On Zionist Logic and Structure: The Repression of Palestinian Narratives in the US Academy

Jennifer Mogannam and Loubna Qutami

Author’s Note: Though this essay and syllabus were drafted prior to the genocide in Palestine that began in October 2023, the themes that the authors explore demonstrate the logics and structures that have facilitated both the genocide and the criminalization of those opposing it on a worldwide scale, particularly within the US academy and universities. At the time of revising this piece (May 2024), over seventy-five student encampments protesting the genocide were launched across US universities. While this piece does not concentrate on the Gaza Solidarity Encampments, it offers a critical exploration of the logics and structures that have animated the counterinsurgency we have witnessed in its wake. Lastly, the authors note that due to the time lapse between draft and publication, they were unable to fully capture their analyses of the contexts and shifts that have ensued since, particularly the way imperialist states have mobilized Zionism to recodify state violences.

Even in this current conjuncture in which the world has borne witness to an accelerated Zionist state genocide on the besieged Gaza Strip that has, at the time of this writing, already claimed the lives of at least 64,000 Palestinians, to teach, speak, and advocate for Palestinian freedom within US universities invites very real material repression.^{^[1]} The problem is not new or accidental. Beyond the financial profit universities yield from investing in military and occupation industries, and beyond the broader colonial, racist, and Orientalist rubrics that permeate the US academy and predetermine what is considered “legitimate” knowledge, a “permission to narrate” has long been denied to Palestinians by design, enforced by the State of Israel, Zionist institutions operating internationally, and imperialist states.^{^[2]} Accelerated over the past decade, and especially since the State of Israel launched its campaign of genocide in Gaza, attention to this phenomenon has grown within the academy and universities nationwide as a result of Zionist vitriol, censorship, and repression campaigns that enjoy the full support of the US state. These campaigns have escalated in retaliation to grassroots movement victories advocating for freedom and justice for Palestine that have resulted in seismic shifts in US public opinion, particularly among students and youth.

In this syllabus, we begin with the fact that Palestinian knowledge and narratives have emerged as the principal target of campaigns of academic repression in the West and that there is an urgent necessity to safeguard them as part of our commitment to the defense of Palestinian land, life, and freedom and our broader intellectual and political investment in liberatory education. We approach Zionism “from the standpoint of its victims,” as Edward Said summoned us to do some forty-five years ago.^{^[3]} This syllabus caters to scholars of Palestine and our costrugglers within the US academy, particularly within the field of ethnic studies. Part 1 offers an examination of how Zionist logics undergird the material structures of settler colonial erasure and racial colonial carcerality in the land of historic Palestine, elaborating how the same logics also inform the discursive violence and epistemic erasures that Palestinian narratives and truth are subjected to. We argue that this repression is systemic and derives from Zionist ideology, even as it is waged by different forces and shifts in form and degree.

As scholars and teaching practitioners situated within ethnic studies and committed to Palestinian liberation, we are especially concerned with how epistemic erasure and discursive violence unfold within the academy and on US university campuses. Part 2 of our syllabus provides resources to scholars, teachers, and students interested in knowing more about the repression campaigns Palestinians and their costrugglers are enduring and resisting. Within part 2, unit 1 provides resources on how to protect oneself and one’s community from repression campaigns as part of larger struggles in defense of academic freedom, free intellectual exchange, and the defense of Palestinian life, land, and narratives. Unit 2 provides resources that illustrate the diverse but interconnected tactics used by Zionists in these campaigns to confuse bystanders, flatten power relations, and quell dissent. Unit 3 identifies the institutions and actors who have waged these assaults on advocates for justice and freedom in Palestine. Unit 4 provides resources on how these assaults pose risk to the broader pedagogical ethos and structure of liberatory education and how universities have been complicit in assaults on free speech and academic freedom. Unit 5 centers the narratives and testimonies of those who have been subject to Zionist defamation, smear, and repression campaigns.

Part 1. The Palestinian Colonial Condition: Settler Colonial Erasure and Racial Colonial Carcerality

For generations, Palestinians have been forced to navigate material conditions shaped by the interface of settler colonial erasure and dispossession and racial colonial military occupation and carcerality. Recent commemorations of the seventy-eighth year since the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) verify that Palestinians continue to struggle for the rematriation of stolen land, the return of millions of refugees to their homes, and the nullification of a military occupation that wages endless war on Palestinian land and life, painfully evidenced in the current catastrophic genocide in Gaza. To put it simply, Palestinians are quite literally fighting for their lives and freedom.

Discursive violence and epistemic erasure are not secondary to but rather constitutive of this material condition. It is no coincidence that Israeli assaults on Palestinian land, life, and movements have been accompanied by the looting, theft, and destruction of Palestinian archives, universities, and other sites of Palestinian knowledge production.^{^[4]} It is not an accident that Palestinian truth tellers, including journalists, academics, teachers, and public intellectuals, have long been targeted for assassination and imprisonment.^{^[5]} In this latest and most catastrophic assault, every Palestinian university in Gaza has been destroyed, and countless academics and teachers targeted for kill, in a systematic assault on Palestinian knowledge. Coined by Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi, following the 2009 Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, scholasticide is now widely understood as the “systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel.”^{^[6]} The Palestinian Feminist Collective defines scholasticide as “the physical destruction of centers of knowledge, educational resources, infrastructures, and archives as well as the silencing, censorship, and repression of Palestinian history, epistemology, scholarship, and subjectivity.”^{^[7]} Beyond the assault on Palestinian knowledge centers, in all parts of historic Palestine various forms of political literature, art, and theory continue to be banned and those found clandestinely producing, reading, or distributing them are punished, often by incarceration.^{^[8]} Each year, the Israeli legislature passes new legal measures that prohibit the rights of Palestinians to freedom of speech, the press, and teaching, writing, learning, and discussing Palestine from Palestinian perspectives.^{^[9]} And during this current genocide, even Palestinians of the heartland, citizens of the Israeli state, are being criminalized and punished for objecting to this war, sometimes for something as simple as a Facebook post.

To think of the assault on Palestinian narratives as a quintessential component of the Palestinian colonial condition forces us to interrogate how epistemic erasure and discursive violence are embedded in Zionist ideology by design. This explains why Palestinians continue to be targeted, silenced, and criminalized even when living in exile and not directly under the boot of Israeli occupation. Indeed, efforts to crush Palestinian narratives are not only enacted by the Israeli state and its security and surveillance apparatus. Zionist institutions across the world have served as both de jure and de facto arms of the State of Israel’s public relations strategy, waging attacks against all those who challenge Zionist hegemonic narratives, all the while enjoying the full support of imperialist states. For decades, Palestinians in exile and their costrugglers have been victims of these repression campaigns. The longue durée of these campaigns, coupled with the massive recent uptick in their frequency compels us to interrogate the Zionist logics that inform systemic forms of epistemic erasure and discursive violence.

It is our observation that the repression of Palestinian narratives is undergirded by two simultaneously functioning, interdependent structures that form the basis of the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Zionist treatment of Palestinian narratives globally: settler colonial erasure and racial colonial carcerality.^{^[10]} As the works of numerous Palestinian and Indigenous scholars teach us, the former structure follows a logic of elimination and a destroy-to-replace calculus: What is annihilated is then covered up with manufactured claims to history and land, presented as the naturalized order of things absent contesting claims.^{^[11]} The latter banks on a logic of racial supremacy, driven by a discipline-and-punish calculus: When Palestinian life, resistance, narratives, truth, and movements are asserted in defiance of the intended erasure, the colonial power relation is restored through a racial colonial exertion of collective punishment, war, imprisonment, torture, and captivity of the body and mind—exercises intent on putting colonized people back in their intended inferior place.

The settler colonial logic of elimination, and the destroy-to-replace calculus that it enacts, is most apprehended by looking at the material transformation of Palestinian land since the onset of Zionist conquest. Zionists have quite literally taken the place of Palestinians in lands from which they have been killed, uprooted, and expelled during and since the 1948 Nakba. During the Nakba, nearly 530 Palestinian villages were destroyed. Among those villages, for example, was Ayn Hawd, which was depopulated of its Palestinian stewards and transformed into a Jewish artists colony.^{^[12]} Arabic names of villages and towns usurped in 1948 have been replaced with Hebrew ones: Ayn Hawd is now referred to as Ein Hod. Another potent example lay in the building of a Museum of Tolerance—dedicated to a commemoration of the death of Jewish peoples killed during the Holocaust—atop the corpses of the Palestinian dead in one of Palestine’s oldest sacred sites, the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. It is also revealed in the construction of Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Ayn Karem, a village whose descendants remain in exile awaiting their return. The village lay directly adjacent to Deir Yassin, a site of one of the bloodiest massacres executed against Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba. Furthermore, across the land of historic Palestine, Indigenous Palestinian crops have been uprooted or decimated and supplanted with foreign species instead, often to cover over evidence of the fact that Palestinians were ever there at all.^{^[13]} And we see this calculus continuing through the genocide in Gaza today, where the mass murder, desecration of land, and starvation and displacement of millions seek to erase Palestinian life while the ground invasion seeks to secure settler expansion or, at least, military occupation. In December 2023, Harey Zahav, an Israeli real estate company that has cashed in on the construction of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, came under fire when it circulated an advertisement of luxury homes superimposed onto an image of a decimated neighborhood in Gaza. The caption of the ad read “A house on the beach is not a dream.”^{^[14]} Beyond the callousness of advertising sales of not-yet-built property upon the ruins of Palestinian homes when the bodies of the Palestinian dead are not yet cold, the advertisement is instructive in exposing the destroy-to-replace calculus that underscores the genocide entirely and the settler fantasies that drive it.

