Antisemitism vs. Free Speech and Peaceful Assembly: 
How US Universities Mishandled the Recent “Occupations” 

Columbia University students participating in an ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus, April 25, 2024 

Although the worst of it is at least temporarily over, I have been deeply disturbed by the student protests and occupations that spread across university campuses in April.

I don’t see them, as some do, as simply demonstrations in support of the people of Palestine. And despite having the support of some Jews (including a few friends of mine), I believe they are rooted in antisemitism. Deeply ingrained, institutional, and nearly worldwide antisemitism.

It is not about Israel’s bombing of Palestine. Remember, the protests began on October 8, the day after more than a thousand Jewish civilians were brutally raped, beheaded, and otherwise murdered. Remember, too, that at that time and since that time, the polls that were taken indicated that at least 70% of Palestinians supported the invasion and slaughter.

The history of the Arab-Jewish conflict is older than Palestine itself. (The first clear historical reference to the area as “Palestine” dates to the 5th century BCE.) And although there were periods when Arabs and Jews lived together in relative peace, the relationship primarily consisted of Arabs attacking the Jews and attempting to drive them off the land and/or kill them.

Since 1948 and the establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, the animosity of Arabs towards Jews has only gotten worse. It is a history of unilateral attempts by Arab countries or Arab terrorist groups to destroy Israel and kill its citizens, followed by Israeli agreements to various Arab demands, followed immediately by more anti-Israel aggression.

And yet, judging from the recent protests, it looks like a large percentage of the brightest and most privileged college students in America don’t know anything about that. But it’s worse than ignorance. It’s that they have somehow been taught to believe in a version of this conflict that is fundamentally and provably false.

Just recently, a friend of mine, who says that he “identifies very strongly as a Jew,” told me that he had recently “discovered” that the Israelis were “colonialists and occupiers of Palestine.”

I addressed that claim, among others, in my first Special Issue on this conflict, and I will come back to it in a future issue. What scares me is how so many people, Jews and Christians alike, believe it.

The “Evil Empire” Story 

Recently, I watched a documentary that gave me some insight into how the occupation lie came into being.

From the age of five or six, Palestinian children are taught, at home and in school, that Israel is an evil empire that has occupied Palestine (which they claim was originally Arab) and has since done everything possible to keep the Palestinians in Gaza poor.

This despite the fact that there are two million Arabs living peacefully and prosperously in Israel. And that, until the current war began, approximately 200,000 Arabs would commute daily to Israel to work at jobs for which they could be paid multiples of what they would be paid in Palestine.

The lie goes back to 2005. In exchange for a Palestinian commitment to a permanent peace, Israel agreed to forcibly remove more than 10,000 Jews that had been living in Palestine for decades or even centuries. They even removed Jewish graves.

With Palestine finally “Jew Free,” Hamas, which had been voted into leadership, began indoctrinating Arab children and their parents to not only see Israel as an oppressor, but to hate all Jews and see “intifada” as the noble purpose of Islam.

They have been telling that lie for almost 20 years – more than enough time to indoctrinate an entire generation.

So, it is not surprising that there were no protests by “peaceful” Palestinians against Hamas after the October 7 slaughter. On the contrary, there were jubilant celebrations all over Gaza and in many Arab countries all over the world.

Think about it. Twenty years of indoctrination. With zero freedom to question or disagree. It’s not easy to persuade people to believe what is demonstrably false. It can be done, but it takes time. And the younger you begin, the better it works.

Then it hit me: This could also explain why, on October 8, when hundreds of dead Jewish bodies were still on the ground, thousands of university students all over the US (in Europe, too) were out there marching and chanting in support of the slaughter that had occurred the day before. It happened because, during the 20 years that Hamas and Hezbollah and other Arab terrorist groups were spreading the lies about Israel, hundreds of professors at American colleges and universities were doing the same thing.

When you think of it that way, it’s no wonder that the student protests and occupations were so quick and so widespread. Our prestigious universities had prepared their students for it for decades.

We Have Met the Enemy… and It Is Us

There is another issue that has emerged in recent weeks. The allegation that many, if not most, of the protesters were not students of the colleges where they were demonstrating. And many were not students at all.

For example, at the University of Texas at Austin, 45 of the 79 people arrested on campus weren’t associated with the school. Of the 282 people arrested by the NYPD when it broke up encampments at Columbia University and City College of New York, just over half were students, and the rest were not.

But this is secondary. The main question is why our university leaders were so tolerant of these blatantly antisemitic and indisputably illegal occupations of university property for so long.

I think one reason is that many of them are people of my generation that had protested the Vietnam War. They may have felt hypocritical in acting against students that were doing much the same thing as they did.

Another reason is surely that they have been at the heart of an academic culture that has been anti-Zionist for several decades. To stay employed and feel okay about the universities they were working for, even the Jewish professors and administrators have had to convince themselves that being anti-Israel was not antisemitic.

But the third and most concerning reason is that they see these student occupations and protests in terms of free speech. And they believe, correctly in my view, that free speech is a fundamental principle in preserving freedom and democracy in America and everywhere else.

