Pro-Israel Politicians and Donors Assault Academic Freedom in America

[Riaz Haq]

Widespread student protests on the US campuses against Israel's genocidal war in Gaza are being labeled antisemitic by pro-Israel politicians and donors. They have now joined forces to intimidate the leadership of top American universities. President Liz MaGill of the University of Pennsylvania has already been forced out. Leaders at Harvard and MIT are also under threat.  The Pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Brandeis Center have called on 200 college presidents to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups. Faculty members and instructors at several public and private colleges have either been placed on leave or fired for comments about the conflict, according to Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman. These actions are a direct assault on the academic freedom in America, with long term negative consequences for the world's most admired institutions of higher education. 

Pro-Palestine Protest at UCLA. Source: Daily Bruin

Academic Freedom: 

Academic freedom is about free exchange of ideas on campus by students and faculty. It is considered essential for learning. Limiting this freedom hurts pursuit of excellence which has helped American colleges and universities become the envy of the world. This freedom must be defended by all Americans to maintain the excellence of institutions of higher learning in America. 

US Congress: 

GOP politicians see these pro-Palestine protests on US campuses as a fundraising opportunity. Harvard alumna Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) aggressively questioned presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT to score points with the Israel lobby. “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?”  asked — to which Gay twice responded that “it depends on the context.” 

GOP politicians like Stefanik are deliberately conflating slogans such as "From the River to the Sea, Free Palestine Free"  with call for genocide of Jews. In fact, this chant is only about ending the long brutal Israeli Occupation of Gaza (along the Mediterranean Sea) and the West Bank (of the Jordan River). 

Jewish Donors:

 Several Jewish donors of major private sector universities have either cancelled their donations or threatened to do so over the Pro-Palestine protests. Investors Bill Ackman and Ross Stevens have been among the most vocal pro-Israel donors at Harvard and Penn. They both called for the ouster of the presidents of these universities over what they call "antisemitism" on campuses. 

The aggressive behavior of Jewish donors is serving to reinforce the antisemitic stereotype of wealthy Jews. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put in a Guardian Op Ed: "As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose – based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world". 

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:

Some right-wing politicians and donors have attacked DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) programs as the cause of what they call "antisemitism" on campuses. These programs help bring in faculty and students from under-represented groups to colleges and universities that have traditionally been almost entirely white. They blame DEI because many new students from minority background tend to sympathize with Palestinians who they see as oppressed. Many of them see Israel as a "Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence", according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Israel has long been seen as a settler colonial state . It was established by the displacement of the indigenous population of Palestinians and their replacement by Europeans, similar to  places like America and Australia. This process of Israel's creation was endorsed by top British politicians like Winston Churchill.  

“I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger,” former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the Peel Commission in 1937, “even though he may have lain there for a very long time.” He denied that “a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the Black people of Australia,” by their replacement with “a higher grade race.”

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[Riaz Haq]

dam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


The political establishment and the mainstream press were largely disdainful. Liberal commentators belittled the students as ‘privileged’, although many of them, particularly at state colleges, came from poor and working-class backgrounds; the protests, some claimed, were ultimately about America, not about the Middle East. (They were about both.) The protesters were also accused of making Jews feel unsafe with their ritualised denunciations of Zionism, of grandstanding, of engaging in a fantasy of 1968-style rebellion, of ignoring Hamas’s cruelties or even justifying them, of romanticising armed struggle in their calls to ‘globalise the intifada,’ of being possessed by a Manichean fervour that blinded them to the complexities of a war that involved multiple parties, not just Israel and Gaza.

There is, of course, a grain of truth to these criticisms. Like ‘defund the police,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ is appealing in its absolutism, but also dangerously ambiguous, fuel for right-wing adversaries looking for evidence of calls for ‘genocide’ against Jews. And there was, as there always is, a theatrical dimension to the protests, with some students imagining themselves to be part of the same drama unfolding in Gaza, confusing the rough clearing of an encampment (‘liberated zones’) with the violent destruction of a refugee camp. But the attacks on the demonstrators – whether for ‘privilege’, supposed hostility to Jews or fanaticism – weren’t a fair portrayal of a broad-based movement that includes Palestinians and Jews, African Americans and Latinos, Christians and atheists.

