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
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.
Students who speak out against an ethno-nationalist political ideology founded in the late 19th century will now risk violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies.
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.
Ethically committed and politically informed anti-Zionism is foreclosed.
“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.
The document lists unambiguous antisemitism, like “minimizing or denying the Holocaust” or “demanding a person who is or is perceived to be Jewish or Israeli to state a position on Israel or Zionism,” alongside examples of arguably reasonable, nondiscriminatory political opposition, like rejecting adherents of Zionism from certain group activities.
Rejecting Zionists can only be discriminatory if “Zionist” is understood as a protected category, rather than a political ideology with defenders and opponents. Consider whether it would be discriminatory, for instance, if a campus protest group in favor of reproductive freedoms insisted that anti-abortion activists be excluded from organizing activities.
The example of Zionist exclusions given by the guide is born out of the last year of protests. Numerous Gaza solidarity encampments around the country sought to exclude Zionist speakers last semester, provoking unsurprising censure. Suggestions that such exclusions were driven by antisemitism were, however, reliably meritless, not least given the significant percentage of Jewish students and faculty participating in and organizing the encampments.
While, as the NYU Faculty for Justice in Palestine noted, the logic of the conduct guidance could be applied to an array of nationalist ideologies beyond Zionism, the immediate threat of such policies is to those speaking out for Palestinian liberation during a genocidal war. It is consistently pro-Palestinian speech that faces exceptional repression.
Last April, NYU was among the many universities to call in police to arrest students and faculty members participating in protest Gaza solidarity encampments. In what the NYU Student Government Assembly described in a statement as the “administration’s reliance on violent force to disperse a peaceful protest,” the police raid led to over 100 arrests of NYU students and workers. Over 2,000 arrests were made on campuses nationwide in consistently brutal police raids, invited by universities against their own students and staff in the name of “safety.”
“The policy is designed to facilitate the administration’s continued repression of pro-Palestinian speech and protest on campus.”
“The policy is designed to facilitate the administration’s continued repression of pro-Palestinian speech and protest on campus,” said Zach Samalin, an assistant professor of English at NYU, of the new conduct guide. Samalin was arrested alongside students and colleagues in the April police raid.
He told me that he understands the conduct guide as “enshrining Zionism — for the first time at any U.S. university, as far as I know — as an ‘identity’ in need of protection under the Civil Rights Act instead of a political ideology that is being used to justify genocidal violence and unfathomable destruction in Palestine.”
Conflation as a Tactic
Conflations of anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become commonplace on campus, often relying on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Jewish bigotry.
Though the IHRA’s expansive definition has been embraced by the pro-Israel political establishment in the U.S., over 100 Israeli and international civil society organizations have urged the United Nations to reject it for its conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
By spuriously specifying Zionism as a part of a protected category, however, NYU’s conduct guide goes even further than the IHRA.
That the school would take this tack now is no accident. The new conduct guide comes in the wake of federal litigation brought against NYU by three pro-Israel Jewish students, who accused the university of failing to intervene in an atmosphere they said made them feel unsafe. The university and the plaintiffs reached a settlement, announced in July, in which the university agreed to pay the students an undisclosed sum of money, and agreed to create a new administrative position of Title VI coordinator to “oversee compliance with Title VI, including ensuring that NYU responds adequately and consistently to allegations of discrimination and harassment based on all protected traits.”
The lawsuit was part of a wave of similar litigation facing universities, including Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California, Los Angeles, adding to months of political and economic pressure targeting universities, weaponizing claims of antisemitism to silence anti-Israel speech and expression.
As the NYU settlement was released, the executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, a group committed to implementing pro-Israel policies on campus, said on X that her organization “looks forward to continuing to work with @nyuniversity administrators & officials across the school in order to develop more best practices around these goals & to support their full implementation!”
While the totalizing onslaught and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank continue with unconditional U.S. backing, universities across the country have hurried to prevent a return to last semester’s student-led protests — not by meeting protesters’ reasonable demands for institutional divestment, but by doubling down on anti-protest regulations and groundless claims that Palestinian solidarity makes Jewish students unsafe.
As I have previously said, universities should not be validating feelings of fear based in false conflations, but they should instead be committed to the work of demystification. Above all, educators should work to cast out the pernicious myths that Palestinian freedom is an inherent threat to Jewish safety, or that it is somehow discriminatory to express opposition to an ethnostate forged and maintained through the violent displacement, dispossession, and slaughter of a people.
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