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Parents, community members, social justice organizations, and solidarity activists must demand a school curriculum that looks forthrightly at the history of Zionism and Palestinian struggles for justice.
Scholasticide.
It’s a term coined in 2009, but has taken on new power as the devastation of Gazan schools, universities, and libraries becomes almost total. As Rice University Professor Abdel Razzaq Takriti of Scholars Against the War on Palestine said about the Israeli assault: “They’re demolishing universities and schools intentionally. They bombarded and destroyed every single university. They’re using schools as barracks and military stations.”
But another facet of scholasticide can be found in our own schools in the United States—erasing Palestinian lives and hiding the history of Palestine-Israel from young people.
Attempts to silence critical teaching around Palestine-Israel have at times been ferocious. And it requires courage for teachers to confront this repression.
In the forthcoming book from Rethinking Schools, Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices, Palestinian American educator Nina Shoman-Dajani writes: “Of the hundreds of assignments my children have brought home from school over the years, not one of them has referred to Palestine.”
In a review of children’s literature on Palestine, in the book, Nadine Foty, Palestinian-Egyptian-American early childhood educator, writes: “As a child, I remember feeling like I didn’t belong because I could never walk over to a map in my classrooms and see my father’s home, Palestine. When I asked, I was met by responses that Palestine didn’t exist.”
The curricular silence that turns Palestinians invisible impoverishes all young people. Instead of the knowledge they need to make sense of how Palestine became Israel and how Israel continues to wage war on Palestinians, they get nothing. Or worse.
Widely adopted corporate textbooks feed students pernicious myth after myth. Glencoe’s World History, for example, begins its section “The Question of Palestine” not with Palestinians, but with Jewish immigrants: “In the years between the two world wars, many Jews had immigrated to Palestine, believing this area to be their promised land.” The entire section simply tells Israel’s origin story as Israeli propagandists would tell it.
About Israel’s founding, Holt McDougal’s Modern World History lectures young people: “The new nation of Israel got a hostile greeting from its neighbors.” The first “Critical Thinking” question in the teacher’s edition asks: “What prevented the establishment of the Arab state in 1948?”
The sole possible answer the book offers: “Palestinian Arabs rejected the partition plan.” (That partition plan was seen by many as a temporary inconvenience, including Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who wrote partition was “not the end but the beginning.”)
The good news is that more and more teachers around the country are breaking through the mainstream curriculum’s silences and lies.
Pro-Israel efforts to repress critical teaching about the history of Zionism and Palestine echo the country’s ferocious right-wing attacks on anti-racist, social justice curricula.
Teaching Palestine collects stories of imaginative teaching from across the country: a simulation that introduces students to Israel’s apartheid system of fragmentation and domination; a critical thinking activity with students evaluating Palestinian narratives on the 1948 Nakba (the Catastrophe), alongside Zionist narratives that fill our textbooks; an historical dive into U.S. policy choices toward Israel from the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis through Hamas’ rise to elected power in Gaza in 2006; a role play activity on the ”seeds of violence” in Palestine-Israel that transports students to Palestine in the Ottoman era and the early years of Zionist immigration and ethnic nation-building alongside Palestinian dispossession; an elementary lesson that uses Malak Matar’s poignant children’s book Sitti’s Bird: A Gaza Story.
But attempts to silence critical teaching around Palestine-Israel have at times been ferocious. And it requires courage for teachers to confront this repression.
Some instances feel absurd. In Portland, Oregon, in response to student work on Palestine posted on the walls of a public school last spring, the school district recently instituted a new administrative directive. Now, teachers may display art or posters that might “stimulate and illustrate” an area of study, but if these are visible from a “common area” like the hallway, they must have prior approval from the building administrator. This fall, school officials tore down—literally—a teacher’s “Stop the Genocide” posters. In a meeting, administrators said that “Stop Genocide” would be permissible, but inserting “the” rendered this unacceptably partisan.
In an article included in Teaching Palestine, the young adult novelist Nora Lester Murad describes how the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) bullies teachers and students by pushing—and weaponizing—the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates Palestinian perspectives with antisemitism.
In Philadelphia, students of the award-winning high school teacher Keziah Ridgeway made a podcast comparing the art of Palestinians with the art of enslaved people. In response, groups there including the School District of Philadelphia Jewish Family Association labeled Ridgeway’s work with students “antisemitic and dangerous.”