For all their missteps, the students drew attention to matters that seemed to elude their detractors: the obscenity of Israel’s war on Gaza; the complicity of their government in arming Israel and facilitating the slaughter; the hypocrisy of America’s claim to defend human rights and a rules-based international order while giving Israel carte blanche; and the urgent need for a ceasefire. Nor were they cowed by Netanyahu’s grotesque comparison of the protests to anti-Jewish mobilisations in German universities in the 1930s (where no one was holding seders). If Trump wins they will be blamed, along with Arab and Muslim voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for a president who armed Bibi, but they deserve credit for mobilising support for a ceasefire and for helping to shift the narrative on Palestine.

The destruction of Gaza will be as formative for them as the struggles against the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and the Iraq War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of solidarity that led students in 1968 to chant ‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands’ after the German-Jewish student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was expelled from France. These are emotions of which no group of victims can forever remain the privileged beneficiary, not even the descendants of the European Jews who perished in the death camps

[Riaz Haq]

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent

As the historian​ Enzo Traverso has argued, a particular version of Holocaust remembrance, centred on Jewish suffering and the ‘miraculous’ founding of Israel, has been a ‘civil religion’ in the West since the 1970s. People in the Global South have never been parishioners of this church, not least because it has been linked to a reflexive defence of the state of Israel, described in Germany as a Staatsräson. For many Jews, steeped in Zionism’s narrative of Jewish persecution and Israeli redemption, and encouraged to think that 1939 might be just around the corner, the fact that Palestinians, not Israelis, are seen by most people as Jews themselves once were – as victims of oppression and persecution, as stateless refugees – no doubt comes as a shock. Their reaction, naturally, is to steer the conversation back to the Holocaust, or to the events of 7 October. These anxieties shouldn’t be dismissed. But, as James Baldwin wrote in the late 1960s, ‘one does not wish ... to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro’s suffering. It isn’t, and one knows it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.’

The question is how, if at all, these movements can help to end the war in Gaza, to end the occupation and the repressive matrix of control that affects all Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up a fifth of the population. While the justice of the Palestinian cause has never enjoyed wider or more universal recognition, and the BDSmovement (vilified as ‘antisemitic’ and ‘terrorist’ by Israel’s defenders) has never attracted comparable support, the Palestinian national movement itself is in almost complete disarray. The Palestinian Authority is an authority only in name, a virtual gendarme of Israel, reviled and mocked by those who live under it. It has been unable to protect Palestinians in the West Bank from the wave of settler attacks and military violence that has killed five hundred Palestinians in the last eight months and resulted in the theft of more than 37,000 acres of land, a creeping Gaza-fication. Palestinians inside Israel are under intense surveillance, ever at risk of being accused of treason, and left to the mercy of the criminal gangs that increasingly tyrannise Arab towns.

The future of Gaza looks still more bleak, even in the event of a long-term truce or ceasefire. ‘Gaza 2035’, a proposal circulated by Netanyahu’s office, envisages it as a Gulf-style free-trade zone. Jared Kushner has his eye on beachfront developments and the Israeli right is determined to re-establish settlements. As for the survivors of Israel’s assault, the political scientist Nathan Brown predicts that they will be living in a ‘supercamp’, where, as he writes in Deluge, a collection of essays on the current war, ‘law and order ... will likely be handled – if they are handled at all – by camp committees and self-appointed gangs.’ He adds: ‘This seems less like the day after a conflict than a long twilight of disintegration and despair.’

[Riaz Haq]

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


Disintegration and despair are, of course, the conditions that encourage the ‘terrorism’ that Israel claims to be fighting. And it would be easy for Gaza’s survivors to succumb to this temptation, particularly since they have been given no hope for a better life, much less a state, only lectures on the reason they ought to turn the Strip into the next Dubai rather than build tunnels.

