‘Faculty for Justice in Palestine’, has been formed and is growing fast on campuses in the US. Cary Nelson and Brett Kaufman argue FJP is an antizionist, antisemitic, and anti-American organisation and announce here the formation of an alternative network, Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism. Nelson is a former President of the American Association of University Professors and Kaufman is Assistant Professor of the Classics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Introduction
In the weeks and months since Hamas carried out its horrific 7 October murder spree in Israel, we have, paradoxically, seen the radical left in academia double down on its antizionism, sometimes voicing an ecstatic enthusiasm not only for the fact of the massacre but also for the tactics Hamas used. Within days, ‘globalize the intifada’ and ‘glory to our martyrs’ appeared on signs and on banners in marches. In the wake of October 7, these slogans praise murder and long for more. A growing segment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators no longer ask for a state alongside Israel but openly seek to destroy it. In the streets and on campus it is now common to hear ‘from the river to the sea’ and ‘we don’t want no two states, we want all of it’ both called out as demands for eliminating the Jewish state. In support of this development, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has helped support the formation of a parallel anti-Zionist, antisemitic, and anti-American organisation, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP). Within months, scores of chapters had organised on American campuses, among them Harvard, NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, and ten University of California campuses. We expect chapters to form in other countries as well.
We believe faculty sympathetic to Israel and the principles of academic freedom and democracy need to organise locally and nationally for the long haul. We recommend the formation of campus chapters of a new initiative, Faculty for Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism. It would encourage fact-based political discussion and work to counter the threats to academic freedom displayed in the FJP manifesto. We will begin with a section on the recent background to the current campus climate, continue with suggestions for the new initiative’s guiding principles, and conclude with an analysis of the manifesto of the FJP chapter on our own campus, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
Background
For a number of years we have witnessed an alarming rise of antisemitism worldwide. Throughout that time, American campuses have been sites for promoting antisemitism and advancing its pernicious claims and rationales. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine have played a major role in that movement, pushing for anti-Israel divestment initiatives and urging a boycott of Israeli universities. Meanwhile, antizionist faculty research and advocacy continues to inspire anti-Israel and anti-American activism on campus and elsewhere. Since the Hamas massacres in Israel on 7 October 2023, we have witnessed all those trends escalate dramatically.
Increased anti-Israel political activity has substantially blurred—and sometimes erased—the already unstable distinction between antizionism and antisemitism. Accusations of genocide levelled against Israel are now nearly universal in campus debate and polemic about the war in Gaza. The suggestion that Jews who support Israel are implicated in genocide has helped persuade students and faculty that their physical safety is no longer assured.
And some troubling campus developments are new. In October 2023 the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) called for the creation of local Faculty for Justice on Palestine (FJP) chapters. Within months, scores of chapters were in operation on American campuses, providing an organised voice for faculty who oppose Zionism, free speech, and democracy both on campus and in the community. Their goal is to exploit academic freedom to spread misinformation and indoctrinate the student body with anti-American and antisemitic hatred. See below for an analysis the FJP’s founding manifesto.
While the large anti-Israel demonstrations on campus and elsewhere may diminish or disappear when the 2023/24 war in Gaza ends, antizionism is unlikely to return to its pre-war rhetorical and organizational status. Short of the realisation of Hamas and its campus apologists’ goal of eradicating the State of Israel, we are likely to face intense antizionism and antisemitism for the foreseeable future.
Ad hoc faculty organising of groups that basically dissolve when an incident has passed will no longer give us sufficient local resources to use in combatting these forces. National and international groups can provide critical knowledge and assistance, but they cannot be expected to respond to every local need and occasion. Moreover, they cannot have the same impact on campus and community opinion. Our aim is to encourage the formation of independent local chapters that can (if they choose) network as part of a national organization, ideally linked to equivalent groups in other countries. The national group would not exercise control over local chapters. Both local and national conversations will need to be continuing parts of the process. We will want to share what strategies work and to inspire and support one another. Local chapters will likely benefit from establishing their own websites. Their general membership lists can be confidential, but a local executive committee that can run day-to-day operations is likely necessary. The executive committee’s names will need to be public if the chapter is to be fully effective. A local chapter will be able to do more things if it has financial support, but a national group simply cannot function without adequate funding.
