Alan Wald
Posted November 12, 2024
INTRODUCTION: As we enter a new political landscape following the election of Donald Trump, resistance to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its bellicose military actions in the region takes on a greater urgency than ever before–even as political repression on US campuses intensifies.
The following essay is based on a talk by ATC editor Alan Wald at a 29 October 2024 symposium at the University of Michigan (U-M) in defense of Professor Maura Finkelstein of Muhlenberg College, the first tenured faculty fired for anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian speech. (See the full report on the case by Natasha Leonard in the 26 September 2024 issue of The Intercept.)
The U-M symposium, called “Academic Freedom in a Time of Genocide,” was sponsored by the Colonialism, Race and Sexualities Initiative of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and it included Prof. Finkelstein as well as Rebekah Modrak, Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Chair of the Faculty Senate at U-M.
I. A Well-Documented History
BLESSED WITH THE keen eye of Minerva’s Owl, much of today’s academia is cognizant that the Red Scare of the 1950s did incalculable harm to US educational institutions. This history is well-documented in many books such as Ellen Schrecker’s classic No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986).
At least since the rise of the Culture Wars of the 1990s, faculty across the political spectrum have been charging “McCarthyism” as the go-to pejorative epithet to contest policies and practices they find threatening to their free speech (briefly, the expression of opinions in public without punishment) and academic freedom (originally, the pursuit of knowledge without external interference).(1)
Allusions to the disgraced Republican senator (Joseph R. McCarthy, 1908-57) are frequently employed by radicals to brand efforts to suppress their activism; at other times they are used by conservatives to raise a hue and a cry about “Political Correctness” and “Wokeness.” In both cases McCarthyism invokes memories of the bad old days of the post-World War II anti-Communist witch-hunt with its broad-based smears and slanders, hardly a forgotten era.
It is also no secret that the Red Scare’s out-of-control campaign of intellectual intimidation — instigated by the needs of US foreign policy — was facilitated by a rapid capitulation to the demands of external political pressure. As soon as the initial forays of government investigators occurred, most administrators and faculty, even if briefly disconcerted, acted shamefully. Their behavior quickly evolved through silence and complicity to formulating liberal rationales for the political purge, famously exemplified by Sidney Hook’s Heresy, Yes — Conspiracy, No (1953).
Yet such groveling didn’t work; today we honor figures like Sarah Lawrence College President Harold Taylor, who fought back and defended his faculty, while many of the one-time Left-wing victims have received institutional apologies. So how is it possible that we are already well into a bumfuzzling resurrection of this malign behavior seventy years later?
II. Faculty of Conscience
The context of 2024 is of course quite different. Faculty in the 1950s, unlike today, were not under fire for militant activism, statements in or out of the classroom, or civil disobedience. The focus was mainly on past political beliefs, i.e., association with the Communist Party (CP-USA). And the demand of the inquisitors was for professors — few of whom still had organizational connections — to repudiate this past by exposing others through the method of “naming names.”
What amounted to political show trials were orchestrated through public hearings of Congressional investigating committees in different states. Professors who didn’t co-operate, by invoking either the First or Fifth Amendments, were mostly punished by their universities through dismissal. Although there was incessant propaganda claiming that such faculty were disloyal, there was never any evidence of professors’ engagement in conspiratorial activities, sabotage, or civil unrest.(2)
At present, faculty of conscience are actively trying to end what much of the world considers to be a genocide of Palestinians by one state (Israel) and enabled by another (ours), which counts among the most monstrous acts of our time.(3) This also means trying to stop Israel from barreling down an ethical abyss ruinous to its own population.
As Zionist Israel becomes an international symbol of oppression, immorality, and illiberalism, Jews throughout the world are wrongly put in danger because the Israeli state insists that it speaks for all of us.(4)
Although individual activists have their own views on causes, solutions, and strategies, the predominant political campaign is for a coordinated global solidarity movement for peace and justice in the region. This should start with an immediate, permanent ceasefire and an embargo on weapons for Israel, and also include economic divestments, boycotts, and increased and more accurate education about the issues.
Yet universities and colleges are implementing a 2.0 version of political repression based on supposed discriminatory, harassing and threatening behavior, and mostly extramural expressions of opinion. Students and staff are also in the crosshairs, which I hope will be the subject of future articles.
