The recent avalanche of civil rights lawsuits in response to Palestine campus protests is the result of an intentional Israel advocacy strategy: criminalizing anti-Zionist politics by contorting the idea of civil rights.
Universities welcomed their students back this fall with a set of policies designed to silence pro-Palestine speech and preemptively criminalize protest. Fortified by strategies from the security industry, they provide an administrative alibi for further militarizing campuses. Yet there’s another, more insidious move at play, one belied by the fact that some universities house these new repressive policies under the guise “free speech” and student’s rights. Across the county, universities are employing the right-wing tactic of weaponizing rights to quash dissent. In the process, we are seeing how the pretense of civil rights mobilizes a machinery of repression aimed to eradicate the movement for Palestinian liberation.
The effort we are seeing play out today is decades in the making – a strategy of the Eurocentric, anti-left organizations that have led Zionist politics. It has built deep roots in party politics, in civil institutions like universities, and among the corporate mega-donor class. Now the Zionist movement is joined by the well-resourced organizations of the white and religious right.
After many decades in which major U.S. Zionist institutions like the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have presented themselves as civil rights organizations, virtually all have now openly declared their alliances with racist, right-wing political movements. Together, they are weaponizing notions of rights and “protecting people”— using civil rights complaints as a tool to contort the meanings of protective language, demand political repression, and create financial risk for universities if they don’t go along with it. Their disdain for progressive concepts and simultaneous willingness to co-opt them finds gruesome resonance in the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), whose board of advisors includes a former Intelligence Officer in the Israeli Air Force and the Chief Censor of the State of Israel as well as a retired litigation partner deeply involved in Israel advocacy, and overlaps with major Zionist organizations including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Academic Engagement Network/Israel on Campus Coalition, the American Jewish Committee, the Combat Antisemitism Movement, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. ISGAP’s director recently proclaimed that “intersectionality is actually a concept that we can use to fight a billion Muslims and all liberal people in the western world.” Indeed, the “war on woke” championed by the Trump-inspired white right is now the driving logic of Zionist groups who are leading public conversation on antisemitism, training university administrators, and advising public officials. Their aim is to produce arights-industrial complex that polices, punishes, and requires institutions, from universities to police to employers, to enforce its repressions.
Title VI as a mechanism for weaponizing rights
Federal anti-discrimination law known as Title VI (which prohibits “shared ancestry” discrimination) has become a superhighway for Zionist and right-wing groups trafficking in the weaponization of rights since October 7. Using Title VI, complainants are seeking to codify baseless claims and contortions of notions of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that have failed in other venues: for instance, claims that talking about Palestine is discriminatory toward Jews, that Zionism is itself a form of Jewish ethnic identity, or that Zionists must be “included” in anti-Zionist groups. Attacks have focused on universities and K-12 schools because Trump-era policy makes educational institutions especially vulnerable. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), during the reign of Trump appointee Kenneth Marcus, attached Title VI to the “IHRA definition of antisemitism.” Now, as OCR evaluates an avalanche of spurious antisemitism complaints, it must “consider” the thoroughly debunked claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitism.
At the heart of Zionist groups’ weaponization of rights is the pernicious and dangerous claim that Palestinian freedom (and political speech that calls for it) is a threat to Jewish safety. A close read of the OCR complaints about antisemitism makes clear this overall strategy: the complaints center objection to Palestine liberation protests, and use protest as a foil for demanding DEI protections for Zionism. A complaint filed against the University of Cincinnati, for example, lists “hate speech being spewed by individuals rallying on campus with the intent to ‘free-Palestine’” as evidence that “Jewish students at the University of Cincinnati are no longer safe or welcome.” The alleged hate speech is the “intent to free Palestine”, clarifying that these claims are actually aimed at eradicating the movement for Palestinian liberation on university campuses.
The avalanche of Title VI claims filed in the wake of campus activism seeks to codify policies that shut down speech and organizing on Palestine. In many cases, antisemitism complainants allege that they are filing on behalf of “all Jewish and Israeli students.” The conflation of “Jewish and Israeli” students, and the claim that all Jewish and Israeli students are covered by the complaint, invents a fictional, singular identity and uses it to erase real people and their identities – particularly anti-Zionist and anti-genocide Jews. Most, if not all,encampments included Jewish students standing in solidarity with the fight for Palestinian liberation. (In fact, Jewish students identified encampments as important spaces for Jewish communal practice, especially because they were marginalized in Hillels and other Zionist Jewish spaces on campus.) The conflation also instrumentalizes the protections that do clearly cover Jewish ethnic and religious identity, by trying to substitute in its place the ethnonational colonial identity “Israeli,” one that is actually “deeply anti-Jewish,” given the anti-Jewish foundations of Zionism.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a main target in these complaints, which operate as if merely mentioning the group offers evidence of antisemitism. Given the ADL and Brandeis letter calling for university presidents to investigate and criminalize SJP chapters on baseless charges of “material support” for terrorism, it is unsurprising that SJP is featured in the majority of complaints; in the Chapman University complaint, for instance, it is labeled plainly – and incorrectly – as an “anti-Jewish hate group.” Indeed, much of the language in these Title VI claims are echoed in House Republicans’ demands that colleges and universities protect Jewish students from antisemitism, even though they are actually part of a right-wing strategy to dismantle DEI and erode civil rights.
