The west is in the midst of the most serious assault on free speech and academic freedom since the heyday of McCarthyism seven decades ago. For years, we were told the danger came from the left: oversensitive students, censorious activists, no-platforming zealots. Yet the most aggressive and successful campaign to police speech in our public institutions is being waged by cheerleaders of a state currently committing genocide.
Consider a recent case. Last December, a pro-Israel lobby group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), celebrated another apparent victory. It describes its mission as contributing “generally as lawyers to creating a supportive climate of opinion in the United Kingdom towards Israel”. In practice, this has meant lawfare, directed not only at pro-Palestinian activism, but at the public existence of Palestinian identity itself.
The offence this time? The Open University’s use of the term “ancient Palestine” to describe the birthplace of the Virgin Mary, which UKLFI argued was “historically inaccurate”. More than that, they argued it risked erasing “Jewish historical identity”, potentially breaching the Equality Act 2010 by creating “a hostile or offensive learning environment for Jewish and Israeli students”.
The OU’s Palestine Solidarity Group responded with a freedom of information request to see how their institution had handled the complaint. The reply from the OU was clear. “Ancient Palestine” was “academically appropriate”. The fifth-century BC Greek historian Herodotus used the term Palestine to describe a region broader than that acknowledged by UKLFI. While the lobby group insisted Mary was born in the “predominantly Jewish region” of Galilee, the university noted that there is no academic consensus that Mary existed at all, still less where she was born.
That should have been the end of the matter. But instead, the OU conceded that “associations of this term with Roman colonial rule and with the contemporary political context require us to think about the meaning of the term to current and future students”. Academics did not “want the use of the term to imply or be read as a comment on the conflict between Israel and Palestine”, it added. In response to the UKLFI complaint, staff accepted that “the term is now problematic in a way that, perhaps, it was not when the materials were written in 2018”.
And so, despite affirming the term’s historical accuracy, the OU agreed to “not use the term ‘ancient Palestine’ in any future course materials”, and to “explain and contextualise its use in existing materials for current learners”. Last month, staff received an internal bulletin confirming the university had “agreed to change references to ‘Ancient Palestine’”, complete with a link to the UKLFI’s triumphant press release: “Open University agrees to change use of ‘ancient Palestine’ following UKLFI intervention.”
Strip away the bureaucratic phrasing and the picture is stark. A university accepted that a historically accurate term would be removed from future teaching because a partisan lobbying organisation objected to its claimed contemporary political resonance. “This is a despicable attempt by political hacks to dictate academic terminology,” says the esteemed historian Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. “Every reputable history covering periods from ancient history to the present uses the term ‘Palestine,’ including scores of works by distinguished Israeli scholars.”
Enter the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, introduced by the last Conservative government amid warnings that leftwing activists were strangling academic debate. The act imposes a duty on universities to secure lawful freedom of speech, even where that speech “may be offensive or hurtful to some”.
The OU had landed themselves in a mess. When the Palestine Solidarity Group argued that censoring an academically defensible term on the grounds that it was politically “problematic” violated the 2023 legislation, the vice-chancellor circulated a clarifying note: the university stood by academic freedom. The school would continue using the term, albeit with “an additional contextual note to support students’ understanding of differing perspectives”. His statement failed to say whether this change was a response to the intervention by a partisan lobby group.
In response to my questions, the university insisted that the controversy only applied to one module, that academic teams had reviewed its use of “ancient Palestine”, and concluded it was academically appropriate and thus no change would be made, except for this “short contextual note”. Yet they also claim not to have retracted any commitment made to UKLFI – which, remember, referred to “any future course materials” – and maintained that “no external organisation determines our curriculum content”. It is difficult, to say the least, to reconcile their public statements with the commitments they made to UKLFI.
This is just one example of UKLFI’s assault on Palestinian identity, past and present. Months before Israel’s genocide began, Chelsea and Westminster hospital removed a display of artwork by Palestinian children after a complaint by UKLFI claimed it made Jewish patients feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised”. A pro-Palestinian concert planned at Morley College in London was cancelled after a UKLFI complaint in 2024. The group also sought to cancel the Falastin film festival in Scotland.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority is now investigating a complaint alleging that eight of UKLFI’s letters “demonstrate a seeming pattern of vexatious and legally baseless correspondence aimed at silencing and intimidating Palestine solidarity efforts”. Whatever the outcome of that investigation, the wider context is impossible to ignore.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump is suing universities and slashing their funding on the pretext that they have allowed antisemitism to flourish on campus – when in reality the trigger has been pro-Palestinian protests, including those led and supported by Jewish students. His administration has sought to deport students opposed to the genocide.
Across the western world, those expressing solidarity with Palestinians have been deplatformed, sacked, beaten by police and arrested. In Britain, the government proscribed the direct-action group Palestine Action; the high court later ruled the proscription unlawful, after nearly 3,000 people had been arrested for holding supportive placards.
This is the real crisis of free speech in the west. The target is not just protest, but a people. Israel seeks to erase Palestinians as a society. First they are destroyed in the present. Then they are deleted from the past.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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