Beyond the Palestine Exception Open Access

Abstract

The heart of the Palestine exception is not simply—or necessarily—the crude denial of Palestinian humanity. It is also the constant overriding and overwriting of Palestinian history by a different and deeply Eurocentric history of age-old antisemitism that is intimately familiar to Western academia and society. This act of substitution is essential to understand how actual Palestinian obliteration in the Gaza genocide has been obscured and deflected from view. Despite having their extraordinary and livestreamed persecution unfold in the twenty-first century, Palestinians are not seen as victims worthy of commemoration but are instead framed as anachronistic antisemites. At the same time, the narrative of a crisis of antisemitism on campuses transforms those who support colonial Zionism, rather than those who oppose it, into the targets who need protection, vigilance, and reassurance by those in positions of academic, institutional, and governmental power.

Universities in the United States have willfully ignored one of the greatest catastrophes in modern history. The most intense and relentless bombardment of a concentrated urban space in recent times, the fastest deliberate starvation of any population in recorded history, the greatest number of journalists killed in any conflict anywhere in the world, the destruction of every university in Gaza: all these brutal facts led the UN special rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian territories to sound the alarm in March 2024 that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel's commission of genocide is met.”¹ According to correspondence published in the respected British medical journal The Lancet, the number of Palestinians killed and who are expected to die as a result of the obliteration of Gaza is vastly undercounted: “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”²

These horrors are met with the stony silence of American academic institutions and their leadership. While many, if not most, major universities in the United States rushed to express revulsion at the violence perpetrated on October 7, 2023, by colonized and besieged Palestinians, none has spoken out against the genocide that has been in full view for over fifteen months. Instead, having been swept along by the furor and panic about what was described as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”³—a claim that is contextually misleading because it suggests that Palestinian violence was motivated by Nazi-like anti-Jewish racism while simultaneously erasing Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians since 1948—university administrations have denounced an alleged scourge of antisemitism on their campuses. They have claimed to be deeply concerned for the safety of their Jewish students and often mandated training in antisemitism awareness for incoming classes of students.⁴ Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur has documented how Israel has methodically obliterated every aspect of Palestinian life, education, and society in Gaza.⁵ Israel has deliberately destroyed schools, universities, archives, cultural centers, heritage sites, mosques, and churches. It has assassinated professors and massacred teachers, faculty, and staff, often with their entire families. Israel's fifteen-month rampage has caused irreparable harm to tens of thousands of students in what UN officials have described as a “scholasticide.”⁶ Yet, still, not a single official word of condemnation has emerged from any US university, many of which have Palestinian students, staff, and faculty. On the contrary, these universities have insisted that they will maintain institutional ties with their Israeli counterparts, including those that are deeply implicated in the war on Palestinian life and society.⁷

This official silence around Palestine is even more striking because Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims—as well as those from other faiths, including Jewish anti-Zionists who support Palestinian solidarity and freedom—have been urgently protesting and encamping across US (and western European) campuses for months in an effort to break the institutional silence about the genocide. Arabs and Muslims, moreover, are represented in many areas of Western academia, mostly as students and to a lesser extent as faculty and staff, but, crucially, not at the highest administrative echelons and certainly not in the political establishment more broadly. Yet, unlike what W. E. B. Du Bois called a “white world”—that “often existed primarily . . . to see with sleepless vigilance” that Blacks were kept “within bounds” of an explicit racial hierarchy—today's US academic establishments eschew explicit racial hierarchies and are bound by laws and policies that forbid racial discrimination.⁸ Until the aftermath of the civil rights era, Black scholars were by law and practice formally (in the case of the segregated US South) and informally excluded from many of the same institutions from within which today Palestinians and their allies, in contrast, are able to witness and try to document their own people's obliteration. What is so remarkable about this development is that Palestinians and their allies have an intimate inside view of their own decontextualization and dehumanization.

Every other case of mass Western oppression or settler colonization of non-Western peoples—whether the enslavement of Black Africans, the genocide of Indigenous or of First Nations peoples, or the colonization of Algerians and South Africans—occurred before concepts such as human rights and racial equality became mainstream in the West decades after the promulgation of the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The Palestine exception (to adopt a term used by Palestine Legal) is, in this sense, out of its racist colonial time.⁹ Both the genocidal violence to which Palestinians are being subjected in the twenty-first century and the way in which Palestine is denied as a major moral question in the West are out of sync with how US academic institutions, let alone the US government, like to represent themselves as liberal. They represent their claim to liberal values as now inclusive, as having made amends for their racist, if not colonial, past. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture tells the story of Black emancipation as a national American story. The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, in turn celebrates the persistence and survival of Native Americans. These museums are located on the National Mall, in close proximity to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which highlights the Nazi persecution of European Jews as part of its declared mission to “confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.”¹⁰ These museums, like universities across the United States, concretize and embody a national ethos that effectively conscripts, domesticates, and claims to tame and transform the racism of the past into cautionary tales that undergird an avowedly multicultural American story of reflection, redemption, and national celebration. Palestinian victims, in contrast, are not seen or felt to be a people with a history that is relatable to liberal America's highly curated story of itself. This story is key to understanding both the origins of the Palestine exception and its staying power.

At the heart of the Palestine exception is not simply—or necessarily—the crude denial of Palestinian humanity but also the constant overwriting of Palestinian history by a different and deeply Eurocentric history of age-old antisemitism that is intimately familiar to Western academia and society. This act of substitution is essential to understand how ongoing Palestinian obliteration is obscured and deflected from view by the singular focus on the overriding significance of the (Israeli) Jewish victims of October 7. Rather than being understood or seen as a people worthy of commemoration or recognizing how their extraordinary persecution is unfolding before the world's eyes in the twenty-first century, Palestinians and their allies are instead framed as anachronistic antisemites. Jewish scholars were indeed once infamously barred from many of the same Ivy League institutions that today crack down on students protesting genocide, a group that is largely nonwhite but certainly also includes Jewish anti-Zionists. At the same time, the narrative of a crisis of antisemitism on campuses transforms those who support colonial Zionism, rather than those who oppose it, into the targets who need protection, vigilance, and reassurance by those in positions of academic, institutional, and governmental power.¹¹ How, in short, did we arrive at such a state of affairs? What is the history of the Palestine exception?

