Universities Face Another Push to Criminalize Speech Criticizing Israel

A revived effort at the University of California system to criminalize speech critical of the state of Israel by deeming it “anti-Semitic” is being met with considerable push-back from students and social justice campaigners, who say there is nothing intolerant about human rights advocacy.

A Monday night forum at the University of California Los Angeles campus was framed by the state system as a public hearing on an initiative—undertaken by an eight-member working group of university regents, faculty, and administrators—to redraft a statement of principles against intolerance.

But the hearing itself was denounced as the product of efforts by Israel advocates to press the system to brand criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitic” and “intolerant.”

“The controversy is not about intolerance. That is a canard,” Liz Jackson, a staff attorney for Palestine Legal and a Jewish University of California alum, told Common Dreams. “Really there are some people who want to engage in critical discussion of Israeli policy, and there are others that want to suppress it.”

“What we should be talking about is the experience of Palestinian and Arab students at UC who see their own tuition dollars invested in state violence against their families,” Jackson continued. “And then they experience intimidation and suppression when they engage in protest.”

“We are struggling to live and to be Palestinian and when we are denied the basic freedoms that are so called enshrined in the U.S. constitution and the universal values of the University, such as the right to think, to words, and to speak,” Loubna Qutami, a Palestinian graduate student at UC Riverside, told Common Dreams. “We are denied our own history, peoplehood, sense of self, commitment to social justice, and position as an equal on UC campuses.”

Palestine Legal reported Tuesday that, over the past few weeks alone, the organization has responded to “a spate of incidents including a physical assault and death threats against students expressing support for Palestinian rights.” This included at least one incident at the University of California Santa Barbara last week, when a member of Students for Justice in Palestine was physically attacked at a protest against ongoing Israeli violence.

But these incidents were not the focus of the discussion Monday night, when Israel advocacy organizations pressed the university to adopt the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, which has been widely criticized for muddying the distinction between real anti-Semitism and criticism of a nation-state.

“This shuts down one side of an important debate,” said Jackson. “Applying the definition to restrict speech would violate the First Amendment; but even adopting the definition as a reference tool silences those who wish to criticize Israel’s well-documented human rights violations by making it taboo.”