But the destroy-to-replace calculus is also evident in the discursive universe that extends far beyond Palestine as a land mass. How else can we make sense of why Palestinians are constantly asked to shoulder the burden of proof in written and spoken testimony, to prove that they were and continue to remain on the land, to prove that there is such thing as Palestine, and that its kin have not relinquished their attendant claims to history and land even if forcibly expelled from it? The destroy-to-replace calculus operates within the universe of discourse by working to erase Palestine from world maps and to expunge Palestinian epistemologies, narratives, and histories from knowledge registers and meaning-making circuits of power. This logic and calculus explains why social media tech giants continue to shadow ban, censor, and erase Palestinian expression. It also explains the enduring institutional absence of Palestinian studies in most educational institutions, which, compared to the resources and pedagogical space allocated to Zionist counterparts, cannot go unnoticed. Take for instance the systematic efforts among Zionist institutions to erase Palestine from a proposed Arab American studies unit in California’s K–12 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.^{^[15]} Epistemic erasure is also evident in the countless number of times educational administrators have disinvited Palestinian speakers, rejected proposals for Palestinian classes, art exhibits, conferences, and student events, and denied space for the creation and circulation of Palestinian expression on campuses. When measured against instances in which Zionists have been deplatformed, the issue becomes clear: Palestinian narratives are silenced while Zionists hegemonic narratives are naturalized.^{^[16]}

It is important to note that systematic attempts at epistemic erasure do not always take place through the destroy-to-replace calculus. Sometimes they function through a selective appropriation of Palestinian culture and tradition. The logic of elimination still rules this strategy in that these campaigns seeks to erase Palestinian claims to their own culture so that Zionists may claim it for themselves. This epistemic maneuver might, at the surface, appear like a deceptive deviation from the destroy-to-replace calculus, but it is generative in that it enables Zionists to lay an indigenous claim to historic Palestine: a narrative that is fabricated and deliberately deployed to undermine their subjectivity as settlers and appropriators of Indigenous Palestinian culture. If we instinctively flinch when reviewing a restaurant menu in our university cafeterias and see advertisements of “Israeli” couscous, falafel, tabouli, hummus, and shakshuka, it is not because we are narrow-minded nationalists, but rather because we recognize the renaming of these traditionally Palestinian, Arab, and Amazigh dishes as a part of the epistemic erasure intrinsic to settler colonialism and the material erasures they stand in for. If we are overcome with anger when, two years into this genocide, university administrators continue to send out grief-laden condemnations of the events of October 7 with no reference to the events that precipitated it or that followed it, it is not because we are void of human empathy. It is because we understand that even Palestinian pain is subject to erasure and appropriation. Both signal and attempt to naturalize the notion that Palestinian life is disposable, and thus they fundamentally serve the destroy-to-replace calculus.

When the erasure structure and process falls short of successfully doing away with Palestinian presence on the land or, better put, when Palestinians refuse disappearance and resist the structure, logics, and calculus that would rather have them passively surrender to material and social death, Zionists turn to a second structure in their treatment of Palestinians: racial colonial carcerality. Materially this structure is most revealed in the military occupation infrastructure imposed upon geographies where Palestinian presence still exists en masse. Driven by a logic of racial supremacy, this structure seeks to establish clear and distinct roles for and asymmetrical relations of power between the colonizer and colonized. Whereas in the settler colonial erasure structure Zionists deny Palestinian existence in order to take their place, in the racial colonial carceral structure, Zionists recognize Palestinians but only as subhuman terrorists whose very presence exists outside of and therefore threatens Jewish existence and broader conceptions of Western modernity and progress. These racially manufactured conceptions render Palestinians as nothing more than uncivilized and barbaric savages who must be contained and punished by any means necessary. Such notions establish the ideological basis and justification for endless warfare and carceral measures imposed upon Palestinians collectively. Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to Palestinians as “human animals” and the accompanying racially manufactured portrayals of Palestinians as bloodthirsty terrorists, baby-killers, and rapists, to greenlight the genocide in Gaza, evidence this logic of racial supremacy.^{^[17]}

The logic of racial supremacy drives a material structure that is built through a discipline-and-punish methodological approach, whereby the Israeli state surveils, polices, holds captive, and besieges Palestinians in order to purge them from the category of “human” and the attendant rights and freedom such recognition might engender. In the West Bank, a racial colonial carceral architecture is made visible in a land shattered into archipelagic islands by an apartheid annexation wall, a constellation of security outposts, checkpoints, roadblocks, and surveillance towers that restrict Palestinian mobility and enforce the surveillance of all elements of public life. It is also made clear in the ways Israeli soldiers stop and harass Palestinians passing through checkpoints, invade homes in the middle of the night to execute arrests, attack Palestinians in their places of worship, implement violent crowd control technologies and shoot-to-kill policies, and impede on the abilities of Palestinians to seek life-sustaining services and care. There is no more visible example of the racial colonial carceral structure than Israel’s necropolitical control of the Gaza Strip, which is now in its eighteenth year under an aerial, naval, and land siege. Often referred to as one of the most densely populated places on earth and the world’s largest open-air prison, the siege on Gaza long limited the mobility of people and life-sustaining goods and resources. Since the siege began in 2007, Gaza has endured five major wars, which have devastated Palestinian land, life, and communities and destroyed critical infrastructure including hospitals, media offices, schools, electrical grids, water sanitation systems, and more. Most of what remained following those wars has been laid to rubble in this sixth war. On day 660 of the genocide, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings had been destroyed, 2 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people had been displaced, and today millions of them are enduring a man-made famine due to the Israeli imposed food blockade.^{^[18]} In both the past and present, when Palestinians resist these forms of collective discipline and punishment, Israeli forces retaliate with more disproportionate force.

The violence that accompanies Israel’s discipline and punishment campaigns targets not just Palestinian land and bodies. Because this violence derives from Zionism’s racial supremacy logic, it also seeks to deny sovereignty to the Palestinian self and collective by coercively invading the interiority of the Palestinian psyche. In other words, it seeks to establish an internalization of colonization within Palestinian minds just as it seeks to exercise carceral control over Palestinian land and bodies.^{^[19]} There is no better evidence of this than the brutal forms of psychological torture that Palestinian prisoners have long reported.^{^[20]} One of the most reprehensible examples of this kind of psychological warfare enacted during the genocide in Gaza is when Israeli drones played sounds of children and women crying to torment Palestinians and lure them out of sites of refuge toward locations where they would be targeted by live fire.^{^[21]} Another example from October 2023 was the impending threat of the ground invasion and the issuing of evacuation orders without proceeding with the ground invasion until weeks after.^{^[22]} Each day in waiting, and questioning whether it would actually be implemented, was a day of incurred psychological warfare for Palestinians.

Should Palestinians think to resist their colonial conditions, even through an exercise of Palestinian expression, they are punished to restore the balance of the colonial power matrix. But efforts to discipline and punish the Palestinian psyche and narrative extend far beyond the land of occupied Palestine. In some cases, these forms of punishment have led to the assassination, imprisonment, and deportation of advocates for justice in Palestine in the United States.^{^[23]} Today, Zionist organizations have expanded campaigns intent on quelling free Palestinian expression and the right to teach, write, and study Palestine within the academy. These campaigns seek to stoke fear, anxiety, and terms of coerced surrender for Palestinians of the diaspora and their costrugglers. In many cases, these forms of punishment have resulted in the firing of journalists, teachers, and academics for speaking in support of Palestinian freedom, the cancellation of university classes that teach about Palestine from the vantage point of Palestinians, and the harassment, doxing, bullying, defamation, and smear campaigns that target students, teachers, and other advocates for Palestine. Many scholars have endured frivolous lawsuits and investigations and have been forced to comply with tedious public request acts filed against them, bureaucratic forms of punishment intent on dissuading and derailing them from speaking, teaching, and writing about Palestine. Others have reported how grants and job offers have been rescinded because administrators have caved to external pressure campaigns. In many of these cases, false conflations of anti-Zionism and antisemitism are weaponized to censor lines of critical intellectual and political inquiry. These are but a few of the examples of how discursive violence seeks to establish a form of racial supremacy through the wielding of colonial power.

Over the course of the last year, these forms of harassment and repression have not only persisted but grown to unprecedented proportions. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff have endured disciplinary measures by campus administrations that have suspended rights to protected First Amendment activity (namely, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly). Administrators, in collusion with both state and private security, surveillance, and police agencies, have made thousands of protestors at US campuses targets for arrest during the April–May 2024 student encampments that spanned over seventy-five university campuses across the country. Hundreds have sustained serious injuries due to both police violence and Zionist vigilante mob violence. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the campus administration stood idle for at least four hours, during which time their students were attacked with metal, wood, and glass projectiles, fireworks, and bear mace by a Zionist and white supremacist lynch mob.^{^[24]} With the support of Zionist organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, AMCHA Initiative, and the Zachor Legal Institute, Zionist students have filed hundreds of frivolous Title VI grievances—at the university level and to federal agencies—that falsely accuse advocates for justice in Palestine of antisemitism. The systematic efforts with which these organizations have weaponized false allegations of antisemitism is in part what has led to congressional hearings whereby university presidents from multiple campuses have been reprimanded for unsuccessfully silencing students, staff, and faculty from speaking out and protesting the genocide in Gaza.

