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Universities Are Cracking Down on Free Speech Over Gaza

The school year is kicking off, and American universities are starting the semester with scaling back students’ First Amendment rights, with the goal of stopping criticisms of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

NYPD officers detain pro-Palestinian students and protesters who had set up an encampment on the campus of New York University (NYU) to protest Israel’s war on Gaza, in New York on April 22, 2024. (Alex Kent / AFP via Getty Images)

Students arriving on campus at New York University (NYU) this fall are being greeted with a few changes. The school, like many others across the country, was a hotbed of pro-Palestine rallies and protests during the prior school year, a response to Israel’s still-ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, the death toll of which is now estimated to be anywhere from 40,000 to more than 100,000. With no end in sight — Joe Biden, an ardent supporter of Israel, is still sending Israel bombs — NYU’s administrators spent the summer break coming up with ways to nip campus activism in the bud.

It’s not only the barricades blocking off seating in the public spaces on campus, watched over by security guards, though that sends a decidedly unwelcoming message. The school’s updated code of student conduct, announced earlier this month, classifies criticism of Zionism as a violation of the university’s antidiscrimination policies.

According to the updated conduct guide, “Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH [nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy] if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists.” In other words, at NYU, Zionists are now a protected class.

To pull that off requires conflating Zionism, an ethnonationalist ideology, with Judaism itself. That sleight of hand has long been a priority for supporters of Israel — including the powerful ones who constitute the Israel lobby, the coalition of pro-Israel organizations, some of them funded by the Israeli state, who work to ensure that the United States continues sending money and weapons to its Middle East ally.

The conflation accomplishes an important trick: if “Zionist” is a synonym for “Jew,” criticism of Zionism becomes bigotry, as it now has at NYU. As the school’s code of conduct puts it, “Using code words, like ‘Zionist’ does not eliminate the possibility that your speech violates the NDAH policy.”

“The new guidance sets a dangerous precedent by extending Title VI protections to anyone who adheres to Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, and troublingly equates criticism of Zionism with discrimination against Jewish people,” NYU’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine said in a statement in response to the updated code of conduct.

NYU’s administrators aren’t the only ones greeting the school year with new restrictions on speech. At the University of California, which saw a UC-wide graduate-student strike last spring, administrators are finalizing their own new restrictions on protest, which are expected to include bans on face masks and encampments.

There are parallel efforts among the state’s elected officials: as the end of the legislative session nears, lawmakers are now considering a bill which would require schools to adopt and enforce rules against harassment, discrimination, or any behavior that “creates a hostile environment on campus.”

Senate Bill 1287, introduced in February by Democratic state senator Steve Glazer, originally included a ban on any “call for or support of genocide,” which many saw as concerned not with Israel’s actions but rather as a response to the slogan “From the river to the sea.” That language has since been removed after free speech advocates raised concerns that the legislation violates the First Amendment.

“It was very clear who this bill was targeting,” Leena Sabagh, a policy manager with the Council on Islamic-American Relations, told the Intercept. Free speech organizations are still alarmed by the amended bill: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in California has said that it will “set a dangerous precedent of chilling speech on campuses across the state.”

But Israel is still bombing the Gaza Strip, and the US government is still aiding and abetting that violence. US universities are still implicated in the genocide through their investments in companies that profit from the war. Just this week, Israel launched its most sweeping offensive in the occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada. In Gaza, Israel is still starving civilians and destroying Palestinians’ water infrastructure.

The Democratic Party may be hell bent on running a good-vibes-only presidential campaign, but expect that to run headfirst into a wave of campus protests that only died down because of the summer recess. No amount of repression and restrictions will stop students from protesting a genocide. Columbia University students demonstrated that mere months ago. (Columbia’s administrators, too, have added restrictions to their student conduct guidelines as well as limiting public access to campus, moves that have elicited criticism among some faculty and staff.)

Classes are only just getting underway, and already, college students are under arrest at the University of Michigan after police attempted to break up a pro-Palestine demonstration. The reasons for protest are just as pressing as they were during the previous school year.

This post was originally published on Jacobin.