<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dana Abuqamar, the 19-year-old president of the University of Manchester’s Friends of Palestine Society, reacting to the events of October 7th, 2023, said:<\/p>\n
Israel is an oppressive regime. Israel is an apartheid, racist, colonial state. It tortures, it brutalizes, it terrorizes Palestinians, furthering its policy of fragmentation of the Palestinian people. 2 million Palestinians, enclaving them into a small strip of land with little to no access to clean water, to food, to life saving medicine, to electricity \u2026 yesterday Gaza broke free \u2026 Gaza broke out of prison.<\/p>\n
British authorities claimed that Abuqamar supported Hamas and was therefore a proponent of terrorism; they revoked her student visa<\/a> on \u201cnational security\u201d grounds, noting that she was a \u201crisk to public safety.\u201d Her case, n. HU\/64191\/2023, is ongoing, and Oxford Professor Emeritus Avi Shlaim, a British-Israeli historian, has been tasked with presenting an expert report on her behalf.<\/p>\n Abuqamar is only one of many UK-based activists who have been called out as \u201cantisemitic\u201d or as supporters of terrorism. Shahd Abusalama, a Palestinian from Gaza who grew up in the Jabaliya refugee camp, eventually obtained her PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, where she began teaching as an Associate Lecturer. She was quickly singled out for her tweets<\/a> defending Palestinian human rights. \u201cAs a high-profile Palestinian artist, author and campaigner for Palestinian rights, I became the target of the Israel lobby in the UK.\u201d Abusalama was accused, investigated and exonerated by SHU, only to eventually find herself hounded out of her job. In a recent piece for Eurozine<\/a>, she writes:<\/p>\n In the US and across Europe, far-right politics are on the rise\u2026The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians would not be able to continue without western military, diplomatic and ideological support, reflected in biased mainstream media that favor Israeli narratives and systematically silence Palestinians.<\/p>\n A British citizen, Shahd Abusalama has since joined her recently displaced Gazan family in Barcelona. She says that she was traumatized by her years in the UK, where immigration authorities refused her entreaties to help get her endangered parents and a brother out of Gaza during the worst of it.<\/p>\n When Hebrew University of Jerusalem lecturer Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian spoke out against Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza, following the events of October 7th, she was arrested<\/a> on suspicion of \u201cinciting terrorism.\u201d Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a respected feminist scholar, was suspended from teaching in March, following her participation in a Makdisi Street<\/a> podcast, in which she expressed doubts about Israel\u2019s official version of the events of October 7th, including the claims of widespread rape and beheaded babies. Hebrew University reinstated her two weeks later, but it is clear that her right to speak freely in wartime Israel has been severely hampered. As of this writing, Shalhoub-Kevorkian has apparently<\/a> left her job at Hebrew U.<\/p>\n In the US, professors Danny Shaw<\/a> and Maura Finkelstein<\/a> were dismissed from their jobs for calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, as was Philadelphia-based Rabbi Lonnie Kleinman<\/a>. In an opinion piece<\/a>, Shaw wrote:<\/p>\n After 18 years teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice\u00a0in New York, I have been fired\u2026this heavy-handed action represents a grave threat to academic freedom and the autonomy of university departments to hire and fire their professors. I have had the honor of teaching thousands of\u00a0students\u00a0<\/a>at John Jay College since the spring of 2007. I was fired because of my\u00a0outspokenness<\/a>\u00a0about the United States and Israel’s ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza.<\/p>\n Maura Finkelstein, a tenured professor of anthropology at Muhlenburg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, defended the Palestinian right to self-determination, and criticized Israel as an apartheid regime. Ultimately, she too was fired from her position in May. In April, writing in TMR<\/a>, she acknowledged that US academics were courting danger by openly supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel\u2019s vicious bombardment and starvation of Gaza.<\/p>\n It is worth quoting Finkelstein at length:<\/p>\n There is an ideological battle being waged within American academic institutions in the wake of October 7th, 2023: Does Zionism count as a protected class? Under most U.S. college and universities\u2019 Equal Opportunity Nondiscrimination Policy, the list of protected classes includes, amongst its many categories, \u201cnational or ethnic origin.