In the Attack on Pro-Palestinian Campus Speech, More Than Jobs Are at Stake

For months before U.S. President Donald Trump took office, nearly daily reports rolled in of students and professors on trial for their activism for Palestinian life.

New York University suspended 11 students who were part of a peaceful flyer distribution and sit-in, including students who simply sat in the library lobby in solidarity. Eleven students at Swarthmore College faced expulsion on assault charges for using a bullhorn. Emerson College laid off 10 staff members, blaming protests for Palestine as a cause for low enrollment, and then using layoffs to target pro-Palestine employees. Emerson also put four students on probation for leafleting on a public sidewalk. Thirteen students at Princeton are being criminalized for “trespassing” on their own campus after they participated in a sit-in. Seven students and faculty at Duke have been called before a University Judicial Board, and without notice or due process are facing termination for participating in nonviolent protest. Tenured professors at Emory are facing similar trials. MIT demoted a tenured professor after he proposed a course entitled Decolonization & Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, & Israel. Professors at Muhlenberg College, Columbia, John Jay College, City University of New York, NYU, and more, have been fired or forced out for advocating for Palestinian rights.

I have spoken with a university librarian fired after teaching a workshop in which they discussed “scholasticide” in Gaza, a K-12 teacher fired for a social media post critical of Israel and the U.S., and scores of K-12 teachers who have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for speaking about the suffering of Palestinians. An avalanche of Title VI Civil Rights Act complaints are being weaponized against educators, many of them filed by individuals or organizations with absolutely no connection to the school in question.

To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is—in part—why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe.

I am personally facing a Title VI investigation at Gonzaga University, where I was hired as an “activist scholar” to be the lead instructor in a Solidarity and Social Justice program. The allegations against me are over attending a peaceful student “walkout for Palestine,” and forwarding to our faculty listserve an open student letter (signed by hundreds of our students) against Gonzaga’s anti-protest policy. A range of outcomes are possible, including termination. Because I went on a pre-approved medical leave the day after my first interrogation, I have been denied the right to submit further statements or participate in any way until May. In essence, I will be on trial for five months with no representation or ability to advocate for myself.

The number of the similar cases is impossible to know, due in part to near media omission. Many people who have faced or are currently facing investigations are instructed that they must remain silent (and isolated) as to not “compromise” the investigation. Some are quiet because their jobs, prospects for future employment, and safety are at stake. What is clear is that the trials are wide-reaching, extraordinarily punitive, largely coordinated, and were coming down rapidly across the country at educational institutions of all types even before Trump was sworn in.

The witch-hunting of educators and students is combined with related measures, including a nationwide rollout of campus anti-protest policies that appears at least influenced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, advisers to Project 2025. At the start of the school year around 100 campuses issued broad policy changes that essentially ban meaningful protest. Some universities have gone as far as to fortress entire campuses with checkpoints and surveillance drones, block common gathering areas with fences, and station security guards outside of classrooms.

These are political attacks, designed to crush a movement that is standing with and for people at the brutal bottom of violent systems of oppression. They have a chilling effect, not just upon those they are wielded against, but upon the entirety of public thought and discourse. Some experts have warned that we are witnessing a new McCarthyism, and one that may well exceed the repression of the 1950s.

The new McCarthyism began before Trump and has been partly initiated by “liberal” higher-ed institutions, but Trump’s tyrannical regime will strive to take the trend to harrowing new extremes. Less than two weeks in office, Trump has already issued an executive order—pulled directly from Project Esther—to deport pro-Palestine students that are not citizens and take “forceful and unprecedented steps to marshal all federal resources” against what he described as campuses “infested with radicalism” and “pro-jihadist protests.”

The crackdown on students and educators—being swiftly and terrifyingly exploited and extended by Trump—is a major assault on free speech and academic freedom. It is a grim threat to democracy, dissent, and the ability of ordinary people to resist all of the assaults of authoritarianism and oligarchy that we are up against. It is an alarming slippery slope, that began in large part as a bipartisan attack on a movement that is challenging U.S.-led racist empire.

Activism for Palestinian freedom and equality necessarily confronts American and Western capitalist and imperial interests. It upends supremacist, dehumanizing ideologies—in the case of Palestine, Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia—that rationalize and sustain a remarkably violent and hierarchical global order. To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is—in part—why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe, garnering broad support from the far-right and liberals alike.

The witch hunt across educational institutions plays on longstanding Anti-Palestinian racism to vilify all forms of protest for Palestine as terroristic and antisemitic, issuing sweeping charges of antisemitism against any expression of concern for Palestinian life. In this, there is a largely intentional conflation of criticism of Israeli government apartheid and genocide with antisemitism. This misconstruing is also dangerous and oppressive to Jews. According to History and Jewish Studies Professor Annelise Orleck, it seeks to enforce a right-wing Pro-Israel political stance to which all Jews must adhere, and attempts to eviscerate Jewish identities rooted in a long tradition of standing for the rights of the oppressed, democratic pluralism, and social justice. Both Jews and Palestinians have been disproportionately targeted in the campus crackdowns.

While protection of Jewish life has become the pretext for persecuting those who express concern for Palestinian life, a haunting rise in antisemitism on the far-right and at the top is being ignored; at times even defended by groups whose stated mission is to “combat antisemitism.” British-Israeli author Rachel Shabi recently wrote in the The Guardian, “If antisemitism is so blatantly wielded as a political weapon, it creates the impression of a fundamental unseriousness about the subject.” It also undermines the very humanistic movements that are our hope for a world beyond both antisemitism and Anti-Arab racism. To restate words I spoke to students at the protest for which I am being accused of “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act:

In a moment of such intensive propaganda and power, the world needs your moral clarity. Your moral clarity that all of our lives are inherently interconnected. That the movement for Palestinian liberation is a movement for human liberation. That liberation for Palestinians forces a reckoning with all interlocking systems of oppression, which is core to—not in competition with—Jewish, Black, Brown, Indigenous, White, Collective liberation. Your moral clarity that human solidarity, mutual safety, and freedom is possible. That love, rather than domination, could be the guiding force of our lives together on this one beautiful planet.

We are going to need to hold firm to the principle and aim of collective liberation in the times ahead, and stand with linked arms against attempts to distort our common humanity. I find tremendous hope in the students and educators who have been brave enough to do so, in spite of intense repression and retaliation. It is the courageous acts of ordinary people that will stop the cruel trajectories we are on.