For faculty, my focus here, the result has been blacklisting, arrests, and job loss. The New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Guardian, and the Left press have been reporting on numerous cases of such repression, pointing to faculty at Columbia University, MIT, Princeton University, UC Irvine, and Northwestern University.
The most shocking is probably that of Dr. Maura Finkelstein at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was Chair of the Anthropology Department and was fired from her tenured position mainly due to her reposting an anti-Zionist poem on social media.(5)
What I’m calling a 2.0 political repression, against pro-Palestinian speech and activism, is perhaps distinct from 1.0 McCarthyism by the way it aspires to con the university community as well as the public. Administrators use the rubric of protecting free speech and the right to protest, and especially the “safety” of Jewish students.
This last is engineered under Civil Rights Act Title VI by treating outspoken anti-Zionist opinions — especially certain slogans, phrases, and ideas — as antisemitic discrimination against a supposed “protected class” due to race, color, or national origin.(6)
The repression is accomplished as well by implementing university policies that were not used during protests of previous decades; many of these involved much greater disruptions of university activities than we have seen to date, and property destruction far beyond the spray-painting that has occurred in several places.
These new rules are then selectively deployed to intimidate and silence when politicians and donors put on the pressure. What is more, undemocratic means of gaining approval for the new rules are achieved through by-passing the norms of traditional faculty “shared governance;” that is, they are imposed top-down, without consultation with faculty and students.(7)
III. Redefining Antisemitism
Then there is a second distinctive element of 2.0: The widespread promotion of a calculated redefinition of the meaning of “antisemitism.” This is what enables the declarations that violations of Title VI have occurred when criticism of the political ideology of Zionism is sharply expressed. Supposedly, the targets of such criticisms were not ideology or state policy but a “protected class” of “national origins.”
This phrase roughly refers to one’s country of birth or ancestry as well as physical, cultural, or linguistic characteristics. If a university fails to act against violations of Title VI (i.e., claims of harassment and hostile environment against a protected class), it can be punished by losing millions of dollars of federal funding.(8)
Thus, when politicians want to take aim at a campus where there has been radical activity, there is a financial incentive for university administrations to find new mechanisms for punishing people to avoid losing funds under Title VI.
Some of the alleged Title VI violations receiving attention are based on complaints about the personal social media of faculty, customarily seen as extramural speech with First Amendment rights.
Individuals and organizations are monitoring accounts of suspected faculty, often searching for political ammunition, and then they (sometimes outsiders and sometimes students) report to university administrators that the content makes them feel emotionally uncomfortable and anxious. The charge becomes that the professor’s speech or writing negatively impacts a student’s access to education.
For sure, emotional upset at views we don’t like is not surprising. The pain felt when there are challenges to myths that are hardwired through socialization into one’s culture and imagination can’t be dismissed. But this works both ways. Those of us who see pro-Zionists’ images and reports from the unhinged Betar, College Fix, Washington Free Beacon, and Right-wing individuals on our own social media feed can likewise feel distress and apprehension.
At the University of Michigan, faculty and student anti-genocide activists can point to Regents who publicly refer to us as “an antisemitic mob” and participants in “a coordinated, foreign-funded student protest that is engaging in violent activity.”(9) These powerful spokespersons are not just dumbing-down the debate into crude insults but defaming us in a slanderous way that could provoke retaliation.
Whether the emotions we feel in response to this level of discourse are tantamount to our being the victims of threats and harassment that demand an institutional punishment is another matter.
Additional alleged violations by pro-Palestinian faculty are attributed to political appraisals that might be used in a classroom. One supposed antisemitic critique is the assessment of the Palestine/Israel historical conflict through the framework of a variant of colonialism known as “settler-colonialism.”(10)
This is reinterpreted by supporters of the Israeli state as a call for annihilation of the Jewish population. Of course, Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi, the most popular explicator of the settler-colonial framework, plainly does not advocate any kind of expulsionism or eliminationism of Jews. As he clearly states in his most famous book:
“There are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two.”(11)
Another critique, decried as antisemitic, rejects present-day Israel as a lawful form of self-determination — not because it is a Jewish state but because any ethnostate on contested land is unacceptable. Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart, among others, has written compellingly about the fact that self-determination is not necessarily achieved through its own state form, and that self-determination cannot mean a violation of others’ rights:
“National self-determination can only constitute a universal right if it means something less than independent statehood. Think about the term itself. For individuals, ‘self-determination’ means autonomy, one’s right to determine one’s own affairs. But there are limits to that right because individuals have to respect others’ autonomy too. It’s the same with nations, which are large groups of people that feel some collective solidarity and want to run their own affairs.”(12)
IV. Confronting Fake History
The situation we face is that protests and scholarship fundamentally challenging the Zionist position, especially those demonstrating that current events are not an aberration but a fulfillment of Zionism, are being outlawed as “antisemitic.”
