BY JENNIFER RUTH
Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Saree Makdisi, UCLA professor and author of Palestine Inside Out and Tolerance is a Wasteland, for the documentary film The Palestine Exception. “The knowledge is out there,” Makdisi told me. “The genie is not going back in the bottle. In fact, the bottle is broken. And now the only question is: Can [people] be pummeled into silence?” The knowledge Makdisi refers to encompasses everything from what Ilan Pappe calls the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine to the International Court of Justice’s July 19th ruling that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal. The pummeling encompasses everything from doxxing campaigns to the hasty issuing of new rules to suppress protest on college campuses.
One particularly effective pummeling technique is that of turning criticism of Zionism (the project of establishing a Jewish nation in historic Palestine) into unprotected speech. One way to achieve this might have been to claim that calling someone a Zionist is “hate speech,” a slur like any other. There is a lot working against such a strategy, the most obvious being that “Zionist” is simply not a slur but a term with a long and often proud history. Another approach, then, is to expand Jewish identity to somehow inherently include Zionism and, thus, trigger Title VI, which protects against discrimination and harassment on the basis of religion (and other categories). And that’s what we’re seeing now in an effort to preempt protest and political education on campuses this fall. If we can be made to believe that Zionism is an essential component of Jewish identity, then criticism of it can be construed as religious discrimination.
Last week NYU issued new rules of conduct that enact this maneuver. NYU’s chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, part of the nation-wide Faculty for Justice in Palestine network, has issued a strong statement for immediate release in response to the new rules. “This weaponization of the Title VI apparatus openly threatens the university’s commitments to academic freedom and to nondiscrimination, and we insist that the administration reconsider these changes for the good of the university community,” the statement reads. It goes on to say:
The new NDAH [nondiscrimination and harassment] guidance represents an intensification of NYU’s year-long effort to censor criticism and criminalize protest of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. This intensification is itself the predictable outcome of the University’s misguided decision to fully incorporate the problematic IHRA definition of antisemitism into its NDAH policy, and appears likely to be connected to the closed-door settlement the University made in response to Ingber et al. v. NYU. Since the terms of that settlement remain sealed, we cannot know to what extent these new policies are mandated by the suit. However, seen in context, the recent shifts in NYU’s NDAH policy are clearly of a piece with the University’s previous repressive and anti-intellectual actions, as well as with several other new measures the University has taken to stifle pro-Palestinian protest and restrict speech criticizing Israeli state violence. Equating criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism has been roundly critiqued by scholars of antisemitism, by Israeli human rights groups, and by our own group. As a coalition of Israeli human rights organizations wrote in 2023, ‘The Israeli government views and treats the IHRA definition as a coercive tactic and tool to silence dissent to its repressive policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians.’ Even one of IHRA’s own authors has warned against its adoption by universities, asserting that it ‘was never intended to be a campus hate speech code.’
The fact that this definition and its equation of Zionism with Jewish identity is now enshrined in NYU’s nondiscrimination policy is deeply disturbing. The Association for Jewish Studies has called on universities to resist campaigns to adopt a single definition of antisemitism, like the one enshrined in IHRA, since Jewish studies scholars, organizations and communities see the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in vastly different ways. Yet the administration of NYU has flatly ignored all of these warnings. It remains committed to disregarding any and all calls from faculty, students and staff to respond substantively to the genocide in Gaza, choosing instead to further weaponize Title VI and to instrumentalize the definition of antisemitism. In doing so, NYU leadership trivializes the tragic devastation in Palestine as well as the realities of discrimination, including antisemitic discrimination, on US campuses and in US society at large.
For more information on how the IHRA definition has been used to silence critics of Israel, see “How a Leading Definition of Antisemitism Has Been Weaponized Against Israel’s Critics” by Jonathan Hafetz and Sahar Aziz.
Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom.
