“It’s Never Been This Bad”
Over the past six months, thousands of Americans have faced arrest to protest the war on Gaza. In Washington, DC alone, hundreds have engaged in civil disobedience by sitting in at the US Capitol building and congressional offices. Meanwhile, across the country, thousands have marched and rallied, sometimes blocking highways and bridges (from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge). Students have held protests, vigils, and sit-ins, occupying administration buildings, quads, and plazas.
The police response to these protests has, at times, been overly aggressive, and politicians and policymakers are tripping over themselves with McCarthyite zeal to condemn and vilify the protesters, even considering legislation to jail protest participants. On campuses, Administrators are toughening their schools’ protest policies or throwing the book at student groups that don’t follow the procedures precisely.
Pro-Palestine dissent has always had a target on its back. For decades, the FBI has treated speech in support of Palestinian rights as terrorism, using some of its most intrusive foreign counterintelligence powers to gather information on domestic political speech. State legislators have introduced hundreds of bills targeting the right to boycott Israel in the past decade in a direct attack on the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement for Palestinian human rights. Right wing groups have borrowed a page from the blacklists of the McCarthy-era, seeking to have supporters of Palestinian rights silenced, fired from jobs, or not hired in the first place.
While it isn’t new, the current antagonism toward pro-Palestine speech has reached a frenzy since October 7, 2023. The legal advocacy group, Palestine Legal, which provides legal support for activists, received “an unprecedented 1300+ reports from people targeted for Palestine advocacy across cities and industries,” between October and February.
Crackdowns on campus
On campuses large and small, students have been particularly vocal in their support of Palestinian rights and calls for a ceasefire. They have faced a strong backlash from rightwing groups, legislative bodies, and from their administrators. When faculty have spoken out or supported protests, they too, have faced reprisals. The same for K-12 students and teachers.
The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to nearly 200 colleges and universities calling on them to investigate their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and at least five schools have suspended their SJP chapters: Rutgers, George Washington, Columbia, Brandeis, and Case Western (Columbia also suspended their Jewish Voice for Peace chapter). Students at Harvard who signed a statement condemning Israel in October were targets of a sophisticated doxxing campaign, which included a billboard truck with their pictures and names that drove around the campus.
Many administrators are cracking down on student groups and even prohibiting traditional means of communication and dissent. American University in Washington, DC, instituted a ban on indoor protests, MIT suspended the school’s Coalition Against Apartheid for giving just one day notice about a planned protest, rather than the required 3, and Barnard College has now prohibited students from putting any signs or stickers on their dorm room doors.
Inside Higher Education explains that many of these new restrictions are the result of pressure from state and federal lawmakers. The pressure is very real. In December, the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn were summoned to Capitol Hill to testify about what their schools were doing to address antisemitism on their campuses. By antisemitism, lawmakers really meant protests in support of Palestine. It did not go well. The Presidents of Harvard and Penn were forced to resign, and lawmakers have set their sights on other schools and programs that they can accuse of being antisemitic based on the protected speech of students and faculty. As pressure from lawmakers increases, so will the restrictions and punishments.
Meanwhile, high school students across the country have participated in walk outs and days of action that have resulted in disciplinary action. In Minnesota, two high school girls were suspended for chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” during a student walkout. In Teaneck, NJ, a student walkout was condemned by local politicians and the town’s member of Congress. In liberal suburban Montgomery County, MD, three public school teachers were suspended for posts on social media supporting Palestine and criticizing Israel.
The definitions game
Language matters, or in this case, definitions matter. Antisemitism is hostility, harassment, violence, or discrimination aimed at Jewish people. It has a long and horrible history worldwide and in the United States, particularly as a facet of white supremacy. It should be condemned and opposed. But members of Congress, state legislators, and many rightwing groups want to twist the definition of antisemitism into a tool to shield Israel from criticism.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been tracking antisemitic incidents in the U.S. since the late 1970s. They recently began defining pro-Palestine marches as antisemitic and including them in their data. For the period from Oct. 7 - Jan. 7, the ADL cited 1,317 peace rallies as antisemitic. As The New Republic notes, these protests were included, “even if these featured no overt hostility toward Jewish people. Any anti-Israel or anti-Zionist chants are enough for the ADL’s new definition of antisemitism.”
Politicians have been working to explicitly include criticism of Israel in official definitions of antisemitism for years, including by adopting into law the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition including the IHRA’s “contemporary examples of antisemitism.” The definition itself is not problematic, but the examples it identifies include criticism of Israel. The use of the IHRA definition with its examples has been roundly criticized by civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom groups for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and targeting core political speech protected by the Constitution.
Sixteen states have adopted the IHRA definition with the problematic examples, either through law, resolution, or gubernatorial proclamation. As of this writing, at least seven additional states are considering similar legislation. The laws differ in how they will be implemented. Georgia recently adopted the definition and is requiring police to use it to decide whether a hate crime has been committed. That means participants in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza are at risk of being charged with a hate crime. A law passed in Florida requires the teaching of the IHRA definition in required Holocaust studies, so students will learn that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
Meanwhile, in Congress, six bills have been introduced since October 7 that include provisions adopting the IHRA definition – including the examples that conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism – into law. Many of these are aimed specifically at academia, which is a particular concern. They pile on to existing policy, such as the 2019 Trump-issued Executive Order 13899 aimed at quashing any advocacy on behalf of Palestinian human rights in academia. The EO adopts the IHRA definition, to force any educational institution that receives federal funding to silence criticism of Israel. Even the author of the definition, Kenneth Stern, strongly objected to this use, or any use of the definition in academia for fear it would chill speech and undermine academic freedom, all while actually causing harm to Jewish students.
In January, DRAD joined with 13 other civil rights and advocacy organizations on a letter to the Department of Education articulating the ways the IHRA definition has been weaponized to infringe upon bedrock First Amendment rights, resulting in “disruptions, including years-long investigations of faculty and student speech that poison the environment of academic freedom; widespread censorship of speech on serious matters of foreign policy and racial justice; frivolous lawsuits draining university and community resources; students denied the ability to mourn in public; scholarships threatened; courses interrupted or canceled; students unable to participate in student government; the exclusion of Palestine in curricula; and severe stress and mental health impacts from all of the above being exacerbated by schools’ lack of response to this defamatory and racialized harassment against students.”
Anti-Boycott Bills
According to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, over 200 bills have been introduced in state legislatures over the past ten years to undermine the right to boycott if the target is Israel. A whopping 76 of these bills have passed, so one would imagine there isn’t much left to prohibit as far as boycotting Israel anymore. But in January, legislators in Virginia, Mississippi, and West Virginia introduced bills to double down on restricting the right to boycott. Read more about the anti-boycott fervor sweeping the states in our Fall 2023 issue of Protest Under Fire.