1. Atoning for Past Crimes while Ignoring the Present

Set against the backdrop of many of these same American universities making belated claims of coming to terms with their racist past, the denial of Palestinian history and humanity underscores the racist present. Universities such as the University of Virginia and William and Mary have built striking new monuments to honor enslaved people while removing others that used to honor the white slaveholders. Other universities such as Yale, Princeton, and the University of California, Berkeley, have renamed buildings or programs in order to acknowledge the complicity of universities and colleges in the slave trade or racial segregation, or their role in devastating Native American culture and society. Yet, while many of their students and faculty are able to connect past sins to present ones and offer land acknowledgments, these universities and large scholarly associations, such as the American Historical Association (AHA) or the Modern Language Association, still refuse to engage explicitly or ethically with the question of Palestine.¹² It is as if the only victims who can be mourned are those safely buried in the past and whose retrospective celebration in an academy dominated by an overwhelmingly white tenured professoriate burnishes the sense of American—and, more broadly, Western—self-validation. The message seems to be: “We have sinned, but we have overcome our sins. We once shamefully denied the humanity of others; now we include the descendants of these others in a better, more modern, more respectful sense of ourselves.” Palestine and the Palestinians are excepted from this calculus.

On the question of Palestine, US academia still trades in a strange, anachronistic Eurocentrism. It no longer overtly upholds white supremacy or the racial hierarchies inherent in colonialism, but it still doggedly privileges a liberal Western narrative that centers Zionism and renders Palestinians invisible. Few foreign countries have more centers dedicated to them on American campuses than Israel. Many of these centers have been established in the past twenty years, at precisely the same time as student-led movements forced institutions of higher education across North America to reckon with their historic complicity in slavery and segregation.¹³ The recent scandal around the termination of Liora Halpern's endowed chair position in Israel studies at the University of Washington in 2022 illustrates how donors do not view Israel studies as an objective study of the reality of Israel and its Palestinian subjects.¹⁴ Rather, they see it as a platform to promote a very specific view of Israel: that is, a perspective that believes that the support of a Jewish state in Palestine is integral to modern Jewish identity irrespective of the harm caused to Palestinians and, in fact, largely in active denial of the significance, history, and even existence of these Palestinians. A plethora of advocacy, cultural, and faith centers and groups associated with American campuses are explicitly committed to supporting Israel's central ideological mission that effectively entails the perpetual political subjugation of an Indigenous people.¹⁵ Supporters of Israeli Zionism still proudly proclaim their support for a state project that has systematically and violently oppressed Palestinians for a century.¹⁶

To understand this exceptional anachronism, one must acknowledge the immediate material and political costs of siding with the Palestinians. Influential pro-Israel institutions and donors, many of whom embrace the political ideology of Zionism, do not hesitate to accuse pro-Palestinian students and professors of being antisemitic. This is not a new phenomenon; professors and students identified with the cause of justice in Palestine have been vilified for decades. But after October 7, 2023, campuses became sites of a massively escalated political and culture war around the question of Palestine. The billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman has led a crusade against students protesting Israeli colonization, calling for them not to be hired into the workforce upon graduating.¹⁷ Jessica Seinfeld allegedly funded pro-Israeli partisans who terrorized a Palestinian solidarity encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, in April 2024.¹⁸ Proudly Jewish as well as non-Jewish American politicians have not wavered in identifying with Israel in the midst of its genocide.¹⁹ Pro-Israel donors also put enormous pressure on university administrations to condemn Palestinian solidarity as antisemitic “hate speech.”²⁰ They also threaten to withhold major donations, as evidenced by the fulminations against Brown University by real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht.²¹ The notorious pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC supports congressional investigations into Palestinian activism on campuses. The partisan Brandeis Center wages constant lawfare against universities and public school districts to add to the financial, political, and emotional cost of taking an ethical position on Palestine.²² In turn, faculty who identify with the ideology of Zionism exacerbate the panic and condemn the rise of Palestinian solidarity on campuses, which they describe as antisemitism without pausing to address the history or reality of Palestinian oppression that motivates student activism in support of this oppressed people.²³

Yet this ubiquitous Zionism at the center of US academia is neither a matter of simple Zionist pressure or prejudice nor an accident, and still less is it mere irony. Rather, it reflects a deep conflation between a modern Western liberal commitment to philosemitism—that is, a professed concern for Judaism and the Jewish people generally—as philozionism, the support for and attraction to Israel's ethnoreligious nationalist state ideology. This conflation occurs as if Palestinians—as people with claims, lives, loves, dreams, losses, and ambitions—are totally immaterial to an evaluation or judgment of this ideology and its colonial reality on the ground in historic Palestine. Because of this conflation, the fight against antisemitism—or at least the claim to be fighting against antisemitism—has become indelibly entangled in an increasingly uncanny and unsustainable denial of Palestinian history and humanity. The Palestinian collective experience of subjugation has until now been overridden by a far more resonant narrative of what is presented as the far greater, more pertinent, and more consequential victimhood of the Jewish people for whom the state of Israel claims to speak. The Israeli historian Benny Morris captured this hierarchy of victimhood when he declared in 2004, “We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here.”²⁴

2. Palestinians in the Shadow of the Holocaust

This denial of the substantive meaning of Palestinian history and humanity took clearest shape in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust that decimated European Jewry. The establishment of a Western-backed state of Israel in 1948 was represented in Western liberal political, intellectual, theological, and cultural circles as expiating the sin of Western antisemitism. During the debates leading up to the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948, the Palestinians were seen by Western diplomats as impediments to the creation of a necessary Jewish state justified by recent European history. The authors of both the 1937 British Peel partition plan and the 1947 UN partition plan emphasized what they referred to as the urgent need to solve the “Jewish Problem”—that is to say, the reality and legacy of Western antisemitism and the perceived inability of Jews to assimilate in Europe. They both admitted candidly the injustice of any form of partition to the Indigenous Palestinian population and nevertheless rationalized this injustice as solving the greater, and in their minds clearly more universally significant, “Jewish Problem.” The Peel report declared that Arab “generosity” would help alleviate the burden of their own dispossession and would generate for them the “gratitude” of the Jewish and Western worlds.²⁵ The UN partition plan, in turn, confessed “that any solution for Palestine cannot be considered as a solution of the Jewish problem in general” but nevertheless recommended the creation of a Jewish state in a country that was overwhelmingly Arab. In other words, the history, attachment, and reality of Palestinian life and society were measured not on their own terms and context but in relation to a solution to a Western-identified “Jewish problem.”²⁶

The denial became more aggressive and totalizing in the aftermath of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in the Nakba of 1948. Israeli leaders such as Chaim Weizmann spoke of “a miraculous cleaning of the land”²⁷ and subsequently denied any responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Leading American liberal figures such the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the coauthor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt, rationalized and justified the uprooting of the Palestinians. Niebuhr described the creation of Israel as a “glorious spiritual and political achievement” and regarded Palestinian “Arabs” as inferior to Jews, framing their suffering through displacement to make way for a Jewish state as unfortunate but unavoidable.²⁸ Roosevelt blamed the Palestinians for opposing their own displacement. Like Niebuhr, she justified her support for colonial Zionism by dehistoricizing what she regarded as primitive, irrational, and aggressive Arabs.²⁹

