Mapping the Fight: IHRA & anti-Palestinian attacks on knowledge. With Lara Friedman, Amira Jarmakani, & Emmaia Gelman.

Transcript

Mapping the Fight: IHRA and anti-Palestinian attacks on knowledge

This is Battling the IHRA Definition, a new podcast by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. 

Today we are re-releasing an episode that we previously posted on the feed of the Institute’s other podcast, Unpacking Zionism. This episode maps the wide-ranging counterinsurgency against the anticolonial Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S., and opens a conversation on strategy for resistance. The “IHRA definition of antisemitism” is at the center of this discussion. You’ll hear Lara Friedman, Amira Jarmakani, and Emmaia Gelman discuss campus safety narratives, Zionist “antisemitism watchdogs”, and a mushrooming landscape of federal and state legislation that weaponize the IHRA definition. 

You can find the transcript of this conversation, biographies of our speakers, and resources on the IHRA definition and how to resist it on our website https://criticalzionismstudies.org/ Check out the episode notes for more details.

And now, without further ado, here is the episode called “Mapping the Fight: IHRA and anti-Palestinian attacks on knowledge”

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Emmaia Gelman: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I’m Emmaia Gelman, your host and director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. This week, instead of an interview, we’re sharing a panel discussion called “Mapping the Fight: IHRA and Anti-Palestinian Attacks on Knowledge.” It’s with Amira Jarmakani of San Diego State University, Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and me, and it took place on Friday, May 3rd, at the American Studies Association mini-conference. At the center of this conversation is the “IHRA definition of antisemitism”, which incorrectly and over the increasing objections of Jewish communities, claims that criticism of the Israeli state is anti-Jewish.

Zionist institutions and the Israeli government have, for a decade, been advocating for IHRA laws and policies that would formally say that criticism of Israel is a violation of Jewish rights. As Amira Jarmakani explains in this discussion, that campaign has been a form of soft counterinsurgency: treating the movement for Palestinian rights as an enemy and trying to reshape civil society in a way that undermines it. 

As we’ve seen in recent months, this weaponized definition of antisemitism is not just soft power. It has underwritten the US government’s transfer of weapons to Israel for use in genocide. It’s being used in Congressional hearings to threaten the funding of universities as places where colonialism is studied. It has been the rationale for riot police to brutalize students and faculty at protests on college campuses around the world. So although IHRA is at the center of our conversation, we’re mapping a much wider set of tactics, organizations, and policies, whose attacks on knowledge produce a really material form of violence.

There is so much to read in the show notes this week: the slides for Dr. Jarmakani’s talk; Lara Friedman’s essential work on tracking legislation; my article on “Astroturf Antisemitism Watchdogs” in Jadaliyya and the zine that goes with it. We’re also linking to work from the Palestinian Feminist Collective on Sophicide, to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition website and to a report on the politics of the IHRA definition from scholar Jamie Stern-Weiner.

Big big thanks to the American Studies Association for making this possible. The recording has been slightly edited for length. 

Emmaia Gelman: So let me just do a little bit of introducing. This is a moment of just incredible frustration and agony as we watch the genocide in Gaza unfold, and also the constant denial of the genocide and the constant re-empowering of Israeli state with no regard for the overt genocidal intentions of the Israeli military, and the evidence that’s before our eyes that people are being assaulted in ways that are not only in contravention of international law, but of all humanity and decency. Also the student uprisings, which are now at more than 100 colleges and universities across the United States, are creating new opportunities for pushing back, changing how demands can be made, and what kind of demands are possible. And in response to that, just naked authoritarianism which really echoes what’s been going on in the refusal of the political class to pay any attention to mass uprising opposing genocide. 

So I just want to situate us a little bit. This has been many months of the lining up of evidence of what kind of forces we’re up against. So first, we had this enormous uprising that showed a huge popular will and demand for an end to the genocide and to us funding and arms transfers and it was ignored, right? What we have been told to believe is the political process is not actually the political process.

A second sort of evidentiary moment was when we realized in response to the student uprising, uprisings, that institutional administrators will literally destroy their own institutions by bringing militarized force into those spaces. Another revelation that we’ve had just in the last couple of days is that Zionist violence at home, which we’ve seen in the attacks by organized Zionist militias essentially on the encampment at UCLA and other violent counter-protests against student encampments won’t be policed. They won’t be policed in the same way that we’ve seen white supremacist violence not really be policed. 

And then another final turn in the last day or so in the violence against the encampments, is that we’ve seen more open collaboration between white nationalists and Zionists showing up to the camps in tandem. So, that’s the situation that we’re, that we’re entering here. And this attempt to map what’s going on is our effort to understand how policy and narrative around antisemitism and around safety and hate is a counterinsurgency that is being used to push back on the movements to oppose these authoritarian forces that are amassing.

Thanks so much Amira and Lara for being here. Really appreciate you. Amira, why don’t you start us off? 

Amira Jarmakani: Thank you. Thanks for continuing to organize us always. As mentioned, I’m Amira Jarmakani. I use she/they pronouns. I’m a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at San Diego State University. And my comments today are also going to bring together some work with Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and the Palestinian Feminist Collective as a way of trying to think through the current moment through the rubric of counterinsurgency. So I am going to put in the chat a Google slide presentation that you’re all welcome to view, I won’t be sharing my screen as I find it a bit disorienting. And also, this way you can move through at your pace. There are a few links inside of the Google slide presentation as well that will link out to the things I’m talking about, some of them. And then at the end are some images from the 2023 Palestinian Feminist Collective Feminist Futures calendar. I invite you to go there and just stay with those images when you need a break from the other things that we’ll be discussing.

So I think the first way, the way I wanted to begin this was just to say that I will be grounding all of these comments in the feminist praxis on academic freedom that’s authored by the Palestinian Feminist Collective. So that’s the first slide you have, and it just gives you a couple of screenshots from the Instagram post about that, but the link is in the notes section of the slides. You can read the larger statement if you like. Basically, it builds on the idea of scholasticide. So it really grounds us in, it builds on the idea of scholasticide to introduce the idea of sophicide, which we could identify or name as the annihilation of wisdom in the context of genocide and Gaza; the annihilation of intellectual and cultural sources of wisdom really, in a really sort of widespread way. And it builds on scholasticide in that sense, where scholasticide is looking at the sort of destruction of infrastructure around learning as an aspect of genocide, this is sort of where we need to be grounded in order to even begin our conversations about the impact on academic freedom here in North America. And so that’s, that’s why I begin there. 

We also are positing, in that feminist praxis, that the sort of existing frameworks for academic freedom on our campuses have actually enabled violence against Palestinians and our allies to occur with impunity.

So we want to forward the idea that a feminist praxis for true academic freedom begins with the premise that all forms of genocide, including sophicide and scholasticide, are antithetical to learning, teaching, well-being, and safety. And the kind of weaponization of safety and the infiltration of into concepts like “safe spaces on campus” is part of how I’ll also be framing the comments today, so I wanted us to sort of think about that as well.

The feminist praxis talks a little bit about this. It wants to work against the kinds of organization of safety and other feminist and liberatory ideals on university campuses that we’ve been seeing playing out. So, in the statement we say: we call out the Zionist, racist, and white supremacist weaponization of safety and fear as a guise for silencing, repressing, and erasing us.

So we’ll be looking at that. You know, Devin Atallah has said that when colonizers talk about security, they are, in fact, talking about violence. So also I think looking at the way that that has been playing out as well. And just to quickly say and name, this kind of move around safe spaces – so, you know, university-speak of “safe spaces on our campuses” really emerges out of feminist and queer organizing, which agitated for centers and resources that would enable people to come together and strategize ways to survive the material impacts of institutional violence collectively.

But the way that this is sort of manifesting our campuses currently is really through a multicultural neoliberal concept of safe space that’s been both diluted and co-opted. So it’s become a sort of method of containment, a place to keep us silent and confine our organizing. And it’s really mangled in watered down concepts of diversity and inclusion. And so that’s another aspect of what I was interested in having us talk about today – just thinking about, you know the kinds of spaces that exist on our campuses or don’t, or the kinds that we are agitating for and then once we – maybe if we even get them – they’re just sort of like, confined and constrain us within them.

So moving from this idea to the counterinsurgency idea, I wanted us to think about repression and how it’s playing out in relation to counterinsurgency, in both the kind of, like, what we might name as a hard kind and a soft kind and to name them as hard and soft, I want to say, by no means intends to imply that soft forms of of the kinds of repression that I’ll talk about are any less dangerous. And we have an abundance of examples of the hard forms, of course. As Emmaia said in the introductory comments.