Amplifying the Jewish Family Association’s complaints against Ridgeway and other teachers, ADL later submitted a Title VI complaint against the school district. As Murad notes, in the complaint, “the ADL advocates for the ‘suspension and expulsion’ of students and the ‘suspension and termination’ of teachers, who under the IHRA definition… have engaged in ‘discriminatory conduct’ for being publicly critical of Zionism.”
As we reported in the spring 2024 Rethinking Schools magazine, four teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland were placed on administrative leave for public expressions of support for Palestinians. A charter school in Los Angeles fired two first-grade teachers and placed their principal on leave after one teacher posted on Instagram that they had taught a “lesson on the genocide in Palestine.” The Decatur, Georgia school district disciplined their equity coordinator for sharing “Resources for Learning & Actions to Support Gaza.”
A recent Jewish Federation of Greater Portland parent advocacy training I attended, told parents, “You are our eyes and ears”—“Record everything. Every single word.” One presenter told the story of a group of parents confronting a principal about a teacher who showed “one-sided” CNN videos. “We demanded that some action be taken. And this teacher—I can tell you, this year, that teacher does not teach at that school.”
Pro-Israel efforts to repress critical teaching about the history of Zionism and Palestine echo the country’s ferocious right-wing attacks on anti-racist, social justice curricula. As Jesse Hagopian points out in his forthcoming book Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, almost half of public school children in the United States live in states that restrict teaching about race and racism.
Educators of conscience need allies who can support their efforts to build a curriculum that centers Palestinian perspectives. This is not the work of educators alone. They need parents, community members, social justice organizations, and solidarity activists to demand a school curriculum of fearless curiosity—one that looks forthrightly at the history of Zionism and Palestinian struggles for justice.
Palestine has been the site of invasion, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and war. But also of resilience, of hope. Let’s help teachers introduce young people to the critical stories they need to make sense of the world—and to change it.
More than 150 bills seeking to undermine academic freedom and intervene in university governance were introduced in state legislatures across the country during 2021-2023.
A recent white paper by Isaac Kamola, director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, details the ongoing culture-war backlash against higher education in America, largely in response to the grassroots activism of Black Lives Matter in 2020 and increasing LGBTQ+ visibility.
More than 150 bills seeking to undermine academic freedom and intervene in university governance were introduced in state legislatures across the country during 2021-2023. While these bills are typically interpreted as an “organic” consequence of increasing polarization among Americans, the current wave of legislation targeting higher education is a coordinated effort between wealthy elites, a network of right-wing and libertarian think tanks, and Republican politicians at the state level.
The paper published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) identifies 11 right-wing and libertarian think tanks responsible for manufacturing the cultural backlash against both K-12 and higher education. A steady stream of papers, op-eds, talking points, public events, and media appearances emanating from these groups have conveyed a false impression of intellectual legitimacy behind their arguments, which conservatives have leveraged for political capital. As a result, the inflammatory narrative that all college and university faculty are “liberal,” biased, “woke,” socialist or Marxist, and hostile to free speech and conservative values has taken hold in the mainstream.
The catalyst for the backlash against educational institutions and the accompanying wave of legislation can be traced back to an executive order signed by former President Trump in September 2020 as well as to the right-wing operative who set it into motion.
Unsurprisingly, the think tanks behind these attacks are prominent, influential, and well-connected operatives in the right-wing ecosphere. Seven of the 11 are members of the State Policy Network (SPN), a web of 167 far-right nonprofit organizations in 48 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom. SPN members play an integral role in ensuring the passage of legislation in state houses by providing academic legitimacy when called on to testify at hearings, producing “studies” or model legislation, and attracting media attention.
In addition, 8 of the 11 highlighted think tanks sit on the advisory board of Project 2025, a series of policy proposals from The Heritage Foundation outlining the sweeping authoritarian and Christian nationalist reforms conservatives expect to see if former President Donald Trump is reelected this year. While proposals promising to severely curtail reproductive rights and environmental protections have received the majority of public scrutiny, the 900+-page document also outlines a plan to radically alter how America’s educational system is funded and administered. Proposals include dramatically cutting federal funding for education, “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory,” weakening accreditation standards, ending student loan forgiveness, strictly focusing higher education on job training and economic growth, and expanding “parental rights” and school choice, among other reform measures.