There are faculty members at UIUC and elsewhere who are committed to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, who endorse free debate about Israeli policies, who believe in and value academic freedom, and who also know that incitement to violence and virulent antisemitism can cause profound harm. They need a collective voice. It is imperative that local faculty can choose to be in free and unfettered communication with their colleagues elsewhere.
We have drafted this statement both to use in our organising efforts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and as a model for faculty at other campuses. Local chapters may borrow from this statement and adapt it to their circumstances. Campus faculty may well want to address local contexts and histories in doing so.
Proposed Governing Principles and Core Activities
– To foster and protect American values of tolerance, pluralism, freedom of expression, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and individual liberty.
– To depoliticise UIUC along the lines of the University of Chicago Principles of Free Expression, and lead our peers as an institution of higher education dedicated to the search for the truth and to the pro-facts tradition that makes the search possible.
– To respond when academic freedom is abused by faculty who spread misinformation, hoaxes, and falsehoods, and who glorify violence against Jews or anyone else.
– To do right by our students by creating an academic environment that discourages indoctrination, by urging UIUC to address the challenge of propagandistic and factually false curricula and events.
– To promote educational initiatives that counter the impact of student and faculty organisations and platforms that spread hate and misinformation.
– To initiate a conversation about the desirability of the University adopting the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism, which was adopted by the US State Department and many European countries, specifying it will be used as an educational tool, not as a disciplinary or speech code. The definition specifies that criticism of Israeli policies that is comparable to that applied to other countries does not qualify as antisemitic. On the other hand, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany does count as antisemitic.
– To aid students in understanding the difference between genocide (deliberate targeting of civilians in order to destroy an entire people) and collateral damage (when civilians are tragically caught in wartime crossfire). In their mission statement as advertised UIUC FJP accuse Israel of ‘genocide’. Claiming that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is a vile kind of misinformation, a ‘moral inversion’ as put by UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis. United States officials have praised Israel’s self-defence strategy as exceeding moral standards in the protection of noncombatant lives. While the IDF publicly rejects valuing people differently based on their ‘ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender or status’, the Hamas charter calls on its member to kill every Jew hiding ‘behind trees and stones’, a jihadist call that became a horrifying reality for the attendees of the Nova music festival. The slaughter, decapitation, and rape of unarmed adults, children, and babies just because they are Jewish at the hands of Hamas is the actual genocide, and it is in the interest of the terrorists and their campus allies to confuse and obfuscate public opinion by declaring the opposite.
– To monitor and address potentially antisemitic incidents on campus and in the community and provide resources for reporters and others seeking faculty perspectives on such incidents.
– To support events and educational initiatives that enhance campus or community knowledge about Jewish or Israeli history or combat antisemitism.
– To provide objective, facts-based commentary on events in Israel and on American foreign policy in the Middle East for local or national reporters, faculty, students, and community members.
– To defend Israel’s right of self-determination – the only country in the Middle East that enshrines equal rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ communities – against delegitimisation tactics employing debunked conspiracy theories denying 3000 years of Jewish indigeneity in their homeland of Zion.
– To help expose university funding sources coming from foreign governments which support terror, and which actively oppress women, LGBTQ+ communities, as well as minorities and pre-Islamic and pre-Arab indigenous communities of the Middle East and North Africa such as Baha’i, Copts, Kurds, Druze, Yazidis, Assyrians, Maronites, Amazigh, Armenians, Greeks, and others.
– To educate our campus community on the differences between South African Apartheid and the status of Arabs in Israel. In Apartheid South Africa, the Black population was not granted citizenship, while in modern Israel, Arabs not only serve in the democratically elected parliament, but the United Arab List (Ra’am) was a part of the majority governing coalition in the 36thgovernment of Israel from 2021-2022. Arabs serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Drawing such parallels is not only historically inaccurate, but also dilutes education on actual apartheid regimes.