If it were not clear before October 7, there is now no hiding the lengths to which Zionist institutions backed by the imperialist policies of the US state will go to punish and silence voices of dissent. In this moment, we see an acceleration of the Zionist repression agenda on the legislative level, particularly through campaigns to pressure states and universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that deceptively equates criticism of Israel, and Zionism, with antisemitism.^{^[25]} The swelling numbers of frivolous Title VI complaints against those objecting to the genocide on University campuses have been used as a justification for the Trump administration to broaden its war on higher education, first amendment freedoms, advancements in equity, diversity, and inclusion programming, immigrant rights, and transgender rights. The Spring 2024 wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations of students on international visas (and green card holders), who were active in the movement for Palestinian liberation, created a chilling effect intent on suppressing the student movement for Palestinian liberation. While the call was made from the highest ranks of office, we cannot feign surprise that the ultra-right Zionist group, Betar, had advocated for the arrest and deportation of Columbia student activist, Mahmoud Khalil, before ICE showed up at his front steps, propagating lists for the US government from the Canary Mission website. Furthermore, the Trump administration’s cuts of millions in federal funds to universities has coerced campus administrators to comply with his far-right agenda by reaching negotiated settlements that rescind advancements made in rights for members of the campus community and cracking down on campus advocates for justice and freedom in Palestine.

Whereas settler colonial erasure seeks to annihilate Palestinian presence and naturalize Zionist hegemony in its place, racial colonial carcerality disciplines and punishes to make an example of those who refuse to comply with Palestinian disappearance. These two structures of power—and their distinct but interdependent logics and methods—not only coexist but rely upon one another. Both are genocidal precisely because of the undeniable intent built into the logic: When efforts to epistemically erase Palestine and Palestinian narratives are challenged by members of the academy and university community, Zionists pivot toward retaliatory measures of discursive violence (and literal violence) that seek to criminalize, threaten, delegitimize, punish, and discipline free intellectual and pedagogical engagement and embodied acts of protest. In both instances the intent and impact of genocide remains intact by means that facilitate either slow or accelerated material, social, and cultural death. Together, these co-constitutive structures, logics, and methods that form the basis of Zionist ideology establish a colonial power structure that naturalizes itself so that it cannot be questioned, challenged, or exposed.

What, then, are the risks of standing idle to Zionist repression of Palestinian narratives and truth? Let us for a moment consider the injury incurred when survivors of violence are denied the right to tell their story or seek recourse—when they are spoken over, or at, rather than with, or punished for telling their truth. How does that form of denial not only enable the material subjugation Palestinians endure but also insidiously produce emotional, psychological, and spiritual injuries that live on when the physiological wounds have healed? What, then, are the stakes of speaking of Palestine when it is rendered unspeakable? What does it mean to think, teach, read, write, and speak of Palestine when it is prohibited, and what dangers does such a prohibition pose to the larger political ethos and pedagogical structure of free speech, liberatory education, and academic freedom? Moreover, given that Zionist repression not only intersects with but is reflective of the US state’s broader imperialist, racist, and fascist war-waging, how does remaining silent on Palestine threaten the rights and freedom of all our communities and the very mission we have committed ourselves to as educators? We pose these questions as a pedagogical exercise relevant for reflection.

Part 2. Resources on Identifying, Mapping, and Combating Repression

Over the last decade, the movement for justice and freedom in Palestine has gained credence across the United States, with over a dozen national academic associations pledging to boycott Israel, hundreds of successfully passed student divestment resolutions, major developments in labor, artistic, and consumer boycotts, and an uptick in street mobilizations calling for a free Palestine. In the last two years alone, thousands of US-based academic associations, departments, and student organizations have condemned the genocide of Palestinians and pledged their solidarity with Palestinian liberation. These grassroots organizing victories have reflected a challenge to the status quo. Within the academy and on college campuses across the country, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has become the key issue of our time, mobilizing students of diverse backgrounds and reflecting a generational shift in the long-held bipartisan investment in Zionism and support for the State of Israel. In response, Zionist repression campaigns have also escalated in numbers and in degrees of extremity. Universities and academia writ large are among the most frequent sites where Zionist disciplining of Palestinian narratives takes place. While Palestinians and their costrugglers have long endured assaults on free speech and academic freedom, within the last decade, as the movement for Palestinian liberation has achieved landslide victories in shifts in public opinion, repression campaigns have become only more egregious and retaliatory. Government agencies, mainstream media, academic administrators, tech moguls, private investors, and other power holders have all been complicit, not only in the genocide in Gaza but in silencing dissent.

To recognize that the right to speak is a quintessential characteristic of the Palestinian freedom struggle forces scholars of Palestine, and student organizers, to contend with risks posed to an interference in their private lives, a discrediting of their political and intellectual integrity, an assault on their character and reputation, and risk to sustaining their economic livelihoods. Most recently, we have learned that these risks may also include criminal charges and physical violence. Many of the repression campaigns scholars and students have endured, featured in the resources below, have involved surveillance, media doxing, stalking and harassment, threats of or incidents of violence that threaten one’s life, safety, and well-being, efforts to fire or reprimand advocates in their places of work, and smear and defamation campaigns levied to discredit the political, ethical, and intellectual integrity of Palestine advocates. Zionist organizations have waged frivolous but time- and money-consuming lawsuits and public request act filings against scholars and students advocating for Palestinian liberation. They have also lobbied university administrators and government officials to pass legislation and protocols that infringe on democratic processes, free speech, and academic freedom and called for institutional cuts to resources for Palestinian and Arab studies or a prohibition of their formation altogether.

While this list is by no means comprehensive, and in fact misses hundreds if not thousands of repression campaigns waged against members of the academy and university communities, we believe it offers a small window into the way Palestinians and their costrugglers are systematically targeted by repression campaigns, even before October 7th.^{^[26]}

Unit 1. Mapping and Combating Repression

As repression cases have become more prevalent and frequent and with their funding exponentially increasing over the past ten to fifteen years, efforts to combat such repression have also grown. Those subjected to attacks face real material consequences, and, through various networks of support, and especially the rise of groups such as Palestine Legal, there have been more organized and concerted efforts to address and combat these assaults and protect rights, including rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, and academic freedom. We note that within the last two decades, one of the most commonly used tactics to silence Palestinians and their costrugglers is the false conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The following resources establish a grounded understanding of who is waging repression campaigns, the discourses, strategies, and tactics they use, the funding pools they rely on, and various instances that illustrate assaults on Palestinian rights and narratives. They also provide various tips on how to prevent and protect against repression when endured.

Overview

The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US (Palestine Legal, 2015), https://palestinelegal.org/the-palestine-exception.

Stifling Dissent (Jewish Voice for Peace, 2015), https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/stifling-dissent/.

The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements for Social Justice (International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, 2015), https://www.ijan.org/resources/business-of-backlash/.

“Reports & Opinion Polls,” Independent Jewish Voices Canada, https://www.ijvcanada.org/opinion-polls/.

Freedom Within Reach: Palestine Action Toolkit (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2021), https://palestinianfeministcollective.org/all-out-for-palestine/.

Steve Salaita, “How to Handle a Zionist Defamation Campaign,” Steve Salaita (blog), June 28, 2021, https://stevesalaita.com/how-to-handle-a-zionist-defamation-campaign/.

“The Lobby – USA, Episode 1,” posted November 3, 2018, by Electronic Intifada, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lSjXhMUVKE&ab_channel=TheElectronicIntifada.

“The Lobby,” Al Jazeera Investigations, https://www.ajiunit.com/investigation/the-lobby/.

Emmaia Gelman, “The World Upside-Down: Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies,” Critical Ethnic Studies 8, no. 2 (2024): https://doi.org/10.5749/ces.0802.09.

More Resources

“Resources,” Palestine Legal, https://palestinelegal.org/resources.

“Archives: USACBI Statements,” US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, https://usacbi.org/category/usacbi-statements/.

“Recent Posts,” California Scholars for Academic Freedom, https://cascholars4academicfreedom.home.blog/#recent-posts.

“Palestinian Solidarity,” Center for Constitutional Rights, https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/issues/palestinian-solidarity.

“Library,” Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/library/.

Unit 2. Methods and Tactics of Repression

Consistent with the Zionist logics previously outlined, we believe repression tactics seek to dismantle any criticism of Zionist hegemony and US imperialism in community, campus, and educational spaces by following methods of epistemic erasure and discursive violence. These methods and tactics silence while simultaneously criminalizing those that speak Palestinian truth. For example, the tactic of doxing works to invoke fear in order to silence while putting personal identifiable information on the internet, which often poses material physical and sexual violence threats to the doxed individuals. In this section, we provide resources that explore the methods and tactics that are mobilized in repression campaigns. We begin with offering a set of resources, provided by Palestine Legal, that illustrate how attempts to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism, and to inscribe such a definition within institutions and by law, are among the most egregious forms of silencing dissent.

Weaponizing the Conflation of Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

“Distorted Definition: Redefining Antisemitism to Silence Advocacy for Palestinian Rights,”

Palestine Legal, https://palestinelegal.org/distorted-definition.

Jewish Voice for Peace, On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice (Haymarket Books, 2017).

Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to Our Movement (Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, 2017), https://jfrej-web-assets.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/JFREJ-Understanding-Antisemitism-November-2017-v1-3-2.pdf.

Jamie Stern-Weiner, The Politics of a Definition: How the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Is Being Misrepresented (Free Speech on Israel, 2021), https://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/The-Politics-of-a-Definition.pdf.

Rowan Gaudet, “IHRA Definition at Work,” Independent Jewish Voices Canada, September 4, 2020, https://www.ijvcanada.org/ihra-definition-at-work/.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Video: Why Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism,” Electronic Intifada, October 6, 2021, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/video-why-anti-zionism-not-anti-semitism.

Independent Jewish Voices of Canada, “Silenced in Our Name: A Jewish Commentary on Canada’s IHRA Handbook,” Independent Jewish Voices Canada, May 2025, https://www.ijvcanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/IJV-Report-2025-Silenced-in-Our-Name-EN.pdf.