Instead, we are frequently offered the view that the violence in the Middle East is a result of the centuries-old “longest hatred” of Jews, as well as a continuation of Holocaust antisemitism. Such an interpretation, that the conflict is at root an ethnic or religious war, keeps the intellectual discourse about states and self-determination in its troglodyte phase.
On the one hand, the object is to normalize the false description of antisemitism found in the International Holocaust Remembrance definition of antisemitism, which is still not legally binding.(13) On the other hand, it correspondingly amounts to deploying a fake history to justify a predetermined conclusion that apartheid and genocide are understandable solutions.
There is a need to name colonial subjugation, and understand its implications, in order to unframe Palestine from the distorting myths of Zionism, which are made possible by a widespread ignorance of Jewish history that ultimately inhibits one’s capacity to understand the world in which we live. This is the only way to reframe the problem as one of equal coexistence through the abolition of Jewish colonial privilege.
Reducing the matter to Jew-hatred only fuels a permission structure to exaggerate one’s discomfort into accusations of a menacing and hostile campus environment. Unsettling chants (“From the River to the Sea”), symbols (Palestinian flags, keffiyehs), and language (“intifada,” which means “shaking off”) are thereby transformed into genocidal threats.
None of these, and similar ones, meet the standard of actionable “hate speech,” which is not a protected class. Only an anti-Zionist statement combined with an imminent physical threat qualifies as punishable. Even scary red triangles (used by Hamas’s military wing to indicate Israeli targets in propaganda videos) don’t make the grade.(14)
For the most part, common sense should tell us that the chants, clothing, and the majority of slogans cited are no more menacing and harassing than pro-Israel partisans waving flags of the state of Israel (the country slaughtering civilians each day), or campus Hillel chapters sponsoring Israeli Defense Force speakers Arky Staiman and Yadin Gellman.
Right-wing websites like Canary Mission that accuse hundreds of university community members of being antisemites and pro-terrorists, or the stream of messages by some Zionists calling anti-genocide protestors “terror and rape supporters,” are as simplistic and as offensive as labeling all Zionists fascists and racists.(15)
If any activists from any point of view sincerely want to get a hearing from people who are not yet convinced of their opinions, they need to avoid gratuitously pushing buttons or using ambiguous slogans that can easily be twisted to mean something not intended. The anti-genocide movement is operating in a climate where powerful actors are trying to depict us as a part of a “global Hamas Support Network [HNS],” turn the public against us, and frighten potential sympathizers into cutting their ties with us.(16)
Veterans of the 1960s antiwar movement who fought for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam know that militancy is most powerful when clear and comprehensible.
Still, disputes over which language actually constitutes a physical threat don’t clarify the question most crucial to accusations made under Title VI: Are the protestors, faculty and others, who are rightfully angry about genocide, but sometimes saying heated and not always accurate things, in any way attacking people of a “protected class”? Or are they vigorously opposing a specific state form and ideology — ones supported by people of various nationalities and ethnicities? Here some definitions and a representative example of how the Title VI accusation is being used might help.
V. Widespread Venerations of Hamas Violence?
Customarily, antisemitism has been described as Jew-hatred, a racist conspiracy theory since the 1894 Dreyfus case. It is commonly distinguished from anti-Judaism, the denial of the Mosaic covenant and replacement by another theology.