– To respect the right of persecuted minorities to define their own terms of discrimination, for example, the Jewish right to categorise calls for the elimination of Israel as antisemitic.
– To reinforce our profound shock and horror at the extraordinary violence carried out by Hamas terrorists and their affiliates in Israel on 7 October 2023: the wanton murder of unarmed men, women, and children; the intimate assaults on families in their homes; the rapes and violent sexual mutilations carried out in violation of all international norms and standards for human conduct; the despicable desecrations of the dead; the kidnapping of civilians in violation of the laws of war; the distribution of videos detailing Hamas murder sprees. These are not valid forms of resistance or steps toward political liberation. They must not be normalised.
– To reject unconditionally the normalisation of rape and violent genital mutilation of women and girls as legitimate revolutionary strategies. These and other central features of Hamas’s 7 October assault have been glorified by the terrorist group’s allies on the UIUC campus.
– To call for progressive spaces on campus to accept LGBTQ+ Zionists and not make them fear for their safety. To reject allegations against Israel of ‘pinkwashing’, the cynical accusation that it is wrong for Jews to be proud that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country with legal protections for LGBTQ+ peoples. In fact, Israel has granted asylum to LGBTQ+ Palestinians, to help them escape violence and oppression in the West Bank and Gaza. Their hard earned sexual freedom in Israel should not be condemned only because it was Jews who granted it. Should we not champion Israel’s stance on LGBTQ+ rights, inspiring other countries to do the same? The alleged pinkwashing of gay rights by Israel is better than the blood-shedding of gays by the other countries surrounding it.
– To encourage assistance to students, staff, and faculty traumatised and threatened by the events of and subsequent to 7 October 2023. That includes women and other community members from other countries who have special reason to feel violated or at risk.
The Deeply Troubling UIUC Faculty for Justice in Palestine Agenda
The UIUC FJP chapter’s principles and action agenda are posted on the UIUC Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) Instagram page. The numbered action agenda’s recommendations conclude with items, 11 and 12, which give the greatest clarity to the FJP’s intended impact on internal campus relations. The FJP aims for nothing less than a complete polarisation of faculty members’ interactions with one another. Normal collegial relations would come to an end, and departmental functioning would either disintegrate or be based on the exclusion of most Jewish members. The level of personal and rhetorical aggression is such that it only stops short of actual violence. We are left with the sense that actual violence would be the only further tactic available.
The two declarations are headed by demands that should widely offend faculty in higher education in Western liberal democracies. Number 11 is headed in bold with FJP’s expression of contempt for civil dialogue; number 12 opens with the demand that Zionists who support the need to defeat Hamas be shunned:
- Stop Pandering to Customs of Civility: You don’t need to condemn ‘Hamas.’ You don’t need to ‘affirm Israel’s right to exist.’ You don’t need to bang on about ‘democratic values.’ You don’t need to be ‘nuanced.’ You need to defend the people suffering a genocide. Not a single one of them is asking for anything else. (‘Who is my audience?’ keep asking yourself. If the answer is anything other than ‘the dispossessed,’ then recalibrate your ethics and try again.)
- Shun the Genocidaires: Those rationalising or cheering on the genocide are personae non grata from here on out. No co-authoring articles with them. No sitting together on conference panels. No buddy-buddy bullshit on the networking circuit. Sure, sometimes circumstance will force you onto the same committee or whatever, but, if the association is voluntary, then decline the opportunity and find colleagues who don’t celebrate mass murder.