Over the last eight months, Palestine has become to the American and UK student left what Ukraine is to liberals: the symbol of a pure struggle against aggression. But just as Zelensky’s admirers ignore the illiberal elements in the national movement, so Palestine’s supporters tend to overlook the brutality of Hamas, not only against Israeli Jews but against its Palestinian critics. As Isaac Deutscher wrote, while ‘the nationalism of the exploited and oppressed’ cannot be ‘put on the same moral-political level as the nationalism of conquerors and oppressors’, it ‘should not be viewed uncritically’.

In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), Rashid Khalidi writes that when the Pakistani activist Eqbal Ahmad visited the PLO’s bases in southern Lebanon, ‘he returned with a critique that disconcerted those who had asked his advice. While in principle a supporter of armed struggle against colonial regimes such as that in Algeria ... he questioned whether armed struggle was the right course of action against the PLO’s particular adversary, Israel.’ As Ahmad saw it, ‘the use of force only strengthened a pre-existing and pervasive sense of victimhood among Israelis, while it unified Israeli society, reinforced the most militant tendencies in Zionism and bolstered the support of external actors.’ Ahmad did not deny the right of Palestinians to engage in armed resistance, but he believed it should be practised intelligently – to create divisions among the Israeli Jews with whom a settlement, a liberating new dispensation based on coexistence, mutual recognition and justice, would ultimately have to be reached.

Today it is difficult to imagine an alliance between Palestinians and progressive Israeli Jews of the kind that flickered during the First Intifada. Groups pursuing joint action between Palestinians and Israelis still exist, but they are fewer than ever and deeply embattled: advocates for the binationalism sketched out by figures as various as Judah Magnes and Edward Said, Tony Judt and Azmi Bishara, have all but vanished. Nonetheless, one wonders what Ahmad would have made of Hamas’s spectacular raid on 7 October, a daring assault on Israeli bases that devolved into hideous massacres at a rave and in kibbutzes. Its short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel’s invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision. ‘Tomorrow will be different,’ Deif promised in his 7 October communiqué. He was correct. But that difference – after the initial exuberance brought about by the prison breakout – can now be seen in the ruins of Gaza.

[Riaz Haq]

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent



Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever more committed to its colonisation project and contemptuous of international criticism, ruling over a people who have been transformed into strangers in their own land or helpless survivors, awaiting the next delivery of rations. The self-styled ‘start-up’ nation has leveraged its surveillance weapons into lucrative deals with Arab dictatorships and offers counterinsurgency training to visiting police squads, but its instinctive militarism leaves no room for new initiatives. Israel cannot imagine a future with its neighbours or its own Palestinian citizens in which it would no longer rely on force.

The ‘Iron Wall’ is not simply a defence strategy: it is Israel’s comfort zone. Netanyahu’s brinkmanship with Iran and Hizbullah is more than a bid to remain in power; it is a classical extension of Moshe Dayan’s policy of ‘active defence’. The violence will not cease unless the US cuts off the delivery of arms and forces Israel’s hand. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: Netanyahu is due to address Congress on 24 July, after receiving an unctuous, bipartisan invitation to share his ‘vision for defending democracy, combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region’. Biden’s call for a ceasefire has been met with another humiliating rejection by Netanyahu, who knows that the administration isn’t about to suspend military aid or observe any of its own ‘red lines’. But the encampment movement, and the growing dissent among progressive Democratic leaders from Rashida Tlaib to Bernie Sanders, foreshadows a future in which Washington will no longer provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes. Whether Palestinians will be able to hold onto their lands until that day, in the face of the settler zealots and ethnic cleansers who have captured the Israeli state, remains to be seen.