AAUP also identifies the top 25 donors to the 11 think tanks and SPN between 2020 and 2022, which include prominent right-wing 501(c)(3) nonprofits like the Roe Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund, the Walton Family Foundation, Stand Together Fellowships (formerly the Charles Koch Institute), the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, the Bradley Impact Fund, and the John William Pope Foundation.
However, a majority of funding for SPN and the think tanks comes from donor-advised funds, which means that the origin of the funds—the actual donor—is completely obscured. DonorsTrust, the preferred donor-advised funding conduit of right-wing billionaire families, is by far the biggest donor. Between 2020 and 2022, it contributed more than $37 million to 10 of the 11 think tanks and SPN. Other donor-advised funds in the top 25 list include the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the National Christian Charitable Foundation, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, the New Venture Fund, the Servant Foundation, and the Morgan Stanley Global Impact Funding Trust.
The catalyst for the backlash against educational institutions and the accompanying wave of legislation can be traced back to an executive order signed by former President Trump in September 2020 as well as to the right-wing operative who set it into motion. Executive Order 13950 made it illegal for federal agencies to incorporate “divisive concepts,” “race or sex stereotyping,” and “race or sex scapegoating” into their training protocols. Notably, Trump issued the executive order three weeks after right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at multiple conservative think tanks, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to disparage the concept of critical race theory (CRT) and call for an executive order banning professors from teaching it. The day after that appearance, Trump called Rufo to discuss the specifics of the executive order.
Though less well-known to the mainstream at the time, Rufo was already a relatively established figure on the right who has held (or currently holds) positions at the Claremont Institute, Heritage, the Pacific Research Institute, The Federalist Society, and the Manhattan Institute. A recent investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and Important Context revealed the handful of right-wing billionaires and major foundations funding these think tanks. Rufo’s existing ties to both these groups and the donors behind them presaged the key players at the center of the full-fledged assault on higher education.
With millions of dollars in financial backing, right-wing and libertarian think tanks mobilized around promoting a reactionary legislative response to the “liberal excesses” of higher education. The legislative backlash began with “academic gag orders,” or bills seeking to ban CRT and other so-called “divisive concepts.” The AAUP white paper found that all but 19 of the 99 academic gag orders introduced in state houses between 2021 and 2023 drew on language taken directly from EO 13950, or from two model bills: the “Model School Board Language to Prohibit Critical Race Theory” drafted by the Center for Renewing America (CRA) and Heritage’s “Protecting K-2 Students from Discrimination.” This includes Florida’s infamous “Stop WOKE Act” (HB 7), which was signed into law in April 2022 and includes the definition of “divisive concepts” outlined in the Trump executive order and the CRA model bill.
Academic gag orders and anti-DEI bills have undoubtedly been the centerpieces of the right’s manufactured backlash against higher education.
Despite enthusiastic support from Republican politicians for these academic gag orders, only 10 of the 99 initially introduced passed between 2021 and 2023. As a result, conservative activists refocused their efforts and shifted their framing. During the 2023 legislative session alone, anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bills were introduced in various states 40 separate times, and all of them addressed a combination of the same four objectives: ending mandatory DEI training, preventing the use of diversity statements in job applications and promotion materials, prohibiting hiring practices designed to increase diversity, and ending state funding for DEI offices and personnel altogether.
One example is Texas SB 17, which made it illegal for colleges and universities to “establish or maintain a diversity, equity, and inclusion office” or to “hire or assign an employee of the institution or contract with a third party to perform the[se] duties,” among other measures. The bill drew from model legislation produced by the Manhattan Institute and co-written by Rufo, Ilya Shapiro of the Manhattan Institute, and Matt Berenberg of the Goldwater Institute. Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) Senior Fellow Sherry Sylvester, TPPF’s Richard Johnson, Heritage’s Adam Kissel, and prominent Black conservative academic and politician Ben Carson testified in favor of the bill before the state Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education. TPPF’s Daniel Bonevack and a University of Texas professor who regularly works with TPPF testified in support of the same bill before the House Committee on Higher Education. Despite more than 100 witnesses who testified against the bill in either the Senate or House committee hearings, the small number of think tank employees proved to be sufficiently persuasive that SB 17 passed along party lines.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican politicians in the state proved to be just as receptive. There HB 931 redefined “loyalty tests” as including a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which effectively ended general consideration of diversity during the hiring process. Sections of the bill were taken directly from the model legislation known as “End Political Litmus Tests in Education Act,” which was co-written by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, along with fellows from the Martin Center and the Goldwater Institute. In March 2023, a month after HB 931 was introduced in the state legislature, DeSantis held a roundtable discussion titled “Exposing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Scam.” Speakers at the event included Rufo, Claremont’s Scott Yenor, and Carrie Scheffield from the Independent Women’s Forum.
