Khirad Siddiqui: Campus Repression at UC Irvine

2025 ICSZ Writing Fellows were invited to submit reflections on their work following the ICSZ 2025 Residential Writing Retreat. Special thanks to Ronit Lentin for copyediting these essays.

During the ICSZ writing retreat, I worked on the first of several reports that a collective of scholars has been undertaking to reflect on campus repression throughout the Global War on Terror, at UC, Irvine and the UC system broadly. Here, I’m focusing on one segment of that history: the struggle against the Principles Against Intolerance (PAI). 

Federal anti-antisemitism investigations and policies have constituted an unprecedented consolidation of power mobilized towards the conservative ambition of refashioning universities within the confines of their sought-after ideological boundaries. Recent settlements of purported antisemitism enforcement thus include wide-ranging conditions like those found in the proposed $1 billion settlement between the Department of Justice and UCLA: demanding the termination of all gender-affirming care in UCLA hospitals, ensuring the university does not depend on foreign enrollment, and halting the admission of foreign students who might “engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.”¹ While the enormity of these enforcement efforts under the second Trump presidency have led to more mainstream liberal condemnations of these investigations as transparent levers of criminalization and political repression, a cursory glance at the past two decades of how university administrations have responded to the student movement for Palestine and BDS belie how nearly all these universities (including the UC system) have themselves ushered these conservative forces onto their campuses. By willfully uplifting distorted framings of anti-zionism as invariably antisemitic, utilizing top-down bureaucratic enforcement mechanisms to police student activism, and inviting pro-Israel actors into virtually every level of university policy-making and discipline (even when these actors have public histories of harassment towards faculty and students), university administrators have mobilized discursive framings of civil rights violations and antisemitism towards the repression of dissent on their campuses well before the federal government did so. The PAI are a particularly resonant example of this recent history.²

The 21^st century, especially the 2010s, saw the growing popularity of the U.S. wing of the student movement for Palestine, including the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement on UC campuses. The successive impacts of the foundation of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in 1993 on UC Berkeley’s campus, and the foundation of the BDS movement in 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, contributed to the growth of an organic, popular, and coalitional anti-zionist student movement on US college campuses, which drew on the legacy of the anti-apartheid boycott movement of the 1980s. Just as the anti-apartheid movement had succeeded in isolating South Africa’s apartheid regime, advancing the global wing of the struggle against White supremacist settler colonialism, SJPs were coalitional and popular amongst progressive students, and BDS represented a way for students to channel popular sentiments towards an identifiable target, leveraging student governments to pass legislation which they hoped would compel universities to divest the billions of dollars in their investment funds that fueled the asymmetrical military power enabling Zionist settler-colonial expansion, apartheid, and occupation. The growing threat posed by this iteration of the student movement for Palestine on US campuses did not escape the notice of pro-Isreal actors and lobbies, leading many of these groups to pursue a novel focus on an area they had largely ignored: university campuses.

By May of 2010, UC President Mark Yudof, Board of Regents Chairman Russell Gould, and Vice Chair Sherry Lansing affirmed they would not allow the UC to divest its funds from Israel.³ They accused BDS resolutions of fomenting antisemitism, and noted that “this isolation of Israel among all countries of the world greatly disturbs us and is of grave concern to members of the Jewish community.” By 2015, the AMCHA Initiative, a pro-Israel watchdog group that tracks student protests across the UC and argues that  pro-Palestine faculty and student groups should be suspended from campus for anti-zionist advocacy, wrote to the UC, complaining about the growing “crisis of campus antisemitism.”⁴ Their open letter, replete with the forms of intentional muddling that characterizes most of the work of pro-Israel campus groups, reported incidents of rising antisemitism on campus such as swastikas drawn on doors alongside the distress allegedly experienced by hearing students “chanting ‘Allahu Akhbar’ at university events and advocating for the Boycott, Divest Sanctions (BDS) Movement.” The letter’s signatories concluded by urging UC President Janet Napolitano and the Regents to adopt the US State Department definition of antisemitism, which would mean defining “anti-Semitism to include denying Israel’s right to exist or subjecting the Jewish state to a double standard.” UC President Napolitano went on record to support the adoption of the definition, but as the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board noted, the “UC wisely backed away from the definition.” Despite this, “Napolitano promised to ask the Regents to consider a broader statement opposing intolerance ‘including, but not limited to, anti-Semitism.’”⁵ Thus, the PAI were born.

