings, while Hunter College also initially tried to block it — and there are likely more instances of the film being blocked or restricted that have gone unreported.
These newly codified policies are not mere guidelines. They set the stage for universities to levy punitive action against all pro-Palestinian speech and organizing, and proliferate across a dizzying number of universities. The policies also create a mechanism for penalizing student, faculty and staff participants, and have already been employed to suspend a professor at San José State University. These policies have even offered the impetus to retroactively target faculty; at California State University-Long Beach recently, the amplification policy was cited in a warning directed solely at the authors of an article calling for the school to divest from Boeing, given its material support for Israel’s military campaigns of displacement, occupation and brutal violence against Palestinians.
Alongside outright bans on encampments at virtually every university come a coordinated set of campus policies, including mask bans, mandatory ID policies, bans on chalking, new protest guidelines and even curricula and syllabi review.
The efforts to shut down critique of campus complicity with militarism should perhaps come as no surprise, as university campuses move to fashion themselves as militarized police garrisons designed to contain and attack their own students. Columbia University, for example, welcomed students back for the fall by enclosing and barricading public green spaces on campus and allowing the NYPD to arrest two pro-Palestinian student protestors. But on many campuses, the garrisons are less visible. They operate through policies shaped by entities like the “risk and crisis management consulting industry,” which is itself staffed by ex-military, law enforcement, and other security professionals trained and invested in counterinsurgency doctrine.
Classic counterinsurgency doctrine, of course, supports overt militarism, like the UCLA police department’s request for of military weapons earlier this fall, but it also fosters a seemingly softer strategy of “armed social work,” which emphasizes the importance of building relations with community leaders, local NGOs and police. The latter offers a helpful framework for understanding the summer activities of a network of organizations that often advocate in defense of Israel — including the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CoP), Hillel International and Jewish Federations of North America — who were busy making recommendations to university administrations.
Under the guise of combating antisemitism on college campuses, the network prepared a list of suggestions — ostensibly to promote safety, though they read more like a direct response to campus movements supporting Palestine. Topping their list of suggestions is the recommendation to “clearly communicate campus rules, standards, and policies,” which urges administrations to “ensure students, faculty, and staff are aware of school policies on protests and demonstrations.” The list even advises universities to “prepare for October 7” by intercepting plans to mark the one-year anniversary of the ongoing genocide. Indeed, Hillel and Chabad have already successfully made good on this promise at Wake Forest, where administrators decided to cancel an event sponsored by five departments across campus after an online petition gathered 8,000 signatures, though there are only 5,471 students on campus.
These groups anchor their current recommendations in the claim that there has been an “unprecedented rise in antisemitic incidents” since October 7, 2023, a claim that consistently shows such “surges” to actually be linked to anti-Zionist political expression. Yet according to ADL’s own statistics — still widely cited despite its unreliable methodology — the bulk of these incidents are expressions “against the state of Israel and/or anti-Zionism,” not antisemitism.
Operation SecureOurCampuses (SOS), the militarized moniker of a program designed by Hillel International in coalition with the Secure Community Network (SCN), has openly announced plans to leverage resources, including “intelligence analysts,” to monitor campus organizing. The SCN framework situates “protestors and demonstrators” as de facto security threats, boasting a “training [that] will provide Jewish students with critical skills in situational awareness and instruction on what to do if confronted by protesters and demonstrators, how to report incidents, to include with law enforcement, and how to respond in potentially life-threatening situations.” SCN has also said it plans to make Jewish students safe by offering “training in hand-to-hand combat — including the Israeli martial art of krav maga.”
These programs and policies are not about safety. Rather, they build on the tradition of silencing dissent through militarism and surveillance, and — terrifyingly — they extend them, mobilizing the rationale of rights to justify repression. The violent assaults on student protests this past spring are reminiscent of Operation Garden Plot, introduced by the U.S. military in 1968 in response to uprisings like those in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts over racist policing. Operation Garden Plot explicitly authorized military deployment as part of a counterinsurgency strategy to quell popular dissent.
Repressing movements for social justice by labeling it as a “civil disturbance,” Operation Garden Plot is part of a longer history of targeting Black and Brown communities in U.S. cities along the lines of “enemy troops” to be pacified. The plan cites “Dissatisfaction with the environmental conditions contributing to racial unrest and civil disturbances and dissatisfaction with national policy as manifested in the anti-draft and anti-Vietnam demonstrations and violent attacks upon the social order,” as its reason for being, demonstrating that it was created specifically to silence popular critiques of racism and imperialism. Operation Garden Plot’s counterinsurgency-style “pacification” plans also included covert tactics in its arsenal of repression, a description apropos to the draconian “expressive activity” policies that have proliferated across campuses.
In the ‘60s, these overt and covert tactics were largely deployed by the state working through a national security rationale. In the contemporary context, however, the tactics are deployed by a much wider set of actors — from NGOs, like the Israel on Campus Coalition, which has been described as a “clandestine Israeli military command,” to astroturf groups and powerful donors. Many of these entities — like the Conference of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — work to advocate for Israel as a unified group. With an acronym like “CoP,” its dedication to policing and surveillance tactics is perhaps unsurprising; yet as an umbrella organization, CoP’s reach is much broader, including soft power tactics as well.
One key player in the soft power landscape is the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), which has sought to codify “Identity Zionism,” and to advance the idea that Zionism should be a protected identity included in DEI efforts.
