Free Speech and the Palestine Exception

WHY LANGUAGE MATTERS. 

When reflecting on the responsibility and role of intellectuals during ongoing genocide, Balraj Gill asks “Do [intellectuals] become a security blanket to comfort our bodies and souls to keep the pain at bay or provide cover for those unwilling to take action?” What does it mean when we end up debating semantics in the face of brutal devastation and gross human rights violations as we have seen unfold in Gaza over the last several months? What does it mean when there is a systematic denial and a willful ignorance to historicize the present, to name Palestine, to name the onslaught of Israeli settler colonial occupation and apartheid regime against Palestinians, bringing into question their very right to exist? 

Universities are complicit in this systemic denial and willful ignorance. The “Dialogue and Action in the Age of Divides” series, which features nine Massachusetts universities (BC, Boston University, Brandeis University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, Tufts University, UMass, and Wellesley College) is notably absent of Palestinian voices. On account of this absence, we raise the question of not only what constitutes free speech but who is allowed to speak in the first place. What does the silencing of Palestinian voices mean as we construct imaginations of ‘free speech’? Who gets positioned as the expert? Who gets to define and deliberate over the parameters and limits of what constitutes civil discourse? Whose voices are allowed to be present and why? Whose voices are excluded? What are the ramifications for free speech and civil discourse in the face of such exclusions? 

In the face of the erasure of Palestinian resistance, historic and ongoing, it is of utmost importance that we amplify Palestinian voices. 

POWER AND NARRATIVE.

Oppression is enabled through control over the narrative. The narrative pushed by the United States and Israel falsely asserts that Jewish and Israeli peoples’ safety is somehow dependent on Palestinian people’s occupation, dispossession, and genocide; thus fundamentally distorting and undermining calls for self-determination and freedom from occupation. Those who have power over the narrative take the words of oppressed peoples and strip them of their meaning, redefining them as evil. For example, the use of "from the river to the sea" is a symbol of Palestinian resistance and a call for liberation from occupation. Yet this term has been deemed as antisemitic, called a "rallying cry for terrorist groups and their sympathizers (American Jewish Committee)," and falsely interpreted as a call for "elimination.” This has resulted in censorship of the phrase across some university campuses and even the creation of legislation aimed at prohibiting the term. 

The disingenuous claim that those in support of Palestine are calling for violence relates to the ways in which the Israeli cooptation of the term “from the river to the sea” is used to deny Palestinian sovereignty and justify colonization.

Another example of narrative distortions includes the way anti-Zionism has been interpreted and re-defined as a proxy for antisemitism. As Benjamin Moser reminds us in a recently published article in The Washington Post: 

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

This falsely drawn equivalence conflates antisemitism--forms of identity-based discrimination such as Islamophobia and Anti-Palestinian racism--with anti-Zionism which is a critique of a form of governance. Governments and nation-states are not entitled to the same types of protections and rights as people are. The conflation of these terms serves to quell any critique of the occupation. It is also used as a tactic to accuse those bringing up critiques of enacting anti-Semitism, a method of silencing. For more on Anti-Zionism, click here. 

THE PALESTINE EXCEPTION.

As this genocide continues, student organizing on University campuses across the United States and beyond has been met with an intensification of longstanding censorship of anyone who dares speak out for Palestine. Students, academics, and activists face administrative sanctions, false accusations of antisemitism, doxxing, and police violence. To read more about how students who speak out for Palestine face censorship and harassment, visit The Palestine Exception. Here are some examples of the kind of backlash and suppression that students have been subjected to by universities involved in this series:

• Brandeis has banned the Brandies SJP chapter, vilifying the National SJP with the false claim that it “call[s] for the elimination of the only Jewish state in the world and its people.” On 11/10/23, campus and city police arrested seven individuals as a demonstration on campus. 

• Boston University is actively supporting the “Israel in Crisis Campus Plan” which partners with the Anti-Defamation League to surveil and target students, faculty, and administration speaking out for Palestine and to spread false information conflating any criticism of the Israeli government with Anti-Semitism

• MIT has suspended students for attending a demonstration on 11/9/23 organized by MIT Coalition for Palestine.  

• At Northeastern University Members of Huskies for a Free Palestine face disciplinary charges after a sit-in.

• Tufts University police enacted extreme verbal harassment and physical aggression against protestors at a peaceful demonstration on 11/17/23

• When UMass Amherst students organized a sit-in to demand the university cut ties with Raytheon, condemn Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and publicly support Palestinian, Arab, Jewish, and Muslim students, 57 students were arrested and charged with trespassing. They now face housing removal, suspension, and expulsion.

• Harvard students faced intensive doxxing, hate speech, and death threats after publishing a solidarity statement, with the university doing little to support them. Students are facing disciplinary cases for organizing a walkout as a part of a week of action. A Black student proctor was fired for protecting students at a solidarity protest from an aggressive counterprotester. In January, former president Claudine Gay was forced to resign after being subjected to Zionist and anti-Black attacks for not doing enough to repress students speaking out against the genocide.

• Wellesley College Faculty signed a letter asking campus administration to make a statement stating that criticism of Israel is not antisemitism; the administration refused.

• UMass Lowell has remained silent in the face of the genocide, only issuing statements that equate “both sides” and obscure the root causes of violence in Israeli settler colonialism and occupation. The Criminology, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Political Science departments co-sponsored a panel (with no Palestinian voices represented) that gave a platform for rhetoric justifying Israel’s genocidal onslaught: including claiming that civilians are not being targeted or placed at risk, claiming that what is happening is not genocide, settler colonialism, or apartheid, and dismissing entire bodies of work that use this terminology as “unscientific.” When more and more Palestinians are being massacred each day that passes without a ceasefire, this is hate speech that is directly enabling genocide. 

Now is not the time for meaningless discourse. Now is the time for action.