The first version of the PAI comprised a 2-page document released in a September 2015 UC Regents meeting, which quickly turned contentious. While Regent Richard Blum threatened to have his wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein, take action against the UC system if it did not adopt the recommendations of the initial Statement of Principles Against Intolerance report, Palestine Legal, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)⁶ all uniformly criticized this report’s potentially repressive impacts. 

Due to this backlash, the Regents were unable to adopt the first draft of the report, and a new Working Group composed of the Regents themselves was tasked with writing an entirely new report. Shortly before the report was released, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) took issue with the imbrications of the “experts” that this Working Group had consulted with in closed-door meetings, as emerging from within the same ecosystem of pro-Israel interest groups that had imposed the creation of the PAI in the first place. JVP pointed to the example of conservative lawyer and pro-Israel activist Kenneth Marcus, who had leverged “false and inflammatory accusations against Arab and Muslim students as pro-terrorist,”⁷ published a law review essay entitled “Anti-Zionism as Racism,” and had overseen the first antisemitism investigation undertaken by the DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights against UC Irvine’s campus during a period of heightened student organizing for Palestine.⁸ In spite of this backlash, by January 2016, the Working Group released a 12-page report⁹ that argued that “opposition to Zionism often is expressed in ways that are not simply statements of disagreement over politics and policy, but also assertions of prejudice and intolerance toward Jewish people and culture.” However, it is the following sentence that attracted the most attention: “Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”

The Working Group’s argument that no form of anti-Zionism could be categorized as protected speech could have eliminated BDS campaigns on UC campuses overnight. Immediately after, a wide array of pro-Palestinian, civil liberties, and free speech groups joined a campaign to protest the implementation of this draft report. Groups like FIRE and Palestine Legal issued new condemnations of the draft,¹⁰ and a new letter from JVP garnered hundreds of signatures from UC faculty, who strongly condemned the impact this would have on intellectual freedom and academic inquiry.¹¹ By March of 2016, a new version of the 12-page PAI Working Group Report was quietly re-released. The wording was nearly identical, bar one sentence that now read: 

“Anti-Semitism, anti-semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”

Ultimately, three reports and two working groups led to the dilution of AMCHA’s initial goal (i.e., the implementation of the State Department’s definition of antisemitism), and resulted in a passing reference to “antisemitic forms of anti-zionism” with no mention of anti-zionism in the ten “principles” concluding the report itself. Furthermore, the published Regents Policy 4403 could only serve to “guide University policy” as noted on the UCOP website, and was not actually enforceable policy in and of itself.² 

What can we learn from the saga that culminated in the PAI, now over a decade ago? Two lessons are especially important now that expanded anti-antisemitism enforcement is used to eviscerate university budgets and criminalize wide swaths of student protestors. First, the PAI saga can help anti-zionist advocacy groups on campus contest and historicize misrepresentations of a campus antisemitism crisis arising after October 7. The fact that external Zionist actors began to manufacture this crisis over a decade ago (and even earlier), just as anti-zionist advocacy was gaining in popularity across campuses, elucidates the ideological motivation underpinning this crisis, especially as these actors have used this supposed crisis to justify the continual expansion of mechanisms of securitization, discipline, militarism, and the eradication of dissent on campus. The campaign for the PAI thus disrupts the central tenet of anti-antisemitism enforcement; that an unprecedented antisemitism crisis had gripped large segments of brainwashed university students after October 7, 2023 — a framework that was left completely uncontested by university administrators who universally mischaracterized the 2024 encampments on their own campuses as presenting an existential threat to their Jewish students and faculty. Knowing that the campus antisemitism crisis is little more than a bad-faith attempt to malign anti-zionist advocacy is surely not news to broad swaths of pro-Palestinian campus actors, but evidence of the weaponization of this purported crisis pre-2023 can help provide a concrete historical example to dispel this misconception, which many swaths of campus actors and the public still tacitly believe to be at least partially true. 

Finally, the PAI was perhaps the only other significant moment in UC history where senior leadership and external organizations worked together to attempt to eradicate anti-zionist dissent off campus, and they failed. The PAI saga highlights how attempts at codifying antisemitism to quell campus dissent collapse when held up to the most basic levels of shared university governance. As expanded Title VI enforcement eschews any semblance of these principles of shared governance, and federal antisemitism investigations are overwhelmingly being settled privately by the same administrators who have proven themselves incapable and unwilling to defend the legitimacy of divestment and the right to protest against Zionist settler-colonialism, alternative avenues to exert collective power against such decisions must be forged creatively and forcefully.