We all know the story by now. On March 8, a day after the Trump administration had made it clear that it had cancelled $400 million in federal funding and contracts with Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, born to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Nakba in a Palestinian camp in Syria, was arrested by ICE agents outside his university apartment in Morningside Heights. Khalil was then transferred to an ICE detention facility in a small town in Louisiana.
Earlier in the week, Khalil had taken part in a sit-in in support of Palestinian rights at campus – unmasked. President Trump sent out a triumphant message declaring that ICE had “proudly arrested” an “Hamas and terrorist sympathizer” who would be deported, that many more were to follow, and that he expected the full co-operation from university administrators.
He need not have worried in that Katrina Armstrong, the same Columbia President who had failed to respond to Khalil’s increasingly desperate pleas for assistance in the face of death threats in the days before his arrest, now declared to her staff that there were “exigent circumstances” requiring full staff co-operation with ICE. She furthermore offered the co-operation of Columbia University in addressing the “legitimate concerns” of the Administration and declared that “combatting antisemitism” was now “the number one priority” of the University.
In the days that followed, the University would impose further disciplinary penalties on pro-Palestinian demonstrators by expelling and rescinding the degrees of some twenty-two Columbia students who had been involved in the April 2024 occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia. Armstrong also declared that the University would comply with the demands of placing its South Asia, Middle Eastern and African Studies Department (MESAAS) under external administration, and that it would seek to appoint new faculty to ensure “more balance” – a signal that Columbia will now start hiring faculty based on their political views on Israel rather than their academic qualifications.
As for Khalil, there is not anything to connect him to Hamas, or any traces of sympathies for Hamas in his public statements as a mediator for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University. But the facts of the matter hardly matters, and though Khalil is undoubtedly being persecuted for nothing but his exercise of First Amendment rights, the legal grounds for it comes straight out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which enables the Secretary of State to declare his presence in the USA to be contrary to US “foreign policy interests.”
The Trump administration’s blueprint for the assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech at Columbia University is the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project Esther’, which in its Christian Zionist conspiracy theory envisions a vast and well-funded “Hamas Support Network” (HSN), which has already infiltrated US universities, US Congress, and civil society, and must be defeated by means of the firing of pro-Palestinian faculty and the denial of access to university campuses for any and all pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) wants Columbia to be “crushed,” and Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute wants universities to “feel existential terror.”
Combatting academic freedom in the name of “combatting antisemitism.”
In his 2024 Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza, Didier Fassin writes: “Language is damaged when demands to stop killing civilians are ’antisemitic’…Thinking is suffocated when debates are prevented, lectures banned and exhibitions cancelled, when the police enter institutions of higher education and prosecutors are imposed to ensure orthodoxy.”
We may of course find it paradoxical that an administration in which dominant personalities openly trade in antisemitic tropes on social media, like to make fascist gestures at rallies, and welcome the support of Nazis and assorted antisemitic white supremacists by declaring that there are “good people on all sides,” should all of a sudden be so concerned about “antisemitism.” But there are long-standing precedents for all of this, in the far-right redesignation of “antisemitism” as a primarily left-wing phenomenon, and one concerned with stigmatizing and criminalizing critiques of Israel’s record on human rights and international law as “antisemitic.” When the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs in late March this year invited delegates to a conference on “combatting antisemitism” attended by Prime Minister Netanyahu, the European political invitees were all from the antisemitic far-right.
An extremely useful instrument has also been the US adoption of the so-called “working definition of antisemitism” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) from 2016 in Trump’s Executive Order 13389 of 2019. No less than seven out of eleven “contemporary examples of antisemitism” in this definition concern what one may or may not say about Israel, and these may give rise to Title VI Protections under the 1964 Civil Rights Act should a Jewish student or staff member feel “offended” by any and all pro-Palestinian speech.
The “Palestinian exception to academic freedom and freedom of speech” that we have been warned about is here – and it is real.
Examples of the kind of speech qualified as “antisemitic” on the basis of the IHRA definition include referring to Israel as an “apartheid state” (which Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem have long done) – in that it implies that Israel is a ”racist endeavour;” calling for a “Palestine that will be free, from the river to the sea” – in that it implies “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” (and heaven forbid that anyone should suggest that Palestinians may have the same right); calling for a boycott of Israel; and suggesting with the ICJ that what Israel has been doing in Gaza since Oct 2023 amounts to a “plausible genocide” – in that this involves “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” (never mind that Israeli cabinet ministers have over and over again declared Gazans to be “Nazis” over the course of these two years). In the interpretation of German, Israeli and US authorities, anti-Zionism is – notwithstanding the existence of Jewish anti-Zionists from Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt via Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé to Daniel Boyarin and Judith Butler – also “antisemitic.”
The weaponization of the IHRA working definition, which was not only drafted under the auspices of strongly pro-Israeli organizations in the USA but was intensively lobbied for by US and Israeli delegates in 2016, is not a new phenomenon. The vague and inconsistent IHRA working definition was from the very outset a quintessentially political definition, and it has, for all practical purposes, been turned into ‘soft law’ in many of the 43 countries in which it has so far been adopted. It is not as if scholars of antisemitism and the Holocaust have not issued warnings about its potential consequences for years. But we have time and again seen how its implementation poses a severe threat to academic freedom and freedom of speech. Among those targeted in its name have been distinguished scholars like Ghassan Hage, Achille Mbembe, Eyal Weizman, Masha Gessen and Rebecca Ruth Gould.
The “Palestinian exception to academic freedom and freedom of speech” that we have been warned about is here – and it is real. European scholars studying freedom of speech have often been bemused by free speech absolutist conceptions in the USA. It now seems we did not realize how easy it would be for the new far-right authoritarians, who have for decades “captured free speech” by posing as the most passionate defenders of free speech about Islam and Muslims, to overturn those very conceptions.
But there is another lesson here, in that the adoption and implementation of illiberal speech regulations such as the IHRA 2016 working definition of antisemitism – in some of the liberal and democratic countries with the strongest protections for freedom of speech in the world and in most cases without so much as public or legislative debates – tells us that the road from neoliberal to authoritarian conceptions of law may not be so long after all.
Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian social anthropologist and works as a Research Professor at KIFO (Institute for Church, Religion & Worldview Affairs) in Oslo, Norway. He was the 2022-23 Stanley Kelley Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University.