\u201d\u00a0 According to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,\u00a0\u201cnational or ethnic origin\u201d<\/a>\u00a0refers to a person who \u201ccomes from a particular place, has a particular accent, or appears to have a particular ethnic background.\u201d<\/p>\n Zionism is a nationalist,\u00a0political ideology<\/a>\u00a0invested in the establishment and enforcement of a Jewish state. Despite numerous discursive attempts to collapse the two, Zionism by definition is not synonymous with \u201cJewish\u201d (an ethno-religious identity) or \u201cIsraeli\u201d (a national origin). However, after\u00a0the House passed a resolution<\/a>\u00a0in December\u00a0equating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, Zionists have been emboldened to lodge complaints against those who are writing, teaching, and speaking out (notably, on social media) against Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. To call for a ceasefire, to criticize Zionist ideology, to suggest that Israel is a racist settler colonial state, is \u2014 according to this argument \u2014 an attack on Zionists and therefore also an attack on Jewish people.<\/p>\n As reported in September in The Intercept<\/a>, Finkelstein was fired only after a months-long crusade, in which she \u201cwas the subject of a campaign of thousands of anonymous, bot-generated emails sent every minute for over 24 hours to the school\u2019s administrators \u2014 as well as local news outlets and politicians \u2014 demanding the professor\u2019s removal and accusing her of \u2018Jew hatred.\u2019…A Change.org petition started in late October\u2026called for Finkelstein\u2019s firing over allegedly \u2018pro-Hamas\u2019 rhetoric; it gained over 8,000 signatures.\u201d<\/p>\n Since losing her teaching position, Finkelstein has moved to Brooklyn with her partner and is embroiled in a legal battle with her former employer.<\/p>\n The Center for Constitutional Rights<\/a> (CCR), headquartered in Manhattan, has received a mountain of complaints and is now representing the case of Columbia law professor Katharine Franke, who has been accused by colleagues of support of Palestinians, thereby \u201ccreating a hostile environment\u201d for Israeli and Jewish students on campus. Her CCR attorney, Kathleen Peratis, compared the case to similar represssion in the McCarthy era. \u201cThis is the Red Scare of our time, yet those who condemn the Red Scare of the 1950s are nevertheless repeating it today.\u201d\u00a0Peratis says that, \u201cThe complaint is without merit and reflects the climate of oppression and marginalization of Palestinians and their advocates.\u201d<\/p>\n In France, dozens of peaceful protesters have been fined for displaying Palestinian flags. Writing in Mediapart<\/a> in April, Edwy Planel explained that expressing \u201csolidarity with Palestine has become a crime. Expressing it by speaking, writing or demonstrating is punishable by police summons, criminal conviction or prior banning.\u201d A number of French activists have been summoned by the authorities for protest activities or social media statements on behalf of Palestinians.<\/p>\n The primary accusation? Being apologists for terrorism.<\/p>\n Mathilde Panot<\/a>, president of La France Insoumise for the Assembl\u00e9e National, was called into the Paris Pr\u00e9fecture in April. \u201cThis is the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a leader of an opposition group in the Assembly,\u201d she said, “has been summoned for such a serious reason\u2026on the basis of fallacious accusations.\u201d<\/p>\n Journalist and activist Simone Assbague, who tweets @s_assbague<\/a>, also received a police summons under the pretense that she was an apologist for terrorists, after posting a tweet explaining the settler-colonial nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict \u2014 noting as many have that the conflict didn\u2019t begin on October 7, 2023. In a video for Daily Motion<\/a>, she articulates why France and so many other western countries are oppressing pro-Palestine speech. Israel, she argues, has aligned itself with western countries as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, Arab extremism and \u201cterrorism,\u201d particularly where Palestinian resistance is concerned. In the absence of a Palestinian state, and with further encroachment of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, resistance to apartheid and military occupation continues, under multiple banners, including by Hamas, but also other homegrown militant movements. Yet Israel has convinced the United States and its allies that they are all fighting the same enemy; Assbague argues these are all imperial powers who support Israel\u2019s supremacist narrative.<\/p>\n
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