One of the slides on the, this feels like really old news at this point, but one of the slides in the Google slides, the third one down is from Columbia University president’s statement about the first call to bring the NYPD onto campus. She said, “This morning I had to make a decision that I hoped would never be necessary. I’ve always said the safety of our community was our top priority, and that we needed to preserve an environment where everyone could learn in a supportive context.” And so, she says, “Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus, I authorized NYPD to begin clearing the encampment.”

And of course I don’t need to say any more, I’m sure, about the ridiculousness of a statement like this. But also just the deployment of safety in that statement is what I was interested in having us look at. And also to, of course, remember many of the ways that police forces have been called onto campuses and to clear encampments are really grounded in all of the kinds of racist constructions of terrorism and the figure of the terrorist, including the idea of outside agitators, right, and using this as an excuse. So that’s another piece that I wanted to sort of ground us in. 

And I think in terms of the construction of the terrorist, we can also remember that one of the sort of early things that happened was that ADL-Brandeis open letter charging university administrations to investigate their SJP chapters. And one of the things I also wanted to remind us of, or to point out, is the way that that charge – so the charge came by way of inviting the, basically making the claim that SJP chapters had a material link to terrorism, right? And that one thing that I thought would be interesting, important for us to remember is that that material support clause actually comes out of the 1994 crime bill. And there’s a lot happening in that crime bill that we’ll have a lot to say about the framing of counterinsurgency that I want us to sort of think through today, both in terms of the sort of like hard and the soft aspects of it. 

The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act is widely known as having – it’s widely credited with the rise of mass incarceration and carceral technologies. And, as I’m saying, that’s also a place where the material support for terrorism claus is embedded as well. It’s less known that this crime bill also basically inaugurated huge amounts of funding for what is known as community policing; and community policing is very much linked because of its, like, reform-based kinds of solutions and, like liberal ideas about diversifying police forces, as a way of addressing police brutality. But these are the same kinds of things that we will see that we’re seeing on our campus in terms of like the soft approaches to repression that we can see in our DEI offices and that will play out through like Title VI legislation as well.

So those are the two things that I’m sort of charged with introducing for our conversation today. I’ll go ahead and point out. So just as a quick point: after the material support clause is embedded in the 1994 crime bill, it’s sort of expanded in the 1996 anti-terrorism act, which interestingly gained momentum in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And so I just named that to remind us of the point, again, about how the kind of racism against terror, the, the figure of the terrorist, which includes, of course, the conflation of Arab and Muslim extremists – that it really doesn’t matter the relationship to any kind of reality there, right? Because as we know that Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh. So just thinking through how this logic continues to propel these kinds of movements and policies and acts that we’ll be looking at today so expanding on this idea of these intersections between militarism, police forces and counterinsurgency, bringing the sort of like, hard and soft aspects together.

Another slide on the presentation, the next one will introduce this point. I’ll give you the background here so you can understand the context of the slide, which is to say that: if we’re thinking about the racist construction of the terrorist figure, we oftentimes will think about Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis, which built off of Bernard Lewis’s Islam and the West. Both of these racist screeds promoting the idea that the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. And what I want to point out is that what’s less well known about Huntington’s work in particular, I think at least in our field, is that his earliest work was focused on the idea of professionalized policing.

And so that’s what that book cover is showing you – that early book from the 50s. And this idea of professional policing can be traced to, or linked very clearly to at least August Vollmer, who is one of the early leaders of police reform and police professionalization. He was also an influential eugenicist. So while he was, most of his tenure was as police chief in Berkeley, California, he did serve as LAPD chief from 1923 to 1924. And I give you a link to a zine created by Stop LAPD Coalition which tells you a little bit more about a range of police chiefs in the LAPD and their link to community policing, which would, again, be a kind of like soft counterinsurgency liberal reform approach to policing.

So the idea of this, the professionalization of policing, it embeds in it a lot of the things that we’ll see sort of showing up. So one of Vollmer’s ideas is the idea that policing and criminalization can be calibrated to the correct level of racial harm. And so it depends a lot on the collection of data and the use of statistics that are really on their face eugenicist in terms of the way that they will both collect the data and then use it to target and racialize and criminalize in racist ways and anti-Black ways particular groups of people. So the other thing I would say is that the book cover that you see, The Soldier and the State from 1957 focused on theories of police professionalization, civilian control, and so it builds on Vollmer’s ideas.

And I name it also to say that it is by no means an old theory that doesn’t show up. It is still, it continues to show up. So, for instance, in the early 2000s, the LAPD had to enter into what’s called a consent decree with the Fed based on the corruption and brutality that had been exposed in the 90s through the Rodney King beating, among other things, and RAND Corporation was contracted to write a report about it. And their recommendations coming out of that report were an increase in professionalism and policing, including community policing and diversity awareness. So this is the link I want to make to how it’s playing out now on our campuses. And I’ll just name some of the things because I think other, the other panelists will follow up on at least some of them.

And in fact, I think the ADL report card, which I believe Emmaia will talk about, brings a lot of these things together. But I just want to be clear that if we look at DEI apparati and the language of inclusion and safety on our campuses, what’s dangerous here is that a lot of these strategies are playing out. The danger is in the moves that are really linked to the IHRA definition in many ways, you know, they’re the moves to really clearly, intentionally, and concretely conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and then to silence, censor, criminalize and sanction every, every kind of movement on campus that does anything like that.

So one example would be like, through, the avenues, the moves to try to have Zionist be a protected identity, another would be the kinds of like anti-hate and upstanders trainings that will also incorporate this kind of idea. And I think the framework of hate would be an important one to talk for us to talk about. And I have some comments on that, but I probably will skip them because of time right now. But maybe we can talk about them more later. I think also the task forces [on antisemitism] are a place, and the ways that they’re charged with producing trainings, you know, this is not problematic on its face, of course, but in the goal and intent of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, again is part of how that’s organized.

Playing out these entities that I’ve just named also will be, and, and the DEI offices in general could also be involved in the kind of data counting, data collection and counting of incidents of antisemitism that will be mobilized to gain resources and also to further censor and silence. I think this is another strategy that is that we’re really seeing pervasively happen on our campuses and you know, I’m charged with talking a little bit about Title VI claims and I would love for us to all talk about it in the discussion section, because I really know nothing about it. All I know is that it really does seem to play a lot on the weaponization of safety. So, a lot of the kind of impetus for the charges of discrimination or the way that the cases are brought rely on a claim of being unsafe. But of course, it has to rise to a larger, a higher level than just unsafety. And so it also would use the idea of feeling unsafe and an idea of discomfort to raise that to the level of, and make a claim that it’s at the level of harassment and discrimination, right? And so this means that it relies on underlying ideas about hate speech and hate crimes, and that’s the part I mentioned earlier that perhaps we can return to and say more about.

Emmaia Gelman: I’m Emmaia Gelman. I am outgoing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. The function of the Institute is partly to create a supportive environment for conversations like this that take a critical look at how Zionist institutions and Zionist politics function. The idea of Critical Zionism Studies itself is not like that, it’s a new thing. We’ve all been doing it, right? We’ve all been looking critically at how Zionist institutions function in the US and we’re subjected to enormous struggles as a result of that. So the idea of outlining critical Zionism studies is partly a way of saying like, look, this is a real sort of urgent need. And we want to define it as a field, and and gather together and talk through these things. So this article and this research that I’m talking about is absolutely in the vein of Critical Zionism Studies. 

I want to sort of give a little bit of a lens of looking at this sort of huge ecology of antisemitism watchdog organizations that we are all seeing all around us. Much of this appears in an article that’s in Jadaliyya and also, because we are trying to figure out how to transmit this information as political education, it’s also a zine. 

I don’t know if it feels sudden to other people, but, looking at how this history has unfolded over the last hundred or so years, for a long time, there have been a very few core, let’s call them legacy institutions that were doing antisemitism watchdogging. They’re are institutions that are generally identified as Jewish institutions; now we’re much more likely to also identify them as Zionist institutions; I would identify them as right-wing institutions. So that’s the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and then there’s also sort of other ancillary and umbrella organizations like the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Jewish Federations. There’s a kind of ecology of Jewish organizations that have become Zionist organizations and that are also grounded in the right. 