Academic gag orders and anti-DEI bills have undoubtedly been the centerpieces of the right’s manufactured backlash against higher education. However, other types of bills have also been promoted and introduced in state legislatures, including ones that weaken tenure and accreditation standards, and others that undermine existing academic governance. Between 2021 and 2023, bills attacking tenure for faculty were introduced 20 times in various state legislatures, with three of them passing. The original version of one of those bills, Texas SB 18, would have eradicated tenure for faculty members hired after September 1, 2023. Although this version didn’t pass, 2 of the 3 advocates to testify in favor of it were Thomas Lindsay of TPPF and Adam Kissel of Heritage.
The aforementioned Florida HB 931 includes provisions to institutionalize “intellectual diversity” by establishing an Office of Public Policy at each of Florida’s public colleges and universities, which undermines academic governance. This section comes directly from a model bill published by the National Association of Scholars and written by Kurtz. Similarly, Ohio’s SB 117 appropriated $24 million over two years to create “intellectual diversity” centers at the state’s public universities. Representatives from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the National Association of Scholars, Speech First, the Jack Miller Center, and Heritage all spoke in favor of the bill, which was ultimately passed during the 2023 legislative session.
“It is important to follow the money when examining the culture war attacks on higher education,” Kamola told CMD. “The goal of plutocrats and billionaires has been to paint all higher education as threatening to American values because the end goal is defunding all public goods. Attacking higher education not only scores short-term political points but also paves the road for delegitimizing all public institutions.”
We are witnessing the emergence of an ideologically incoherent but politically effective bloc around the repression of Palestine solidarity on U.S. campuses, straddling the militant Right and the liberal center.
On January 17, after having first occupied it as a military base and interrogation center, the Israeli army employed scores of landmines to blow up Israa University, the last institution of higher learning then left standing in Gaza. While the terms “scholasticide,” “educide” and “epistemicide” have long been used to describe the assault on Palestinian intellectual life and infrastructure, they have become grimly literal as Israel’s war on Gaza effects what journalist Eman Alhaj Ali calls the erasure of Gaza’s education system. The logic of elimination undergirding Israel’s effort to make Gaza uninhabitable has included the demolition of academic buildings, the lethal targeting of its scholars and intellectuals—from the poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer to the rector of the Islamic University and scientist Sufyan Tayeh—as well as the slaughter of countless students. Genocide, to borrow from literary scholar and Al-Aqsa professor Haidar Eid, has gone hand-in-hand with sociocide and ideocide.
Any discussion of the latest phase in the United States’ so-called “campus wars” must start from here, and not just to check the language we use to talk about conflict. Ever since the 1960s, intense fights over political speech, protest and curricula have periodically roiled U.S. universities. But the current war against Palestinian life and culture, which many young people correctly perceive as an Israeli-American war, has marked a new phase in these ideological and discursive conflicts, one whose violence has not just been metaphorical — recall the shooting of three Palestinian students near the University of Vermont in late November.
Over the last four months, as Israel has ratcheted up its long-term attacks on Palestinian intellectual life, pro-Israel political actors in the United States have tied the silencing of Palestinian solidarity to ongoing campaigns against critical and progressive agendas in education. In so doing, they are also bringing together the political center and far Right in ways that trouble the narrative of a coming battle between a broad liberal front and a proto-fascist Trumpism.
As Israel has ratcheted up its long-term attacks on Palestinian intellectual life, pro-Israel political actors in the United States have tied the silencing of Palestinian solidarity to ongoing campaigns against critical and progressive agendas in education.