After the horrors of the Second World War, Western liberalism found itself in desperate need to reconstruct an ethical meaning of “universal man” (presumed to be white and Western). As historian Daniel Cohen suggests, this liberalism expressed itself in profoundly Eurocentric and philosemitic discourse, which regarded the historical and political persecution of the Jews in and by the Christian West as an urgent moral and human failure that needed philosophical and political redress.³⁰ This philosemitism quickly merged into philozionism, embodied in the state of Israel, amid the outbreak of the Cold War. The same liberal West, however, refused to take an equally strong stand against colonial racism or to consider how the new fight against antisemitism had to be integrated into the fight against wider racism and colonialism. Instead, France and Britain bitterly sought to hold on to their colonies in Africa and Asia at the same time as they embraced Israel. As both Du Bois alluded to in his 1940 Dusk of Dawn and the Black anticolonial poet Aimé Césaire insisted in his 1955 Discourse on Colonialism, while the victorious allies of the West portrayed Hitler as a uniquely German monster, Du Bois and Césaire recognized him as part of a terrible story of Western racism whose virulent exponents had carried out genocides in the modern era against non-Western peoples across the world.³¹

Césaire called out this “pseudo humanism” and remarked acidly that while white Westerners were properly horrified by Nazism, they refused to consider how “before they were its victims, they were its accomplices.”³² The effect of this pseudo-humanism was evident in how comprehensively the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 was justified and accepted across the liberal West—in both Western Europe and North America—not so much because of an active hatred of Palestinians but because, far more prosaically, Palestinian dispossession was key to the creation of a viable Jewish state. The now stateless Palestinians were reduced to being dehistoricized wards of the international community who needed to be clothed, fed, and provided a rudimentary education by the newly created United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)—but never granted their basic political rights of returning to their homes and property.³³

In the wake of the Nakba of 1948, the new state of Israel launched an effective propaganda campaign across the West in which it both represented itself as the victim of Arab belligerency and “terrorism” and championed itself as the inheritor of the mantle of a post-Holocaust piety and the guardian against antisemitism.³⁴ As Saree Makdisi illustrates, the Holocaust memorial site and museum in Jerusalem called Yad Vashem, which was opened in 1957, overlooks—but says nothing about—the once Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, where Zionist gangs committed an infamous massacre in April 1948. The survivors were expelled and their homes expropriated.³⁵ The museum in Jerusalem itself showcases Jewish tribulations throughout the ages that culminated in the Holocaust, which finds its antithesis in the subsequent creation of a Jewish state of Israel. The museum systematically erases Palestinian indigenous history although it is built on Palestinian land. Golda Meir's infamous 1969 statement that “there were no such thing as Palestinians” (which in 1976 she insisted was a misquotation of her original assertion that “there is no Palestinian people”) reflected this near total denial of Palestinian history in Israeli official discourse.³⁶ The affective ties between diaspora Jewry and the state of Israel were reinforced after 1967 by the development of a new consciousness about the Holocaust in the United States. In Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union and German unification spurred the construction of the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate. Historian Tony Judt notes how the specific memorial to the genocide of the Jews attempts to overturn the “prevarication of an earlier generation of lapidary commemorations.”³⁷ The material and historical commemoration embodied in the establishment of Holocaust museums and memorials across the West is undeniably important and impressive. Inevitably, however, because of the reality of colonial Zionism and Israel's claim to represent all Jewish people, and its claim to be the only safeguard against another anti-Jewish genocide, these museums become implicated in the question of Palestine.³⁸

All these perspectives, in turn, reinforced a Eurocentric Zionist narrative that overrides the ability to articulate, let alone advocate, for Palestinian history on its own terms. Rather than see Palestine in its wider, centuries-old Ottoman and Arab milieu, or as an integral part of a Mashriqi region, Israel is instead depicted as the age-old and ever-memorable home of the Jewish people whose continuous persecution at the hands of non-Jews culminated in the Holocaust—except the “righteous” non-Jews who rescued Jews, as Yad Vashem puts it.³⁹ This view insists that the unique historic persecution of Jews requires a uniquely Jewish, modern, democratic, European-style state, which European Zionists built by making the Palestinian “desert bloom.” Ever since, the nationalist narrative of colonial Zionism continues: Israeli Jews have been besieged by angry anti-Jewish Arabs who picked up the ugly antisemitism that European Christians only recently abandoned. In historian Bernard Lewis's formulation of this narrative in The Jews of Islam, Arab opposition to Israel has little to do with colonialism, dispossession, or the amply documented reality of Palestinian lived experience—all of which Lewis passes over in silence save for a few sentences about what he calls, vaguely, “the Palestine question.” Instead, Lewis proclaims that a new “Arab antisemitism” that the Arabs and Muslims imported from Europe presaged the “end of a tradition” of Judeo-Muslim coexistence.⁴⁰ Palestinians have no place in this narrative except as the inheritors of European anti-Jewish prejudice, just as Zionists insisted that Palestinians had no place in their historic homeland except as perpetually subordinated and minoritized non-Jewish “Israeli Arabs.” In Edward Said's evocative phrase, “the Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew.” Said elaborates:

This neat formula of philozionist self-righteousness is remarkable in its efficiency. A single word—or, more precisely, the recalling of antisemitism—immediately brings to mind the history of the Nazi persecution of innocent European Jews who were herded into boxcars and sent off to mass death. It recalls the chilling extermination camp of Auschwitz in Poland. It evokes countless films, stories, memoirs, and histories of the Holocaust that reinforce and visualize the depravity of German Nazis and the very real terror they inflicted on their Jewish victims. It alludes to the Americans who liberated the camps. In this very tightly scripted story of persecution and liberation, Americans are not implicated in their own pervasive domestic racial segregation that preceded and followed World War II. The reality of America's refusal to allow many persecuted Jews refuge is overtaken by a powerful one-dimensional image of American soldiers as liberators overseas, scrubbed clean of their implication in Native genocide and pervasive domestic segregation. The celebration of Zionism and the “birth” of Israel thus not only functions to erase Palestinian history but also whitewashes other itineraries of US racism and genocidal violence that have shaped American political culture as deeply committed to a beautiful story of Israel.

Amy Kaplan describes how the final scenes of Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning 1993 film Schindler's List capture this relationship almost perfectly. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust are told by a European horseman that there is no place for them in a desolated Europe that “hates them,” and none in “the West” either, but only “over there”—that is to say, in what would soon become the Jewish state of Israel. The next scene shows these survivors walking toward the Promised Land steadfastly—and anachronistically—to the musical score of the Israeli Hebrew song “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (“Jerusalem of Gold”), which was actually composed in May 1967 and immediately used to celebrate Israel's invasion and occupation of East Jerusalem a month later in June 1967.⁴² The film buttresses the narrative of antisemitism-Holocaust-Israel and ties the war against antisemitism to the birth of Israel.