In more recent years, in the last 15 years or so, there is a massive proliferation of other kinds of organizations. They are native to the right. I should back up and say that the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, even though I’m identifying them as organizations that are on the right, they’re grounded in liberalism, right? Their claims are liberal claims: that they’re about equality and they’re defending liberal rights, etc. And they have been aligned with the state in doing that project for the last hundred years, but most especially in the post-Holocaust moment, where they entered a space that was like opposing fascism, opposing Nazism by helping the United States become less racist, become un-racist. And that’s a sort of liberal grounding, a civil rights grounding, that follows them through to the present and sometimes allows them to be mistaken for progressive; allows them to enter spaces like schools, claiming that they are performing anti-racism training, etc.

The new set of antisemitism watchdog organizations is native to the right. They use a variety of strategies, but for example, the idea of “woke antisemitism,” right? That is not an idea that claims any sort of origins in civil rights discourse and liberalism, even though it uses some of their arguments. So the journalist for the Jewish Daily Forward – which I think is now just called, I’m dating myself by calling it the Jewish Daily Forward – Arno Rosenfeld who reports on antisemitism, started like a year or two ago, keeping a running list of new antisemitism watchdogs as they popped up. And I was fascinated by that list and also by his reporting, which, coming from within a Zionist newspaper was often very challenging of these organizations and sort of peeling back the curtain. But also, he had not yet done a ton of research on these organizations, so it’s just a list. So I started to look into the organizations themselves. And at the same time I was reading a book that I highly recommend by Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola called Free Speech and Koch Money. And I was also reading a new book by Hil Aked called Friends of Israel: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity, which helpfully frames this sort of infrastructure of Zionist organizations as “a social movement from above,” which I think is a really helpful way to to articulate the fact that it purports to be a grassroots movement, and yet it’s so completely driven and funded and resourced from above by states, by corporate money, and by the sociality of people who live and work together in this, in a layer of society that most of us don’t penetrate, right. So that’s the Koch money analogy and, and the sort of model of how right wing organizations purport to be grassroots and rights based organizations, and leverage claims about rights, is really the inspiration for how I was able to sort of start thinking about Arno Rosenfeld’s list of organizations and his, and his research. And it just became really clear that Koch network astroturfing is what’s happening in the Zionist antisemitism watchdog sphere. 

So, I’ll just try to, like, taxonomize it a little, because the Jadaliyya article includes a lot of it. So just to begin with, astroturfing means, just broadly, simulating grassroots support for a demand, hiding the forces behind it; like, using resources from a sort of concentrated and single and highly empowered point of origin to produce what looks like a diffusion of support. Not just that there’s public support, but that it’s personal, like the issue is personal for many individuals. And also that the issue is so pertinent and so obvious and so natural that it produces a lot of independent and separate organizations who are all pulling for it together. So it creates, like, not only the sense that this is sort of coming from below, but also that it’s such a mobile idea that it’s producing a political movement. And it additionally uses the individuals and the, the sort of proliferation of small organizations coming from different positions saying the same thing to attach whatever issue it’s peddling to the rights of those people or groups. So that could be like identity-based rights or the right to education or free speech. 

And just to give an example of how this works, other issues that have been astroturfed are fracking and guns. The NRA is famous for ad campaigns that pretend that like regular people are up against the big, bad, well resourced anti-gun lobby. And it makes sense because these are unpopular and destructive issues that are pushed by powerful industries who are trying to leverage liberalism’s obligations to individual people, and popular will, and to rights. 

And what we get from looking at these organizations as astroturfing and understanding them that way, that way is we can borrow also from the strategy that was used that has been used to combat the Koch network. Which is, as Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola offer, it is just like stop taking them on the terms that they’re setting. Let’s stop talking about violations of rights. Stop talking about like who gets to be included and why aren’t you including my right-wing ideas in this campus. And start looking at who these organizations are funded by, what their other projects are, et cetera. So that’s one strategy that we get out of this. And I will say that these organizations are dramatically under-researched. So there’s lots of room to do this. 

But I wrote that article like a month or so, a month and a half ago, and so much has changed that I want to revisit the question of whether that’s actually a useful strategy anymore. I’ll come to that in one second. 

So I wanted to taxonomize these organizations. So it appears to me – and I’m just sort of starting to study this –  there’s four categories of organization that are working together. So there’s lawfare organizations, which are not actually astroturf. They’re just like mega-donor funded or often funded by pro-bono work from big law firms. Lawfare firms which include the Brandeis Center and Stand With Us, Zachor Legal Institute, the Deborah Project, the Lawfare Project, and they, they do have big funders like Adam Milstein, who is the mega-donor, who also funds like PragerU and Heritage Foundation, and I can’t remember what else. And more recently the Israeli state has also entered lawfare. And all these white shoe law firms, I’m just going to name some of them because I think that it’s pertinent for people to sort of recognize the names when they come to your campus. So these are just some, right. Davis Polk, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Wilmer Hale, Weill Gotshal, Lewin and Lewin, Siegel and Richardson, Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, and I’m sure there are more.

The lawfare organizations overlap – all of these organizations have overlapping boards. The Deborah Project, which is the one, one that’s particularly pushing “Zionist identity” as a protected category – and in California as it battles the, as it like fights against ethnic study, the teaching of ethnic studies – has tried to link, link Zionist identity to indigeneity and, and basically articulate that saying in the classroom that Zionism is a racist project would be a violation of the civil rights of Zionists. And the Deborah Project actually overlaps also more directly with the Koch network because it has an overlapping board with the Kohelet Policy Forum, which is doing the same thing, the same work that ALEC, the Koch funded legislative network, is doing. Okay, I’m going to speed it up here.

So then there’s advertising. The role of advertising, which is funded by mega donors also, is to craft and amplify messaging using the language of antisemitism, that’s really about the rollback of rights and academic freedom and sort of responsiveness to public movements. So to craft and amplify messaging that feeds grievance, and to pick up messaging from campuses where Zionist students and faculty are like, you know, Shai Davidai doing at Columbia and amplify it into larger spheres, like to, to make it sort of common parlance among school administrators or in Congress where we’ve seen it.

So some of those organizations are Jew Belong, which was funded by Archie Gottesman, who’s not a billionaire, I don’t think, just a mega-donor. #StandUpToJewish Hate, which is Kraft funded. There are several others. To give an example of how they have intervened in narrative, you have probably heard over the last couple, year or two, the term – actually maybe three or four years now – the term “Jew hate” replace “antisemitism.” And that was a deliberate project that was raised by the Lawfare Project, in an effort to try and figure out, like, how do we capitalize on the same kind of vibe as the, as the Black Lives Matter movement generated, how do we capitalize on that kind of goodwill? And this articulation of Jew-hate as opposed to antisemitism, and turning it into a hashtag, first appeared at a rally against COVID restrictions that was by like religious Jewish communities saying that COVID restrictions were an interference in their rights. And it was adopted then by Ron Lauder in a video that was circulated widely. And it’s become sort of a replacement for talking about antisemitism, which was once a category that you could – the ADL collected data on, like, did somebody not get their day off for a Jewish holiday, well, that’s antisemitism, right? But now it’s called “Jew-hate” which makes it jarring and violent and sort of demands a different kind of response. 

Third category is student and campus organizing. Organizations like Jewish on Campus or Mothers Against College Antisemitism, which teach Zionist students to narrate their feelings as discrimination, and then create an infrastructure to solidify that feeling into action. 

And the last is institutional advising. So as there’s the push out of narrative about antisemitism on campuses, of course, campus administrators are like, what are we going to do about this, we have to respond. Well, who’s going to help them? Institutional advisors. So the AEN, the Academic Engagement Network, and CAM, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, these are organizations that are avowedly and clearly pro-Israel, Zionist organizations, anti-woke – the Combat Antisemitism Network is particularly focused on woke ideology – and they become advisors, develop advising relationships, not only with individual institutions, but with whole systems. I think the AEN is advising the UC system. Amira, you can tell me if that’s right or not. 

So we have this sort of machinery that all works together, and that is fueled from outside, that uses mega donor funding, that uses lawfare to try and leverage the actual infrastructure of US society, and that cultivates and deploys individual grievance and discussion of rights to do it. 

So the question that we’re left with is how do you intervene in that? And I hope that’s something that we can have a conversation about in the Q&A. There are a couple of examples of how things have worked, but the most recent one that I’m just sort of floored by and interested in, is that at Goldsmiths in the UK, that student protest included demands to reconsider the IHRA definition as university policy.

So, on the one hand, there’s the anti-Koch strategy of like, exposing these organizations, which we absolutely must do. I’m not 100 percent sure that, at this point, when it’s so clear that the right is involved in this project, that exposing Zionist organizations as the right, fundamentally changes the calculus. Although I think we must. I think there’s also these new tools, student protest, disruption, legal strategies that we need to consider.  