The congressional grilling of university presidents over alleged campus antisemitism in December, and the ensuing “affair” that led to the ouster of former Harvard University president Claudine Gay, were illustrative of this new alliance. They demonstrated how slandering solidarity as antisemitism can undermine student campaigns against institutional complicity and divert attention from the United States’ pivotal role in enabling mass murder. This is glaringly evident if we compare the attention lavished by The New York Times on Gay’s citational practice with the paper’s consistent unwillingness to probe Israeli propaganda.
But what the hearings also revealed is how repression of Palestine solidarity helps advance the culture war agenda of the U.S. far Right, enlisting liberal elites in its campaign to purge critical and liberatory perspectives from the curricula and undo the uneven institutional gains made by minoritized groups. As historian and political theorist Nikhil Pal Singh told me, the backlash against pro-Palestinian student movements “is triggering a clear rightward movement” in the political mainstream, thanks largely to right-wing operatives who have “weaponiz[ed] the type of free speech and colorblind discourse that has always been more effective and appealing to centrist liberals than overtly racist and authoritarian appeals.” Right-wing anti-diversity activist Christopher Rufo’s crude playbook for peeling mainstream liberalism away from an anti-colonial and socialist Left shows he’s not unfamiliar with this insight. As he declared on October 13 on X (formerly Twitter): “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind. Connect the dots, then attack, delegitimize, and discredit. Make the center-left disavow them. Make them political untouchables.”
The strategy has been simple but effective. The demonization of critical race theory (CRT) that marked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to bring Orbánism to the Sunshine State has more recently pivoted to a systematic campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in universities, public administration, and business. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor astutely observed, DEI has proved a better target than CRT, bypassing academic abstractions and appealing to core claims of “unfairness” that mobilize a Right organized around grievance politics. The Right’s recent work to associate diversity with antisemitism only draws more people into the tent, including those who have always been quick to berate anti-Zionist activists of color for “betraying” Jewish allies.
The history of tarring anti-Zionism with the brush of antisemitism to target and undermine liberation politics—from SNCC and Black Power all the way to queer thought—is long and repetitious. As the journalism scholar A.J. Bauer recently noted, the “Palestine Scare,” like the anti-communist “Red Scares” before it, allows the Right to police the borders of liberalism, and to conscript centrists into its anti-emancipatory project.
At Harvard, with Bill Ackman, as at the University of Pennsylvania, with Marc Rowan, the open interference of donors has played no small role in recent events. Gloating over his role in Gay’s unseating, Rufo proclaimed that his own “narrative leverage” required not just the “political leverage” of those like Rep. Elise Stefanik—the New York Republican who led the congressional interrogation of Gay and two other university presidents—but also the “financial leverage” of the Ackmans. In the past few years, “red” states have used the public purse to coerce state universities into quashing diversity initiatives and curbing the teaching of “divisive concepts” like race. But as New York University professor Rebecca Karl told me, the fact that this pressure is now being replicated at private universities through donor and trustee influence represents a “huge intensification, deepening and widening of the incursions” into academic freedom.
The repression of Palestine solidarity is at the heart of this shift. As Harvard historian Walter Johnson noted, in a reflection tellingly titled “Living Inside a Psyop,” the “interlocked campaign of financial, political, and reputational attacks on dissidents in American universities is seemingly designed to secure the inter-generational transfer of unquestioned support for Israel by producing object lessons illustrating the costs of speaking out.”
It’s ironic, if unsurprising, that this is taking place through the targeting of administrative diversity initiatives that critical scholars have long diagnosed not as Trojan horses for Marxist subversion but as devices for the “elite capture” of the radical movements. When diversity programs emerged within U.S. colleges and universities, explains Roderick Ferguson, author of the 2017 book We Demand: The University and Student Protests, it was amid an era of economic expansion, wherein corporations sought to “refashion themselves” according to the pressures of social movements: “to present as diversity-friendly” without supporting redistributive politics that could actually correct social inequalities. Now, however, diversity is falling out of fashion among certain sectors of the capitalist elite. And, as in Gay’s high-profile case, university diversity officers and administrators whose remit was not at all radical are now being maligned, often in racist and sexist terms, for betraying the vocation of their elite institutions.