AEN presents itself as an organization focused on trainings and education about antisemitism for university administrators. But in tax documents, its funder, the Israel on Campus Coalition, says the network “provided resources and education on Israel to faculty members working to help protect freedom of expression and academic freedom on university and college campuses.” Such “protections” have manifested in part through AEN advocacy for pro-Israel policies on NYU’s campus this past summer, when Zionist was elevated to a “protected class,” a move that gravely erodes all freedom of expression deemed to be anti-Zionist.
But make no mistake, the repression reaches much farther. The campaign to eradicate knowledge production about Palestinian liberation plays out through a pattern of attacks, censorship and doxxing of Palestinian and Arab faculty in particular, as well as women of color and BIPOC faculty supporters more broadly. Punitive silencing also manifests through blocked hires, rescinded job offers, refusing to reappoint contingent faculty, terminating employment, suspending professors and — most recently — terminating a tenured professor for pro-Palestine speech. These tactics are designed to erase Palestinian epistemic authority and they demonstrate that epistemic violence is also a form of dispossession.
False accusations of antisemitism fuel this epistemic violence and are in line with the long history and practice of intimidating and racially targeting Palestinian professors and students, and silencing their narratives for decades. One of the earliest instances of repression was in 1969, when the AJC circulated a confidential memorandum describing college campuses as sites of Arab propaganda about Israel. In the decades to follow, the number of organizations created to target, surveil and harass scholars who advocate for Palestine have skyrocketed. Their tactics include blacklisting scholars in campaigns that span the ADL’s “black book” of pro-Palestinian scholars accused of antisemitism, published 1983, to the ongoing psyops targeting campaigns of the Canary Mission, which was founded in 2015.
Behind all of these examples are countless more that never made the headlines — they are literally impossible to count because we will never be able to take stock of all the speakers who have been silenced through draconian measures, the scores of professors who attest that they have remained quiet out of fear of losing their positions and livelihoods, and those who have simply not been hired or considered in the first place.
Classic counterinsurgency doctrine supports overt militarism, like the UCLA police department’s request for of military weapons earlier this fall, but it also fosters a seemingly softer strategy of “armed social work.”
One recent example of a blocked hire is the case of Nicole Nguyen, who was offered a position in the Geography Department at Dartmouth University, contingent upon receiving tenure, a norm for senior faculty hires. As the author of three award–winning books, the recipient of a Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Foundation, and the author of numerous publications in coveted, high profile journals, Nguyen’s bid for tenure could be seen as little more than a formality; she is objectively qualified based on even by the most stringent standards. Nguyen’s research has meticulously demonstrated how the broad targeting and surveillance of U.S. Muslim communities utilize racist and damaging assumptions that equate Arab and Muslim communities with terrorism, deeply harming them. She has also worked with community organizations to push back on flawed programs — like “counter violent extremism” — that target and criminalize Muslim youth using coercive, soft power tactics that deputize teachers and counselors to enact community surveillance.
Yet, like other high profile cases of faculty of color being denied tenure by Dartmouth, Nguyen’s bid was rejected by the Committee Advisory to the President of Dartmouth, despite receiving unanimous support from her department. Dartmouth has an abysmal record when it comes to denying tenure to women of color faculty, who represented only 13 out 150 professors in 2022. Given her impeccable publishing record, however, Nguyen’s rejected bid also raises serious questions about bias against research that demonstrates how anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Black racism fuels key aspects of terrorism and security studies research.
Universities are notoriously protective and secretive about tenure cases, and Dartmouth is even more so, given that Dartmouth keeps the letters produced by each level of review confidential; candidates are only told if their bid was approved or denied at each level, and whether the vote was unanimous. Though we will never know precisely why the committee rejected such a strong case, we do know that when Nguyen’s case went forward, some members of the committee were themselves conducting research that is in many ways at odds with Nguyen’s. That includes research that makes sweeping claims about anti-Western and anti-Jewish rhetoric among people in the Middle East. It also includes research that is based in debunked “radicalization” scholarship that is widely seen as racist and Islamophobic.
At the very least, these connections strongly suggest that the negative decision about Nguyen’s tenure and promotion case was not an objective assessment of the merit of her work. Rather, it appears to be a targeted rejection of her principled, rigorous research. The anti-Muslim racism that drives justification for the global “war on terror” — including in the radicalization theory that Nguyen’s research works to debunk — cannot be separated from anti-Palestinian racism in the U.S. One of the main mechanisms for justifying the broad repression of Arab and Muslim communities is “through U.S. antiterrorism laws, many of which arose during or were adapted to pivotal moments in the Palestinian liberation struggle,” according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. Such “material support” claims are the same baseless and dangerous claims currently being deployed to shut down student protests and student organizing.
Student encampments were examples of principled protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, collective education and political resistance; they intentionally cultivated spaces of popular education, mutual aid and collective care. Through this ethic, their demands for divestment not only invigorate the movement for Palestinian liberation — they make urgent connections among U.S. imperialism through the war on terror, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and deadly policing practices in the U.S., all through the lens of weapons manufacturers. We must not let them be silenced.
In the face of ongoing genocide in Gaza and devastating attacks on Lebanon, I take solace in the communal forms of knowledge and practice that activate and sustain us. The actual S.O.S. urgently before us does not call for the securitized response of militarization and repression; it demands our urgent commitment to life and collective liberation.