Sumaya Awad and Daphna Thier, “Sorry, Anti-Zionism Still Doesn’t Equal Antisemitism,” Jacobin, March 25, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/03/anti-zionism-antisemitism-hate-speech-israel-palestine.

Muhannad Ayyash, “Weaponisation of Anti-Semitism Is Bad for Palestinians—and Jews,” Al Jazeera, June 22, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/22/weaponisation-of-anti-semitism-is-bad-for-palestinians-and-jews.

Terry Ahwal, “Anti-Palestinianism Makes the Weaponization of Antisemitism Possible,” Mondoweiss, October 15, 2022, https://mondoweiss.net/2022/10/anti-palestinianism-makes-the-weaponization-of-antisemitism-possible/.

Sherene Seikaly, “Anti-Zionism Can and Should Be Anti-Racism,” New York Times, April 4, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/04/04/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism/anti-zionism-can-and-should-be-anti-racism.

Dina Rizk Khoury and Laurie Brand to President Trump, “Letter Criticizing President Trump’s Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism,” Middle East Studies Association, December 12, 2019, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2019/12/12/letter-criticizing-president-trumps-executive-order-on-combating-anti-semitism.

“Palestinian Rights and the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism,” Guardian, November 29, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/nov/29/palestinian-rights-and-the-ihra-definition-of-antisemitism.

Noura Erakat, host, Transnational Times, podcast, episode 4, “Weaponizing Anti-Semitism to Silence Student Activism: Berkeley Law School,” جدلية, Jadaliyya, May 4, 2023, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44998.

Unpacking Zionism, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/our-work/podcast-unpacking-zionism/.

Battling the IHRA Definition, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/podcast-battling-ihra/.

Benjamin Balthaser, “The Antisemitism Awareness Act Bars the Teaching of Modern Jewish History,” Hill, May 16, 2024, https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4666860-the-antisemitism-awareness-act-bars-the-teaching-of-modern-jewish-history/.

Media Doxing

Savanna Craig, “Canary Mission Is an Online Blacklist for BDS Activists,” Link, February 5, 2019, https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/canary-mission-is-an-online-blacklist-for-bds-activists.

Haley Barker, “Doxxing on Campus: How BDS Tensions at Harvard Became Personal,” Religion News Service, July 8, 2022, https://religionnews.com/2022/07/08/doxxing-on-campus-how-bds-tensions-at-harvard-became-personal/.

Omar Zahzah, “Did a Social Justice-Focused Jewish Non-Profit Give in to a Right-Wing Harassment Campaign by Firing an Anti-Zionist Employee?,” Mondoweiss, July 8, 2022, https://mondoweiss.net/2022/07/did-a-social-justice-focused-jewish-non-profit-give-in-to-a-right-wing-harassment-campaign-by-firing-an-anti-zionist-employee/.

Slander and Caricature Poster Defamation Campaigns

Charlotte Silver, “Racist Group Launches National Offensive on US Campuses,” Electronic Intifada, October 25, 2016, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/racist-group-launches-national-offensive-us-campuses.

Labor4pal, “UAW 2865 Condemns Horowitz Posters, Climate of Islamophobia and Racism,” Labor for Palestine, May 2, 2016, https://laborforpalestine.net/2016/05/02/uaw-2865-condemns-horowitz-posters-climate-of-islamophobia-and-racism/.

Terrorism Accusations and Intimidation

Charlotte Silver, “US Activists’ Homes Targeted in Pro-Israel Intimidation Campaign,” Electronic Intifada, May 17, 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/us-activists-homes-targeted-pro-israel-intimidation-campaign.

Jared Malsin, “Pro-Israel Group Monitoring, Intimidating Columbia Faculty,” Right to Education, April 30, 2010, https://right2edu.birzeit.edu/pro-israel-group-monitoring-intimidating-columbia-faculty/.

Sherene Razack, Gaye Theresa Johnson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Shannon Speed, Saree Makdisi, and Ali Behdad, “What Does Anti-Arab Racism on Campus Have to Do with the War on Gaza?,” Nation, May 23, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/ucla-anti-arab-racism-palestinian-rights/.

Frivolous Lawsuits and Grievances

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “The Spirit of ’68 Lives On: Zionism as Racism, and the Network of Lies,” Mondoweiss, July 21, 2017, https://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/spirit-zionism-network/.

George Bisharat, “Law Against the People/The Empire Strikes Back,” Revista Antropolítica 42, no. 1 (2017): https://repository.uclawsf.edu/faculty_scholarship/1636.

“Lawsuit Dismissed Against American Studies Association, Steven Salaita, Others for Israel Boycott,” Center for Constitutional Rights, February 5, 2019, https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/lawsuit-dismissed-against-american-studies-association-steven.

“UMass Amherst: Lawsuit Attacking Free Speech Event,” Palestine Legal, May 31, 2019, https://palestinelegal.org/case-studies/2019/5/31/umass-amherst.

Freedom of Information Act and Public Request Acts

Alex Kane, “A Pro-Israel Lawyer Is Weaponizing Public Records Law Against Palestinian Activists,” Intercept, March 6, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/03/06/palestine-israel-students-ucla-public-records/.

Tech Repression and Censorship

“Zoom, Facebook and YouTube Censor SF State Palestine Class,” Palestine Legal, September 23, 2020, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2020/9/23/zoom-censors-palestine-class-threatened-to-revoke-zoom-account-for-entire-cal-state-system-over-webinar.

Tamara Kharroub, “Systematic Digital Repression: Social Media Censoring of Palestinian Voices,” Arab Center Washington DC, June 8, 2021, https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/systematic-digital-repression-social-media-censoring-of-palestinian-voices/.

No Tech for Apartheid, https://www.notechforapartheid.com/.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, “Social Media Giants Repress Palestinian Content,” Electronic Intifada, March 29, 2022, https://electronicintifada.net/content/social-media-giants-repress-palestinian-content/35096.

Zahzah, Omar. Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in

the Palestinian Liberation Struggle. Seven Stories Press, September 2025,

https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4729-terms-of-servitude?srsltid=AfmBOortorcoNzpsq_U_c_Y700BgxwFsfHLuuWJaPHpnORrU3S0ADi4e.

Denial of Tenure, Unlawful Termination, Rescinding of Offers, and Employment Discrimination

“The Firing of Steven Salaita: Palestine Solidarity & Academic Freedom,” Center for Constitutional Rights, https://ccrjustice.org/files/Salaita_Factsheet_1-29-15_0.pdf.

Hilary Burns, “ ‘The Palestinian Exception to Free Speech’: Students and Scholars Feel Muzzled on College Campuses over Tense Topic,” Boston Globe, January 30, 2023, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/01/30/metro/palestinian-exception-free-speech-students-scholars-feel-muzzled-college-campuses-over-tense-topic/.

Susan Snyder, “Is It Antisemitism or Political Discourse? Professor Plans to Sue Cabrini University After He Was Fired for Tweets About Israel,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 2023, https://www.inquirer.com/news/cabrini-university-anti-israel-tweets-firing-professor-20230319.html.

Joe Kay, “Critic of Zionism Denied Tenure at US University,” World Socialist Web Site, June 18, 2007, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/06/fink-j18.html.

MEE Staff, “University of Toronto Rescinds Job Offer to Academic over Israel Criticism,” Middle East Eye, September 17, 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/university-toronto–job-offer-academic-Israel-criticism.

Murtaza Hussain, “Fresno State Cancels a Middle East Studies Professorship amid Alleged Right-Wing Pro-Israel Pressure,” Intercept, June 5, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/fresno-state-cancels-a-middle-east-studies-professorship-after-pressure-from-right-wing-pro-israel-group/.

Unit 3. Repression Organizations (a sample)

While there are countless institutions that both initiate and support racialized repression campaigns against Palestinians and their costrugglers, below is a list of organizations that have been at the forefront of initiating the attacks on Palestine in the academy and across US universities. Other organizations and groups have supported the initiatives of the organizations below, including through mechanisms like developing and deploying technologies that send bot emails to flood administrators’ email accounts or “like” apps that will click on new Canary Mission profiles countless times in order to immediately show Canary Mission as the top search result when peoples’ names are written in a browser search. While actors of repression campaigns are diverse and exist across institutions, we are naming the organizations that have a track record of spearheading repression campaigns, especially within the academic sphere, and lobbying for new legislation that criminalizes advocacy for justice and freedom in Palestine. One of the contradictions of these organizations that at times poses a challenge in combating them is the nature in which they articulate themselves. A visit to their websites will demonstrate the use of concepts like “legal/civil rights,” “human rights,” “freedom,” “justice,” “antihate,” and “antibullying” as the missions of many of these organizations. In fact, organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League purport themselves to be progressive and antiracist. They are often solicited to train school districts and public servants on issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity, yet their glaring racism toward Palestinians and manipulative abuse of Title VI laws reveals a gross manipulation of racial justice rhetoric to sustain institutional power. The shrewd ways in which these groups hide behind their so-called progressive public-facing discourse reveals staggering contradictions when it comes to Palestinian freedom.

Overview

“Introducing: From Above,” Unpacking Zionism, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, April 7, 2025, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/introducing-from-above/.

AMCHA Initiative, https://amchainitiative.org/.

American Jewish Committee, https://www.ajc.org.

Anti-Defamation League, https://www.adl.org/.

Brandeis Center, https://brandeiscenter.com/.

Canary Mission, https://canarymission.org/.

Campus Watch/Middle East Forum, https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch.

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), https://www.camera.org/about/history/.

David Horowitz Freedom Center, https://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/.