[Riaz Haq]

An influential rabbi (Sharon Brous) with a fast-growing congregation in Los Angeles, Brous, 50, has spent much of her career advocating for human rights, including for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This past September on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, she used her sermon to publicly warn that the future of “our beloved Israel” was under threat from within. She argued that by denying the “basic rights, dignities and dreams” of millions of Palestinians for decades, Israel’s increasingly “extremist” leaders were undermining the country’s Jewish and democratic ideals. “The existential threat to the state of Israel is internal,” she said. “The call is coming from inside the house.”

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/on-gaza-an-american-rabbi-dec...

American rabbis often avoid criticizing Israel from the pulpit. Particularly at a time of uncertainty and threat for Israelis and Jews around the world, many spiritual leaders worry they will alienate congregants and empower antisemitism if their view of Israel’s policies sounds disloyal. Rabbi Sharon Brous understands such reticence, but she argues that staying silent is irresponsible.

An influential rabbi with a fast-growing congregation in Los Angeles, Brous, 50, has spent much of her career advocating for human rights, including for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This past September on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, she used her sermon to publicly warn that the future of “our beloved Israel” was under threat from within. She argued that by denying the “basic rights, dignities and dreams” of millions of Palestinians for decades, Israel’s increasingly “extremist” leaders were undermining the country’s Jewish and democratic ideals. “The existential threat to the state of Israel is internal,” she said. “The call is coming from inside the house.”

Even after Hamas’s attack on Israel two weeks later on Oct. 7, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, her sermons have expressed concern for both Jewish pain and Palestinian suffering. She has railed against Hamas’s campaign of “brutality and terror” against civilians, including many Israeli peace activists, but argues that the real fault line is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between those who embrace violence as an answer and those who don’t. “You either believe that every single person is an image of God, or you don’t actually care about human life,” she said on Oct. 28.

Yet as someone who has lost friends and received death threats for calling for compassion across faiths and races, Brous admits that she has been horrified by efforts to defend Hamas among groups she had thought were allies. That a “retrograde, totalitarian, misogynistic terror regime” has become “a hero of the left” has rudely awakened her to the “very deep roots of antisemitism,” she says. She points to reports in October of protesters screaming “gas the Jews” in Sydney, Australia, and of rioters torching a synagogue in Tunisia. She has been alarmed by cases of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses that have threatened Jewish students, including at Columbia University, her alma mater.

“Every time somebody finds themselves tongue-tied when asked to condemn the rape of Israelis on Oct. 7, I find myself thinking this is not hard,” she says over video from Los Angeles. “You should be able to simply say that under no circumstances do we condone acts of abduction, rape and murder of innocent civilians, and we must work toward a just future for Palestinians who suffer terribly under the status quo.” She adds that it is not possible to “build a society that is free of racism while holding on to one of the oldest racisms, which is against Jews.”

[Riaz Haq]

Christiane Amanpour
@amanpour
“If we shall not end the occupation, we shall not have security,” warns Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, “and if we shall not end this occupation, we shall not have democracy.”

In an extraordinarily candid interview, Israel’s former internal security chief condemns what he calls Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “toxic leadership,” and argues that as the war continues, “we are losing our identity as people, as Jews, and as human beings.”

Watch our full conversation here.

https://x.com/amanpour/status/1805295431355973645

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In January 2024, Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's internal security force, the Shin Bet, said that Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state. Ayalon also called for Israeli authorities to release Marwan Barghouti, the jailed leader of the second intifada, to help negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state. Ayalon also said that Israel is not at war with the Palestinians.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/14/shin-bet-ami-ayalon-c...

Ami Ayalon, a retired admiral who also commanded Israel’s navy and was wounded in battle and decorated for his service, also said destroying Hamas was not a realistic military goal, and the current operation in Gaza risked entrenching support for the group.

“We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation,” he said in an interview at his home. “To say the same in military language: you cannot deter anyone, a person or a group, if he believes he has nothing to lose.”

He said Israel’s war in Gaza was a just one, after the horrors of the 7 October attack, in which Hamas slaughtered at least 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage. But too many Israelis could not accept that Hamas did not represent all Palestinians, or that they had a legitimate claim to their own state, he said.

