By Jeremy Salt

This is the second part of an article by Professor Jeremy Salt, delving into the relentless backlash faced by those who dare to speak out for Palestine.

In the US, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum and his pernicious ‘campus watch’ student espionage unit has long served as a weapon for the harassment of academics critical of Israel.

Pipes should be happy with what he sees now. Since October 7, 2023, it has become impossible to speak openly about Palestine. Lectures have to be given in the knowledge that spies are in the classroom to report any remark they find unacceptable to the nearest campus or off-campus Israeli lobby group. Surveillance has the same effect on social media. University administrations, state governments, and the mainstream media, with backing in Congress, have joined forces to punish student activists and professors for speaking out against genocide.

The internet site Truth Out estimates that about 80 percent of the complaints made to the federal education department’s Office of Human Rights have come from conservative and Zionist legal advocacy groups claiming universities were failing to adequately deal with ‘anti-semitic’ incidents.

In spring 2024, New York Governor Kathy Hochul ordered a review of alleged anti-semitism at the City University of New York (CUNY). It found that while the university was poorly prepared to deal with such complaints, they came from “a small vocal minority” and did not amount to a widespread problem.

University professors investigated for pro-Palestinian statements include Ruha Benjamin of Harvard and Kathleen Franke of Columbia’s law faculty, who was forced into early retirement after she gave an interview accusing students who had served in the IDF of “having been known” to harass Palestinians and other students. The harassment of Professor Franke included death threats at her home and emails hoping she would be raped or murdered.

Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies scholars, Joseph Massad, Muhammad Abdou, George Saliba, and Hamid Dabashi, were targeted over months by Zionist lobby groups on and off campus alleging ‘anti-semitism.’

At the University of Arizona, two professors were suspended, and at the University of Southern California, a third was ordered to teach remotely “while being investigated” after making statements critical of Israel.

In Pennsylvania, Professor Maura Finkelstein was suspended by Muhlenberg College after sharing a social media post from a Palestinian-American poet saying “do not cower to Zionism.”

The university said classroom discussion “was also involved,” but according to Professor Finkelstein, “I wasn’t fired for anything I said in the classroom. I was fired because of a charge brought by a student I had never met, let alone taught, who had been surveying my social media accounts for months. This isn’t about student safety, this is about silencing dissent. We are witnessing a new McCarthyism and we should all be terrified of its implications.”

She said thousands of bot-generated emails had been sent every minute over 24 hours to her, the university administration, local news outlets, and politicians.

In Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) described the “chilling effect” on people speaking out in support of the Palestinians, not just academics but journalists, medical interns ‘flagged’ to potential hiring committees, police, a government analyst, a nephrologist, a school principal, and a restaurant employee, a cross-section that indicates widespread public outrage at the onslaught on Gaza.

In the UK, the targets of Zionist vilification include the high-profile case of David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bristol University who was sacked in 2021 “because he did not meet the standards of behavior expected of university staff.” In fact, he was dismissed because of his defense of Palestinian rights, his opposition to Zionism, and his description of Israel as the enemy of world peace.

Miller was investigated by the police as well as the university. In February 2024, an employment tribunal found he had been unfairly dismissed and accused the university of discrimination.

A further case is the slander that followed the appointment of Dr. Shahd Abusalama to a lecturer’s position at Sheffield Hallam University. Dr. Abusalama was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. She was sitting mid-term exams in high school when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, killing 1,383 people, including 333 children.

Three days after starting work in January 2022, the university suspended her after opening an investigation into comments she made on social media when defending a first-year student’s poster inscribed ‘Stop the Palestinian holocaust.’

In June 2022, a further complaint was made, again theoretically putting her in violation of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) code, which Sheffield Hallam had signed on to and which in several passages conflates resistance to occupation and the Israeli state with anti-semitism.

Cleared by the university of the accusations against her but repeatedly under attack by the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish News, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Dr. Abusalama had had enough and sought a conciliatory process that would allow her to leave the university.

