Pro-Israel Advocates Are Weaponizing “Safety” on College Campuses

Two weeks ago, the Columbia chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine publicized an email leaked by an anonymous student at the university’s social work school. In the email, a professor, who was also not named in the screenshot, raised the issue of a Palestinian flag emoji that the student had placed next to her name during Zoom meetings.

“On an unrelated matter,” the professor wrote, “it has recently been brought to my attention that geopolitical emojis” — the Palestinian flag — “used at the end of name info has caused trauma reactions, making it difficult for some to remain present and not dissociate during class session.”

LEAKED EMAIL EXCHANGE:
Columbia University Professor asks CSSW student to remove Palestine Flag from their zoom name online because it has “caused trauma reactions”.
“Geopolitical emojis” is referring to the Palestinian flag. pic.twitter.com/SQVyB6E4rU

— Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (@ColumbiaSJP) March 14, 2024

The professor asked for the student’s “continued partnership in ensuring our class space remains a safe one for all.” In an excruciatingly polite response, the student asked for permission to discuss the issue collectively, with the class.

It’s the stuff of far-right parody: an absurd example of “woke” culture. An Ivy League professor, invoking the language of “trauma response” and safety, in an email that refers to class members as “folx,” suggesting the removal of an emoji.

Yet the professor’s email speaks to a broader problem of student safety being flattened into a question of whether students feel safe. And these aren’t the reactionary tropes of left-wing “snowflakes”: “Safety” is being invoked by pro-Israel students, many conservative and center-right, who believe that protests targeting the nation state constitute inherent attacks on them as Jews.

The same dynamic played out in the fall at the same university. Last November, Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, as The Intercept reported, because an “unauthorized event” put on by the groups “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” When challenged to name the threat, Columbia Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg said only, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the student groups, that “accusations that Israel was ‘a racist state committing genocide’ and ‘is an apartheid state’ could upset some people and ‘seem … like an incitement of violence.’”

New York City’s Upper West Side isn’t the only setting for such thin complaints. A staggeringly imbalanced feature in The Atlantic this week, written by Stanford sophomore Theo Baker, offered up a supposedly neutral narrative that treats the “conflict” on his college campus as a battle between imperiled Jewish students and unreasoned pro-Palestine zealots.

Right-wing GOP culture warriors and conservative Zionist groups are using similar claims about campus incidents nationwide. “Safety” is the latest weapon in the culture war, being deployed now to deal a blow to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and to silence criticism of Israel.

“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe.”

The result has brought us to our intolerable status quo, with students and faculty risking grave consequences for protesting a war in which Israeli forces have slaughtered over 31,000 people. Israel’s U.S.-backed assault has razed to rubble every single university in Gaza, but the concern as relates to intellectual life in this country focuses instead on the inoculation of Israel’s young supporters from bad feeling.

“People are taking their feelings of being uncomfortable with information as the same as physically being unsafe,” said Layla, a Palestinian American graduate student at Columbia’s School of Social Work, who asked to withhold her last name for fear of harassment. “As a Palestinian student, I’ve lost family in Gaza. Frankly, I get uncomfortable when Zionist students are chanting ‘no ceasefire’ on campus. That makes me feel uncomfortable. That makes me feel unsafe. But I know that it is not a physical threat to my safety. That is free speech.”

Feeling Safe vs. Being Safe

The need to distinguish between feeling safe and being safe is both urgent and undeniably fraught. Antisemitism is rising. There have been instances, including on campuses, of Jewish students harassed and targeted solely for wearing a kippah or being otherwise identified as Jewish. Islamophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian violence is surging. And a American-supported genocide is being carried out halfway around the world in the purported name of Jewish safety. Yet this is no time for cowardice.

Writing as a professor and a Jew, with a profound commitment to my students’ safety and well-being, I see an imperative for them to learn to distinguish between genuine threat and paranoia — that their judgments of the world be grounded and attentive to the workings of power, propaganda, and ideology.

Instead, a perfect political storm, driven in large part by sustained campaigning from pro-Israel groups, has produced structures of feeling — a map of collective emotions at historical junctures — that are resistant to challenge. The elements include the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, pushed evermore fervently by Zionist groups in the last decade; the equation of feeling unsafe with being unsafe that has been normalized in the oversimplified liberal discourse; and the weight of intergenerational Jewish trauma combined with very real antisemitism in the present.