And they are not the only ones. Many pro-Israel Libertarians, like me, are struggling with what seems to be a moral conflict between free speech and antisemitism. We believe that political speech – even when it is clearly hateful, as the pro-Palestinian chants clearly are – should still be allowed. Because the moment you try to regulate hate by criminalizing it, you open the door to fascism, which is the opposite of freedom and democracy.

First, You Define the Offense. Then You Criminalize It. 

This is why I’m troubled by the recent Congressional resolution to define “antisemitism.” On the face of it, it seems entirely unobjectionable. It is simply defining the term by providing examples of it, all of which seem antisemitic to me.

But the problem with definitions like this is that they can be used by the government to carry out repression of any sort of speech they object to. Once the definition of hate is codified in law, the legal assault on free speech begins. And this kills public statements of opinion that have a right to be heard.

A fellow book club friend of mine, exasperated by the coddling of the campus protesters, recently sent an email in which he noted that the protests are no longer anti-Israel, but pro-Hamas. And the slogans they are chanting are not about what to do with Palestine, but that Israel, as a country, should be obliterated and even, in some cases, that Jews should be wiped from the face of the Earth. He was outraged that, now that the protests have shown themselves to be not just antisemitic but genocidal, the students haven’t been arrested and put in jail.

He is correct about what is happening. Antisemitism is alive and strong in the US. It is not official. Nor is it expressed in polite company. But there has always been an undercurrent of antisemitism among Christians, and even atheists, that is real and potentially dangerous.

It is showing itself now in the response to the anti-Palestinian (now pro-Hamas) protests and occupations.

The demonstrators see them as legitimate anti-war protests equivalent to those that we Baby Boomers participated in during the late 60s and early 70s. And there are similarities. But having been an anti-war protester, I can say that the similarities are not positive or worthy of self-righteous pride, as so many of my peers feel they are. The protests against the Vietnam War were, like the pro-Palestinian protests, a movement against something that was going on halfway around the world. We saw the North Vietnamese much like the pro-Palestinian protesters today see the Palestinians – as defenseless, poor people that simply wanted to try out an economic and political ideology that we had been told, by many of our college professors, was just.

But the fact was that 90% of us knew nothing about the theory of Communism, much less the history of it in practice. We knew even less about what was going on in Vietnam or in the backrooms of Congress, the White House, and the various war departments.

This, as you can see here, is true for many of the anti-Israel protesters today.

Our ignorance back then did not mean we were wrong about the cause: getting out of Vietnam. Anyone who has studied the war understands why we never should have been there in the first place and were, in any case, doomed to lose.

I do believe that Israel is fully justified in its war against Hamas and its soon-to-be war against Hezbollah and other anti-Israel, antisemitic terrorist groups. But that is not an argument I want to make here.

Let’s assume that Israel’s position is unjust or, at least, ill-conceived and destined to fail, as it might be. That, again, has no bearing on the question of how universities should have handled the student protests and occupations.

As I said above, what university leaders did in allowing the occupations to flourish was wrongheaded from the start. Even if we gave them a pass for equating today’s protests and occupations to those against the Vietnam War. Even if we accept that they have unwittingly succumbed to the idea that being anti-Israel is not antisemitic. That still leaves their primary mistake in allowing the occupations to take place: They see them as legitimate expressions of free speech.

Free Speech: Is That the Issue?

Let’s talk about free speech.

In the US, free speech is guaranteed by our Constitution, because it is seen (rightly, I think) as one of the foundations of freedom and democracy.

There are a few categories of expression that are not protected by the First Amendment:

* Obscenity
* Fraud
* Child pornography
* Speech “integral” to illegal conduct
* Speech that causes imminent unlawful action
* Speech that violates intellectual property law
* Commercial speech (misleading advertising)
* Incitement to violence
* Defamation
* And in certain situations, threats and false statements of facts.

Hate speech is not an exemption, per the 1993 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell. It is allowed, again correctly in my opinion, because it can be so narrowly defined that it stifles the free expression of ideas. In other words, US citizens have the right to speak hatefully, and it is important for all of us to maintain this freedom.

But you don’t need hate-speech laws to prevent the sort of antisemitic, pro-Palestinian protests that have been going on all over the States.

The right to peaceful assembly is also guaranteed by the Constitution, but there are also limitations. The assemblers must have permission from the property owners. Which means “occupying” buildings and other spaces without permission is illegal.

The problem with what’s been happening on campuses is that some university faculty and administrators are viewing the protests as acts of free speech, which confuses the issue. Yes, people are allowed their antisemitic chants. But what they can’t do is occupy territory they do not themselves own or have permission to assemble on.

The universities should have recognized, the first time their campuses were “occupied,” that they were allowing for the possibility of significant and mass unlawfulness. They should have recognized the probability that the occupations would intimidate their Jewish students and the possibility that they would become violent.

They should have, therefore, closed the occupations on day one. Regardless of what sort of speech was being expressed.

Had they done that, they could have removed the protesters and, if they wanted, assigned them designated areas to demonstrate where they would not pose a threat.

That is what they should have done. And that is what they should do today. Protect free speech. Even hate speech. But prosecute the illegal occupations that are making it unsafe for Jewish students to attend class.