Lara Friedman: Thanks so much for having me. And thanks to the brilliant presenters who preceded me. My name is Lara Friedman. I’m the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. We are a Washington DC-based foundation. We do grant-making in the Israel-Palestine space, mostly on the ground in Palestine and with some Israeli organizations in Europe and the US a little bit. And then we also function something as a think tank producing our own intellectual capital, which is what I’m here to talk to you about today, because I’ve been tracking lawfare and IHRA stuff since my previous job when I was the director of policy and government relations at Americans for Peace Now with anti-BDS laws, and then starting in 2016, the rise of IHRA. These were almost at the same time. So I’m going to just run through a huge amount of information pretty elliptically because there’s so much, and I’m probably going to leave you all feeling utterly defeated and depressed, which is why I don’t get invited to parties.

And, and you guys, this conversation I know is supposed to be more about what you can do. I’m sort of level-setting where things are legislatively. I was saying to a friend the other day, I sort of feel like we’re in this, this odd moment where there’s tremendous hope around the energies we’re seeing at the grassroots, these tectonic shifts we’re seeing on the ground in the United States around the world. But I think about this in terms of tectonic shifts, the results of them are measured in, in geological time, geological eras. And what I’m dealing with and watching every day are political shifts and political moves, which run a lot faster. And I think tectonic shifts probably overall in the end of the day will win. I mean, the continents move where they move, but there is a tremendous amount of energy at the political level to overtake them with political and legal shifts. So that’s what I’m going to talk about. 

I sort of want to say, the previous presenter talked a lot about right-wing organizations, and right and left is I think how we tend to think about this. The overarching way that I think people need to understand what’s happening in terms of lawfare and targeting of groups and targeting of individuals and targeting of social structures, is that we’re at a moment – and this predates October 7th – where there is a, a confluence, it’s an alliance that is developed, between openly illiberal, regressive forces, who are largely defined increasingly around an anti-woke agenda, and who also often overlap with right-wing Zionist evangelicals. So you’ve got that space which generally, I think most people would think is sort of politically, socially antithetical to liberals. And yet, because of pro-Israel issues and defense of Israel and defense of Israeli impunity, we see this confluence of activities, and a confluence of interest that has developed, between these illiberal forces on the one hand, and what should be, or understood to be, forces of pro-Israel, liberalism, progressivism, tolerance, anti-discrimination, all of that, on the other hand.

And that’s where you end up seeing these weird bedfellows, right? You see the Anti-Defamation League aligned – and this goes again before October 7th – aligned increasingly with the most illiberal forces as they stand together against critics of Israel, against protesters. And pre-October 7th, where this really was most obviously embodied, were the anti-BDS laws, right? So in, for the sake of trying to, trying to discourage and punish and chill grassroots activism using the tried and true methods of protest – which have been accredited across generations and are dear to the hearts of most liberal Americans and even Americans on the rights across the political spectrum. You know, you boycott things by power of the purse. We, we show where we, what our values are by what we buy. We call for divestment. We think countries are doing bad things. We call for sanctions. We think they’re doing bad things. These are nonviolent tools of protest – but in order to protect Israel from pressure, we see those very tactics attacked. And they’re attacked jointly by the most illiberal forces that are very happy to see a clamp down on protests in the US, and these so called liberal forces that want to see Israel protected. And predictably and many of us predicted this back from 2016, 2017, 2018, these anti-BDS laws were then repurposed into legislation to target other things: most notably ESG, that’s ethical investing, and DEI. ESG and DEI being at the center of the target of the anti-woke warriors in this country. 

And, and they’re using, as their model legislation, anti-BDS legislation. And where that gets even weirder is, as I think has been mentioned earlier, I mean, DEI and ESG, it’s not just that they’re, that, that the right is using these, these these models that were developed in order to protect Israel to target ESG and DEI. There’s still another confluence here because those who want to see Israel enjoy absolute impunity and absolute immunity to any real criticism, have also jumped on the anti-ESG, anti-DEI bandwagon. You can’t have ESG because ESG has global screens about environmental practices about governance practices and about human rights practices. But if you have a global screen on human rights practices, Israeli companies get caught in that. And that’s intolerable. And you can’t have DEI. Because if DEI doesn’t actually elevate Jewish concerns, Jewish identity, Jewish claims of victimhood equal to or above all else, then we say it’s anti-Jewish, antisemitic. So you have that confluence there between the right and ostensibly left. 

Post October 7th – and again, some of this started before October 7th – but post October 7th, what’s happened is that this now has jet fuel in it. You know, it’s riding this to the moon. And where we’ve seen this most obviously is in the targeting of academia. And it was obvious for anyone who watched the first hearing on the hill, you know, back with the University of Pennsylvania and others, it was clear that this is straight up witch-hunt season, right? And that’s what we’ve seen ever since then. And again, you have this confluence of interests around this, where you have a core group of Republicans who are unapologetic and more power to them, they’re clear their agenda is to destroy anti-woke or to destroy “woke academia,” which they believe is ruining our country and ruining our youth. And because they’re using antisemitism and this claim to fight antisemitism, even though many of these people have a record of trafficking in antisemitism themselves, or hanging around with antisemites, or defending antisemites, it doesn’t matter. Because they’re now claiming to be out there to stop antisemitism, they are legitimized and empowered by the forces that in theory are the more progressive forces, particularly the ADL and the American Jewish committee and, also the federations and everybody else.

So that’s where the overarching structure of the moment we’re living in. And unfortunately it’s not a simple right-left question, because the left for those that hold power in the structures of power, in politics, the left is very much a party to this. And that is something that, that really I think I should say it’s a head scratcher on how you deal with that.

Going into it, I was asked to speak about the IHRA definition and I’ll focus on that first, but then I’ll sort of pull the camera, pull the lens back a little bit. And I think it’s, I’ve said for years, and this is my, my pinned tweet on, on X, which is the line “You have to define it to fight it.” And what that actually means is you have to define all meaningful criticism of Israel and its policies or Zionism as antisemitism in order to suppress it. Because you can’t win the arguments any other way. And I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that the whole framing around IHRA, and why people want IHRA, is the IHRA examples. And under the IHRA examples, as I say, most meaningful criticism of Israel is considered antisemitic at the core of that argument. And at the core of all of this debate around antisemitism today, if you listen to Jonathan Greenblatt, at the core of it is the argument that support for Israel and Zionism is an intrinsic part of Jewish identity.

And for all of us who’ve worked around anti-Zionism issues for, for more than, you know, 15 years or however long before IHRA sort of took over. It’s striking because for years, we were all very, very clear on this. I was always clear: It is antisemitic to hold Jews accountable for the actions of Israel. It’s antisemitic to assume that all Jews support Israel. It’s antisemitic to assume anything about a Jewish person’s views on Israel, because that is, that is conflating Jews and the country of Israel, right? Except that IHRA insists that you do that. So in effect, you’re antisemitic if you don’t do it because it’s intrinsic to the identity of every Jewish student. And by the way, if you are a protester who says all Jews support Israel, you’re also an antisemite because you’re conflating. That’s the bizarreness of this moment also. 

As far as IHRA goes in legislation, so there have been efforts to legislate the IHRA definition of antisemitism with all of its examples into law since 2016. They haven’t worked. And it’s fascinating to realize, given how much energy has been behind this for years and years and years, that – it’s interesting that it hasn’t worked. AIPAC centered this in, I think it was 2016, I was at the policy conference and you had, you had, I think it was Cardin who was up on the main stage announcing this. I mean, this has been a centerpiece of the efforts of much of the most powerful forces in the legacy Jewish world for, we’re going on seven years, and they haven’t passed it into law. 

And I think the reason they haven’t passed it into law is because it is so deeply problematic. The ACLU has always been very, very clearly opposed to it. Kenneth Stern, who wrote the definition has spent basically the past 10 years almost doing penance by just constantly explaining to people how this is not how it was intended to be used. So it wasn’t moving. 

