Editor’s Note: The following statement was issued on May 3, 2021, by the organizers of the Open Classroom event, Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine. Mondoweiss occasionally publishes press releases and statements from organizations in an effort to draw attention to overlooked issues.
We write as members of the organizing team of the April 23rd censored open classroom, titled, “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?,” featuring liberation-centered activists from three continents, Rula Abu Dahou, Ronnie Kasrils, Leila Khaled, Sekou Odinga and Laura Whitehorn in a conversation with the four of us. We are unable to include, and thus credit, other more vulnerable members of our team at this time for fear of retaliation and reprisal, including by our institutions.
We were denied access to share this open classroom publicly. We were forced to record our event privately after the private tech company Zoom that controls all online communications at our public universities censored our event. For the second time in less than a year, Zoom relented to a massive Zionist campaign intended to silence any and all discussions of Palestine. Two other private tech companies, Facebook and Eventbrite, accepted the fraudulent threat of prosecution by the federal government and joined Zoom in silencing our event on free speech for Palestine. This censorship was enabled by the leaders of our own public universities who refused to stand up to the ban private tech corporations imposed on the content of our curriculum and facilitate the public live streaming of our open classroom. In this they emboldened the Zionist agenda of chilling of speech on Palestine. As a result, our students, colleagues and members of our communities were once again deprived of the opportunity to participate in the interactive session of oral history narratives from leaders of the 1960s struggles and beyond.
This development is an affront to everyone who subscribes to justice for all. It underpins the need for critical studies of Palestine and the integrity of liberatory intellectual praxis, including those of us who dedicated time and effort to develop a crucial, multigenerational conversation–our team of moderators, panelists, AMED researchers. Following the shut down of all publicity by Facebook and Eventbrite under the unsubstantiated claim that our open classroom was in violation of “community standards,” Facebook then went on to delete the entire AMED Studies page, erasing years of educational and activist content that has been a vital community resource and a necessary site for the survival of the program in the face of SFSU refusal to institutionally support the program. It is a chilling demonstration that corporate censorship within and outside the university knows no limits when it comes to Palestine and our right to speak, teach and advocate for the indivisibility of justice. The demand for the restoration of the AMED Facebook page and hold accountable tech companies for their censoring and silencing of pro-Palestinian voices become more urgent than ever.
On April 22nd, Zoom announced that it will block the use of its platform for our scheduled event, “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?” This was a repeat of the censorship of the original event on September 23rd, an open classroom of six SFSU classes of two of us, Rabab Abdulhadi, Director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies and Tomomi Kinukawa, Lecturer Faculty in the Department of Women and Gender (WGS) Studies. April 23rd was also crafted as an open classroom for AMED and our collaborative partners, the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), and the Council of University of California’s Faculty Associations (CUCFA). Sean Malloy initiated this collaboration as part of UC-Merced Free Speech Week in February but we had to push it to April due to COVID-related illnesses. Sean invited the co-moderators and the panelists to build upon the 2017 Merced Humanities Seminar Series he co-organized on Decolonizing Palestine for which Rabab Abdulhadi gave the inaugural lecture. CUCFA joined as a co-sponsor to express their strong opposition to the denial of academic freedom.
As in the previous instance, Zoom cited Leila Khaled’s virtual presence as the issue. But we know that this repeat cancellation was not about “material support for terrorism,” an argument that has already been effectively dispelled by legal experts. In fact, Zoom hosted Leila Khaled in a webinar less than a week after it censored our classroom last September. Since no changes had occurred within a week, it stands to reason that this had nothing to do with the faulty interpretation of the U.S. law and everything to do with the designed campaign to delegitimize Palestine as an integral part of the curriculum. This is not coincidental but reflects another desperate attempt by Israel’s apologists to cover up what can no longer be hidden. In her interview with NPR, the Executive Director of the Lawfare Project declared that their bullying was about the content of the curriculum.
Interestingly, it was only last week that Zoom loudly trumpeted its new approach to online instruction in which it transferred decision-making power over content to universities. However, this new “contract” included built-in censorship exceptions which would preserve the power that Zoom has already wielded over the teaching of Palestine. Despite condemnation, several resolutions by CFA, PSC-CUNY, and other academic pressures, Zoom refused to reverse its September 2020 censorship of academic discussions of Palestine, illustrating how the new approach continues to reinforce the existing status quo of colonial knowledge production by catering to the Israel lobby industry.