But the ethical efficiency of this chain of relations (antisemitism-Holocaust-Israel) depends on erasing Palestinian history and humanity, thus turning Palestinians into a people without history and, even worse, a people scripted coercively into a story about the meaning of Israel and the West in which they have no role except as bit players and would-be spoilers. Since their dispossession in 1948, Palestinians have been framed as the antisemitic anachronism. Leon Uris's novel Exodus, which was adapted into a blockbuster film starring Paul Newman, encapsulated this philozionist orientalism. Here, the place of the Palestinians is not as a people fighting for self-determination on their own land but rather as fanatics fighting Jewish/Zionist rebirth and Western post-Holocaust redemption.⁴³

3. Scripting the Palestinian as Antisemitic Villains

The corollary to this narrative is that those who disrupt it by raising the question of the treatment of Palestinians or insisting on Palestinian history on its own terms, like the Palestinians themselves, are scripted into the story as antisemitic villains. In 1948, the founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Judah Magnes, noted what he called the “the terror of the Zionist political machine” in America directed at anyone, including fellow Jews, who contested this narrative of beautiful Zionism.⁴⁴ The American Christian journalist Dorothy Thompson, who had been a Zionist and one of the earliest American journalists to draw attention to Hitler's antisemitism, was shocked when she visited Palestine in 1945 and recognized the unjust nature of the Zionist project there. When she pointed this out, she was defamed as an antisemite and lost her column in the New York Post.⁴⁵ Decades later, the Israeli and US ambassadors to the United Nations both conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. They deemed antisemitic the General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975 that determined “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”⁴⁶ They declared that Palestinians and their supporters across the world acted out of anti-Jewish hatred as opposed to anticolonial conviction and passion. The Israeli ambassador to the UN went so far as to draw a direct comparison between the UN deliberations and the Nazi persecution of Kristallnacht in 1938, and described the UN as becoming the “world centre of anti-Semitism.” During the debate about UN Resolution 3379, the outraged US ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “The abomination of anti-Semitism . . . has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty—and more—to the murderers of the 6 million European Jews.” Not once in his infamous speech did Moynihan utter the word Palestinian, as if their existence and fate was irrelevant to a discussion about the nature of Zionism. Yet by denying the actual history of Palestine and the Palestinians, and the actual history of the Zionist movement that had for decades celebrated its colonial foundations explicitly, Moynihan could declare to the world that Zionism constituted a multiracial “national liberation movement” that was the antithesis of racism. He suggested that it was the Arabs and the Third World represented at the General Assembly who were the racists because they engaged in an “infamous act” and “a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage.”⁴⁷ Moynihan's speech epitomizes the incandescent rage of self-righteous denialism.

This totalizing conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is most routinely justified by pointing to the controversial figure of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem who was exiled from his land in 1937.⁴⁸ The mufti initially collaborated with British colonialists after they appointed him head of the newly created Supreme Muslim Council in 1922. But having watched the colonization of his country by British-backed Zionists for two decades, including the brutal suppression of a major anticolonial revolt, the conservative mufti relocated to Berlin and met with Hitler in 1941 in a vain attempt to rally support against colonial Zionism.⁴⁹ Hajj Amin, by this point, conflated Zionists and Jews and was so blinded by his antipathy to the Zionist colonization of his country that he expressed repugnant anti-Jewish ideas. He was not alone in associating with Germany in this period: the Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, the Irish nationalist Sean Russell, Chechens, Azerbaijanis, and many others also adopted the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” to lobby Germany for support as Berlin cynically sought to remake itself as a center for anti-British interests and, in the context of the sprawling British Empire, anticolonial intrigue.⁵⁰ Nevertheless, a photograph of Hajj Amin's meeting with Hitler in 1941, as well as false accounts that he visited the death camps, have been used relentlessly by apologists for Israel since 1948 as a rod with which to beat Palestinians, to insist that they were collectively motivated by an ancient antisemitic hatred of Jews, and to deny the legitimacy of their indigenous anticolonialism and anti-Zionism. There is an entire wall at Yad Vashem dedicated to exposing the connection between Hajj Amin and the Nazis, whose purpose Israeli historian Tom Segev says is to allow a visitor “to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs enmity to Israel.”⁵¹ In 2015, the extremist Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu took this tendentious line of argument to its absurd conclusion when he insisted that it was Hajj Amin who gave Hitler the idea of exterminating the Jews.⁵² Even when not actively vilified, Palestinians as a whole are placed in an impossible epistemic and hence political position. They are constantly measured as lesser victims in relation to the magnitude of the Holocaust. At the same time, they are also required, in effect, to atone for Western antisemitism.⁵³ Self-righteous supporters of colonial Zionism have thus been able to take solace in their idea of Israel by ignoring, downplaying, or cynically distracting from the nature and structures of colonial Zionism that have grown ever more violent in what historian Rashid Khalidi describes as “the hundred years’ war on Palestine.”⁵⁴

4. Palestinians Try to Reclaim a Place in History

In the decades since the 1967 war, the United States guaranteed Israel's military supremacy over all the Arab states and turned a blind eye to the entrenchment of apartheid throughout the occupied Palestinian West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands and the gradual declassification of Israeli archives punctured many of the founding myths of Israel.⁵⁵ They also have validated the essence of the Palestinian narrative about the Nakba of 1948. As a result, while the brilliance of the story of Israel after the Holocaust within Western higher education began to lose some of its luster, the basic structure of the Zionist narrative—that the Jewish nature of the state of Israel was both beyond question and utterly necessary—still maintained its general coherence across the West.