The Lawfare Project, https://www.thelawfareproject.org/.

StandWithUs, https://www.standwithus.com/.

StopAntisemitism, https://www.stopantisemitism.org/.

Zachor Legal Institute, https://zachorlegal.org/.

Zionist Organization of America, https://zoa.org.

“Who Are David Abrams and the Zionist Advocacy Center (TZAC)?,” Palestine Legal, https://palestinelegal.org/who-is-david-abrams.

Unit 4. University Complacency with Zionism

We are not surprised when university administrators collude with external Zionist organizations to erase and/or repress Palestinian narratives and voices on campus.We recognize that US universities have long been complicit in projects of racial chattel slavery, white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, war-making, attacks on the working class, imprisonment, and other forms of violence and oppression.^{^[27]} The attacks on the Gaza Solidarity Encampments evoke the painful histories of racist state and institutional violence against student protestors during the 1968 student strikes, the student protests against the war in Vietnam and apartheid South Africa, the Kent State University massacre against students protesting the US imperialist intervention in Cambodia, and the history of violence against the civil rights and Black Power student movement.

The rise of the neoliberal university over the last fifty years has posed additional challenges in relation to the question of academic freedom beyond how universities advance the predatory capitalist and imperialist interests of the state through investments in police, prison, and military-industrial complexes.^{^[28]} During this period, universities have successfully reversed advancements made in affirmative action, waged an assault on the inclusion of the working and middle classes within its ranks, and allowed for education to become coercively structured by donor-driven demands. In the past two decades, we have witnessed the growth of a significant threat toward humanities and social science education in favor of STEM-driven education. As public universities continue to rely upon a growing majority of their funding from private sources, they have increasingly become beholden to donor interests and neoliberal market employment demands, as opposed to critical pedagogy, free intellectual engagement, and serving the needs and interests of historically marginalized communities.

As efforts to include Palestine within ethnic studies curricula have grown over the last decade, they have also been met with extreme backlash in part because of what the university has always been and how it has been transformed over the last five decades but also as a result of the unique ways the Zionist lobby weaponizes repression. The kind of repression campaigns we have witnessed, at their core, reveal the collusion between white supremacist and Zionist groups who work together to silence the amplification of histories from below and Third World study, as the 1968 student strikers who formed the field of ethnic studies sought to secure. There have been multiple approaches to the question of Palestine within the university and within ethnic studies: On the one hand, there have been efforts to mutilate the original mission of ethnic studies from Third World studies toward multiculturalism studies. Through this approach, there are liberal demands for all groups to be included, thus making space for Zionists as well as other groups who may be perceived as minorities but who benefit from colonial, imperial, racist, and capitalist world systems. This approach thus dilutes the radical, anticolonial, and anti-imperialist origins and ethos of ethnic studies. On the other hand, there is a more conservative attempt to simply erase Palestine and Arab studies by weaponizing false allegations of antisemitism against their proponents. Groups like the AMCHA Initiative push against both the academic inclusion of Palestine and support for ethnic studies in the university. Because of donor relationships, public relations optics, and state repression, universities typically buckle to these censorship campaigns, reinforcing the colonial power structure and thus making themselves complicit in not only an assault on Palestinian narratives but limiting the intellectual and pedagogical freedom of liberatory education more broadly.

Exceptionalizing Antisemitism in the Absence of Condemning Other Forms of Racism

Hank Reichman, “UC Faculty Groups Challenge Proposed ‘Intolerance’ Policy,” Academe Blog, March 22, 2016, https://academeblog.org/2016/03/22/uc-faculty-groups-challenge-proposed-intolerance-policy/.

“Regents Policy 4403: Statement of Principles Against Intolerance,” University of California Board of Regents, March 24, 2016, https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/governance/policies/4403.html.

Saree Makdisi, “Blind Spot on Palestine and Palestinians at UCLA: An Open Letter,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2, 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/blind-spot-on-palestine-and-palestinians-at-ucla-an-open-letter/.

Nada Elia, “The Real Problem on US School Campuses Is Anti-Palestinianism,” Middle East Eye, August 4, 2021, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-school-campuses-anti-palestinianism-real-problem.

“Creating an Institutional Space for the Critical Study of Zionism: A Conversation with Emmaia Gelman and Christine Hong,” Speaking Out of Place, https://speakingoutofplace.com/2023/08/11/creating-an-institutional-space-for-the-critical-study-of-zionism-a-conversation-with-emmaia-gelman-and-christine-hong/.

Zionism’s Attack on Critical Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory

“ ‘No Palestinian Exception to the First Amendment and Academic Freedom!,’ ” US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, https://usacbi.org/academic-defense/.

Alicia Hawkins, “UCLA Law Launches Project to Track Attacks on Critical Race Theory,” UCLA Newsroom, August 2, 2022, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-law-launches-critical-race-theory-forward-project.

Rana Jaleel, “Critical Race Theory and the Assault on Antiracist Thinking: What Counts as Racism?,” Academe Magazine, Fall 2021, https://www.aaup.org/article/critical-race-theory-and-assault-antiracist-thinking.

CES Editorial Board, “A Love Letter to the Youth Impacted by Attacks on Ethnic Studies,” Critical Ethnic Studies (blog), June 23, 2021, http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/blog/2021/6/23/a-love-letter-to-the-youth-impacted-by-attacks-on-ethnic-studies.

Jewish Educators Letter, “Open Letter from Jewish Studies Scholars, Jewish Academics, and Jewish Educators on Ethnic Studies,” Medium, September 14, 2023, https://medium.com/@jewisheducatorsletter/open-letter-from-jewish-studies-scholars-jewish-academics-and-jewish-educators-on-ethnic-studies-9a36de3b946c.

Repression of Student Organizing on Campus

GUPS SFSU, “GUPS Statement in Response to SFSU’s Independent Review of Jerusalem Mayor Protest,” Medium, September 2, 2016, https://medium.com/@sfsugups415/gups-statement-on-independent-review-of-april-6th-2016-99d3c5b722c1.

“Student Group Harassed, Defamed and Threatened with Lawsuit Over Conference,” Palestine Legal, November 1, 2018, https://palestinelegal.org/case-studies/2019/2/4/nsjp-2018-conference-case.

“Bard Students Exonerated After Protesting Anti-Palestinian Speaker,” Palestine Legal, September 22, 2021, https://palestinelegal.org/case-studies/2021/9/22/bard-students-exonerated-after-protesting-anti-palestinian-speaker.

“Fordham Bans Students for Justice in Palestine,” Palestine Legal, June 10, 2021, https://palestinelegal.org/case-studies/2017/3/9/fordham-bans-students-for-justice-in-palestine.

SJP at UIC (@sjpuic) and Palestine Legal (@palestinelegal), “Want to learn more about our Study Abroad campaign and why we filed a federal civil right complaint with Palestine Legal?,” Instagram, September 15, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CxPGX6Ergkd/.

Susan Abdulhawa to President Magill et al., September 2, 2023, Palestine Writes Literature Festival, https://palestinewrites.org/2023/09/15/letter-to-the-university-of-pennsylvania/?fbclid=IwAR3oQiricx3Tk9NEY4Qhf1Ok1TgYMMlEMeA3RYDCQKi1X-CLUlzimuBmae0.

Attacks on Academic Freedom

Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Haymarket Books, 2015).

Peter N. Kirstein, “Steven Salaita, the Media, and the Struggle for Academic Freedom,” Academe Magazine, January–February 2016, https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/102-0/steven-salaita-media-and-struggle-academic-freedom.

David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy, Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel (Zed Books, 2020).

Malaka Shwaikh and Rebecca Ruth Gould, “The Palestine Exception to Academic Freedom: Intertwined Stories from the Frontlines of UK-Based Palestine Activism,” Biography 42, no. 4 (2019): 752–73, https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2019.0076.

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “ ‘Enforcing Silence’ in the Academy,” Mondoweiss, June 30, 2020, https://mondoweiss.net/2020/06/enforcing-silence-in-the-academy/.

Saree Makdisi and Judith Butler, “Op-Ed: Suppressing Criticism of Zionism on Campus Is Catastrophic Censorship,” Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-makdisibutler-uc-antisemitism-report-20160323-story.html.

Organizations That Challenge Zionist Repression in the University

“Who Are We?,” California Scholars for Academic Freedom, https://cascholars4academicfreedom.home.blog/.

US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, https://usacbi.org/.

Palestine Legal, https://palestinelegal.org/.

Center for Constitutional Rights, https://ccrjustice.org/.

Unit 5. Testimonies and Experiential Knowledge

There is no one that understands the intrinsic ways these repression campaigns work, and the damage and harm that result from them, more than those who have experienced them. Below is a select sample of personal firsthand testimonies produced by scholars who have been subject to these repression campaigns. While the list is nonexhaustive, the pieces shared demonstrate the range of how these repression campaigns unfold and are experienced by those enduring them.

Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita, “Why I Was Fired,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2015, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-i-was-fired/.

Steven Salaita, “Steven Salaita: I Will Always Condemn Injustice, No Matter the State of My Employment,” Nation, November 13, 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/steven-salaita-i-will-always-condemn-injustice-no-matter-the-state-of-my-employment/.

Rabab Abdulhadi

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Tomomi Kinukawa, Saliem Shehadeh, and Sean Malloy, “We Will Not Be Silenced! In Solidarity with Palestinian Sumoud and Intellectual Integrity,” Mondoweiss, May 5, 2021, https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/we-will-not-be-silenced-in-solidarity-with-palestinian-sumoud-and-intellectual-integrity/.

David Spero, “Palestinian Professor Hits Back at Israel Lobby Attacks,” Mondoweiss, July 31, 2019, https://mondoweiss.net/2019/07/palestinian-professor-attacks/.