To proceed with our open classrooms in September 2020 and April 23rd, we sought the support of the leadership of our universities. We were hoping that they might reconsider the devastating effect their crumbling to Zionist pressure has on our teaching and the campus climate as a whole. Unfortunately, as if they have received the same memo, UC-Merced carbon-copied SFSU actions when our original September 23rd event was shut down. Neither set of administrators, at SFSU then and UC now, were willing to match their claims of support for academic freedom with deeds, despite (our) repeated requests and (their) repeated declarations. In denying our creative use of online instruction to build opportunities for our students to engage with luminaries that our programs could have never afforded to host in a face-to-face classroom, SFSU and UC administrators not only catered to Zionist demands for censorship; equally alarming is how they deepened the existing inequalities for students at public universities that were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 global pandemic.
In fact, as one of us argued, if a pipe breaks down in a classroom, or the space provided proved insufficient to accommodate student learning, the university is obligated to provide an alternative physical classroom. As has been the case of responses to the global pandemic, the responsibility to ensure access for students and faculty does not and should not end when the university decides to shift to a virtual context. If universities are genuinely committed to the standards to which they claim to uphold, they must hold accountable, not hide behind, private companies that decide to arbitrate who is allowed or not allowed to be a class guest speaker. Violation of freedom of speech and academic freedom is not an option that university administrators can cherry-pick to cater to donor pressure or powerful political lobbies.
Unfortunately, instead of using their resources to challenge the unconstitutionality and chilling effects of the “Material Support for Terrorism” U.S. law that has been repeatedly applied as a baton by the right wing/pro-Israel lobby, UC, CSU, and SFSU participated in silencing Palestine. By contrast, the UC Academic Senate has just passed a resolution “calling upon the university to file a pre-enforcement action, or to take similarly urgent steps, to clarify the reach of the federal material support statute.” It is past time for the broader movements for justice, within and outside the academy, to challenge the use of this problematic definition of “material support” as a means of silencing critical scholarship on and by communities who are the most vulnerable to racist and Islamophobic political persecution and programs who demand the decolonization of knowledge.
Universities also have a moral and ethical obligation to reject false and offensive attempts to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. They must cease enforcing academic and political silence by this erroneous conflation. San Francisco State and UC Merced not only refused to challenge Zoom’s censorship but in both instances of suppression of academic freedom they went a step ahead and sponsored events that politically and conceptually legitimized it. For example, on September 23, 2020, SFSU co-sponsored a rally that was designed to demonize our open classroom. The counter-event was organized by Hillel, Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), along with the consulate of the State of Israel. Instead of using its resources to respond to repeated demands to end Islamophobia and racism against Arab, Muslim and Palestinian students and faculty on campus, SFSU chose to place at the service of pro-Israel bullies both of its Division of Equity and Community Inclusion as well as its Office of Diversity, Student Equity, and Interfaith Programs. Cementing the credibility of this demonizing rally, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney not only spoke at this event but she used the false conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism to disparage the September 23rd open classroom before it even took place. Notwithstanding her insistence on support for academic freedom, President Mahoney’s hostile tone toward our open classroom rose as she changed audiences. While her September 5th message to the SFSU campus community stressed inclusion, President Mahoney eliminated any references to Islamophobia and anti-Blackness in her next public statement. In the open-editorial she published in the Jewish News of Northern California, Jweekly, President Mahoney dropped any references to Islamophobia and anti-Blackness and exclusively cited antisemitism, as an example of “hateful ideologies that marginalize people based on their identities, origins or beliefs.” In the third statement that was widely circulated by the SFSU media office, President Mahoney defended Zoom’s censorship on the very same day of the open classroom and the pro-Israel rally. Another statement was issued by President Mahoney’s office shortly before the April 23rd event was to take place.
UC Merced echoed SFSU. The university’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion sponsored an event on “AntiSemitism and our Principles of Community” that was planned for the same day as our event and that explicitly stated that “counter programming is a vital tool in addressing speech that can be harmful”, an implicit dog whistle Israel lobby groups consistently resort to in order to smear scholarship and advocacy for justice in/for Palestine. Without ever discussing the content, learning about the background or even waiting for the panelists to speak, two of whom are prominent anti-Zionist Jews, UC-Merced, like SFSU, acted as if the mere discussion of Palestine and the assertion of free speech for Palestine is somehow equivalent to antisemitism and would “naturally” be “harmful” to Jews. Here, both universities validated the slippery slope of assuming that all Jews accept Zionism as well as the Zionist false monolithic construction of Jewishness. Ironically, while our own event was shut down under external Israel lobby pressure, the “counter programming” was mounted as a normal everyday university programming, once again illustrating the imbalance of power that inevitably produces the silencing of Palestine.
Conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the Division of Equity and Community Inclusion at SFSU along with SFSU president uncritically and unethically supported Zionist colonial logic and accepted the false self-identification of Zionists as the “targeted, marginalized or discriminated” student groups. By validating colonial narratives, the UC and SFSU administrations abandoned their claims for impartiality and neutrality and affirmed their biased investment in the normalization of Israel settler-colonial violence and oppression against Palestinians and on our campuses. A thick archives of Jewish scholarship for which there is no space to fully cite here, underscores our argument that universities have the obligation to reject the equation that anti-Zionism and advocacy for justice in/for Palestine amounts to antisemitism.
The (in)action of our university administrators is not only hurtful but it speaks volumes of who matters at our campuses. University leaders could have easily sent a strong and loud message against years of failed Zionist efforts to erase and silence Palestinian and other narratives of gender, justice and resistance. However, they chose directly or indirectly to normalize and enable smear campaigns, threats and intimidation. Adding insult to injury, our administrators reproduced Islamophobic, Orientalist and anti-Palestinian discourses that have historically been deployed against Arab, Muslim and Palestinian women and feminists. In this, SFSU leadership participated in the delegitimization of scholarship, pedagogy and public engagement on Palestine studies in general and justice in/for Palestine in particular. Likewise, by sponsoring a program on antisemitism on the same day as our Palestine Free Speech event, UC-Merced provided a cover for the false accusations against us that deepened our vulnerability by equating antisemitism with Palestinian resistance, opposition to Zionism and for holding Israel accountable for its colonialism, racism and Apartheid.
This troubling repetition of the familiar pattern of double talk, which we experienced last September, amounts to no less than sanctioning the veto power of Zoom over the content of our classrooms. It cannot but be interpreted as a tacit endorsement of a new McCarthyist campaign by Israel and its apologists to shut down academic venues for discussion and debate. In doing so, UC Merced, like SFSU, reflected complicity in silencing Teaching of Palestine as an intellectual and pedagogical praxis framed within the indivisibility of justice. By literally enabling the turning off the microphone university administrators reversed efforts to decolonize the curriculum, as has been evident in the war against California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. This also hindered our contestation of the boundaries between the university and the academy by holding open classrooms in the spirit of ‘68 in the longest strike in U.S. student history, led by the Black Student Union (BSU) and Third World Liberation Front (TWLF).
The shutdown of the AMED Studies Facebook page is the most recent offensive against our scholarship and pedagogical praxis. It is but the latest transparent systematic effort to exert “massive punishment” against those of us who dare challenge the colonial borders and corporate-imposed campus boundaries. In an attempt to delegitimize Teaching Palestine as an integral part of a justice-centered curriculum, Israel’s apologists, including Christians United for Israel, Hasbara Fellowships, and CAMERA, have been trying for years to dismantle the AMED Studies program. Israel lobby groups such as Keneth Marcus Brandies Center, Israel on Campus Coalition, Middle East Forum, Stand With Us, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, B’nai B’rith International, and the Zionist Organization of America have sought to shut down the AMED Studies and its Facebook page.
As activists and scholars, we remain committed to place at the center of our work the voices of oppressed peoples who speak and act in support of their own liberation instead of using them as secondary props or photo opportunities to universities and corporations. Palestine is no exception to this notion of justice-centered knowledge production. We are more resolute than ever to our scholarly accountability and ethical commitments.
We shared our reflection on a slice of what has transpired. We now ask for your intervention to end this silencing of Palestine and other narratives of resistance and justice. We ask that you join us in demanding:
- An immediate restoration of the AMED Facebook page
- An end to all forms of censorship and bullying by Israel lobby groups who seek to shield Israel from criticism and accountability
- An end to corporate control over our curriculum
We Will Not Be Silenced!
We Renew Our Commitment to Teaching Palestine and the Indivisibility of Justice
