Since 7 October, commentators have been ringing the alarm that a growing protest movement in solidarity with Palestine signals not just the end of a “golden age” for American Jews – as Franklin Foer recently put it in the Atlantic – but for American liberal democracy itself.
As Foer wrote, the “surge of antisemitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism”. Writing before the start of the encampments, he noted that Columbia was “a graphic example of the collapse of the liberalism that had insulated American Jews: it is a microcosm of a society that has lost its capacity to express disagreements without resorting to animus”. Meanwhile, on CNN, the anchor Dana Bash invoked 1930s Europe – “and I do not say that lightly … the fear among American Jews is palpable right now”.
There is no doubt that many Jewish students – especially those raised to believe that their Jewish identity is indivisible from the political ideology of Zionism – feel uncomfortable, or that many of them feel ostracized by their peers. But their discomfort has justified a powerful attack on academic freedom and first amendment rights that long predates the student encampments – part of a longstanding rightwing project to curb speech and reshape the public sphere.
Foer and Bash are right that American democracy is imperiled. But as the draconian crackdown on non-violent student protests makes clear, accusations of antisemitism are not themselves evidence of liberal decline, but rather the tip of the spear in a frightening illiberal project serving the agenda of an emboldened, autocratic right wing.
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The months since 7 October have seen shocking attacks on freedom of expression and assembly on campus. Even before the stunning display of police brutality in recent weeks, campuses have been home to canceled speakers and events, arbitrary disciplinary hearings, and outright censorship. The University of Southern California has canceled its entire commencement ceremony rather than let its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, deliver a message of Palestine solidarity in her speech. Universities have suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace, in decisions that PEN America has said are “united by a degree of opacity, in that university leaders have not been fully forthcoming in delineating how these student groups broke campus rules, or how the decision to suspend them was reached”.
These curtailments of civil liberties, enacted in the service of “protecting Jewish students”, are not now and will not be confined to Palestine-related speech. The recent history of suppression of Palestine activism suggests that tactics employed by legislatures, universities, and other institutions will soon pop up elsewhere.
Anti-boycott laws – targeting the non-violent tactic of boycott when applied to the state of Israel – exist in 38 states, under the argument that such boycotts constitute antisemitism. In the past few years, this tactic has spread to protect other causes beloved by the right. Now, several states have laws on the books that prohibit the government from doing business with groups or individuals who are boycotting fossil fuels or the gun industry. “They’re shrinking the space for public debate and action on some of the most important issues of our time,” Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, told Jewish Currents in 2022, underscoring why “it’s so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to speech”.
The pro-Palestine movement has also provided cover for the right to expand its attack on protest – a project advanced significantly after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Building on laws that allow motorists to hit protesters with their cars, and bar convicted protesters from holding state employment or receiving public benefits, GOP lawmakers have introduced new legislation pinned to the wave of pro-Palestine protests since 7 October. In March, Senator Tom Cotton introduced the “Stop Pro-Terrorist Riots Now Act”, to “crack down on pro-Hamas riots”, increasing punishments for rioting and providing mandatory sentences for anyone committing violence as part of a riot. Senators Marsha Blackburn and Thom Tillis have introduced legislation making it a federal crime to block roads or highways, a move they said was in “direct response to radical tactics of pro-Palestinian protesters who have intentionally blocked roads and highways across the country”.
In a tactic familiar from the post-9/11 landscape, GOP lawmakers and civil society leaders from groups like the ADL and the Brandeis Center have endeavored to paint student protesters and groups as “terrorists”. This is bad news for activists across the country: a 2024 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights details how “core features” of US antiterrorism law, “driven by anti-Palestinian agendas”, were “expanded and ‘brought home’ to repress other protest movements”, including the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against the “Cop City” Atlanta police training center. As early as next week, the Senate could vote on a bill designed to penalize criticism of Israel by suspending tax-exempt status for “terrorist supporting organizations” – which Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said would “dispense with the due process” and empower “a single US official to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner of [American] orgs whose viewpoints that official disagrees with”.
Of course, some student groups have adopted inflammatory rhetoric, reminiscent of some anti-Vietnam war campus protesters’ adoption of the Viet Cong flag. Many observers have referenced a toolkit released by National SJP in the days after 7 October affirming their support for armed struggle. But these are political opinions that constitute protected political speech. “Students’ independent political rhetoric is not material support for terrorism,” Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Jewish Currents in November. “A blanket call to investigate every chapter of a pro-Palestinian student group for material support – without even an attempt to cite evidence – is unwarranted, wrong, and dangerous.”