In my view, the current 2.0 redefinition of Jew-hatred is primarily aimed at damaging the reputation of people trying to act responsibly; these are hyperbolically and opportunistically smeared as Jew-haters (even if Jewish). Here it is worth noting what Peter Beinart posted on X a few months ago: “When I speak on campus, I ask what % of the pro-Palestine protesters are Jewish. Usually, Jews are overrepresented. Sometimes they’re the largest identity group. Maybe folks calling for cracking down on protesters in the name of Jewish safety should consider their safety too.”(17)
Furthermore, using the antisemitism smear as a lie and a tactic is particularly alarming with the rise of actual antisemitism worldwide. Continually playing the “antisemitism card” to extort fear and silence means that the term loses its power to illuminate, making the charge less credible in relation to the real dangers from the Right.(18)
This is not to suggest that, in contrast to the rest of U.S. society, there is no antisemitism to be found on the Left, or that Jew-hatred has been non-existent among Palestinians and Arabs.(19) Supporting a cause does not mean idealizing the side one espouses, or robotically believing that every action taken in the name of that cause will effectively further it.
While it is up to Palestinians to determine their own future, much of the movement does not hold that the ideology and strategy of Hamas, or the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance,” are one and the same as Palestinian resistance. What we do know is that Israel has harshly stamped out efforts at nonviolent resistance (the First Intifada, the Great March of Return) and oppressed people will resist through the means available to them.
It is only by halting the Zionist onslaught that conditions can be created for there to be a fuller range of choices and options for meaningful alternatives by the population.(20) In our shared struggle with Palestinians for a better world, we should rebut those who use disagreements with Hamas as a convenient excuse to disengage.
Instead, socialist internationalists must redouble efforts to organize and mobilize around effective demands on the U.S. government that will expand, not shrink, the needed mass opposition.
A widely publicized example of the invocation of Title VI appeared on The New York Times Opinion page, in late October: “College Officials Must Condemn On-Campus Praise for Hamas Attacks.”(21)
I choose this article because the author, Erwin Chemerinsky, is no eye-popping wing-nut fanatic; to focus on cherry-picked cringe and fringe opinion from places like Campus Reform wastes time. Chemerinsky is a respected legal scholar, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, and possibly a nice guy. This gives him authority and credibility to most Times readers. But what does he say?
First, Chemerinsky starts by equating some “anti-Israeli language” with “glorification of the Hamas massacre.” Referring to a UC Berkeley rally of 1000 people this October 7, he insists that “many of the protest signs were explicit in their endorsement of the violence on that day.” He then cites one sign (yes, an offensive one, reading “Israel deserves 10,000 October 7ths”) and then one other sign (“Long live Al-Aqsa Flood”). He then mentions one banner, “Glory to the resistance,” which has a red triangle.
After that, however, Chemerinsky immediately moves away from his Berkeley demonstration of 1000 over to Columbia University, to cite one essay posted by an organization, and next to Brown University to cite one Instagram post. He climaxes by quoting the Anti-Defamation League, notorious for identifying statements critical of Israeli actions with antisemitism.
The ADL asserts that all over the country there were, similarly, “protestors’ signs, clothing, flags, chants and speaker comments [that] explicitly venerated Hamas’s deadly attacks.” Not surprisingly, no evidence is cited.
So out of 1000 people protesting at Berkeley, he cites two problematic signs, and also one banner. What did the other 998 participants express by their signs, buttons, and chants? (Could it be that they called for ceasefire, divestment, and so on — not a glorification of the Hamas attack?) Who placed that banner, who agreed with it? Were there any other banners with different slogans?
Notwithstanding, Chemerinsky concludes that the Berkeley action was a threat serious enough to violate Title VI (meaning Jew-hatred), compares it to a KKK rally, and demands administrative action. But none of these signs and posts refer to Jews. Some refer only to armed resistance against an occupying power — which is recognized as legitimate by international law. (To be clear: International law additionally regards the targeting of civilians as a war crime — where Israel, in its slaughter and starvation of Palestinians, is by far the more grotesquely savage perpetrator.)
One must cast a gimlet eye on this Op Ed, for it is not just an ill-informed hot take based on a safari via Google among a wide range of campus protests. Chemerinsky is trafficking in a panic and outrage that turns him into part of the propaganda machine that provides justification for others — off campus — to pressure university administrators to do the actual dirty work of banning and punishing.
VI. Who Are the “Zionists”?
I’m not disputing that Chemerinsky’s five examples might be crude, ambiguous, unhelpful to winning people over — expressions of rage and frustration.
The problem begins with rendering these confrontational anti-Zionist statements as antisemitic, and then his excessive inflation of their presence. It is then multiplied with his invoking of Title VI with reference to Jews — which is disingenuous and factually false.
Chemerinsky’s demagogic melding simply ignores that the largest body of Zionists in the United States, espousing the Israeli political position that Jews have the God-given right to all the Holy Land, are Christian Zionists. They number at least 30 million, compared to about 4.5 million Jewish adults of whom only half consider Israel crucial to their identity.
They are very well-organized — Christians United for Israel, led by John Hagee, has 11 million members. Politically, Christian Zionists are completely aligned with the Israeli state, give many millions of dollars to Israel, and are the largest component of the Israel Lobby. Pastor Hagee is personally close to Netanyahu and gave the benediction when the capital of Israel was moved to Jerusalem in 2018.
Their theology, however, is anti-Judaic. Christian Zionists want Jews to make Aliyah (immigrate to Israel) because the Jerusalem ingathering of Jews is the prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ following the Rapture (believers’ journey to heaven) and seven-year Tribulation.
Jews in Israel must at that time convert to Christianity or suffer the fiery horror of the apocalypse, burning in hell forever. Moreover, Hagee believes God sent Hitler to create Israel, Muslims have a “mandate to kill” Jews and Christians, and the coming anti-Christ, embodiment of all evil, will be a half-Jewish homosexual.(22)
What is critical here is that Hagee’s less-numerical allies are also people who have chosen an ideology. The portion of the Jewish population supporting Zionism, which is far from homogeneous, is subscribing to a nationalist movement infused with religion, somewhat like Hindutva (the right-wing ethno-nationalist political ideology of Hindu nationalism in India), and various others.
The Zionist movement is relatively recent (about 120 years) compared with the Jewish religion (at least 2500-3000 years) and emerged as a secular form of Jewish nationalism in the late 19th century in the face of antisemitism. It was generally rejected by Jews until the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Even then, their primary desire was not Aliya but to escape antisemitism by immigrating to the United States, where entry was mostly prohibited as it was across Western Europe and Great Britain.(23)
Thousands of refugees from Europe who then poured into Palestine before World War II would have been murdered if this one remaining escape route were not available. It is additionally true, however, that the founders of Zionism, going back to the Agricultural Aliyah (1881-1903), had evolved from seeking a Jewish homeland to collaborators in Western colonialism when they became sponsored and protected by Great Britain (the 1917 Balfour Declaration).
By the time of the 1948 Nakba and establishment of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine before World War II, the transformation of all wings of political Zionism — Left and Right — into settler colonialism was clear.(24)
To be sure, there is no doubt that many of the founders of the Israeli state were a remnant of a European population that itself underwent a precarious history of the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia, blood libel accusations, pogroms, and outright genocide; furthermore, a near-majority of those Jews in Israel today are non-white refugees from Middle Eastern and African countries.
Nevertheless, this suffering of the past only helps explain but does not justify the behavior of the Israeli state. Its rulers have long been acting like the white overlords of the U.S. South or South Africa — and are now much resembling the historical persecutors of Jews.
If aimed only at this political ideology, anti-Zionist speech is simply not antisemitic. Undeniably, it can be angrily expressed, and can also be combined with antisemitism. This is obvious if one blends Holocaust denialism, conspiracy theories about “Jewish Power,” and statements like “death to infidel Jews” with an anti-Zionist political claim.
Nevertheless, slogans, tweets, political analyses, and statements of groups focused on the Israeli state and the Zionist ideology are not expressions of Jew-hated or harassment of a protected class — even if they may feel threatening.
VII. The Responsibility of University Intellectuals
Those of us affiliated with universities have an unequivocal intellectual and ethical obligation to make it clear that anti-Zionist contentions about settler-colonialism are not antisemitism. The same goes for challenging the right of self-determination in ethno-state form when it encroaches on an indigenous population. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are historically and definitionally discrete.
Zionism is a political mission of state-making that advantages Jews. In contrast, anti-Zionism stands in resistance to a supremacist state — but emphatically not to Jews or Judaism. We must expose the fallacies behind the conflationary argument that Zionism is a core belief of Jews that cannot be contested without opposing individuals qua Jews, so that expressions of opposition become the equivalent of a harassing or even hate speech.