For much of the Cold War, there were virtually no Arab, let alone Palestinian, professors of modern history in any leading US university. The most famous Arab professor of history of the second half of the twentieth century was Albert Hourani at Oxford. He maintained a careful silence on the question of Palestine after the Nakba of 1948, although he had, as a member of the short-lived Arab Office, pleaded before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946 to understand the threat of colonial Zionism.⁵⁶ By contrast, his contemporary, the aforementioned Bernard Lewis, was deeply sympathetic to Israel; he gave regular public lectures at Tel Aviv University, from which he received an honorary doctorate. He also donated his library and archives to the university's Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies (named after the Israeli military leader who participated in the Nakba).⁵⁷ Lewis enjoyed public acclaim in America as a respected expert on the modern Middle East and the Islamic world. A medievalist by training, Lewis was nonetheless hailed across Western academia as an objective interpreter of contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamic politics. Ensconced at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies beginning in 1974, after teaching for decades at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London, his persistent thesis about Islamic decline had the allure of Orientalist simplicity. It fixated on an alleged “rage” of the Oriental Arab and Muslim “man” whom Lewis insisted was out of place and out of time in the modern Western world. Lewis's oeuvre is one of obfuscation about Palestine: he drew attention to what he regarded as a “clash of civilizations” (a term he coined in 1990 before it was popularized by the political scientist Samuel Huntington) but downplayed colonialism and colonial Zionism.⁵⁸ He confirmed the story that his Western mainstream audience—nurtured on the idea of a fundamentally good Israel, the young nation born from the ashes of antisemitic persecution—wanted to hear. Hiding behind a veil of dispassionate objectivity, Lewis contributed significantly to the cumulative impact of the narrative connecting Antisemitism-Holocaust-Israel that simultaneously affirmed Israel as the antidote to the universal scourge of antisemitism and obscured—that is, “complicated”—the plight of the Palestinians.

The limited gains by the Palestinians in the international arena in the 1970s—as well as within certain fields such as Middle Eastern studies, which by the 1980s counted many more Arabs and Muslims in their junior ranks—were offset by a campaign launched against “the new antisemitism” in the 1970s that equated anti-Zionism with anti-semitism. The term “the new antisemitism” was popularized by the national leaders of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a 1974 book with that title. The first sentence of the book alludes to the history of postwar philosemitism by asking, “Is the post–World War II honeymoon with the Jews over?”⁵⁹ The key answer provided was that philosemitism was threatened principally because the state of Israel, which the book admitted had been the beneficiary of the philosemitic Western postwar order, was now allegedly being singled out for criticism even though “excepting the Jewish religion itself, Israel represents the greatest hope and the deepest commitment embraced by world Jewry in two millennia.”⁶⁰ The term “new antisemitism” was used again by Lewis in 1986 to refer to his thesis of Arabs and Muslims adopting an outdated European prejudice, and yet again by ADL leader Abe Foxman in 2003. The dramatic uptick in articles and books about the topic since the turn of the twenty-first century is tied not only to delegitimizing Palestinian resistance to Israel but also to demonizing increasing expressions of solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians in the West. According to Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, the point of the “meticulously orchestrated media extravaganzas is not to fight anti-Semitism but rather to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism.”⁶¹

The paradox was that while certain pockets of a slowly diversifying American academia began to allow discussion of modern Palestinian history, sociology, anthropology, and literature, criticism of the settler-colonial foundations or ethnoreligious supremacy inherent in a Jewish state imposed on a multireligious land was largely taboo in the wider public sphere, to say nothing of American politics. While criticism of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after 1967 was increasingly evident within the American public sphere (often posed as concern for Israel's alleged Jewish and democratic character, with Palestinians often represented as a “demographic time bomb”), there was very little discussion of the racism inherent in maintaining an ethnoreligious nationalist Jewish state in multireligious Palestine.⁶² Edward Said's stature as the most prominent, cosmopolitan, and certainly the most articulate Palestinian academic in the West should not obscure the fact that he was a professor of literature at Columbia University who never taught a class on the history and politics of Palestine. Yet even Said was repeatedly defamed and harassed after he took public stands on behalf of Palestinian liberation. His office at Columbia University was vandalized, and in 2001, the Freud Society of Vienna canceled a major lecture he was meant to give because he had been photographed throwing a stone the year before from the Lebanese border in the direction of an Israeli guardhouse half a mile away after Israel ended its decades-long illegal occupation of southern Lebanon.⁶³ The success of Said's Orientalism (1978) was so pronounced within academia in part because of the wide scope of its argument that extended far beyond Palestine and helped usher in the new field of postcolonial studies and literature. Less commented upon was the brilliant second volume of what he always thought of as a trilogy of books related to the Orientalist politics of representation, a volume titled The Question of Palestine.⁶⁴

5. Avoiding Palestine in the Face of Palestinians

Said's fame notwithstanding, the avoidance of “controversy” around the question of Palestine became a key aspect of academic socialization in US higher education, which continued to develop robust relationships with Israeli institutions despite the systematic, documented discrimination against Palestinian survivors of the Nakba and their descendants. One simply did not rise high in North American academic institutions if one stridently criticized Zionism or was even faintly tarnished with the accusation of antisemitism. In such a national climate, despite the insurgent academic impact of Said's Orientalism in 1978, self-censorship around the question of Palestine became a habit among scholars. At the same time, though, precisely because of the crack that Said made in the Orientalist edifice, the multiculturalization of American pedagogy, and the increase in the number of Arab and Muslim scholars studying their history and societies in Western universities, as well as Israel's actions in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, many younger academics were less inclined to accept the Israeli Zionist narrative in toto.

For that reason, the Zionist idealogue Daniel Pipes established Campus Watch in 2002 to “alert university stakeholders (administrators, alumni, trustees, regents, parents of students, state/provincial and federal legislators)” and to report on academics and students who supported Palestinian liberation.⁶⁵ All this intimidation and surveillance, to be sure, was carried out in the name of “objectivity” and nonpartisanship. The pro-Israel Association for the Study of the Middle East and North Africa (with none other than Bernard Lewis as founding cochair) was established in 2007 to rival the main scholarly Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), which itself had been founded in 1969.⁶⁶ Also in 2007, Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University following the extraordinary intervention of the Zionist Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.⁶⁷ The 2014 withdrawal from Steven Salaita of an offer of a tenured appointment at the University of Illinois was a stark reminder of the consequences of defying Zionist orthodoxy—as was the blocking in 2020 of the appointment at the University of Toronto of respected legal scholar Valentina Azarova.⁶⁸ In January 2023 the scholar and clinician Lara Sheehi, then at George Washington University, was defamed, harassed, and subjected to a university investigation (which, predictably, cleared her name, but not after taking an enormous toll on her) after being accused of antisemitism by the right-wing Zionist group StandWithUs, which filed a federal Title IV complaint with the US Department of Education.⁶⁹ The list goes on and on.

Pointing out the obviously discriminatory and racist nature of Israel vis-à-vis non-Jewish Palestinians remained, in short, a well-marked and carefully avoided career minefield. In a book from 2012 about Palestinian global politics and the PLO's global nature, an author felt compelled to admit in his introduction to an academic work that his approach is not of an activist but a scholar, and that he “agree[s] with the prevailing precepts of international law that Israel has a right to exist and that the Palestinian people have a right to a sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”⁷⁰ This gesture suggests a profound reluctance to appreciate that international law has no such actual precept about states having a “right” to exist and, more fundamentally, a reluctance to acknowledge what such a self-proclaimed Jewish state in a multireligious land ultimately means to its subordinated Muslim and Christian Palestinian citizens. After all, a scholar writing on apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South presumably would not have to indicate that they accept the right of these regimes to exist in order to explicate the nature of Black South African or African American resistance to those states. A 2013 book, in turn, sees a prominent scholar describe the Nakba (without using the term) by saying “700,000 Arab refugees . . . had emptied the cities of Haifa and Jaffa and 400 villages,”⁷¹ as if Palestinians themselves, unbidden, fled their cities and towns and as if they were not methodically and systematically ethnically cleansed before and after May 1948.

The accumulation of these kinds of circumlocutions signals the difficulty of writing plainly about Palestinian history and Palestinians’ resistance to their own erasure. Ultimately, the tension around the writing about Palestinian anti-Zionism is made palpable by the apparent ease with which American academia and society today highlight (and attempt to institutionally bless and arguably co-opt) the agency of the oppressed and the silenced in Black and Indigenous histories—notably following centuries of framing these histories and subjugated peoples as irrational, inferior, and barbaric.⁷² Until recently, Palestinians have been largely curated out of the broader historiography of anticolonialism, although they were involved in one of the largest anticolonial uprisings in the interwar period. Insofar as Palestinian resistance to their oppression is given any significant attention, it has generally been, as the examples above illustrate, with trepidation, or with a focus on its shortcomings and failures. Anything else—as the recent case of Jodi Dean illustrates and the constant threat of legal jeopardy of being identified with Palestinian “foreign terrorist organization” underscores—is liable to vehement denunciation, censorship, and possible imprisonment.⁷³ By the same token, the modern emphasis on the need to undo the silences of the past, to bring in the voices of the marginalized and previously oppressed, and to shed critical light on the realities of settler colonialism, Western imperialism, and anti-Blackness cannot keep out Palestinian history indefinitely—especially when so many Palestinians and allied scholars of all faiths and ethnicities press their claims to be heard and recognized.⁷⁴ Not every scholar and student, it turns out, is afraid to traverse the minefield.

6. The Last Stand of Liberal Zionism

There are today more Palestinian, Arab, Israeli, and other scholars than ever before who are speaking and writing honestly and competently about modern Palestinian history.⁷⁵ The proliferation of human rights reports since the turn of the twenty-first century provide an irrefutable and accessible archive that exposes virtually every detail of Israel's apartheid.⁷⁶ They reveal the explicit Israeli state commitment to what the leading Israeli Human Rights organization B'tselem called out in 2021 as “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea” over Muslim and Christian Palestinians.⁷⁷ Such undeniable evidence of systemic Israeli racism is augmented by the actions and demonstrations of Israeli settlers routinely crying out “Death to the Arabs,” an Israeli political party called Jewish Power, and Israeli Jewish pogroms launched against Palestinian subjects in the West Bank, all while Israeli politicians and the general Israeli Jewish public consistently call for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians who have remained on their ancestral lands.⁷⁸ Israel's most lauded historian in philozionist Western academia is also one of its most notorious: Benny Morris, who was awarded the 2008 National Jewish Book Award for his apologetic work on the 1948 war, infamously described Palestinian society in 2004 as one “in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers.”⁷⁹ Morris castigated Islam as well. “There is a deep problem in Islam,” he said in the same interview. “It's a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien.” The anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and anti-Arab racism of the kind articulated by Morris is not masked in Israel, which makes the academic denialism still practiced by American philozionists all the more phantasmatic and ultimately untenable.

In the main, the liberal defenders of Israel in US higher education no longer express their philozionism in the vulgar style of Morris, or even the Orientalism of Lewis. Morris's virulent racism simply could not pass muster in an academic setting that has so ostentatiously and institutionally claimed to make amends for its own racist past. His descriptions of Palestinians and Muslims as collectively barbaric is anachronistic in an era of announced diversity and inclusion. Instead, as the Israeli Zionist narrative has steadily lost intellectual and ethical ground as more information comes to light about the Nakba, and as Israel's own actions against colonized Palestinians demonstrates, the philozionists in North American academia seek other ways to persist with the Eurocentric orthodoxy of antisemitism-Holocaust-Israel. They either suggest that the existence of Palestinians and their actual reality should not impinge upon their essentially positive view of Israel, or even if one were to acknowledge the Palestinians, that Zionism is “heterogenous” and thus has multiple and, presumably, equally consequential meanings.⁸⁰ They even reprise a theme raised by US ambassador to the UN Moynihan in 1975 that Zionism constituted a “national liberation” movement of the Jewish people, though now they go one step further and claim that it has an “unacknowledged kinship” to the field of postcolonial studies—despite the fact that it originated in Europe and was realized on another people's land in multireligious Palestine with British colonial support.⁸¹ In other words, they want to understand, see, and relate to colonial Zionism as if Palestinians do not ultimately matter and as if the question of Zionism is an internal, Jewish, affective communal affair that can and must be separated from that of its Palestinian victims. Although a very different case, there is an uncanny parallel with how until recently white southerners might have wanted to uphold the “values” of the South or fly the Confederate flag as if Black people and the Black experience of slavery and segregation did not ultimately matter. Nevertheless, such obfuscation repeatedly attempts to turn back the historical clock and goes out of its way not to foreground the mountain of evidence of a century of colonization in Palestine—to say nothing about the world's first livestreamed genocide playing out before our collective eyes.⁸²

In other words, philozionist academics embrace their ideal of Israel and Zionism without attention to its actual history. They do not dwell on the enormous political, institutional, bureaucratic, and donor influence that pro-Israel figures—and those deeply attached to its ideology of colonial Zionism—wield inside academia and beyond its ivory towers. And, crucially, unlike the overtly racist Morris, these philozionists do not say or necessarily think that they are anti-Palestinian. For this very reason, some prominent academics such as Derek Penslar advance multiple interpretations of Zionism that inevitably obfuscate its central colonial meaning on the ground in Palestine and as understood from the standpoint of its Palestinian victims (as Said famously pointed out as far back as 1979)⁸³ or even as understood by colonial Zionists themselves: to make the indigenous majority in Palestine a minority on its own land and to make Jewish colonists a majority in their stead.⁸⁴ In his recent 2023 book, Zionism: An Emotional State, Penslar, for example, begins by presenting a privileged, positive emotional affiliation and definition of Zionism as self-determination for the Jewish people in Palestine before contrasting it with the perspective that Zionism might also be related to colonialism (and what he calls the negative emotions of “frustration to hatred”)⁸⁵—as if the Native experience of colonialism were merely a matter of contested interpretation and not plain historical fact. Tellingly, Penslar writes in the introduction that “in the warfare that accompanied Israel's establishment as a state in 1948, almost two-thirds of Palestine's Arabs went into exile,” a choice of words that glosses over the deliberate and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Nakba overseen by Israel's first prime minister, the Polish-born David Ben Gurion.⁸⁶ Other academics such as Cary Nelson of the University of Illinois and Erwin Chemerinsky at the University of California, Berkeley, do not focus on what Israelis are saying and doing but fixate instead on what American academics and students must not do in the name of “academic freedom” or fighting “hate speech” and “antisemitism.”⁸⁷ In the cause of combating allegedly rampant antisemitism across higher education, liberal Zionists thus warn: don't boycott Israel, which is a “democracy”; don't “single out” Israel, which is the only “Jewish state” in the world; and thus, don't be antisemitic by criticizing Israel or its ideology of colonial Zionism no matter what the facts on the ground say or reveal. In the name of defending the narrow “academic freedom” of Israelis, they foreclose the possibility of Palestinian freedom more generally.⁸⁸ They consistently reject out of hand the repeated Palestinian calls for a nonviolent boycott of Israeli institutions that are complicit in the crime of apartheid. But their tenacious refusal to see what is so obvious to most of the world requires them not to see or hear Palestinians, and to pretend that Israel and its many Zionist institutions faithfully mirror the latest liberal and multicultural trends in American academia.

No better example of this desire to look into the Zionist mirror and not see Palestinians is the evolution and marketing of the Dan David Prize to honor major artists and scholars. The prize was established in 2001 at Tel Aviv University, which is built on the remains of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis and institutionally involved in Israel's subjugation of millions of Palestinians. The eponymous founder of the prize, Dan David, lived through “Nazi and Communist persecution in his native Romania before becoming a global business leader and philanthropist.”⁸⁹ He was an active youth Zionist before emigrating to Israel (at that point ethnically cleansed of its native Palestinian population) in 1960, after which he established his fortune and went on to sit on the board of Tel Aviv University. According to historian Esmat Elhalaby, when the distinguished scholar Catherine Hall repudiated the prize in 2016, the Dan David Foundation changed their approach to their prize, even hiring an American publicity firm to rebrand the prize as “the largest history prize in the world.”⁹⁰ Rather than award a single senior recipient, the foundation engaged scholars from around the world to judge and ultimately award nine separate $300,000 prizes to junior scholars working in the “historical disciplines.” Among the recent recipients are several scholars of color who work on topics such as recovering women's relationship to Atlantic slavery, the history of African American philosophy, and centering African histories within digital spaces. To date, no Palestinian has ever been awarded this prize and no topic relating to Palestinian history has been recognized. This liberal academic washing of Israel's reputation normalizes Israel as a liberal society and even celebrates it as a bastion of liberal values, no matter what the reality outside and on the ground portends for literally millions of Palestinian colonized subjects living under the longest and most brutal military occupation of modern history.

7. The Palestine Exception Will End

The events of October 7, 2023, brought this anti-Palestinian episteme into full view. The fact that hundreds of Israeli civilians and settlers were killed by Palestinian guerrillas and colonized subjects who broke out of their ghetto on a single day also temporarily energized the ardent disciples of the Eurocentric narrative of Zionism into furious self-righteousness. The ubiquitous Western description of the Palestinian attacks as the deadliest attack on the Jews “since the Holocaust” (repeated as recently as May 2024 by US secretary of state Anthony Blinken and January 2025 by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer) was palpably Zionist in its framing.⁹¹ US president Joe Biden's insistence (cited at the beginning of this essay) that the Hamas attack was “as consequential as the Holocaust” rejuvenated the genealogical sequence that connects antisemitism and the Holocaust to the creation of Israel and conflates Nazis with Palestinians. Although some scholars working on the Holocaust pushed back against what they correctly identified as a “misuse” of Holocaust memory in the service of Israeli power,⁹² their intervention made little impact on the prevailing national furor, shock, and outrage induced by Palestinian actions on October 7, 2023. It has had little impact on the extraordinary and ongoing campaign of defamation, censorship, and intimidation that has been launched against Palestinian students, staff, and faculty and their allies across the United States and Canada in the name of fighting antisemitism.

The univocal and almost immediate condemnations of Palestinian violence by virtually every US university of note, and the mourning of Israeli Jewish civilians, paralleled the total silence about the far longer reality of Israeli state and settler violence against Palestinians, long before and after October 7. The inability to name, let alone mourn, the equal humanity of Palestinian civilians—including over a million children who have been subjected to mass starvation and genocide in the fifteen months that have followed—has been especially striking. The American Historical Association's Council, which was so quick to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, maintained a stony silence about the obliteration of Palestinian education, archives, and history. It even announced, in the midst of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, its approval of the Dan David Foundation as an AHA affiliate.⁹³

More to the point, from UCLA to Columbia University, the overwhelming preponderance of official communications by university leaderships since October 7 has centered on the fears, anxieties, and feelings of one group of Jewish students and faculty who identify with the ideology of the state that is carrying out this obliteration, and who are “distressed” and made uncomfortable by the stridency of the criticism directed at this state. The chilling assumptions at work here are that Jewish “security” requires perpetual Palestinian insecurity in Palestine and that the “discomfort” of some students in America far outweighs in urgency (and is more deserving of sympathy and formal protection than) the pain, anguish, and trauma of many more students who are horrified by the actual suffering, killing, maiming, starvation, and terrorizing of over two million Palestinians in their own land by eleven months of bombing, siege, and engineered famine. It is not genocide that alarms university leaderships across America. It is students calling attention to genocide.

Although the overwhelming majority of actual doxing and lawfare cases has targeted Palestinians and their allies, and although three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont, university administrators obdurately refuse to listen to or comprehend what many of their own students and faculty are actually saying. The chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, for example, made clear in March 2024 that in her view the Palestinian political and historical “story” that many faculty and students passionately believed in was fundamentally a “wrong story.”⁹⁴ Of no other group of marginalized students and faculty would such a categorical denial of their history and narrative be proffered so casually. Then again, no other group has been so consistently subordinated to and asked to atone for the overwhelming burden of Europe's persecution of its Jewish population.

The general academic proclivity to decenter Europe has yet to undo the tenacious hold of the Eurocentric genealogy of Zionism. The Palestine exception shadows the work of any scholar invested in Palestinian liberation. Yet, for the first time in living memory and on a national scale in panels, writings, and talks, a diversity of writers and poets embodying past US legacies—from Viet Thanh Nguyen to Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Angela Davis to Alejandro Varela, Maya Binyam, Fady Joudah, and Christina Sharpe—have offered up-front support for Palestinian liberation and have denounced genocide. More dramatically and immediately on campuses across America, students, faculty, and youth of all faiths and backgrounds are pushing back against this racist, anti-Palestinian, Zionist episteme. At both the peaceful spring 2024 UC Berkeley student encampment, which was not violently dismantled despite enormous pressure to do so from the state and the board of regents, and at the Columbia University encampment, which was crushed, Muslim students and students of many other faith traditions participated in makeshift Passover seders with their Jewish colleagues.⁹⁵ Their actions, bodies, and collective commitment to fight injustice refute the idea that supporting Palestinian freedom is anti-Jewish or that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. But more than refuting stereotypes, students are positively centering Palestine and Palestinians: their present, and therefore their history and future. They are thus rejecting the idea that Palestinians are a people without history or a people who enter Eurocentric history only as antisemites or as violent “Jew-haters.”

