College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash Gaza Protests
A New York University student holds a Palestine solidarity sign at a protest for a ceasefire in Gaza in New York City on Oct. 25, 2023. Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
New York University students who speak out against Zionism will now risk violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies.
As students and faculty in the U.S. return to campuses for the fall semester, there are innumerable reasons to continue demonstrating against institutional complicity with Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The need for those protests is as urgent as it’s ever been.
University and college administrations, however, are not only signaling plans to treat pro-Palestinian speech with intellectual dishonesty, they’re making clear they plan to use their specious logic to inflict evermore repressive intolerance.
New York University led by troubling example when the school shared an updated code of student conduct last week. Ostensibly aimed at curtailing bigotry, the new language instead shuts down dissent by threatening to silence criticism of Zionism on campus. Students who speak out against Zionism — an ethno-nationalist political ideology founded in the late 19th century — will now risk violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies.
The corporatized industry of American higher education is hardly a site of social justice and liberatory knowledge production. There is, however, something particularly ghoulish in NYU’s actions here.
School communities are returning to a new academic year after a summer in which Palestinians have seen no shred of respite from Israel’s U.S.-backed eliminationism: constant bombing and forced displacement, a campaign of targeted starvation, purposeful destruction of water supplies, and denial of basic medical care. Instead of fighting against U.S. material support for these conditions, however, university administrators like those at NYU have spent that same summer prefiguring ways to demonize anti-genocide protesters as bigots.
Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the new NYU guidelines introduce an unprecedented expansion of protected classes to include “Zionists” and “Zionism.” Referring to the university’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy, known as NDAH, the updated conduct guide says, “Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists.”
The university’s NDAH rules are intended to reflect the school’s legal obligations, including to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination and harassment based on a student’s race, color, national origin, religious identity, shared ancestry, or ethnicity.
“Using code words, like ‘Zionist,’” the guide says, “does not eliminate the possibility that your speech violates the NDAH policy.”
“Dangerous” Title VI Precedent
The entire premise of the guidance — that “Zionist” must be functioning as a “code word — is a flaw egregious enough to reject the entire document outright.
The language here is of utmost importance. The text does not say that “Zionist” can and has been used by antisemites as a code word, which is no doubt true. Instead, it takes it as a given that, when used critically, “Zionist” simply is a code word.
The ironies of the approach abound. On campuses and off, anti-Zionists have been vocally trying to ensure that “Zionist” does not get used as a stand-in for “Jewish.” Yet it is Zionists themselves who most often insist on the conflation, claiming that Israel as an ethnostate speaks for, acts on behalf of, and represents all Jews.
According to NYU’s guidance, then, Zionist and Zionism are either antisemitic dog whistles when invoked critically or a protected category akin to a race, ethnicity, or religious identity. Ethically committed and politically informed anti-Zionism — including the beliefs of many anti-Zionist Jews like myself who reject the conflation of our identity and heritage with an ethnostate project — is foreclosed, and the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which has existed as long as Zionism itself, is all but erased.
“For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the NYU guidance says. And this is of course true. That does not, however, make Zionism an essential part of Jewish identity.
There are conservative Christians for whom the damnation of homosexuality is a key part of their Christian faith too, but Republican lawfare to see homophobic positions enshrined as protected religious expression have been rightly and consistently condemned by the liberal mainstream.
“The new guidance sets a dangerous precedent by extending Title VI protections to anyone who adheres to Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, and troublingly equates criticism of Zionism with discrimination against Jewish people,” NYU’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine said in a statement in response to the updated conduct guide.
“Furthermore, the new guidance implies that any nationalist political ideology (Hindu nationalism, Christian nationalism, etc.) that is integrated into some members of that group’s understanding of their own racial or ethnic identity should be entitled to civil rights protections.”
The faculty group warned that the guidance “will legitimize far-right and ethno-nationalist ideologies under the guise of protecting students from racial discrimination.”
Repressing Speech
The conduct guidance purports to provide “examples and explanations of our policies to help the community better understand not only what the rules say, but how they are applied.” The list offered for Zionism, though, only serves to ensure that the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is obliterated.