Many of the complaints share the claim that the utterance of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an obvious and uncontested example of antisemitism. Collectively, they represent a strategy that willfully misrepresents protected speech as an instance of discrimination. As multiple scholars and authors have shown, the call for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” is just that – a call for freedom. Mischaracterizations claiming that this call for freedom “would necessarily lead to the mass annihilation of Jewish Israelis is rooted in deeply racist and Islamophobic assumptions about who the Palestinians are and what they want.” When Marc Lamont Hill was criticized [and fired!] for using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” he noted, as many others have, that the phrase has been used by “a long history of political actors—liberal and radical, Palestinian and Israeli—who have called for their particular vision of justice in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” For example, the phrase has also been used as part of the official Likud party platform and is actually an overtly eliminationalist call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians “when spoken on behalf of the Israeli state.” In fact such attacks on the phrase “from the river to the sea,” align with, and exacerbate, the unprecedented surge in racist attacks, harassment, and repression against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities in the diaspora. Since Israel’s most recent onslaught in the Gaza Strip began, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities in the U.S. have beenmurdered, shot at, beaten with deadly weapons, targeted in hit-and-run incidents, stalked, harassed, threatened with murder and sexual assault, and experienced vandalism, including the burning of mosques. These intimidation tactics are designed to silence Palestinian narratives, truth, and speech, and they contribute to a widespread culture of racist demonization.
Title VI as an entry point for attacks far beyond the university
Although OCR is intended to protect the rights of campus communities, anyone can file a complaint – and anyone has. Trump-era policy makes universities vulnerable to spurious complaints that rely on the IHRA definition, and universities have been willing to enact repression in response to those complaints. As a result, complaints have become a bludgeon for the use of right-wing and Zionist advocates far beyond campuses. Among the fifty-nine complaints published OCR, at least twenty were filed by advocacy groups with no connection to students or university employees. Thirteen of these were filed by one person – Zachary Marshall of Campus Reform, and three were filed by the Defense of Freedom Institute, whose principle activities in 2023 were to oppose trans inclusion in Title IX and to agitate against Biden’s plan to forgive student loans. Others were filed by outside Zionist advocacy groups including StandWithUs, Mothers Against College Antisemitism, the Lawfare Project, and the Brandeis Center. All of Marshall’s complaints conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism; they all mention Students for Justice in Palestine and identify words such as “occupation” and “apartheid” as well as the chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as instances of antisemitic hate speech that universities have failed to curtail and/or sanction. In short, they advance the one repressive, violent claim that to call for Palestinian liberation in the face of agenocidal campaign waged by a settler colonial regime constitutes harassment and discrimination against Jewish students in the US.
The weaponization of rights also activates an array of financial logics – well beyond the pressure on universities from megadonors – to silence discussion of Palestine. Lawfare, a campaign by Zionist organizations to entangle critics of Israel in lawsuits, has worked by imposing hefty legal costs on those who are forced to defend themselves. For the last decade, those lawsuits have often fizzled out because their claims were spurious. But as Title VI complaints have become a pathway to codify the IHRA definition, private lawsuits mirroring those complaints have been able to win financial settlements. A recent federal suit against NYU – in which the unserious allegations of “antisemitism” included a Zionist Jewish student being called white – was settled with an undisclosed payout. In turn, as contrived antisemitism lawsuits become more winnable and rapidly proliferate as the tactic of an organized, well-resourced Zionist movement, they produce new calculations for risk management. Insurance companies, which provide liability coverage to universities, set premiums based partly on prior years’ exposure to discrimination claims. More lawsuits means both higher premiums and more pressure from insurance companies to crack down, as they try to mitigate their risk. These calls have already begun, with insurers’ recommendation that universities set “clear” (restrictive) policies on “time, place, and manner” of speech, and establish task forces to assess and address campus climate.
While students were away, university administrators undertook risk management with a vengeance. Administrators have dramatically restricted speech and granted themselves the case-by-case right to decide what activities fall in or out of bounds, and partnered with security firms to harden campuses against students who resist. In practice, these tools have been used to curtail Palestine-related speech, while they are often unenforced in other cases. Many universities have also implemented task forces on antisemitism. The task forces, too, are risk management strategies that underwrite suppression of calls for Palestinian liberation. Columbia University’s antisemitism task force report was denouncedby faculty for “misrepresent[ing the] meaning and implications [of alleged antisemitic incidents]… to justify interference in the institution’s governance and operations.” Some of the new “risk management” policies directly weaponize notions of rights. NYU’s decision to declare “Zionist” a protected class, which appears to be a response to last year’s lawsuit, expressly prohibits speech that criticizes the enthno-nationalist political ideology.
The fact is that the repressive policies released in concert across university campuses this fall, along with their measures to assure swift and effective silencing of pro-Palestinian speech, go far to achieve a goal that Israel advocacy groups have advanced for decades: they set the stage for criminalizing anti-Zionist speech through the mechanism of civil rights. This kind of weaponization of rights is actually a long-standing strategy of both Zionist organizations and the right. Let’s be clear that their aims – reflected through the horrors of the Palestinian genocide and US repression – are not separate. The efforts to codify the IHRA definition has been an ongoing strategy to weaponize rights, and it has not had clear success – it is opposed by the ACLU and other mainstream rights groups and has been rejected widely, even as it has also creeped into policy. The impacts of this effort were on full display in the recent Senate hearing on hate crimes. While openly expressing racism against the director of the Arab American Institute, who was exhorted to “hide [her] head in a bag,” or who was simply shut down, cut off, and dismissed, Senators pursued a line of questioning that manipulated fabrications that Jewish students are unsafe on college campuses in order to call for defunding universities, especially DEI offices, and to support McCarthy-like claims that college protests are the result of foreign influence.
Now, Title VI has become a vehicle for this machinery. It is intervening in the realms of law, policy, and teaching, and it seeks to expand protected identities in dangerous ways. Through the false claims of this mechanism, too, it produces violence, unemployment, homelessness, defunding of education. We have to fight it through a broad spectrum of strategies, both on our campuses and beyond.
Find a toolkit for opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism here.