Is that going to be different this year? I mean, we’re going to see. The Antisemitism Awareness Act, which is the legislation that would basically codify president Trump’s executive order and impose the IHRA definition with all of its examples on Title VI – this is, this is in the education department – that bill passed the house this week. It passed overwhelmingly in the house. We had a decent number of, I think, I don’t remember what the exact number of people who voted against it were, but it passed by more than two thirds. So it even could have gone under suspension, it would have passed. But it passed the house. It’s now in the Senate. And what we’re at is actually a really fascinating moment, which is that I think people thought it might just sail through the Senate and there was word yesterday, they were trying to move it by hotlining it or they ask if anybody has objections and then try to move it to the immediately to the floor for unanimous consent. And what’s, what’s happening now, developed today is that it appears that it is being, is going to be blocked. And I think it’s probably actually going to be blocked entirely by Republicans. And it’s being blocked because we have some free speech absolutists in the Republican caucus, and we have some super, super fun characters in the Republican caucus who are now backed by people like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, who are looking into saying, “oh shit, we can’t allow this to become law, otherwise, well, if this becomes law, we can’t talk about the Jews killing Christ without being called antisemites,” which is just so bizarre. So it looks like the antisemitism awareness act may actually not be going anywhere this year as it stands. 

However, I will say there is another bill, which is very likely to become the compromise. If the Antisemitism Awareness Act gets stopped, I think very likely we are going to see passage of something called the Countering Antisemitism Act, which is a massive piece of legislation that is framed as being a bill to implement president Biden’s antisemitism strategy. And what it effectively does – and I think somebody else is working on a very long analysis of this – what it effectively does is it legislates that virtually every US federal agency prioritize and center the goal of fighting antisemitism in their work. Which in and of itself is stunning, because we have no similar prioritization or centering as a goal of any across organizations of say fighting anti-Black racism or indigenous rights, or women’s rights, or, you know, fighting anti-gay – This is, this is a special carve out only for antisemitism across the whole of government. And as far as IHRA goes, IHRA is also in this bill. The folks who are defending it, including the Nexus Project, which is strongly behind it are saying, “yes, you know, don’t make the perfect, the enemy of the good, it only invokes IHRA in a non-binding sense of Congress…” And I’m like, okay, I’ve written my analysis. You can see this online. The bottom line is it basically is the wind beneath the wings of the executive order of Mr. Trump, which is still in power. This would absolutely weaponize the civil rights, the Office of Civil Rights to go after universities and students. And I think this is actually very, very likely to pass. 

In addition, without people noticing, there’s a whole bunch of other IHRA bills out there. I would encourage people to take seriously this entire list of bills I’m now going to talk about. Some of them may not go anywhere, but I would say it’s worth noticing that House Speaker Johnson this week announced a whole of the house or across the house initiative to fight antisemitism, which is going to involve at least six house committees, making it a priority of their work – I would say between now and the election, cause this feels very political – to center and shine a constant spotlight on and score constant political points over antisemitism. 

On IHRA, we have a Senate bill. It’s bipartisan. That would make it easier to use claims of antisemitism to quash Palestine voices and solidarity on U.S. campuses. That’s S3580. 

We have a house and Senate companion bills S3078 and HR3773. I don’t expect people to remember the numbers. I tweeted an entire list of these yesterday. You can find them. Now this is a bill – it’s all GOP – a bill to rescind federal funding for universities that quote, “promote antisemitism” explicitly defined using the IHRA definition and its example. So it would defund federal funding for universities if they don’t implement and enforce IHRA. 

We have a Rubio bill to impose the IHRA definition and its examples on campuses and then target students accordingly. 

We have another bill, a GOP house bill, to revoke visas of students who “have engaged in antisemitic activities,” invoking the IHRA definition as the measure of an antisemitic activity.

We have another bipartisan bill that would require colleges to adopt and enforce the IHRA definition as a condition for receiving federal funding.

And we have another GOP bill that would require the adoption and enforcement of the IHRA definition and its examples in the context of enforcement of all civil rights laws at the federal level.

So that’s IHRA. I’m now going to just jump to a bunch of other bills and then I will leave this open for everyone to talk about what they want. 

So we have legislation that is broadly targeting not just campus free speech, but free thought. I’ve been calling it the House Un-American Activities Committee of 2024. It is a bipartisan house bill, HR6578, which would in effect create a new antisemitism commission, members of which would serve for the life of the commission. Every member endowed with all the authorities of the commission, including broad subpoena authority to call any American to testify and provide evidence that’s been requested. And you’re not allowed to claim the Fifth. They say you, you don’t need to have a right to claim the Fifth because they make a commitment to not prosecute you if you give any testimony that could be prosecutable. So they are going to take away your right to, to not self incriminate because… Yeah, I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds weird. But that is bipartisan, guys.

There are a couple of bills that are focused on criminalizing protest in general. And I think our first speaker talked about this being that there’s a, there’s a broad arc of assaults on the right to protest in this country that started before October 7th. A lot of this is, you know, BLM and post-BLM. You have two bills, a house and Senate bill, both GOP, that basically would criminalize nonviolent protests. This is linked to blocking roads, and it’s explicitly framed in its introduction as a response to Palestinian protests. This is before the stuff moved to campuses.

You have another Senate bill called the Stop Pro Terrorist Riots Now Act. Tom Cotton. 

We have a whole long list of bills targeting students and pro Palestine protest, one of which is has been talked about, but not yet introduced.

It’s called the COLUMBIA Act. That’s an acronym. I don’t remember what exactly it stands for, but the COLUMBIA Act is going to be introduced by Representatives Lawler and Torres of New York, House Republican and Democrat. And this would basically mandate the placement of federal antisemitism monitors on campus as a condition for receiving federal funding if people think that that campus is – if someone complains that campus is not defending students for antisemitism. So you have on-campus monitors. 

We also have legislation, I’m just going to go through this quick: there’s a bill to defund colleges that provide support for any organization that “engages in antisemitic harassment” or allows faculty to “promote antisemitism” and it invokes the IHRA definition. Sorry. I should have mentioned that on the earlier list. 

We have another one that was introduced yesterday or the day before, that would “bar entry or deport any foreign person charged with any crime in connection with participation in a pro-terrorism or antisemitism rallies or demonstrations.” So it’s just merely being charged for deportation, not even found guilty.

We have another bill to bar entry to the US and deport from the US foreigners who support Palestinian rights, framed as an anti-terrorism, antisemitism law. We have a GOP bill to define “individuals who endorse or espouse terrorist activities” – which is what obviously students are constantly being accused of doing when they call for ceasefire – to define them as “engaged in terrorist activity and therefore inadmissible to and deportable from the US.”

There’s another house bill to define campus activism critical of Israel as antisemitism and link it to terror, and then use that to defund federal student aid. 

We have another bill to deport foreigners who support Palestinian rights.

And then we have another fun one introduced last night, House and Senate, to punish those convicted of violations during campus protests by making them ineligible for student loan forgiveness, cancellation, waiver, or modification.

It’s just wild. It’s every day, something new being introduced. And it really does feel like we’re in a almost a game show era where people are just trying to come bidding on the craziest or the most, the most cruel idea they can come up with and see how far they can, they can have it go.

Last thing I’ll say on Title VI, because this came up on one of the previous speakers. I’ve been tracking Title VI for years. I will put into the chat some links. One of them is a link to a table that I maintain of Title VI cases. What we’ve seen. Before October 7th, there was just this constant drumbeat for years now of what this is. Some of this is SLAPP litigation. It’s actually lawsuits. And some of it is Title VI complaints to the Department of Education, and most of them don’t go anywhere. Some of them result in, you know, kind of like, okay, we’ll bring someone in and maybe we’ll, we’ll have it. Some people have adopted the [IHRA] definition as a result of these. Some, some schools haven’t. But since October 7th. It is a flood. And if you read the complaints, they are surreal. There’s an entire flood of complaints that are being generated by one guy at one organization because it turns out with Title VI, you don’t actually have to be a student or in any way be directly connected. You can read an article that says that something happened on that campus and file a Title VI complaint, which is what this guy is doing. And the Department of Education accepts them and pretty much investigates them all. And then based on this flood of complaints, I would argue the vast majority of which are just grandstanding. You then have members of Congress grandstanding about the flood of complaints as if the complaints themselves are proof of violation. That is how it is being framed right now. So I’ll put into the chat a link to that table if people want to look at it. I’ll also put into the chat. A link to the, I have a table tracking all the IHRA legislation, federal and state level.