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “The Spirit of ’68 Lives On! Palestine Advocacy and the Indivisibility of Justice,” Mondoweiss, July 14, 2017, https://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/palestine-advocacy-indivisibility/.

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, “The Spirit of ’68 Lives On: Zionism as Racism, and the Network of Lies,” Mondoweiss, July 21, 2017, https://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/spirit-zionism-network/.

Hatem Bazian

Hatem Bazian, “Palestine, Islamophobia and the Business of Demonization,” YouTube, April 11, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16-wPRnBKjs.

Adam Entous, “How a Private Israeli Intelligence Firm Spied on Pro-Palestinian Activists in the U.S.,” New Yorker, February 28, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-a-private-israeli-intelligence-firm-spied-on-pro-palestinian-activists-in-the-us.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, host, Electronic Intifada, podcast, episode 4, “How Israel Spies on US Campaigners,” March 27, 2019, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-4-how-israel-spies-us-campaigners.

Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad, “Witch Hunt vs. Academic Freedom,” Against the Current, May–June 2005, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/275.html.

Joseph Massad, “Statement to the Ad Hoc Committee1,” Censoring Thought, March 14, 2005, https://www.jrbooksonline.com/adl/adl/censoring-thought-and-the-adl-effort-to-deny-tenure-to-joseph-massad.html.

Lara Sheehi

“Breaking: GWU Clears Dr. Lara Sheehi of Anti-Semitism,” ADC, March 27, 2023, https://adc.org/breaking-gwu-clears-dr-lara-sheehi-of-anti-semitism/.

Nora Barrows-Friedman, host, Electronic Intifada, podcast, episode 73, “Fighting the Lobby’s Racism, with Lara Sheehi,” February 22, 2023, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-73-fighting-lobbys-racism-lara-sheehi.

“Silencing Criticism of Israel in the Classroom: MEMO in Conversation with Dr Lara Sheehi,” MEMO: Middle East Monitor, May 10, 2023, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230510-silencing-criticism-of-israel-in-the-classroom-memo-in-conversation-with-dr-lara-sheehi/.

Maura Finkelstein

“Muhlenberg College Violated Academic Freedom in Dismissing Finkelstein,” American Association of University Professors, April 29, 2025, https://www.aaup.org/news/muhlenberg-college-violated-academic-freedom-dismissing-finkelstein.

Ryan Quinn, “Tenured Jewish Professor Says She’s Been Fired for Pro-Palestinian Speech,” Inside Higher Ed, September 27, 2024, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/09/27/tenured-jewish-prof-says-shes-fired-pro-palestine.

Unpacking Zionism, podcast, episode “From Above: Hillel with Maura Finkelstein,” April 22, 2025, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/from-above-hillel-with-maura-finkelstein/.

DeCal UC Berkeley

“UC Berkeley Suspended Course on Palestine,” Palestine Legal, October 17, 2017, https://palestinelegal.org/case-studies/2017/10/13/uc-berkeley-suspended-course-on-palestine.

“Palestine DeCal Course Has Been Reinstated!,” Hatem Bazian, September 19, 2016, http://www.hatembazian.com/content/palestine-decal-course-has-been-reinstated/.

Sean Malloy

Valentina Azarova

Mersiha Gadzo, “ ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’: Appointment Row at Toronto University,” Al Jazeera, September 20, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/20/anti-palestinian-racism-appointment-row-at-toronto-university.

“Statement of Support and Solidarity: CAUT Censure of University of Toronto,” American Studies Association, July 16, 2021, https://www.theasa.net/about/news-events/announcements/statement-support-solidarity-caut-censure-university-toronto.

Michael Page, “University of Toronto’s Leadership Draws Fire over Academic Freedom,” Human Rights Watch, April 28, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/04/28/university-torontos-leadership-draws-fire-over-academic-freedom.

Cornel West

Deepa Shivaram, “Cornel West Has Announced He’s Leaving Harvard and Says the School Has Lost Its Way,” NPR, July 13, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015632217/cornel-west-has-announced-hes-leaving-harvard-and-says-the-school-has-lost-its-w.

Cornel West, “Cornel West Speech at ‘Criminalizing Dissent’ Palestinian Rights Panel at UMass,” posted December 6, 2019, by Media Education Foundation, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngo1CiU4IIU.

Philip Weiss, “Cornel West Says Harvard Donors Establish ‘Taboo’ on Criticism of Israel (and NYT Buries That Angle),” Mondoweiss, March 7, 2021, https://mondoweiss.net/2021/03/cornel-west-says-harvard-donors-establish-taboo-on-criticism-of-israel-and-nyt-buries-that-angle/.

Kenneth Roth

Amy Goodman, host, “Harvard Faces Outcry for Rescinding Post to Ex-Head of Human Rights Watch over Criticism of Israel,” Democracy Now!, January 9, 2023, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/1/9/kenneth_roth_hrw_harvard_israel_criticism.

Steve Inskeep, host, “Kenneth Roth Had a Harvard Fellowship Offer. Was It Rejected for His View on Israel?,” Morning Edition, NPR, January 18, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149719573/kenneth-roth-had-a-harvard-fellowship-offer-was-it-rejected-for-his-view-on-isra.

Nerdeen Kiswani

“#WeStandWithNerdeen: Take Action,” Within Our Lifetime, https://wolpalestine.com/statements/westandwithnerdeen-take-action/.

“NYT Article on Campus Palestine Advocacy Erases Scope of Anti-Palestinian Attacks,” Palestine Legal, February 2, 2021, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2021/2/2/nyt-article-on-campus-palestine-advocacy-erases-scope-of-anti-palestinian-attacks.

Fatima Mohammed

“Center for Constitutional Rights Condemns Chancellor’s and Board of Trustees’ Dangerous Attack on CUNY Law Student over Graduation Speech,” Center for Constitutional Rights, June 1, 2023, https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/center-constitutional-rights-condemns-chancellor-s-and-board.

Lara Friedman, host, Occupied Thoughts, podcast, episode “Defending Palestine Free Speech: The Case of Fatima Mohammed,” Foundation for Middle East Peace, August 2, 2023, https://fmep.org/resource/defending-palestine-free-speech-the-case-of-fatima-mohammed/.

Marc Lamont Hill

Hannan Adely, “Free Speech, Politics and Anti-Semitism: Marc Lamont Hill Tells His Story,” North Jersey, March 25, 2019, https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/passaic/clifton/2019/03/25/marc-lamont-hill-fired-cnn-tells-his-free-speech-story-nj/3238443002/.

David Palumbo-Liu, “Marc Lamont Hill and the Israeli Lobby on US Campuses,” Al Jazeera, December 10, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/12/10/marc-lamont-hill-and-the-israeli-lobby-on-us-campuses.

Democracy Now!, “Marc Lamont Hill Speaks Out After CNN Fires Him for Pro-Palestine Speech at U.N.,” YouTube, December 18, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVkUnWnjqlk.

Angela Davis

Democracy Now!, “Exclusive: Angela Davis Speaks Out on Palestine, BDS & More After Civil Rights Award Is Revoked,” YouTube, January 11, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2zYlg7zz7s.

“Butler’s Cancelation of Angela Davis Talk Latest in Pattern of Palestine Censorship,” Palestine Legal, April 1, 2021, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2021/4/1/butler-university-cancelation-angela-davis-talk-latest-pattern-palestine-censorship.

Bill Mullen

“Solidarity Statement in Support of Professor Bill Mullen,” Jewish Voice for Peace, March 22, 2016, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2016/03/solidarity-statement-support-professor-bill-mullen/.

Terri Ginsberg

“Professor Says Comments Cost Her a Job at NC State,” WCNC, July 6, 2011, https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/regional/professor-says-comments-cost-her-a-job-at-nc-state/275-374051883.

“Sign Petition: Support Dr. Terri Ginsberg’s Academic Freedom Case!,” US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, https://usacbi.org/2012/02/sign-petition-support-dr-terri-ginsbergs-academic-freedom-case/.

Norman Finklestein

Joe Kay, “Critic of Zionism Denied Tenure at US University,” World Socialist Web Site, June 18, 2007, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/06/fink-j18.html.

Judith Butler

John Cheney-Lippold and Lucy Peterson

“Defend Academic Freedom and the Right to Boycott: Support Lucy Peterson and Jon Cheney-Lippold,” US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, https://usacbi.org/2018/10/defend-academic-freedom-and-the-right-to-boycott-support-lucy-peterson-and-john-cheney-lippold/.

“University of Michigan Investigates Two Teachers for Academic Boycott,” Palestine Legal, December 10, 2018, https://palestinelegal.org/case-studies/2018/12/7/umich-suppression.

Vida Samiian

Flaherty, Colleen. “Why Did Fresno State Cancel a Search for a Professorship Named after the Late Edward Said?” Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/31/why-did-fresno-state-cancel-search-professorship-named-after-late-edward-said. Accessed 8 Sept. 2025.
Anonymous. “Notes from a Finalist: On the Cancelled Edward Said Professorship Search at Cal State Fresno.” Abolition, 10 May 2020, abolitionjournal.org/notes-finalist/.
“Cases.” Palestine Legal, palestinelegal.org/cases. Accessed 8 Sept. 2025.

Sang Kil

Kil, Sang Hea. “Islamophobia, Dirty Water Tactics, and Student Encampments for Gaza:

Threats to Free Speech at San Jose State University.” The Radical Teacher, no. 130

(2024): 15–19. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48813133.

Jonah S. Rubin, “JVP Academic Council condemns San José State University’s firing of Dr. Sang Kil,” July 7, 2025, https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/07/07/academic-council-condemns-firing-of-dr-kil/.

