Despite the challenges of remote learning, campus activism for Palestine charged forward this past year.

Faculty and staff at the University of Illinois call on the administration to reject equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism saying it not only carries grave implications for free speech, but also distracts from challenging the actual racism happening on Illinois campuses.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University have both passed historic resolutions calling for divestment from Israel. “These campus BDS victories are indicative of the rapidly changing tide we’re seeing across the United States,” the BDS Movement’s North America coordinator Olivia Katbi Smith told Mondoweiss. “Despite the escalating campaigns of repression on campuses and in the halls of government, it is becoming impossible to be ‘progressive except Palestine’, because it is becoming impossible to silence our movement.”

In recent weeks, the chancellors at the University of Illinois and University of Massachusetts have targeted pro-Palestinian voices on their respective campuses. The Illinois Student Government responded by passing a resolution titled “Condemning Ignorance of Racism and Equating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism,” but the attacks come amidst a wider crackdown on such perspectives which is being fueled by the Trump administration’s Department of Education.

Steven Salaita’s book “Israel’s Dead Soul” (2011) merits serious attention and ultimately effusive praise. It contains five critical essays that not only offer brilliant insight into the cultural and ideological practices of Zionism in both Israel and the United States, but implicitly explain why his conscientious efforts would be denigrated and rejected by the ostensibly liberal aspects of this culture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.