And by the way, I would say with IHRA legislation at the state level, we’re going to get to test very soon what it means for states when they pass IHRA laws. I asked a friend of mine who is in the Palestine legal space to look at this because, Arizona, for example, years ago, three years ago, I think, adopted the IHRA definition as part of their hate crimes law. So in theory in Arizona, if you are found guilty of, I don’t know, I think it’s maybe a felony, maybe less – but if you’re found guilty, and in the commission of the crime that you’ve been found guilty of, there is some sign that there’s something that violates the IHRA definition, then you are required to face enhanced sentencing. So for instance, students, if they are charged with and found guilty of felonies – a huge number of students have been arrested I believe in Phoenix and in Tucson on university campuses for protest – if they are found guilty of felonies, we’re going to have to look and see what they’re sentenced to because there’s a very good chance under current Arizona state law, they’re going to face hate crimes sentences. So that’s something to watch.

And the last thing I’ll put into the chat is a link to a table that I’ve been maintaining now for almost 10 years of expert analysis challenging the IHRA definition or raising concerns about it. We’ll stop there. 

Emmaia Gelman: Amazing. Thank you so much. I want to pose a few questions because our thought here was that these are all emergent conversations, and we both need to orient ourselves and we need to develop a shared strategy that we can actualize across our campuses and our communities.

But the first thing I want to actually just address two holes in our conversation, one of which Lara pointed to, which is the sort of terminology of left and right. I, I would make the pitch, and I have been making the pitch, it’s kind of the gospel that I’m preaching right now, that we need to identify Zionist organizations as part of the right. And that actually is, that draws on their earlier history before, before the ADL and the American Jewish Committee were Zionist, about their level of investment in settler colonialism and whiteness and anti-communism. Like, even though they are aligned in the US with Democrats often, I think probably many of us would agree that that does not make them part of the progressive world or the left. And I think that it’s important to identify them as, as right wing. But it also produces this sort of problem that that’s not the prevailing language in U. S. politics. So I completely agree with you there, Lara. It’s a mistake to to leave that without identifying that Democrats, and often Democrats who identify themselves as progressive, are part of this right-wing current. 

The other thing that we haven’t really talked about so much is Christian Zionism. Even though we’re talking about the right and there are, I think, something like a hundred Congress members who identify as evangelical. We should incorporate that and we haven’t quite gotten to it. 

The questions that I want to pose to Amira and Lara and to all of you are a few. I’m just going to list them out. So what resources are actually being moved here? Like, what’s at play? What are the interests that are at play? Like, Biden may have an ideological or sort of emotional attachment to Israel. Christian Zionists may want it for their millennialist and times goals. There are weapons manufacturers who have a, a, like a monetary interest in it. What are the interests that are at play and who is actually pulling the strings here? Since it’s not us, right? Who’s pulling the strings? And then two more questions. Lara actually gave us a really strong sense of the idea of pushing back on the antisemitism narrative. And I wonder again, if we’re at the point where the narrative actually doesn’t matter anymore, it’s really, I’m asking it as a question, I’m not saying it – but since reality is no longer pertinent, right, to many people, like, how much does, does it matter what the public thinks and understands? And last question: what are the concrete strategies that you have seen that work and that we should, or new strategies that may be available to us now? So a very broad field of questions.

Amira Jarmakani: I just was going to quickly add a little bit about the Title VI piece as, Lara, you mentioned in your comments that the way in which some of the legislation that’s being introduced could weaponize the OCR or charge it with investigating campuses. And then, as you mentioned, that’s already basically happening to some extent. And I think part of what this landscape is about is us trying to figure out what will come out of these investigations posting and putting in the chat, a link to an article that talks about the case that you mentioned or the, the person Zachary Marshall, who some describe as a conservative culture warrior, the one responsible for filing more than thirty Title VI complaints, at least 12 of which are now active investigations. And the one thing that I was going to say earlier is that those cases depend on the assertion that calls for Palestinian liberation are a threat to Jews. So like the legislation that went through the house about claiming that the phrase “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic, these kinds of things that those charges about the actual phrases that are being used as being the harassment and the discrimination themselves is, I think a major piece of how this, the, the safety thing in the Title VI cases are all playing out. So it depends on this. It’s like that line between the question of safety and how it gets pushed over to a claim of harassment and discrimination is based on these ideas about words, and how the words themselves are committing some sort of violence against the claim is Jewish students, right? And that conflation.

Lara Friedman: So I can, I can offer a couple of thoughts. The first thing, on who is pulling the strings: I don’t think there’s any single party playing the strings. And, you know, I wrote a huge article a while ago for the University of the Pacific Law Review looking at these, these different trends and, and you can find some clear, some leaders, right? And they’re leaders not so much because they’re the ones who have the most money or the most power, they’re leaders because they’re people who came up with really clever ideas and other people are like, that’s great, let’s join that. And, and there are, you can, you can figure it’s, it’s not rocket science to sort of look at who’s behind different pieces of this, but the bottom line is a lot of this is just plain straight up opportunism.

I don’t want to go into a long analysis of the mental, well, the psychology of Jonathan Greenblatt. But it is for whatever reason, there has been a decision at the ADL and in other organizations, particularly AJC and in Ted Deutsch, even from when he was still in Congress, before he took over the AJC, when he was as a member of Congress calling for a whole of government adoption, enforcement of the IHRA definition there’s, there’s been a decision that this is where things have to be.

And I have argued for years that this hardening of views on the liberal Zionist pro-Israel left comes from the fact that since the, since at least for the past fifteen, twenty years, that the resurgence of the Bibi era and the end of even a pretense that Israel is interested in peace and a two state solution or anything about Palestinian rights or international law, if there was a period – before this current period we’re in, where people who loved and defended Israel could tolerate a certain amount of criticism because they could say, listen, Israel has free speech. It has a judiciary. It’s trying really hard. Like there was this, this, this squishy area where you could be a critic of Israel without feeling like, you know, if we allow this criticism, this is the beginning of the end of our entire Zionist enterprise.

We’re back now to a – it’s a sort of sense of the world, which feels a lot more like the world that I, that most of us were probably born into a for over the age of 40, which is, you know, the world where it is zero sum, the very existence of Palestinians has to be denied and erased. Otherwise, it challenges the founding myths of the state of Israel. So there can be no space at all for criticism. And if you’re not going to have space for criticism, you can’t win the arguments. You got to delegitimize and chill and punish and suppress. So you’ve got that as a clear agenda for folks who normally would have been one standing up for free speech. 

And on the other side of the equation you have, and we had reference to the Christian Zionists, which is a big piece of it. Christians United for Israel, I think is still the largest Zionist organization in the US. You have, since the beginning of the Tea Party era, you have a strong Christian evangelical Zionist cohort in Congress. They’re incredibly active. They’re well funded. And then add to that this anti-woke piece of it, where you, you put, you put, again the confluence of interest between people who want to defend Israel from the left and people from the right who see, who recognize, we saw this with the start of the anti-BDS stuff, where I used to joke that if Democrats couldn’t create space across their very broad spectrum of views, a safe space for people who are more critical of Israel and supported the tried and true tactics of boycotts, divestment and sanctions – if they couldn’t create space for that, then basically they were creating a sharp edged weapon. And it didn’t require Republicans to come and slash them with it. Republicans just toss that weapon across the aisle and let Democrats slash each other with it. And that’s what we see every time you see Democrats attacking Rashida or Ilhan or somebody else because they said something that Democrats have decided is too politically costly that it’s somehow beyond the pale. You don’t have to let Republicans criticize. We’ll do it. We’ll criticize our own. And in so doing, I’m saying if I were, if I were the Democratic Party, we’ll criticize our own and then we’ll essentially empower Republicans to say, “oh, Democrats have an antisemitism problem.” And then we’ll be on the defense. It is, politically, the power of antisemitism as a tool in the current political moment. It cannot be overstated. It’s, it’s almost, it’s a political weapon of mass destruction and people are using it that way.

Now, does engaging matter? I would say absolutely. They’ve been trying to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act since 2016. It is shocking to me, I have to be honest, that it hasn’t passed yet. Truly shocking given all the efforts behind it. And it hasn’t passed yet because at a grassroots level, people have been appalled by it, what it means for free speech. I think the people who tried to bring it up now thought, Oh, well, now after October 7th, we’ll have a better shot of getting around those free speech concerns. They did not anticipate that now it would be the Republicans standing up and saying, whoa, we don’t want to be called antisemites when we say things that are actually kind of antisemitic. You know, it’s, it’s when you’ve got Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson as Standard bearers of this argument. You’re in a very weird place. But the reality is, and I’ve said this to friends of mine for years, the reality that it is the pro-Palestine, what is considered the far left that has been required for the past 20 years to be the standard bearer of free speech rights in this country when it comes to anything related to Israel, even though when you quash free speech on these issues, you quash it for everybody.