Rupa Marya

Rupa Marya, “To Voice the Unspeakable,” Deep Medicine, October 15, 2024,

https://rupamarya.substack.com/p/to-voice-the-unspeakable.

Joe, Kottke, “California professor sues university over suspension for online comments on Gaza,” NBCNews.com,

June 7, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-professor-sues-university-suspension-online-comments-gaza-rcna211573.

Huda Fakhereddine

Huda Fakhereddine, “Intifada: On Being an Arabic Literature in a Time of Genocide,” Literary Hub, August 29, 2024, https://lithub.com/intifada-on-being-an-arabic-literature-professor-in-a-time-of-genocide/

Maryclaire Dale, “Pro-Palestinian faculty sue to stop Penn from giving wide swath of files to

Congress,” APNews.com, March 13, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-

university-pennsylvania-lawsuit-congressional-investigation-42792a4ce91af4c2d3498fbe7469e1e6

Repression in the Context of the Gaza Genocide (A Select Sample)

Lama Rimawi, Toni Biskup, Ellen L. McMahon, and Jess Ghannam, Anti-Palestinian Racism Survey Preliminary Report 2024 (Anti-Palestinian Racism Research Group, 2024), available at IUAPR’s Anti-Palestinian Racism Research Group, “Anti-Palestinian Racism Survey Preliminary Report April 2024,” Medium, April 18, 2024, https://medium.com/@aprresearchgroup/anti-palestinian-racism-survey-preliminary-report-april-2024-11cfed327d85.

M. Muhannad Ayyash, Samer Abdelnour, and Marwa Fatafta, “Academic Freedom Under Attack: The Silencing of Palestine and Palestinian Voices,” Al-Shabaka, November 23, 2023, https://al-shabaka.org/events/academic-freedom-under-attack-the-silencing-of-palestine-and-palestinian-voices/.

Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, “Call to Action: Support Academic Freedom for Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,” Mondoweiss, March 13, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/call-to-action-support-academic-freedom-for-nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian/.

Saree Makdisi, “For Whom Is Campus Supposed to Be Safe?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 10, 2024, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/for-whom-is-campus-to-be-safe/.

Robin D. G. Kelley, “UCLA’s Unholy Alliance,” Boston Review, May 18, 2024, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/.

Anna Rajagopal and Kaitlyn Cook, “Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment: A Timeline,” Institute for Palestine Studies, May 3, 2024, https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1655523.

Democracy Now!, “ ‘The New McCarthyism’: Pro-Palestine Educators Face Censorship, Harassment & Firings Across U.S.,” YouTube, May 22, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeYQnaR5IG0.

Natasha Lennard, “University Professors Are Losing Their Jobs over ‘New McCarthyism’ on Gaza,” Intercept, May 16, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/.

Hank Kalet and Sean T. Mitchell, “Suppressing Pro-Palestinian Speech Is the New McCarthyism,” Progressive Magazine, May 2, 2024, https://progressive.org/latest/suppressing-pro-palestinian-speech-is-the-new-mccarthyism-kalet-mitchell-20240502/.

Somdeep Sen, “Censorship Is a Crucial Complement of Genocide,” Al Jazeera, March 20, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/20/censorship-is-a-crucial-complement-of-genocide.

Ambereen Dadabhoy and Mary Rambaran-Olm, “Scholars Should Be Able to Speak Out Against Genocide Without Fear of Punishment,” Truthout, April 4, 2024, https://truthout.org/articles/scholars-should-be-able-to-speak-out-against-genocide-without-fear-of-punishment/.

StudentNation, “The Crackdown on Campus Protests Is Happening Everywhere,” Nation, April 26, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/gaza-solidarity-encampments-campus-crackdown-palestine/.

“Palestine Legal Statement on McCarthyist Congressional Hearing with Columbia University President,” Palestine Legal, April 17, 2024, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2024/4/17/palestine-legal-statement-on-mccarthyist-congressional-hearing-with-columbia-university-president.

“Palestine Legal to Dep’t of Ed.: Investigate Anti-Palestinian Racism at Northwestern Law,” Palestine Legal, April 17, 2024, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2024/4/17/palestine-legal-to-dept-of-ed-investigate-anti-palestinian-racism-at-northwestern-law.

“University of Massachusetts Amherst Under Federal Investigation for Anti-Palestinian Hostile Environment,” Palestine Legal, April 24, 2024, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2024/4/24/university-of-massachusetts-amherst-under-federal-investigation-for-anti-palestinian-hostile-environment.

Other Resources

Tool Kit: International Actions Against Scholasticide (Scholars Against the War on Palestine, 2024), https://scholarsagainstwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/SAWP-Actions-Against-Scholasticide-Toolkit.pdf.

“A Feminist Praxis for Academic Freedom in the Context of Genocide in Gaza,” Palestinian Feminist Collective, https://palestinianfeministcollective.org/a-feminist-praxis-for-academic-freedom-in-the-context-of-genocide-in-gaza/.

Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/.

Unpacking Zionism, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/our-work/podcast-unpacking-zionism/.

From Above, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/podcast-from-above/.

The Trouble with White Feminism, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/white-feminism/.

Battling the IHRA Definition, podcast, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/podcast-battling-ihra/.

Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism, https://criticalzionismstudies.org/jcsz/.

Ethnic Studies Council at UC, https://www.ucethnicstudiesfacultycouncil.org/.

The Lower Frequencies, podcast, Buzzsprout, https://www.buzzsprout.com/2470045.

Conclusion

Palestinians are fighting for their material freedom. Palestinians in Gaza are quite literally fighting for their lives as we pen these words. While Palestinian bodies, homes, and lands remain threatened with extermination, dispossessed, and held captive, Palestinians continue to find ways to practice freedom as an exercise in revolutionary becoming. Part of this practice entails protecting their narratives and truth from Zionist denialism and distortion. If the last seventy-seven years were not evidence enough, the racially manufactured propaganda that greenlit this genocide illustrates how much words matter to Palestinians. To safeguard truth, whether done in writing, teaching, speaking, cultural production, or other meaning- and knowledge-making spaces, requires tenacious dedication to challenge what is made unthinkable or unquestionable by Zionist design and to expose the systemic gaslighting these repression campaigns attempt to naturalize. Liberated expressions—whether by the pen or spoken word—are but one means in which Palestinians practice freedom, and yet they remain under persistent assault.

We offer this syllabus not as a response to the burden of proof that Palestinians and their co-strugglers have long been asked to bear but as an invitation to all of our communities to consider how and why the parameters for an ethical and meaningful engagement with Palestine remains fraught as a result of enduring repression campaigns that seek not only to dismantle the rights of Palestinians to assert their own narratives but also to distort the pedagogical structure of liberated ethnic studies and true academic freedom. Our hope is that we have illustrated how Israeli state practices that deny Palestinians their rights and freedom stem from the same Zionist and US imperialist logics that deny Palestinians their claims to history, land, freedom, and truth in discursive realms.

Millions of non-Palestinians have responded to the invitation extended by Palestinians to join the struggle for a free Palestine. In so doing, they have been gifted the ability to experience a revolutionary becoming of their own. Their personal investment in Palestinian liberation stems not only from an ethical commitment to standing with those facing injustice but also from the very ways they themselves have endured discipline and punishment for taking a principled stance in the face of injustice. And it is for these reasons that so many involved in the struggle for a liberated Palestine understand it to be one part of a larger struggle against systematic oppression and power. A new generation of student activists who have put their academic careers and lives on the line in protest of this genocide understand that their government’s possessive investment in Zionism spawns from its own imperialist foreign policy abroad and settler colonial and racist state violence structure domestically. To do the meaningful intellectual and political work of liberation requires the curation of safe space for teaching, thinking, debating, reading, writing, and engaging the question of Palestine alongside all struggles for justice and freedom. That space is not a given within the US academy, even within fields of study that purport to challenge white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, imperialist and (settler) colonial hegemony. And that is why the fight for the right to speak, write, and teach Palestine freely is ultimately about the right to speak truth to power. It reflects a broader dedication to free intellectual exchange and liberatory knowledge production. More than anything, it reveals broader political struggles for justice and freedom for all our communities that we must continue to engage and signals the incomplete task of revolution, decolonization, and anti-racist work that must be done within the United States.

Jennifer Mogannam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. .

Loubna Qutami is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Palestinian death toll in Gaza passes 64,000, officials say, after ceasefire talks break down,” PBS News, September 4, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/palestinian-death-toll-in-gaza-passes-64000-officials-say-after-ceasefire-talks-break-down. ↑
Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13, no. 3 (1984): 47. ↑
Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” in The Question of Palestine (Knopf Doubleday, 2015). ↑
For more on the theft and destruction of Palestinian archives, see, for example, Hana Sleiman, “The Paper Trail of a Liberation Movement,” Arab Studies Journal 24, no. 1 (2016): 42–67; Rona Sela, “The Genealogy of Colonial Plunder and Erasure—Israel’s Control over Palestinian Archives,” Journal of Social Semiotics 28, no. 2 (2017): 201–29; Kareem Estefan, “Narrating Looted and Living Palestinian Archives,” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 2 (2022): 43–69, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.43. For more on how Zionists manufacture history through a destroy-to-replace logic that undergirds the formation of the State of Israel’s archives and photographic records, see Ariella Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). ↑
See, for example, Yumna Patel, “Killing of Abu Akleh Shows Israel Targets Palestinian Journalists,” Al Jazeera, May 11, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/11/killing-of-abu-akleh-shows-israel-targets-palestinian-journalists. For a statement issued by the International Federation of Journalists and its affiliate the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemning the targeting of journalists during the July 2023 Israeli raid on Jenin, see “Palestine: Journalists Targeted by Israeli Forces During Raid in Jenin,” International Federation of Journalists, July 4, 2023, https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/middle-east-arab-world/article/palestine-journalists-targeted-by-israeli-forces-during-raid-in-jenin/. See also “Recent Israeli Arrests of Palestinian Students and Professor,” Middle East Studies Association, August 4, 2022, https://mesana.org/advocacy/committee-on-academic-freedom/2019/09/24/recent-israeli-arrests-of-palestinian-students-and-professor. ↑
Ameera Ahmad and Ed Vulliamy, “In Gaza, the schools are dying too,” The Gaurdian, January 9, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-schools. See also, Karma Nabulsi quoted in “What Is Scholasticide?,” in Toolkit: International Actions Against Scholasticide (Scholars Against the War on Palestine, 2024), https://scholarsagainstwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/SAWP-Actions-Against-Scholasticide-Toolkit.pdf.