This ended in an out-of-court settlement in October 2024, with the confidential non-disclosure agreement breached by the leaking of its terms to the same news outlets that had been accusing her of anti-semitism. The intimidation and silencing of Palestinian or pro-Palestinian voices was described by the conservative Times Higher Education Supplement as creating a ‘culture of fear’ with a “chilling effect” on debate, the same phrase used by Canada’s CBC.

The victims include Nadeem Crowe, a British-Jordanian doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London. When Dr. Crowe arrived for work on August 14, 2024, he was told he had been suspended with immediate effect for “potentially upsetting” social media posts about Israel and Gaza.

He was told they were screenshots, without the hospital’s ‘responsible officer’ specifying which ones. Requests for further information were ignored as was a letter from his solicitor. Neither did he have a response from the employment tribunal until it told him, “We don’t understand your claim.”

With no help coming from any institution he approached, Dr. Crowe ultimately filed an FOI application. The reply revealed that a complaint of anti-semitism had been made by someone whose name had been redacted. By this time, the way he had been treated for opposing genocide plus the knowledge that his social media posts were being policed led him to leave the National Health Service.

Police intimidation includes arrests at street demonstrations followed by prosecution under the Terrorism Act. Activists detained and interrogated include Richard Medhurst, Kit Klarenberg, and Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada, whose executive director, Ali Abunimah, was arrested on the street in Zurich on January 25 ahead of a speaking engagement and taken into custody ahead of being deported to the US.

The arrest was ordered by the head of the Department of Security, Mario Fehr, whose slanderous abuse of Abunimah included “We do not want an Islamist anti-Jew hater who calls for violence in Switzerland.”

Since October 7, the British government has fully aligned its position with Israel and its UK lobby groups, as illustrated by the open letter sent by Michelle Donelan, the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Innovation, to the head of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the public body dispensing funds to universities.

In the letter, she expressed her “disgust” at the appointment to an advisory group of an individual sharing “extremist views” on social media. The ‘individual’ was Kate Sang, a professor of gender and employment studies at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University.

The “extremist views” turned out to be Professor Sang’s view that the ‘crackdown’ on support for Hamas after October 7 was “disturbing.” Dr. Kamna Patel of University College London was also named for calling Israel an apartheid state committing genocide in Gaza.

Donelan called on UKRI to close the group. It agreed to suspend it while “investigating” but by this time more than 1,300 academics had signed an open letter of their own to UKRI denouncing government-led repression and censorship. In the coming months, the number grew to more than 3,000.

In March 2024, UKRI reinstated the advisory group after its investigation found “no evidence of a breach of its regulations by any member” and “no evidence in the public domain of support for a proscribed terrorist organization or the sharing of extremist material” and “no grounds to remove any member of the committee.” It posted an apology to Kate Sang, this being followed by an apology by Donelan to Kate Sang and the payment of damages.

Nevertheless, surveillance and arrests continue, with Jeremy Corbyn questioned at a police station after marching in a London rally on January 18 and others charged after allegedly breaching police conditions imposed on the rally.

Not only does the UK government maintain relations with a genocidal government, it also enables the genocide by continuing to supply it with arms. It has suspended arms exports to Israel but only “some,” amounting to 30 out of 350 licenses.

It says parts for F35 jet fighters were excluded because they are not sent directly to Israel. In fact, the reality concealed by this duplicitous statement is that they are sent to the US, where Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman build them into the F35s which are then supplied to Israel.

Apart from the continuing supply of weaponry, support for genocide includes the close collaboration between Israel/the IDF and western universities (notably MIT) and US tech giants. Microsoft actually increased the delivery of its cloud computing and AI services to Israel after October 7.

Trump is a satirical figure from American fiction, Elmer Gantry, Babbitt, the huckster, the snake oil peddler, the real estate hustler who can give you a really good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge and an even better one on Gaza. He will have to learn that Palestine is not just a real estate problem and that his commitment to a genocidal state is only going to drive the Middle East further into chaos.

To read the first part of the article, click here. 

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.