Rufo’s invidious association of BLM and Hamas indicates that the culture war Right’s aim is to opportunistically fuse backlash against Palestine solidarity with its preexisting campaigns against anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. It’s an economical strategy, given both the genuine and long-standing links between these movements for liberation, and the ease with which centrist elites can be drawn into the unqualified defense of Zionism.
Crucial in recruiting centrists into these twin campaigns is a deep vein of anti-intellectualism. For the Right it takes the conspiratorial form of jeremiads—frequently antisemitic themselves—against “Cultural Marxism” and its American offspring, from “gender ideology” to intersectionality, which former Republican senator and now University of Florida President Ben Sasse has improbably depicted as “a religious cult that’s dominated higher education for nearly a decade with the shallow but certain idea that power structures are everything.”
We should not underestimate how much a phobia of “theory” serves to cement the convergence between the far Right and the center when it comes to the politics of academic life. The attack on DEI is not just a thinly veiled vehicle for historic resentments against affirmative action and the political legacies animating Black, ethnic, or gender studies departments. DEI is now explicitly presented as the enabler of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine agitation on campuses (what Stefanik grotesquely misrepresented as calls for genocide) through the mediation of curriculum.
This narrative draws on older liberal ideologies while ultimately doing the work of the culture war Right. Witness an editorial penned by former Harvard Dean Harry R. Lewis, pointedly titled “Reaping What We Have Taught.” Lewis claims that “unapologetic antisemitism” (by which I presume he means calls for Palestinian freedom and an end to Israeli violence) is the result of how faculty “teachings are exploited by malign actors.” His evidence? Online searches revealing that the words “decolonize,” “oppression,” “liberation,” “intersectionality,” “social justice” and so on appear in the titles of numerous Harvard courses, testifying to a corruption of the curriculum by the “recent fashions of the progressive left.”
It’s revealing that ideas stemming from liberation and decolonization struggles more than half a century old should be declared “recent fashions,” when one might ask instead why they took so long to receive a scholarly hearing. But the right-wing perception that critical theory has corrupted elite universities is now echoed by centrist media as well, with The Atlantic blaming the “academic jargon” of “settler colonialism” for popularizing comparisons between the oppression of Indigenous people in Palestine and North America.
It’s no surprise that the emergence of broad coalitions of young people refusing complicity with imperialism, dispossession, and genocide are being met with a reconfiguration in the actions and discourses of power elites toward universities.
Frameworks like settler colonialism and intersectionality—which are not holy writ on the anti-racist and anti-colonial Left—have served, at their best, to bridge the demands of scholarship and the energies of activism. Conveniently ignoring their own politicization of academia, militant conservatives and their liberal allies denounce the scholar-activist as a dangerous chimera. As the communication theorist Moira Weigel has irreverently shown, right and center can come together not by developing theories about their adversaries but by condemning theory altogether. If we think of the ways in which superficial or misleading references to settler colonialism, intersectionality, or decolonization have been enlisted in the conjoined campaigns against DEI and Palestine solidarity, Weigel’s conclusions resonate: “Theory is good to hate with because the performance of hating theory defines the community engaging in it as empirical or natural, beyond debate, a fact.” This “community” is now bringing together liberals and conservatives who might otherwise not see themselves as sharing common ground.
We are witnessing the emergence of an ideologically incoherent but politically effective bloc around the repression of Palestine solidarity on North American campuses, straddling the militant Right and the liberal center. It disproportionately targets people of color and anti-Zionist Jews. It reveals the powerful uses to which anti-intellectualism can be put; how reactionary alliances can be built around the idea that institutions of higher learning are breeding grounds of seditious conduct. It’s no surprise that the emergence of broad coalitions of young people refusing complicity with imperialism, dispossession, and genocide are being met with a reconfiguration in the actions and discourses of power elites toward universities; half a century after the student revolts of the 1960s and ’70s, higher ed institutions remain crucial ideological battlefields. It seems that from Wall Street to Congress many are still muttering, like Richard Nixon on the Watergate tapes, “The professors are the enemy.”
In the shadow of the ongoing scholasticide in Palestine, these new coalitions between right-wingers and centrists will require that progressive forces use both analytical vigilance and strategic intelligence, as the terms of the liberal order fray and contentious politics takes centerstage in academic life and beyond.