Alongside this effort to tar protest as terrorism, the right is seizing on the emotions inflamed by Israel’s war to make headway in a longstanding offensive on education. Over the past several years, the GOP has sought to meddle in the academic freedom of universities, which they allege are indoctrinating students into “woke”, leftwing ideology. This is perhaps most dramatic in Florida, where, in a bid to control access to history and information, Governor Ron DeSantis has all but remade the public liberal arts college New College in his image, and has introduced the Stop Woke Act, curtailing what teachers can teach on topics of race and gender. Republicans have also taken aim nationally at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, introducing more than 30 bills targeting DEI funding, practices, and promotion at schools. Nine have been signed into law – efforts that the ACLU says “represent yet another attempt to re-whitewash America’s history of racial subjugation, and to reverse efforts to pursue racial justice”.
The moral panic around antisemitism has been a useful vehicle to further the campaign against DEI, as congressional hearings on antisemitism since 7 Octoberhave made clear. “Evidence shows that campus DEI bureaucracies play a major role in propagating the spread of antisemitism,” said the US representative Burgess Owens at a November hearing. “It is a dirty little secret at the heart to DEI.”
Though these attacks on academic freedom and free speech on campus have been spearheaded by the right wing, under the guise of “fighting antisemitism”, Democrats are playing along. Last week, a bipartisan House vote affirmed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would codify the controversial International Holocaust Remembrace Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism for the purpose of campus harassment investigations. According to the ACLU, the adoption of this “overbroad” definition “could result in colleges and universities suppressing a wide variety of speech critical of Israel or in support of Palestinian rights in an effort to avoid investigations by the Department [of Education] and the potential loss of funding.” At the City University of New York (Cuny), faculty have been whispering for months about how the Democratic governor Kathy Hochul’s independent review into the school’s policies on antisemitism and discrimination has chilled speech and could feed calls to defund Cuny from Republican lawmakers at the state and federal level. This effort to defund higher education is part of a broader GOP plan to punish universities, as the Republican US representative Jim Banks admitted in a Zoom call with business leaders leaked to CNBC. “The hearing was the first step,” he said, in reference to the congressional hearings grilling college presidents about antisemitism allegations on their campuses.
Private universities will not be immune from these repressive headwinds, if the April testimony of Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, before Congress was any indication. Rather than stand up for academic freedom, Shafik obliged GOP lawmakers’ agendas, suggesting she would meddle in departmental appointments, investigate and punish protected speech, and cordon off protest, all in the name of protecting Jewish students. A day later, she invited police to Columbia’s campus to arrest more than 100 students who had been peacefully protesting.
To be clear, all of the most serious violent attacks since October have been on Palestinians and their supporters. In Chicago, a six-year-old Palestinian American was killed and his mother injured in a stabbing attack by their landlord. In Vermont, three Palestinian students were shot while wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic; one is permanently paralyzed. At Stanford, an Arab Muslim student was targeted in a hit-and-run after a Palestine solidarity protest. Just this week, a cousin of the extremist Jewish leader Meir Kahane allegedly rammed protesters with his car outside the home of a Columbia trustee. And last week at UCLA, 25 students were hospitalized after an attack by a Zionist mob with wooden planks, fireworks, and pepper spray.
Yet there is no discourse in Washington suggesting that Palestinians are unsafe in the United States, or that pro-Israel supporters are “genocidal” – and no comparable rush to legislate.
Liberals, particularly older ones, have long scolded college students for their illiberalism, their “safe spaces”, and their low tolerance for discomfort and disagreement. But to watch the full-throated support for the violent repression of student activism resounding in the media, in university administrations, and at every level of government these past several weeks is to witness an astounding repudiation of our civil liberties on account of their discomfort. It’s worth remembering that the Vietnam anti-war protests were also unpopular at the time – three-quarters of the American public opposed them, and the country elected a racist, criminal president, Richard Nixon, in part to restore “law and order”.
Liberals know there is an autocratic strain spreading across this country – they identify it in Trump’s efforts to steal the election, or DeSantis’s attacks on history. Come November, Trump could return to office, and the erosions in our civil liberties we have written into law and practice in these months will be there for his use. But it’s worth remembering that the crackdowns on our first amendment rights over the last several weeks have happened under a Democratic president, in defense of a US-funded war that enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, if not among a changing Democratic party base.
As the White House repeatedly accuses the students of antisemitism, in a tacit endorsement of the police swarming university campuses, it’s worth taking the students’ word for why they’re there in the first place: Biden’s disastrous foreign policy, in which every opportunity for Israeli accountability has been spurned, has turned Gaza into a mass grave – off the charts compared with any other contemporary conflict by every metric – and brought the entire Middle East to the brink of all-out regional war.
I believe history will vindicate these students and their call for Palestinian liberation and an end to US complicity in a brutal, futile Israeli war. But even if you disagree, it’s clear that protecting them is also an investment in the protection of our fundamental liberties.
Arielle Angel is the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents
