Over the past 26 months of Israel’s still ongoing genocide in Gaza, we have covered the exceptional degree of repression on universities directed at Palestine solidarity activists. National media attention has largely focused on the violent actions taken by campus security forces against student protest encampments and on high profile cases like the arrest and detention of US green-card holder and Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil, still under threat of deportation by the Trump regime. We want to focus on the less widely publicized campaigns of repression directed at faculty which have ramped up over the past few years to a degree that threatens the very structure and mission of the postwar “liberal” university.
Universities have long been the target of Zionist efforts to control the discourse on Palestine. For decades, the question of Palestine was rarely taught on US campuses and very few Palestinian faculty were hired nationally. Palestine was the “third rail” of academia as of the media. The work of Edward Said began to make inroads only thirty years after the Nakba and was immediately met with virulent antagonism as it illuminated the colonial nature of the Israeli state. Gradually, both the persistence of scholars and activists on US campuses and the increasingly evident violence of the Israeli settler-colonial regime made Palestine a critical site of study and activism, and students now have a complex and detailed understanding of the workings of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide and a language that informs their activism.
Faced with the fact that every debate now forces them to justify the unjustifiable facts of the Israeli supremacist regime, Zionist organizations no longer demand debate, but seek to repress and punish speech about Palestine in schools and universities. California’s “democratic” governor Gavin Newsom recently signed off on Assembly Bill 715 that effectively bans the teaching of Palestinian perspectives in California schools after years of Zionist lobbying. Numerous faculty have been targeted for their speech on Palestine, both on private social media accounts and in the classroom, or for their protection and support of student activists at encampments. They have been targeted by external actors, from right-wing MAGA activists to their Zionist allies such as Silicon Valley Chapter Hillel (as in the case we discuss today) or the ADL, and by their own university administrations. Even Harvard, that is making media capital for its legal defiance of the Trumpian demands, fired an assistant dean in the Divinity School merely for the crime of hosting a program on Christian Zionism.
In California, the UC and CSU system’s administrations are behaving in a no less draconian manner, from demanding oversight of syllabi on Palestine and the “Middle East” to undermining longstanding faculty disciplinary proceedings, and from prosecuting or expelling students to sanctioning and even firing faculty. Today we speak with two CSU professors, Ahlam Muhtaseb and Sang Heal Kil, who have been subject to many years of Zionist and administrative harassment, culminating in the firing of one of them, tenured San Jose State University professor Sang Hea Kil. We discuss with them their first hand experience of the collaboration of university administrations and Zionist lobby groups, the overall picture of regression in academia, and Sang’s case in particular. How are faculty and students resisting this new repressive regime? What does it mean for the future of universities that are also threatened from many other quarters, from the advent of AI to the right-wing efforts to control university research and teaching in line with their own agendas? Is Palestine once again the cutting edge of violent reactionary efforts to curtail learning and democracy in the United States?