These dissenting students draw on and reflect the recent transformations of American academia that have opened up limited space for both Palestinian-centered courses and a more diverse student body. They draw on different strands of both the Black American and Indigenous Native experience of confronting and surviving in what Du Bois memorably called a “white world.” They collectively draw on the legacy of past experiences and moments of student protests against racial segregation, against the Vietnam War, against South African apartheid, and against anti-Black police brutality. They also draw on the availability of social media not subject to the stringent gatekeeping that has long characterized the mainstream media.⁹⁶ They hear the sounds of injustice and see its images: of destroyed homes, schools, universities, churches, and mosques, but most of all of broken Palestinian bodies, emaciated and mutilated toddlers, terrified children, mothers, and fathers. The dam of denial behind which so many Zionists still shelter will not contain an entire countermovement of the young and the old, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and many other faith traditions as well as atheists and agnostics. The immediate catalyst for the movement is a visceral human revulsion at the inhumane Israeli treatment of Palestinians. It is an expression of terrible sadness and outrage in the face of a seemingly unstoppable genocide. But it is also fidelity to the loudly proclaimed but ignored allegedly universal principles of humanity that Israel and its supporters in the West have so decisively cast by the wayside.

Whereas student and faculty critics of Zionism and Israel's genocide routinely distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, and often feature prominent Jewish activists and voices and students in their ranks, Israel's supporters in America adamantly, affectively, and cynically conflate Zionism with Jewish identity. They have created a crisis on campuses of their own imagination in a bid to not see what is staring them in the face. Rather than see the relationship between escalating anti-immigrant racism, anti-Palestinian hatred, and actual antisemitism, they fixate on what dissenting Jewish commentor and editor of Jewish Currents Peter Beinart refers to as “bullshit antisemitism” (as opposed to the genuine antisemitism that he is deeply concerned about) based on their axiomatic conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.⁹⁷ New York University has even recently updated its student code of conduct by affirming that “for many Jewish people, Zionism is part of their identity” and thus arguing that being Zionist may well be considered a protected category against discrimination.⁹⁸ Non-Zionist Jewish students who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, let alone anti-Zionist ones, are virtually never considered in the university discourse about protecting “Jewish students.” As for Palestinian and Arab students, they might as well be living on a different planet. Their reality and history are almost totally denied by tendentious messaging that makes it crystal clear that the thousands of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, staff, and faculty—many of whom are grappling with actual multigenerational losses due to Israel's slaughter of entire families in Gaza—simply don't matter.⁹⁹ Or, at least, that they don't matter nearly as much as “Jewish students”—always assumed to be monolithically Zionist—do.

The paradox is that the more information about the first livestreamed genocide in history from Gaza has become available, the more the pro-Israel orthodoxy has increased its absurd denialism and the more it wants to compel everyone else to participate in this quest to uproot alleged antisemitism from campuses. To stamp out the Palestinian heresy in their midst, many university leaders reacted to the dozens of student encampments that were erected in the spring of 2024 by arresting, beating, punishing, and discipling their own students and faculty on a mass scale because they defy the taboo about contextualizing Palestine and criticizing colonial Zionism. They spent millions of dollars not on education but on its suppression and have overseen the arrest of 3,100 students.¹⁰⁰ The suspension in April 2024 (since rescinded) of the full professor Jodi Dean from teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York because of her essay about Palestinian resistance drives home the heavy-handed suppression of dissenting forms of empathy with Palestinians.¹⁰¹ So, too, does the manner in which UCLA police stood by as a Zionist mob rampaged through a peaceful solidarity camp on its campus on April 30, 2024, yet on May 2 crushed the protestors and forcibly disbanded the encampment for reasons of “safety”—once again naming “our Jewish students” as a point of concern without referring to “Palestinian” or “Muslim” or “Arab” students. So egregious has been the crackdown of academic freedom in America that even the conservative AHA and the American Council of Learned Societies finally, if tepidly, condemned the repression of student protestors in May 2024. But they both carefully avoided using the words Palestine or Palestinian and found themselves unable to clearly acknowledge what and why the students and faculty were actually protesting.¹⁰² When finally pushed by its members appalled by Israel's obliteration of Gaza to hold a democratic vote on a resolution to condemn the scholasticide in Gaza, which passed by a huge margin at the annual convention in January 2025, the AHA Council—its leadership body—quickly vetoed the resolution. It maintained that such a resolution fell outside the organization's mission despite having issued in 2022 a categorical condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.¹⁰³ Members of the AHA Council insisted that while the organization's assertive stance on Ukraine was about history, the resolution about Gaza was not; or that whereas there was (alleged) consensus on Ukraine, there was no similar “consensus” on Gaza; or that what occurred in Gaza was not yet “settled history” and thus outside the purview of the historical association.¹⁰⁴ Once again, the AHA Council proved the Palestine exception. Palestinians, it seems, have no history that rises to the standard of History worth defending, let alone cherishing.

The ongoing student and faculty determination not to be silenced about Palestine and the turmoil around activism across university campuses over the Gaza war has exposed the very clear philozionist fault line that runs right through Western academia. The war in higher education is massively consequential. The multireligious and multiracial coalition of student protestors represents generational change in the West. Zionist academics remain invested in a repressive status quo. They can't rely on student support because Israel's system of apartheid and its Gaza genocide ultimately are intellectually and morally indefensible. The warriors for pro-Israel orthodoxy nevertheless condemn not the unfolding genocide but the mobilizations against genocide. While university leaderships propose anodyne “dialogue” to tame Palestinian solidarity among their students, a raft of new repressive anti-Palestinian tactics of largely unaccountable university boards in Democratic states converge with those of blatantly right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Latinx, authoritarian, and xenophobic Republican states that demonize pro-Palestinian solidarity to undermine free speech and critical thought in America.¹⁰⁵ As different as their internal dynamics, means, and constituencies are, such convergence around a pro-Zionist orthodoxy that denies genocide while defaming students and faculty across America who are horrified by what is unfolding in occupied Palestine should sound a loud alarm. There is precious little left of critical thought and genuine academic freedom across US institutions of higher education.

Notes

Works Cited