The campus war of words over antisemitism and the BDS movement

The Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 have highlighted sharp disagreements — among college and university leaders, students, faculty, alumni, politicians and the general public — over where to draw the line between protected speech and impermissible harassment or threats. Anger at the language and tactics of pro-Palestinian protesters and insistence on stronger action from colleges and universities to suppress antisemitism are resulting in demands for policies that, in some cases, conflict with the values of academic freedom and free speech.

Much of the rhetoric that divides college campuses, including claims that Israel is a “settler-colonialist” “apartheid” state guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, has its roots in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Proponents describe BDS as a campaign of economic pressure to compel Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, respect the rights of its Palestinian citizens and allow Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Critics condemn it as an antisemitic attempt to delegitimize Israel and an assault on “Jews who support Israel’s right to exist.”

Many experts trace the origins of the BDS movement to the controversial 2001 NGO Forum at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, which equated Zionism with racism and labeled Israel “a racist apartheid state” guilty of “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

The economic impact of BDS boycotts has been negligible, but it has attracted a following in academia, a “primary target.” A significant number of individual faculty and academic associations, including the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, and the National Women’s Studies Association, have supported boycotts of Israeli academic institutions. And student activists periodically push divestment resolutions, participate in an annual “Israel Apartheid Week,” and stage “die-ins” to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Colleges and university administrators have — rightly, in our view — rejected academic boycotts as threats to the free exchange of ideas. In 2017, the governors of every state denounced BDS as “antithetical to our values.” In 2019, the House of Representatives decried BDS for promoting “principles of collective guilt, mass punishment and group isolation.” Both the Trump and the Biden administrations have condemned BDS, and 38 states have adopted legislation requiring government contractors to affirm they do not boycott Israel or barring companies supporting BDS from receiving government contracts. Courts have found some anti-BDS laws to be unconstitutional infringements on free speech.

A loosely organized movement whose supporters do not always agree on means and ends, BDS has become “a proxy for the Israel-Palestinian conflict … with all the emotion the conflict stirs,” according to the New York Times in 2019. BDS backers note that boycotts have often been used to pursue civil rights goals and insist that BDS is a legitimate attempt to protect the rights of Palestinians. Critics respond that BDS is an inherently antisemitic effort to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.

Until last year, however, 84 percent of Americans had little knowledge of BDS. That changed with the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, as BDS proponents escalated their tactics and their rhetoric. At Brown University, 41 students who demanded that the school divest “from Israeli military occupation” were arrested and charged with willful trespass after refusing to leave an administration building after hours. At Cornell University, a group of protesters, after finding the university’s president guilty of complicity in genocide and apartheid in a mock trial, occupied the university’s main administration building.

At the University of Minnesota, the tenured faculty in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department posted a lengthy statement on the department’s website accusing Israel of a “genocidal war” against the Palestinians and endorsing “the call by Palestinian civil society for BDS.” And at Amherst College, 60 faculty called on the school to divest from companies that “directly profit … from the ongoing Israeli military operations that are laying Gazan life and society to waste.”

As anger at BDS-style rhetoric grows, demands to suppress antisemitism are growing with it. Government officials have threatened to defund colleges tolerating “anti-Semitic rants,” the Department of Education has opened investigations into antisemitism at a growing list of colleges and universities, and donors and alumni have demanded college policies prohibiting “hatred” as well as threats and violence. Brandeis University has pledged to cut ties to student organizations supporting the BDS movement because it “aims to dismantle the Jewish state.” In effect boycotting the boycotters, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville now requires guest speakers to sign a pledge declaring they do not support BDS.

The long-running controversy over BDS serves as a reminder, especially in the present heated environment, of the daunting challenge facing colleges and universities, which must fulfill two imperatives that are sometimes at odds.

Hate speech (even when it is protected speech) attacks the dignity and worth of those subjected to it, undermines their sense of physical and emotional safety and is therefore “inimical to learning.” Many Jewish, Muslim and Arab students now feel unsafe on college campuses, and their learning is at risk.

At the same time, as the American Association of University Professors noted in 1994, the principles of academic freedom and free speech are “the very precondition of the academic enterprise itself.” Those principles require tolerating even deeply offensive speech, unless it rises to the level of true threats, incitement to imminent unlawful action or harassment.

Managing this tension has been rendered more problematic because many colleges and universities have not applied free-expression policies consistently, leading to charges of hypocrisy and left-wing bias. Finding ways to foster a safe and inclusive learning environment without sacrificing their commitment to free and open inquiry may be the single most important — and most difficult — task facing higher education leaders today.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. David Wippman is President of Hamilton College.