↑
“A Feminist Praxis for Academic Freedom in the Context of Genocide in Gaza,” Palestinian Feminist Collective, https://palestinianfeministcollective.org/a-feminist-praxis-for-academic-freedom-in-the-context-of-genocide-in-gaza/. ↑
For example, between 1967 and 1987, Israel banned thirty-five textbooks from being taught to Palestinian students. For more, see Yamila Hussein, “The Stone and the Pen: Palestinian Education During the 1987 Intifada,” Radical Teacher 74 (2005): 17–22, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20710326.pdf. For more on how artists endure carceral punishment, see, for example, Sliman Mansour, “How the Watermelon Became a Palestinian Symbol of Resistance,” posted by AJ+, June 9, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzWe0A-DMaA. ↑
For example, in 2009, the Israeli Ministry of Education banned the use of the term Nakba in textbooks for children and in 2011 made public commemorations of the Nakba a criminal offense. See Neve Gordon, “Israel Denies the Nakba While Perpetuating It,” Al Jazeera, May 13, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/13/israel-denies-the-nakba-while-perpetuating-it/. ↑
We root this understanding in a critical theorization of Zionist ideology written in 1965 by Palestinian scholar and former PLO Research Center director Fayez Sayegh. Sayegh contends that Zionist ideology—and how it has played out on Palestinian land and people—is simultaneously characterized by territorial expansion (in which elimination of the Palestinians is seen as a required element), racial supremacy (wherein subjugation of Palestinians is not only warranted but also necessary to structure them as inferior), and violence. Fayez Sayegh, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965),” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 206–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2012.10648833. ↑
For more on how Zionism is a settler colonial project predicated on the intended erasure of Palestine and the Palestinians, and the naturalization of Zionist presence and claims to history and land, see, for example, Sayegh, “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.” See also Steven Salaita and Peter Gran, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse University Press, 2006); Barakat, Rana. “Writing/righting Palestine studies: Settler colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost (s) of History.” Settler colonial studies 8, no. 3 (2018): 349-363.; George Jabbour, Settler-Colonialism in South Africa and the Middle East (University of Khartoum, 1970), 38; Irene Calis, “Beyond the Apartheid Analogy: Time to Reframe Our Palestinian Struggle,” Al Shabaka, January 13, 2015, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/beyond-the-apartheid-analogy-time-to-reframe-our-palestinian-struggle/; Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2012.10648823; Rana Barakat, “Writing/Righting Palestine Studies: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Sovereignty and Resisting the Ghost(s) of History,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): 349–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2017.1300048; Yara Hawari and Ahmed Amara, “Using Indigeneity in the Struggle for Palestinian Liberation,” Al-Shabaka, August 8, 2019, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/using-indigeneity-in-the-struggle-for-palestinian-liberation/. ↑
Rachel Leah Jones, dir., 500 Dunam on the Moon (RLJ Productions, 2002). ↑
For more on how this material process reflects itself in Israel’s public relations discourse, see Saree Makdisi, Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022). ↑
Brett Wilkins, “ ‘Cashing in on Genocide’: Israeli Firm Pitches Beachfront Real Estate in Leveled Gaza,” Common Dreams, December 19, 2023, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-settlements-gaza. ↑
“Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies,” CLES, last accessed September 6, 2025, https://ethnicstudies-coalition.org. ↑
We specifically use the term Zionist hegemonic narratives because we recognize the difference between Zionists and Jewish communities. Zionists are those who believe in a Jewish state in historic Palestine and are willing to ignore, deny, or justify the settler colonial character of both Zionist ideology and its state form and what it has done to Palestinians. Jewish communities are pluralistic and hold a diverse range of political beliefs as it pertains to Zionism and Palestine. Our Jewish costrugglers are among some of the most active anti-Zionists involved in the struggle for a free Palestine and continue to engage in their own struggle against Zionist institutions, which conflate Zionist ideology with Jewish identity and deny space to dissenting Jewish voices. ↑
“Israeli defence minister orders ‘complete siege’ on Gaza,” Al Jazeera, October 9, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-defence-minister-orders-complete-siege-on-gaza. ↑
“Infographic: 660 Days of Genocide in Gaza,” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, July 29, 2025, https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6809/Infographic:-660-days-of-genocide-in-Gaza. ↑
Ample decolonial psychologists illustrate how colonizers seek to force the colonized to internalize their own inferiority. Most prominently, Frantz Fanon illustrates how decolonization of the mind is a central part of broader struggles for liberation. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Constance Farrington, First Evergreen Black Cat Edition (Grove Press, 1968). For more on these matters as they pertain to the Palestinian colonial condition, see Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2022). ↑
See, for example, Ashjān ʻAjūr, Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). ↑
Lucy Jackson, “Israeli Drones ‘Playing Sounds of Babies Crying Before Firing,’ ” National, April 18, 2024, https://www.thenational.scot/news/24261522.israeli-drones-playing-sounds-babies-crying-opening-fire/. ↑
Yonah Jeremy Bob notes the ground invasion as being ordered to commence on Friday, October 13, and discusses the ground invasion and its delay as a psychological warfare tactic (Yonah Jeremy Bob, “Why Has the Gaza Ground Invasion Been Delayed Since Friday?,” Jerusalem Post, October 16, 2023, https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-768684). A panel of experts notes that the ground invasion started on October 28, over two weeks after Gazans in the north were originally ordered to evacuate the north (“Israel’s Ground War in Gaza Has Started. How Will It End?,” Atlantic Council, October 28, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/fastthinking/israels-ground-war-in-gaza-has-started-how-will-it-end/. ↑
On October 11, 1985, West Coast regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Alex Odeh was assassinated by a planted pipe bomb outside of his Santa Ana office. The assassination was executed by members of a Zionist organization, the Jewish Defense League. To this day, Odeh’s executioners have not been tried, and his family continues to seek accountability. In addition to this case, various Palestinian American groups and figures have been criminalized for their activism, speech, and philanthropic giving to Palestine. This includes the cases of the 1987 Los Angeles Eight; the politically motivated indictment, harsh sentencing, and imprisonment of the Holy Land Five and Muhammed Saleh; the criminalization, imprisonments, and eventual deportations of Chicago-based community leader Rasmea Odeh and Florida-based university professor Sami al-Arian. ↑
Robin D. G. Kelley, “UCLA’s Unholy Alliance,” The Boston Review, May 18, 2024, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/. ↑
Federica Marsi, “Will the US Adopt IHRA’s Anti-Semitism Definition? What’s the Controversy?,” Al Jazeera, May 8, 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/8/will-the-us-adopt-ihras-anti-semitism-definition-whats-the-controversy. For a letter to the secretary of the Department of the Treasury requesting the investigation of social justice organizations for material support, see James Comer and Virginia Foxx to Janet Yellen, May 14, 2024, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Letter-to-Yellen-051424.pdf drive.google.com/file/d/1spbZ2tJ7wTXOjB4YQuSNpamUR7ShzyNc/view. ↑
For a more sustained understanding of the ongoing assaults on academic freedom and free speech on campus, follow Palestine Legal, https://palestinelegal.org/. ↑
See, for example, Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury Press, 2013); Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, eds., The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). ↑
See, for example, Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008). ↑

The Liberated Ethnic Studies Classroom

Revisiting the Battle for A-G/H Ethnic Studies

2011 UC Santa Cruz Graduate Student Proposal for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Field Notes from an Ethnic Studies Classroom in a Time of Genocide

A Safe Space for Apartheid: Zionist Organizations and the Countermobilization Against Palestinian Solidarity on US College Campuses

On Zionist Logic and Structure: The Repression of Palestinian Narratives in the US Academy

Part 1. The Palestinian Colonial Condition: Settler Colonial Erasure and Racial Colonial Carcerality

Part 2. Resources on Identifying, Mapping, and Combating Repression

Unit 1. Mapping and Combating Repression

Overview

More Resources

Unit 2. Methods and Tactics of Repression

Weaponizing the Conflation of Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

Media Doxing

Slander and Caricature Poster Defamation Campaigns

Terrorism Accusations and Intimidation

Frivolous Lawsuits and Grievances

Freedom of Information Act and Public Request Acts

Tech Repression and Censorship

Unit 3. Repression Organizations (a sample)

Overview

Unit 4. University Complacency with Zionism

Exceptionalizing Antisemitism in the Absence of Condemning Other Forms of Racism

Repression of Student Organizing on Campus

Attacks on Academic Freedom

Organizations That Challenge Zionist Repression in the University

Repression in the Context of the Gaza Genocide (A Select Sample)

Other Resources

Conclusion

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JOURNAL FOR THE CRITICAL STUDY OF ZIONISM

The Liberated Ethnic Studies Classroom