U.S. Universities and the Anti-Palestine Agenda
By Luke Peterson
July/Aug 2024
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The great majority of U.S. pundits and talking heads within the authoritative news media estimate that between 80 and 100 of our country’s institutions of higher learning are currently in turmoil, having seen a wellspring of protest encampments as the Spring semester of 2024 ends.
Located on many universities green spaces, their occupants gather to protest Israel’s ongoing war against Gazans (and to a less immediate extent, the West Bank) and, more specifically, to seek to compel their respective universities to divest from Israeli war industries. In so doing, they are both defying university edicts against such public displays and facing intimidation and threats from universities and/or city officials who declare such assemblies unlawful, against university policy or, using an all-too-familiar mode of castigation, antisemitic.
Many of these brave students have been disciplined, punished, censured or expelled for their humanitarian actions for Palestine. In other places, particularly universities across the South, students have been set upon by riot police or National Guardsmen, even though Lois Beckett, writing for The Guardian (May 10), noted that nearly all of their activities have been peaceful and non-threatening to staff or students on campus.
In all, 2,000+ students and supporting faculty members have been arrested and an untold number maced, trampled or beaten by police. In one case, Columbia and Barnard University students arrested at encampments during the first week of May were tortured via denial of food and water for 16 hours (Akela Lacy, May 6, https://theintercept.com).
But what has prompted this organic expression of solidarity with Palestine among American university students now? One obvious answer is the duration of Israel’s current cruelty toward Gaza’s civilian population, all funded and at least tacitly supported within their country’s halls of power.
But a closer look at the proscription of academic discourse surrounding Palestine and Israel may provide a more detailed answer. Indeed, the university system has seen a notable uptick in activity from a number of well-organized and evidently well-funded organizations. Their remit is to censor students, professors and other members of university communities nationwide who accuse Israel of crimes against humanity or suggest that its targeted attacks against Palestinian civilians — 40,000+ deaths in Gaza since October 2023 — constitute genocide (Julia Frankel, https://apnews.com, April 6).
One such organization that exists solely to target and condemn any human rights advocacy in North American academia is the online extremist organization Canary Mission (https://canarymission.org/). Its raison d’être is to meticulously document any scholarship and advocacy that is even remotely critical of Israel or its primary paymaster, the U.S. Canary Mission has organized branches in North America for the stated purpose of documenting “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.” Their scope and reach is as ambitious as it is broad, and they clearly view their remit in contemporary political discourse as critical — their website tagline reads, “Because the world should know.”
In that regard, that organization and this author agree. The world should know that, despite protestations to the contrary, Canary Mission is an explicitly political organization whose operational goals have nothing to do with creating safe spaces for university students or protecting marginalized or vulnerable populations. Rather, it seeks to silence every utterance of Israeli criminality, past or present, across North American university campuses.
For example, its “Organizations” tab brazenly equates international media organizations like Al-Jazeera with neo-Nazi agitators like the Daily Stormer and the Goyim Defense League. Such falsification of plainly non-existent connections makes Canary Mission’s painfully clear: Paint with as broad a brush as possible, condemn and associate as many individuals as possible and tarnish all who dare to criticize Israel as hateful antisemites no matter the truth or logic of their arguments. It’s a clumsy practice, as dishonest as it is dangerous, and potentially, if defamation laws were to be applied fairly and on balance, an illegal one.
Operating with an identifiable hubris and self-importance, Canary Mission clearly fears no reprisals for publicly listing the names and affiliations of professors and students, aid organizations and media outlets, who speak out against the ongoing genocide. Its operations seem to grow daily: pointing out and castigating as many critics of Israel as they can, maneuvering with increasing impunity in the wake of the militarized American response to the ongoing university protests, and Canada’s very tepid response to the protests of hundreds of Canadian students and organizations.
In sum, any U.S. university student questioning Israel’s official narratives about its creation and brutal military record over 75 years, or publicly asking about this country’s uncritical fealty to Israel, is a suitable target for identification. Reminiscent of other oppressive, authoritarian organizations, the Canary Mission’s blacklists continue to grow.
A similarly constituted group, the anti-Palestine propaganda initiative CAMERA (Committee For Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis; www.camera.org) and Camera on Campus, targets and defames pro-Palestinian groups located on American university campuses. Its supporters take videos of pro-Palestine demonstrations and protests, spuriously reclassifies them publicly as hate speech or antisemitic antagonism and then posts the humanitarian demonstrators’ personal details online to engender negative professional and personal consequences for them.
Professing to be non-partisan defenders of the truth behind Zionism, Camera on Campus (https://cameraoncampus.org/), like other anti-Palestine hate groups, deliberately ignores Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948-49, its mass confiscation of land designated for a future Palestinian state via the U.S.-funded settler movement since 1967. Camera on Campus also deliberately obfuscates the idea of indigeneity within historic Palestine, using an indigenous spokesperson from American Samoa in a highly skewed and historically inaccurate video on their X page to praise with false laurels the Zionist colonial project.
The intent of this loose coalition of anti-Palestine groups is to quieten any and all criticism of Israel on American university campuses and to do their best to dehumanize Palestinians to the greatest extent possible. This hate campaign is being conducted alongside a simultaneous repackaging of organic pro-Palestine university demonstrations as thinly veiled antisemitism, a baseless hatred of Jews as a whole.
In effect, these groups intend to gaslight membership of the American academy by convincing the public writ large that the Palestinian victims of genocidal oppression are in fact the victimizers of Israel and global Jewry. Supporters of Palestine are falsely castigated as mindless thugs, and as modern-day brownshirts who intend anti-Jewish violence simply for the sake of it while having no coherent political agenda to speak of.
The monitoring, outing and doxing campaigns organized by Canary Mission, CAMERA, and other like minded organizations censor free speech and humanitarian action focused on aiding the besieged and bombarded Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They have had real-world, lasting consequences for conscientious student-activists. Emboldened by the false equivalence that equate legitimate criticism of Israel with blanket antisemitism, in the months since campus protests have mounted against the Israeli genocide in Palestine, Zane McNeill notes that a number of otherwise talented and qualified university students nationwide have had job offers rescinded (https://truthout.org, Oct. 19, 2023).
In other cases, protesters for Palestine have been disciplined, fired or denied tenure simply for being outspoken on behalf of Palestinian rights within the context of the American educational and political system (https://www.chicagotribune.com/2019/03/06/steven-salaita-rejected-by-u-of-i-over-israel-tweets-seems-to-have-found-peace-driving-a-school-bus/).
These cancellations, broken promises and false equivalencies continue to haunt doxed pro-Palestinian speakers in the academy and in professional circles around the country. This reality demonstrates these techniques’ effectiveness and the damaging nature of the sanctioned anti-Palestine hate speech now common within popular discourse. As such, it would seem evident that the much-lauded right to free speech said to resonate throughout this country in the contemporary political era continues to be conditioned by that speech’s content and the speaker(s) in question’s proper alignment with the ideological and/or political interests of both the U.S. and Israel.
Luke Peterson received his Ph.D. from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Cambridge — (King’s College). His new book, “The U.S. Military in the Print News Media: Service and Sacrifice in Discourse,” has been published by Anthem Press.
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