Just one last thing I’ll say, I mean, as an example. So the, so the IHRA definition thing, I think probably is not going to pass the Senate. We’re going to end up with the other version, which is still terrible, different story. But in parallel, we have another bill, which was passed in the house a couple weeks ago, which nobody noticed. I’ve been screaming hair on fire about it since it was introduced. It is a bill that will give the Secretary of the Treasury basically unlimited power to act as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner for NGOs, which he decides are supporters of terrorism. And he doesn’t have to show any evidence. You don’t get a trial. He basically, and you know, this entire law is designed to go after SJP. And it’s based on the arguments that have been laid out by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which say that “the Holy Land Foundation was a Hamas organization. It was found guilty. It was dissolved. The remnants of the Holy Land Foundation became American Muslims for Palestine, which we argue is a Hamas organization, even though they’ve never been convicted of that. And someone from AMP is the founder of SJP. Therefore SJP is a terrorist organ, is a terrorist supporter. They are linked to a terrorist organization. And we see what they’re doing on campuses and that proves it.” And then the Secretary of the Treasury can just yank their tax exempt status. And there’s, there’s virtually no meaningful recourse. There’s recourse in the law, but it’s not meaningful. And since that was announced, we’ve had a right-wing organizations start a, there’s an email that went out a couple of days ago saying that, that the prime target or first target of this law should be OSF, should be Soros and Open Society.

This is the way this law can be used. It’s so broad and so vague, and it is a weapon of mass destruction against the NGO sector. I don’t know why Republicans aren’t upset about this because, you know, you’ve got the Proud Boys and stuff. They’ve got their, their NGOs. Right wingers have long argued that the IRS is anti-conservative in how they vet organizations for tax exempt status, but they seem to be going along fine with putting into law an open politicization and weaponization of the tax exempt process.

I mean, getting, making some noise makes a difference. If this does get stopped, it’s because it’s going to be because, you know, someone wrote an article in Reason Magazine about this last week, and drew attention to it. Maybe a Republican will read that, but Dems aren’t standing up on this. So I will say that I think what happened with the Antisemitism Awareness Act until now is a clear sign that getting involved does help.

Last thing I’ll say, because we’re talking about academia here, and I’m not an academic, I am heart sick watching this. You know, leaders of the academic community go before Congress and and and pander. I don’t know how else to say it. I just, I said this to another academic group that was asking me, consulting me a couple weeks ago. People need to start understanding Washington better, and I don’t know how you make that happen. But trying to pander to people that are determined to have your head doesn’t keep them from cutting off your head. It just makes them kick you harder before they cut off your head. The pandering is absolutely counterproductive. You have people going up there and throwing their students and their faculty under the bus and free speech under the bus, and it still isn’t saving them. So, you know, as we go into another round of these hearings, which are going to include K-12, I have to say that I’m still. After the first round, I was shocked that anyone will agree to testify now without a subpoena, and if you’re subpoenaed, you can bring a lawyer, and why wouldn’t you? This is a witch-hunt. I’m shocked that people are still, still willing to testify without a subpoena and without a lawyer.

Emmaia Gelman: Amira, do you want to jump in? 

Amira Jarmakani: I mean, what are they trying to be saved from is maybe a question we could ask that would get at who’s pulling the strings. The question you asked – I mean, I’m equally flabbergasted by the performance of university presidents in Congress, but I, it seems like yeah, that question of what, how, what do they think they’re saving themselves from by pandering in that way?

Maybe will get at that question. I also think I never said the thing about hate, as a framework, but I think that hate as a framework is the thing that for us to take up. You know, I would just note that, like, hate studies as a field arises in tandem with efforts to institute the IHRA definition, essentially, and I’m including, like, the decade lead up to the 2016 quantification of the definition, but just thinking through how that all works, and also thinking through the ADL’s participation in hate crime frameworks.

And those would include – Emmaia, you’ve done a lot of work on this so you could probably speak to it even better – but just thinking about the like, 1990s context in which the ADL is agitating for hate crime legislation, or those who were, were expressing opposition to US militarism, and meanwhile you know, the ADL was attacking anti-war activism, which they were describing as political correctness and attacking like diversity multiculturalism and ethnic studies and saying that those are fomenting antisemitism. And that all of course is still happening at the same time that those same terms are being taken up to … in the service of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

So yeah, I just wanted to name that, sort of exposing that and bringing down the hate crime and hate studies frameworks, I think, is another strategy, potentially. 

Emmaia Gelman: It seems like we’re talking about, we have sort of two buckets of strategies that we’re talking about. One is, longer, long-term knowledge interventions, discursive interventions, like trying to challenge the hate framework, which is a project that has been underway since it was first proposed and primarily led by, by queers and particularly by queers of color And like, we have a huge platform to build from, right? So the discursive intervention in the, in the hate framework and again, that’s actually, that’s something that has been taken up in the context of of critiques of terror. And I’m just going to post here, Shireen Sinnar’s helpful article, looking at how the hate framework has been sutured to the terror framework as a way for, as a way of strengthening anti-terror law which is, should make us all scared about the hate crimes framework.

So we have that kind of discursive intervention in hate. We have the discursive intervention in antisemitism charges. There’s the opportunity to try and get in the way of the reprehensible journalism, fake journalism, I don’t know what to call it, terrible journalism, that’s coming out about student protests that is misattributing Zionist violence to student protesters – as happened with the UCLA arrests in which only the 200 counter protesters, armed, mobbing counter protesters were doing violence. And all of the folks at the encampment were arrested supposedly as a result of violence that they didn’t, but it wasn’t, it’s not reported that they didn’t create it. So we have these discursive interventions. 

Then I also want to just point to a few things that have worked in terms of concrete immediate strategic interventions. One, which I mentioned earlier, that to the extent that student protest is making immediate demands of institutions demands to not accede to these policies are, can be part of that. And the students at Goldsmiths just won a review – probably in the future – but a review nonetheless of IHRA policy. Another example, which actually, when we originally planned this panel, Sheryl Nestel was going to be a speaker and the experience that she was going to offer was how Canadian academics defeated IHRA as a broad policy by having a ton of academic institutions pass resolutions opposing IHRA before it came to the broader global body. And that is something that we can do now. 

When this panel was supposed to be taking place at ASA we had talked about generating a resolution at ASA opposing IHRA. which could become a model for for other academic associations. That’s a long process, but we’re also, as, as Lara pointed out, we’re sort of in speeded up time, right? We’re like in the Anthropocene of the academic anti-Palestinian panic response. So we actually have the capacity potentially to do that kind of, that work on a much more speeded up time scale. Which could potentially, I think – I mean, I’m curious to know what you think, Lara – could potentially be a way to intervene in the adoption of federal policies. There’s also legal strategies. There are lots of efforts to use Title VI to push back on the antisemitism allegations by by making Title VI claims about anti-Palestinian racism. One was just filed at Columbia. And there are other legal interventions. So, if the idea here is to map, I’m curious to hear what you guys think about those strategies and there’s from the chat, the question of, of whether the Columbia and Emory Title VI investigations are sort of replicable tool, and can be influential.

Lara Friedman: I will say, as someone who’s been following lawfare for many, many years, and I’m currently I’m on the board of UNRWA USA, where we’re currently facing an anti-terror lawsuit against us. Super fun. I think, you know, there’s a capacity issue here, and I applaud the people are doing this because I think groups that work on lawfare from the pro-free speech and pro-Palestine students perspective are utterly overwhelmed playing defense. I think wherever it is possible to go on offense, it matters. You know, they’ve been very successful on defense. You look at Palestine Legal and CCR’s  win on the US Campaign case, which was a case, an incredibly attenuating case claiming support for terror, which, by the way, looks a lot like the case that’s now been filed against SJP and AMP which was filed, I believe, day before yesterday. It matters. And it sends, I think, a powerful signal that people are not sitting by, just kind of keeping their heads down, hoping this all goes away. They’re actually bringing the fight to the table, to their opponents. 

I will say that SLAPP suits – or not even, these aren’t SLAPP suits – but the challenge with with a legal strategy is that the other side – and here you do have, you know, we talk about, like, the Brandeis center – you have the other side, which is incredibly well funded incredibly well resourced in terms of staff and money. And for every one case that the good guys can put up, the bad guys can put up a hundred. So I don’t think you win that way, but I think you can have significant wins. For sure, and I think that matters, and there’s a process of learning with the courts. And I think as long as you get, I mean – they have to be good cases because one terrible court ruling is going to be devastating for the future.