Ayalon said most Israelis believed that “all Palestinians are Hamas or supporters of Hamas”, and they did not accept the concept of a Palestinian identity. “We see them as people, not ‘a people’, a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept [the idea of a Palestinian people] because if we do, it creates a huge obstacle in the concept of the state of Israel.”

He believes releasing Barghouti, a Palestinian who has been jailed since 2002, serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada, would be a vital step towards meaningful negotiations. According to recent polls he would beat senior Hamas figure Ismail Haniyeh in open elections.

[Riaz Haq]

Gentile News Network™
@Gentilenewsnet
But when I say this it's an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

https://x.com/Gentilenewsnet/status/1846975999650804034

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Rabbi Shmuley
@RabbiShmuley
Incredible. The new Prime Minister of Britain has a Jewish wife who is actively involved in the Jewish community and keeps tradition and observes the sabbath. President Biden has two of three of his children who married Jew’s. President Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. Kamala Harris is married to a committed Jewish husband.

https://x.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1810353861116223661

[Riaz Haq]

Chris Menahan 🇺🇸
@infolibnews
Facebook's "Jewish Diaspora" chief Jordana Cutler explains how she uses her position to censor "hate speech" that "makes Jewish people feel unsafe."

She says Meta banned "harmful stereotypes like 'Jews run the world'" as "hate speech" after consulting w/ World Jewish Congress.

https://x.com/infolibnews/status/1848587365800976534

[Riaz Haq]

US Jewish teens likely to criticize Israel, sympathize with Hamas - The Jerusalem Post

New data shows the worrying reality of how American Jewish teens view Israel.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-830230


A newly released survey from Mosaic United, conducted with Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism, reveals that Jewish teens in the United States are significantly more likely to hold critical views of Israel and sympathize with Hamas compared to their peers in other countries.

According to the findings, 37% of American Jewish teens expressed sympathy for Hamas, a stark contrast to just 7% of Jewish teens globally. Similarly, 42% of US Jewish teens believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, compared to only 9% of their international counterparts.

These disparities highlight a worrying divergence in how American Jewish teens perceive Israel, influenced by differences in culture, community, and education.

The survey also emphasized the correlation between Jewish educational engagement and positive attitudes toward Israel. Teens who participated in Jewish camps, day schools, or supplementary schools, or who had personal encounters with Israelis (mifgashim), were far less likely to harbor anti-Israel views.

Among those with a strong Jewish background, only 6% sympathized with Hamas, compared to 65% of teens with little to no Jewish educational experiences.

Connection grows with age, but challenges persist
Despite these concerns, the survey offers a hopeful trajectory as Jewish teens grow older. While 60% of 14-year-olds expressed sympathy for Hamas, this figure dropped to just 10% among 18-year-olds, suggesting that ongoing engagement and education can foster a deeper understanding of Israel’s complexities.

Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli called for increased efforts to bridge the gaps: “It is more important than ever to strengthen the bonds between Jewish teens in the diaspora and Israel. We are glad to see that 94% of Jewish teens feel a connection to Israel, but these findings show we must continue educating and supporting Jewish youth globally.”

[Riaz Haq]

Cyrus Janssen
@thecyrusjanssen
Wow! The Truth of America's TikTok ban has finally been exposed. TikTok has now admitted to the Supreme Court that it is being forced to sell because it "refused to censor certain viewpoints"

Several US lawmakers had accused the platform’s content of being “too pro-Palestine” and here is the direct quote from TikTok:

"The startling proposition that there should be no judicial scrutiny of a law shuttering a speech platform used by 170 million Americans would mean Congress could ban petitioners from operating TikTok explicitly because they refused to censor views Congress disfavours or to promote views it likes,"

US politicians love to criticize China for censoring content while simultaneously banning a Chinese app in America because it refuses to censor content.

You seriously can't make up how ridiculous this situation is. Hypocrisy at its finest 🤦‍♂️

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3293393/tiktok-tells-us-sup...

https://x.com/thecyrusjanssen/status/1875575211380371826