The 12th point opens with what amounts to a slander, disparaging campus ‘genocidaires’ The loss of life in Gaza is tragic, but it is not genocide. Those ‘rationalising’ the genocide obviously includes all who decry civilian deaths but feel Gazans can have no viable economic or political future unless Hamas is removed from power. The FJP demands that people cease their normal collegial interactions with those so condemned and deemed ethically defective. In majority Hamas-allied programs, that could mean ostracising all dissenting faculty and students. Refusing departmental duties because of political differences with colleagues would further polarise departments and lead to organised shunning of those holding minority opinions. Committee service, one might note, is a standard prerequisite for promotion and tenure. Are political beliefs to free candidates from those responsibilities? If the answer is ‘yes’, the entire premise of faculty service as we know it will collapse, as individual faculty members will refuse to conduct service with others whose backgrounds they despise. As such, discrimination in the faculty ranks will be normalised.
It should be apparent that academic freedom would be severely compromised by the FJP’s radically discriminatory agenda. If a department honoured it, that department would be a zone in which academic freedom no longer functioned at all. As antizionism has escalated in the wake of 7 October that is likely already the case within a few disciplines. If the SJP/FJP ideology spreads to a group of departments in the humanities or social sciences on a given campus, the institution would be in crisis, having betrayed the core principle governing higher education. A Faculty For Academic Freedom and Against Antisemitism chapter should exist in part to prevent that from happening.
The UIUC FJP chapter predictably endorses the entire BDS agenda, including the comprehensive Palestinian ‘right of return’ that could make Israeli Jews a religious minority. It amounts to a dog whistle calling for the elimination of the Jewish state. As its 2nd action item specifies, ‘We encourage academic and cultural boycotts of Israel and Israeli academic institutions, both of which have been responsible for maintaining apartheid and colonial occupation.’ The comprehensive academic boycott that both FJP and SJP endorse would necessarily target both Jews and Arabs at Israeli universities, creating a twofold violation of American law prohibiting discrimination based on religious background. The reprehensible 3rd item makes the FJP attack on those opposing academic boycotts personal: ‘Reluctance to boycott is no longer acceptable. It is the baseline of political decency. Anybody who continues to oppose or dissemble about academic boycott should be regarded as untrustworthy on everything else.’ We cast our lot with academic freedom and opposition to academic boycotts. We endorse the principle that maintaining dialogue among academics worldwide, facilitating the free international exchange of ideas and research results, and maintaining student access to institutions of their choice are values fundamental to academic freedom. The University is supposed to be the place where civil discourse and respectful dialogue prevail, even and especially if this is not the case anywhere else.
There are a number of additional unfortunate polemical passages scattered here and elsewhere in the manifesto. Number 11 disparages ‘nuance,’ hardly the best recommendation for faculty members. It also puts ‘Hamas’ in quotation marks, implying that the Hamas classified as a terrorist group and castigated for its monstrous conduct on 7 October is a false political construct. The real Hamas is presumably the one SJP has celebrated. At other points we are urged to ‘gum up the machinery of genocide’ and ‘raise hell about the abomination that is the Zionist entity,’ and we are told that ‘shitting on Palestinians is a reliable method of upward mobility.’ One wonders what audience they had in mind with this rhetoric.
The 5th FJP action item references ‘the 75+ years of Israel’s occupation in the context of settler colonialism and Zionist ideology,’ making it clear that the occupation stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Academic freedom protects faculty members’ right to hold these views and to form a voluntary organisation to promote them. But our collective educational goals will benefit from an organized vehicle for alternative perspectives. We intend Faculty For Academic Freedom And Against Antisemitism to fill that role.
Finally, we should point out that FJP and SJP are allied and collaborating groups. SJP has been in the lead organising pro-Hamas demonstrations since 7 October at UIUC and on campuses throughout the US. FJP also supports the SJP arguments that lend antisemitic connotations to its project. Action item 5 invokes the ‘interlocking systems of oppression underpinned by global white supremacy and racial capitalism’ and adds ‘We understand the absolute urgency of drawing these transnational connections in the current moment of escalating genocide.’ The implications are clear: the war in Gaza is a genocidal project carried out in the service of a racist, white supremacist Israeli state. Once again, faculty are entitled to make these claims, but we need to emphasise that many Jews and others who believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and those who care about historical facts find them deeply offensive.