This is something lawyers are very, very conscious about. You know, on the, on the anti-BDS stuff, one of the things that people forget is that the, the case in Arkansas, which went all the way to Supreme Court, the Supreme Court declined to hear, it was celebrated by the anti-BDS folks as, hey, see, the courts agreed you can’t boycott Israel. But actually what the Eighth Circuit agreed is you can’t boycott anything. Or you can, but it’s not protected free speech. They literally undid what the entire country considered settled law for the civil rights era that viewed boycotts as free speech. And for the sake of protecting Israel from boycotts, they’ve now undone that for every issue which is just. It’s astonishing.

So I think the legal piece of it has to be done very carefully. And I trust the lawyers to have a better idea than I am on what that looks like. 

Amira Jarmakani: Thanks for that question, I assume you mean the OCR investigations on Islamophobia. And I was going to mention that my university has also been under investigation for that, had a charge in November, I think? Early November. And it’s been very difficult to get any information about that. In fact, it’s that has been used, it seems as a way to say, “oh, well, we, we can’t say anything about this because we’re under investigation. All we can tell you is that we were asked for some information. We’ve provided it.” And so I’ve been wondering this myself, like, well, what will this look like? And will we… how will it play out? It’s like a huge question for me. 

I think strategy-wise, though, maybe along these lines, and maybe it’s worth mentioning, Emmaia, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism has a mechanism to support folks in making FOIA or PRA requests to their institutions. So this could be a strategy to try to understand a little bit more about that. 

That earlier question you asked about, I forgot how you put it – I mean, who’s pulling the strings, right? So this question of like, what does the landscape really look like? And, you know, when my university came under investigation, there was a – one of the articles asked the president for a comment. And one of the things she said was, well, we deny this claim. And in fact, we have a SWANA/ Islamophobia task force, that I am somewhat non-consensually on. And we had been demanding to meet with the president, and she has till now still refused to meet with us. And yet she told the news people that. They’re not Islamophobic because they have us, who she was refusing to meet with. So yeah, just to offer that non answer.

Emmaia Gelman: We have just a few minutes left. I’m just reading this in the chat. So, there has been a sort of effort to pool knowledge about Title VI cases, both Title VI cases like OCR complaints, but also there are some universities that have lawsuits against them. And then there’s also the way that, the environment in which those kinds of cases emerge creates self censorship and chilled conditions already.

We’re up against a couple of things here. One is that, the absolute total scarcity of attention which I think all of us are running at max capacity as are legal organizations, as are academic freedom organizations. And as is Lara, obviously, like, the volume of attack is so intense. It feels like we’re still at the start of strategizing this – and also that the runway is very short. So the idea here was to develop strategies and to a certain extent, we’re still kind of asking questions about strategies. So I just want to flag that, this is an iterative process that everybody is involved in, and the knowledge that’s coming from each institution that’s experiencing this is new and special knowledge, I guess that’s what I’m saying. So I hope everybody feels like they have something to offer, even if it’s just reporting in.

Amira and Lara, I’m not sure if you want to have any last words on first level strategies. We have this sort of collection of possibilities. For me the first level strategy is just like super immediately, political education. And I know that’s not even one that we’ve discussed, but there are so many new people coming into the student encampments who have just been activated, that for me, political education, so that we can start to have these conversations feels like number one. But what number 2 is, I, I don’t know yet. I don’t know where the interventions are. 

Amira and then Lara, if you have any further last words, we want to know.

Amira Jarmakani: I was still looking at the question in the chat, and I think the ICSZ podcast could potentially be a resource in response to that. 

Other things that we have done on our campus is to put forward resolutions that explicitly reject the IHRA definition. So I think this would go back to something you said earlier. And we were able to pass that, and I’m happy to share the language of it. But I think it’s, it’s serving also the purpose of popular education, at the same time that it’s putting forward a resolution that will ideally have some kind of protective measure. And then maybe could contribute to a wider sort of grassroots effort, as you said, to get these kinds of resolutions passed so that they can perhaps do something as those moves are being made on larger levels.

Lara Friedman: Yeah, so I have a couple of things. The first thing I’d say is don’t panic, right? This is, these are not – these are terrible times. I’m not going to, I don’t sugarcoat anything, but panic achieves absolutely nothing. And one foot in front of the other, the sun’s still going to rise and we’ll fight another day, blah, blah, blah. That is actually, that is absolutely true. 

Second, I think it is vital for people in the academic space who care about free speech, who care about Palestinian rights, who care about right to protest to adjust themselves to the reality that, that this is all under imminent threat. And they’re keeping your head down, isn’t going to save you having, this is something where, there’s no way you’re not going to duck this threat, except by stopping being an academia and going and opening a coffee shop down the street. This is the reality. So don’t panic, but also recognize that this is the moment. What I said to the group that I spoke to a couple of weeks ago in an academic setting was, I think being prepared and mapping what’s going on is great. I will say that if you really do start doing that –  if you, if you make that something that is a precondition for deciding what to do – you’ll never do anything because so much is happening. It is changing so fast. The constellation of organizations and of actors and of laws and of threats is, it’s overwhelming. I mean, these databases that I keep, and I keep a whole set of them – I joke, this is an entire flock of albatrosses I carry on my back – but it, you know, there’s no way to ever get it all straight. You actually just have to decide what you’re going to do and do it. But the more you’re communicating with each other, and the more that there is, I would argue a consensus in academia of what is the correct way to respond to these attacks.

And that, some of that is, what are the offensive factors? This is, this is what ALEC does. I mean, the organization ALEC, right? You get model legislation, you push it across every legislature in the country. You know, this may be a place where if there are, there’s infrastructure in place, universities to have model stuff. So everyone’s working off, everyone has the same resources. You know, language has already been worked through. It’s less work for people. You’ve got facts and talking points and whatever. I mean, I think that’s the kind of thing that you can do working together much better than one office university by university.

I’d also say that this is a place to really think about the guiding principles. And this has been when I say I am heart sick watching these legislators, these administrators go on campus. I mean, what’s been lost, I think, from the leadership of academia in most cases is a clear articulation of what is at stake and what you are standing up for and what you are standing against. And that is why administrators in so far, two major hearings have completely lost the public, the public with this. They’ve allowed themselves to be washed into a corner and they either look like talking heads, spewing lawyers, talking points, or they are just shamelessly pandering. I don’t know what they stand for. It doesn’t seem like they stand for anything. I don’t know what that looks like, but academia. Yeah. The intellectual part of academics, the thought leaders are desperately needed here to articulate for the public narrative what is at stake and what we stand for, and articulate it in a way that centers Palestinians and Palestinian rights, because right now the tip of the spear is going through literally and metaphorically is going through Palestinians. 

But also making people understand. And I’ve said for years, you may not give a crap about Palestinians and Palestinian rights, but Israel/Palestine cares about you. And it’s coming for your rights. You should care about Palestine and Palestine rights. You absolutely should. It’s a moral issue. It’s an ethical issue. It’s a fundamental values issue. But even if you don’t, you still have to care about this. And that’s a place where, you know, I don’t know if it’s a symposium. I don’t know if it’s call for papers, but rather than being on defense or trying to come up with initiatives on offense, they’re specifically framed in the language of the people who are attacking you. You know, really settling into what academia is good at, right, which is fleshing out these ideas and putting, helping people understand why things matter in the historical, the arc of history.

I mean, this is what academia needs to be doing right now. Damn it. 

Amira Jarmakani: And I think, and speaking of what we stand for, just contributing to the collective energy and power around the divest movement is clearly – will proliferate not only it’s the energy around it, but also all of the critiques that are already embedded in that call for divestment. So I think, it touches, it also connects to this long history of building on BDS as well. 

Emmaia Gelman: That’s great. Thank you so much. And also, I just want to point to the sort of field building like resource work that Palestinian Feminist Collective and Foundation for Middle East Peace and Lara in particular have done.

So, like, resources are available and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism is actually trying to assemble some of those. We’re just building our infrastructure, but we’re assembling research. We have this podcast, which tries to explain some of this stuff too. 

Thank you so very much everyone for joining us. Thanks so much to Chris Shell and the American Studies Association, and Mishauna Goeman, for making this all happen as a way to make sure that we could do Palestine solidarity work at ASA without losing our capacity to also do thinking and academic work. Appreciate you all so much. Hope to see you again soon. 

Emmaia Gelman: Thanks for joining us. Please check out the show notes to find all the materials we discussed here. Our thanks again to the American Studies Association for hosting the conference and to the participants on the panel and in the audience. Till next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.