I have no doubt that the students’ feelings of fear are real, but educational institutions should not be validating a psychic block that precludes seeing support for Palestine as anything other than a threat.

One way universities are validating these feelings as proof of real danger may be out of their hands: through Title VI complaints and, in some cases, official investigations. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. By statute, universities are duty-bound to take these complaints seriously, but that doesn’t mean they’re always serious.

In the post-October 7 campus battles, the complaints in question consistently center on claims of campus antisemitism — referring to Title VI’s protection from discrimination based on national origin.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has 80 open Title VI investigations that have arisen since October 7 that fall under the category of “shared ancestry” discrimination, which also covers incidents of Islamophobia and other religious discrimination. And just one man, Zachary Marschall, the editor of the right-wing site Campus Reform, is responsible for 10 of them, according to a database of the complaints and investigations put together from public data by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

To file a complaint, a person need have no affiliation with the institution in question. Marschall, an outspoken critic of DEI, has no connection with any of the universities against which he is the Title VI complainant, but claims to be filing the complaints on behalf of campus figures who are often not publicly named.

While details of the federal investigations are not public, Campus Reform’s coverage of reported antisemitism on campus offers clues about Marschall’s approach. His posts on the site consist largely of alarmed responses to Palestinian solidarity slogans, calls for ceasefire, and vocal anti-Zionism on the part of left-wing Jewish student groups.

Consider, by way of example, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, against which Marschall filed a Title VI complaint. Campus Reform wrote about the school too. A November post cited as evidence of anti-Jewish animus the fact that a faculty open letter in support of a Gaza ceasefire was commended by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Campus Reform alleged is connected to Hamas — a common attack against CAIR that the group has denied as a “smear.”

Marschall may well think the discrimination he is alleging is very real, but it hangs on a thin reed. To have the desired impact, though, the Title VI complaints don’t necessarily need to be sustained. The Department of Education might rule that Marschall’s complaints fail to show civil rights violations, but the investigations themselves can still have a chilling effect, forcing universities to act out of fear of losing federal funding.

The investigations can and have drummed up publicity, putting other university funding in the crosshairs. The effects of similar pressure campaigns are already being felt: Elite universities have appeased wealthy pro-Israel donors, who have since October 7 threatened to withhold their money if anti-Israel speech is tolerated on campus.

Antisemitism as Cudgel

Using antisemitism for political ends is not a new tack. Efforts like Marschall’s play into a pattern of reporting on antisemitism that obfuscates rather than clarifies material antisemitic threats. Frightening statistics, leading to sensationalized headlines, about soaring campus antisemitism are compiled by conservative, agenda-driven watchdogs that conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism as policy.

They assert without compunction that calls for Palestinian liberation are a threat to Jews. The statistics then take on the imprimatur of official narrative, stoke further fear, and resist dispute — any such challenge is open to charges of antisemitism denialism.

Meanwhile, three Palestinian students wearing Keffiyehs were shot last November in Vermont, leaving one paralyzed from the waist down. An Arab Muslim student at Stanford was hospitalized in a hit-and-run in November that authorities are investigating as a hate crime. (The latter incident went notably unmentioned in Baker’s viral Atlantic story detailing threats at Stanford.)

And there have been physical dangers at Columbia, too — for pro-Palestine students. Those attending an on-campus Palestine solidarity rally in January were sprayed with a noxious chemical by two veterans of the Israeli military, also Columbia students. Numerous students — including Layla, the Palestinian social work student — were hit with the foul-smelling spray, believed to be Israeli-developed chemical weapon known as “skunk.”

Fifteen students had to seek hospital care for nausea, burning eyes, and irritated skin. While the NYPD is investigating the incident and the assailants are currently banned from campus, the university’s initial response was to chide the injured students for holding the protest in the first place.

Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students at Columbia and elsewhere have seen their faces and names projected on “doxxing trucks” circling campus. A vocally pro-Zionist business school professor, Shai Davidai, has faced complaints that he used his X account to target individual Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students by linking them to Hamas. (Davidai has denied going after particular students, though in January he promoted a form letter that singled out a student by name and, in March, accused a student of being “pro-Hamas” while linking to a tweet that identified her.)

In response to dozens of student complaints, the university launched an investigation into Davidai’s behavior; he has decried the probe as “retaliation.” His outrage make sense, I suppose, in a universe that gives credence to a Palestinian flag emoji as a potential trigger for a “trauma response.”