Every time one merges antisemitism and anti-Zionism, one goes through a political looking-glass to produce false information, and that’s when dangerous hallucinations begin to bloom into a perpetual din of fictional perceptions. Jewish faculty, above all, must object to administrators recycling Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “defend women” as an excuse to repress students and campus diversity efforts; they’re saying, in effect: “Whether the Jews like it or not, I am going to protect them!”
We are also faced with the constant recirculation of a relatively small number of ultra-provocative, and a few possibly antisemitic, protest messages. Refuting the relentless “exposure” of these in the press would require a non-stop-treadmill of fact-checkers.
Besides, rebutting spurious complaints about “widespread Left anti-Semitism” doesn’t address any real problems, because the purveyors of this false information are only interested in protecting the Israeli state from accountability. They are out to exploit what is so far a minor although real problem, rather than helpfully resolve it.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t follow that we should ignore our obligation to clarify really existing antisemitism in this country and around the world, so as to work toward its elimination. Here a special responsibility falls on those of us in the Marxist tradition, for our 19th century understanding was profoundly misguided as to the strength and tenacity of modern Jew-hatred — which was mistakenly judged to be an anachronistic survival doomed to wane.(25)
So it goes in regard to academic freedom in a time of genocide. Yes, we can see that many of our colleagues, especially those with the least job security, are understandably tempted to keep their heads down so as not to be in anyone’s sights. Still, it is time for more secure activist academics to go on the offensive in the way we know best and in which we are trained.
Collective action is probably the most effective, through local and national Palestine Justice organizations that collaborate with students and staff, as well as the American Association of University Professors.
At this point, I do not know if we can win cases like that of Maura Finkelstein. A commitment to solidarity in a time of genocide means that one cannot count on a safe passage through life.
Faculty protestors like Maura, with a steadfastness of moral vision, are up against unprincipled bullying, character assassination, and perceived guilt by association. And these are being perpetrated by pliant and petty university and college administrators, obediently carrying out their orders, who are the latest personifications of the banality of evil.
But in listening to my inner Jean-Paul Sartre, we only know our authentic values and degree of intellectual honesty when we tell the truth even if that truth might hurt us.
Notes
- The clearest explanations of Academic Freedom and Free Speech are available through the American Association of University Professors website: https://www.aaup.org/programs/academic-freedom/faqs-academic-freedom. For my own discussion of Academic Freedom in the McCarthy era, see: https://s-usih.org/2013/08/ornery-professors-and-academic-freedom/
back to text - This the conclusion of research in Lionel S. Lewis, Cold War on Campus: Study of the Politics of Organizational Control (1989).
back to text - See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/06/we-are-witnessing-the-final-stage-of-genocide-in-gaza
back to text - Gideon Levy encapsulated the situation well regarding Israeli Jews in this comment in Haaretz: “This is another cost of the war in Gaza that should have been considered: The world will hate us for it. Every Israeli abroad will be a target for hatred and violence from now on. That’s what happens when you kill almost 20,000 children, carry out ethnic cleansing and destroy the Gaza Strip. It’s a little quirk of the world; it doesn’t like those who commit these sorts of crimes.” The passage is from a longer Opinion piece: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/from-amsterdam-to-the-hawara-pogroms-are-wrong/00000193-128f-d304-a3db-16ff60fb0000?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=Content&utm_campaign=daily-brief&utm_content=48710845b5
back to text - See Anemona Hartocollis, “Professors in Trouble of Protests Over Protests Wonder if Academic Freedom is Dying”: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/us/faculty-protests-academic-freedom-tenure-discipline.html; Megan Zahneis, “This Tenured Professor Says She Was Fired”: https://www.chronicle.com/article/this-tenured-professor-says-she-was-fired-her-case-tests-the-limits-of-academic-freedom; David Shorter, “Academic Freedom Under Attack”: https://truthout.org/articles/academic-freedom-under-attack; Michael Sainato, “US Professors Face Discipline and Investigation Over Palestine Support”: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/24/university-professors-discipline-palestine-support
back to text - To try to understand what I believe is the inaccurate claim that a Zionist political identity constitutes a “protected class” under Civil Rights Act Title VI (discrimination against race, color, national origin), see Congressional Research Service, Legal Sidebar, Updated 17 September 2024: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB11129#
back to text - See Andrew Manuel Crespo and Kirsten Weld, “The Harvard Corporation Tries to Kill Faculty Governance”: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-harvard-corporation-tries-to-kill-faculty-governance
back to text - At present the University of Michigan receives one billion dollars of federal funding per year.
