The incoming president’s policy plan states that “The US should view the effort to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) Israel as inherently anti-Semitic and take strong measures, both diplomatic and legislative, to thwart” it. Trump will also “ask the Department of Justice to investigate coordinated attempts on college campuses to intimidate students who support Israel.”
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Students and faculty who openly support Palestine or criticize Israel immediately become subject to various forms of attack. A shadowy
McCarthyist website, Canary Mission, has profiled hundreds of students and scholars. The website aims to warn future employers about these individuals, whom it describes as antisemitic terrorism supporters.
Other Israel advocacy groups, working more openly, have made similar attacks against students and faculty. Recently, UC Berkeley
cancelled a student-led course that examined Palestine through a settler-colonial lens in apparent response to pressure from over two dozen advocacy groups that called the class propaganda. The dean blamed Paul Hadweh, the Palestinian student who proposed the course, for failing to follow approval procedures. Only much later did the dean
apologize — inadequately — for these false accusations.
The course was
reinstated a week later, but the damage was done: the university had signaled that any attempt to critically study Palestine would be met with lengthy ordeals, baseless accusations, and public attacks.
At the City University of New York, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has spearheaded campaigns to get the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) banned from all twenty-three campuses due to alleged antisemitic activities. An independent, six-month long investigation, however,
found that the claims either could not be substantiated or could not be attributed to the student group, that the group’s activities were protected political speech, and that the “tendency to blame SJP for any act of anti-Semitism . . . is a mistake.”
Nevertheless, the damage, again, had been done. New York legislators responded to the ZOA’s alarmist accusations by
threatening to cut CUNY’s funding because of its “failure” to address the alleged antisemitism.