“The Absence of Any Real Threat”

The disparity of the stakes — felt safety and its material counterpart — become ever starker when one’s gaze is turned to where it really belongs: Palestine itself. Students speaking out for Palestine are not doing so to shore up campus safety for Palestinian students — which the Palestinian students, of course, deserve — but because they are desperate to see an end to Israeli assault on Gaza.

“I question why our focus is on the elite college campuses and their use of language over the horrific injustices being committed against the Palestinian people,” wrote Maryam Iqbal, a freshman at Barnard College and among the students hospitalized after the Columbia chemical attack, in the college newspaper. “There is absolutely no reason to be centering the feelings of privileged college students over the victims of an actual genocide.”

Iqbal told me that she hoped that following the chemical attack, the university administration’s attitude towards what constitutes threat and safety, and where risks lie, would change. “Nothing has shifted,” she said.

Instead, attacks on expression continue. Last month, Barnard banned students from displaying any decorations on dorm room doors, to avoid “the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs.”

There are, without question, students who feel hurt and unwelcome when faced with protests and speech condemning Israel as a genocidal apartheid state. Many Jewish people struggle to square such realities with the idealized notion of Israel we were raised with: that it is a noble and necessary state for Jewish safety.

I know, too, that there are Jewish students who fear that antisemitic groups and individuals are simply using opposition to Israel as a guise for anti-Jewish hate — there’s certainly historic precedent. And there are, as I noted, examples of genuine heightened antisemitism on campus. When Jewish people are targeted for being Jewish, we need to act with severity. Fear, however, does not make a protest against Israel, even a protest against its maintenance as a Jewish ethnostate, a protest against Jews.

“Treating feelings of fear and discomfort seriously does not mean reifying them.”

Institutions of higher education should be in the business of demystification, even when it involves challenging certain sensitive received wisdoms. We fail as educators if we permit the false lesson of all too many Zionist upbringings — that Palestinian freedom is a threat to Jewish safety — to persist for our students.

As Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia who has been perturbed by the treatment of pro-Palestine protest on campus, told me, “Treating feelings of fear and discomfort seriously does not mean reifying them.”

Howley, who is also Jewish, noted that, by the same logic, we would not want to validate the fear felt by a white student, conditioned under racist assumptions, who called the police because they felt afraid in the presence of a Black student.

“Capitulation to this sort of language of fear and unsafety in the absence of any real threat,” he said, “is a real betrayal of our actual responsibilities as teachers to the social emotional development of our students.”

More Than a Feeling

We might be tempted to hand it to the anti-woke right, who warned against the proliferation of “safe space” language and “therapy speak” as organizing forces at American universities. Such criticisms, though, rely on bad faith framings of anti-racist and diversity work — only the worst liberal iterations, although too common, exemplify the right-wing caricature of colleges privileging “snowflake” student feelings.

It is a different, more rigorous exercise entirely when students and professors proffer materially grounded, historically informed opposition to oppressive speech and discriminatory treatment on campus.

When the Hillel student group at the New School in New York City, where I teach, invited a lieutenant from the Israeli military to come speak on campus in early March, I was among several colleagues who signed a letter to our administration, requesting the planned event be canceled.

Among the reasons listed was that many students, above all Palestinians, would feel “utterly unsafe” to have an active-duty Israeli soldier on campus. This, I thought, was true, but a weak argument; the students might feel unsafe, but they would not be unsafe.

The letter’s far stronger claim was that, as a university founded on antiwar ideals and a purported commitment to liberatory principles, the school should not offer “a platform for an army that continues to violate international law and is actively engaged in perpetrating human rights abuses and the murder of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.” It is, I believe, valid to oppose a university hosting an active ranking officer of an army that has obliterated every single institution of higher education in Gaza.

Citing the importance of free speech, the university permitted the talk to proceed.

I’ve long argued against an absolutist approach to free speech on campuses and beyond; some oppressive speech, even if constitutionally protected, should not be platformed. Decisions about canceling speakers and banning certain speech, however, should not be a question of privileging certain peoples’ feelings and fears over others, however visceral the feelings might be.

Rather, we must — without presuming answers in advance — interrogate whether structures of oppression and violence are normalized and upheld in our educational institutions through these choices. The decisions will be imperfect and contested, but at least they will be based on more than feelings.