back to text - See: https://apnews.com/article/michigan-university-president-vandalism-8f523c277762107708c155faa3a443d6; and Guardian, 24 October 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/24/michigan-attorney-general-dana-nessel-campus-gaza-protests
back to text - Unlike metropole colonialism, where a parent state exercises direct control over a colony or empire, settler-colonialism takes land and resources from an indigenous people with the aim of displacing them by settlers.
back to text - This quote from The Hundred Years War on Palestine (2017) has been widely circulated; see, for example, “How Israelis and Palestinians Can Make a one-State Solution Work”: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-israelis-and-palestinians-can-make-a-one-state-solution-work. This is not to suggest that violence can be ruled out in the anti-colonial process, only that it must be minimized as much as possible. As Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi points out: “Ultimately, decolonization, if it is to be effective, is not going to be grounded in bloodletting and killing of civilians. It’s going to be a process that’s focused on dismantling a structure of oppression.” See: https://jacobin.com/2023/11/hamas-israel-palestine-gaza-history-decolonization-violence. While many facts are not known about the events of 7 October 2023, and Israel has promoted lies about beheadings and systematic rape, the reports of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem should be taken seriously.
back to text - https://jewishcurrents.org/there-is-no-right-to-a-state
back to text - See: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
back to text - See: https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/what-is-hate-speech
back to text - For Canary Mission, see: https://canarymission.org for “terror and rape supporters” see: https://www.instagram.com/betar.us/p/DBro62CvpRJ/?img_index=1
back to text - See, for example, Project Esther of the Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/report/project-esther-national-strategy-combat-antisemitism. Some useful political advice about the need for strategic thinking can be found in an essay by Palestinian activist and scholar Bashir Abu-Manneh: https://jacobin.com/2024/10/palestine-genocide-israel-international-solidarity
back to text - See: https://x.com/PeterBeinart/status/1782202542127972511
back to text - https://religiondispatches.org/the-adl-is-correct-that-antisemitism-is-rising-but-the-main-and-most-dangerous-source-isnt-the-left-its-always-been-the-right/
back to text - For example, see the brilliant discussion of Arab responses to Naziism in Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010). This was reviewed in Against the Current by David Finkel: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc151/p3191/
back to text - Here I am sympathetic to the views of Rashid Khalidi: “There is a powerful trend or faction that advocates an unrestricted form of violence…In my view, this trend does not have a strategic vision. It has achieved tactical victories and some catastrophic strategic defeats, and it has caused enormous suffering to Palestinians and also to Israelis….Only a new vision of Palestinian liberation, rooted in progressive ideals rather than in the ethno-religious project of Hamas, he argues, can lead to genuine Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.” For the full interview see: https://jacobin.com/2024/10/gaza-lebanon-ireland-biden-netanyahu
back to text - See: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/opinion/hamas-colleges-free-speech.html
back to text - For more on Christian Zionism and Hagee see: https://forward.com/opinion/603310/john-hagee-christian-zionist-iran-israel; and https://forward.com/culture/569725/john-hagee-march-for-israel/
back to text - See Harold Myerson: https://prospect.org/world/2024-05-06-who-created-israel-palestine-conflict/
back to text - There is also the question of whether there is convincing scientific (genetic) or historical evidence to prove convincingly that contemporary Jews throughout the world have a common ancestral origin; that is, comprise a population entirely exiled from Palestine two thousand years ago with a Biblical property right to own the Holy Land. This is the subject of many books, which point out that there is no shared Jewish gene to define Jewish ancestry, that Jewish migration from Palestine was not complete and caused by many factors, and that substantial conversions to Judaism had a major impact on Jewish history. Some of these matters are discussed by David Finkel in his review of Shlomo Sands’ The invention of the Jewish People: <a href="https://againstthecurrent.org/atc146/p2805/
https://againstthecurrent.org/atc146/p2805/<br/back to text - See Enzo Traverso’s remarkable The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (2019) for the fullest discussion. See Peter Drucker’s review of the First Edition: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc065/p2310/
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Alan Wald is an editor of Against the Current, a member of the Academic Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and a founder of the University of Michigan Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.
to appear in the January-February 2025 issue, ATC 234
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