The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and are fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
We should all be concerned when our students are being repressed, threatened and silenced for peacefully advocating against a genocide.
As members of American University Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP), we find it imperative to speak up about the uneven treatment of Zionist versus anti-Zionist students, faculty and staff at American University, especially given the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Zionism is a political ideology grounded in privileging the rights of one set of people over the rights of another to sustain a Jewish state in what was historically Palestine. Early Zionist leader Moshe Sharett said in 1914, “we have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture.”
Anti-Zionism is specifically opposed to this political ideology. Anti-Zionists range from Palestinians to Jewish Americans and Israelis, along with millions of others around the world. FSJP strongly believes that antisemitism should never be tolerated at AU and maintains that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic.
The University community has consistently platformed voices supporting Israel’s war on Gaza while distorting, censoring and surveilling anti-Zionist and Palestinian voices in increasingly authoritarian ways, as we see in Eagle articles, university-wide communications, funding allocations and more. This distortion and authoritarianism has resulted in an atmosphere that implicitly, and at times explicitly, supports violence and repression of civil rights on our campus, nationally and around the world.
In emails sent out by AU’s provost, cabinet, presidents and student government in the last year, terms like Islamophobia, “anti-Muslim” and “anti-Palestinian” were only mentioned when coupled with references to antisemitism. Antisemitism, on the other hand, was the focus of several community-wide emails, most notably a Jan. 25, 2024 email from Sylvia Burwell, Bronté Burleigh-Jones, Nkenge Friday, Raymond Ou and Billy Walker.
The email, “Taking Immediate Action to Support Safety and a Sense of Belonging,” states, “Antisemitism is abhorrent, wrong, and will not be tolerated at American University,” before listing several actions purportedly intended to make Jewish students feel safer on campus. The email does not mention support for students facing anti-Palestinian racism or Islamophobia.
Beyond distortions and censorship, AU actively suppresses and surveils Palestinian-centered speech. The AU Police Department (AUPD) has had a presence at nearly all pro-Palestine protests. At a vigil in October 2024 where students read aloud the names of the more than 14,500 murdered Palestinian children in remembrance, AUPD threatened attendees with zip ties and arrest.
Similarly, armed officers from the Metropolitan Police Department had a presence at a protest outside a board meeting on Nov. 22, 2024. Attendees counted more than 15 MPD vehicles for a protest of around 30 students, staff and faculty. AUPD and other University officials even dismantled a Gaza Solidarity Sukkah structure constructed by anti-Zionist Jewish students observing Sukkot, an act demonstrating that AU selectively supports its Jewish students based on their political beliefs, putting the intentions behind their pontifications against antisemitism into question.
When our students joined a peaceful encampment at George Washington University (GWU), Vicky Wilkins, Burleigh-Jones and Ou issued a statement via email on April 25, 2024, ironically titled, “Ensuring Freedom of Expression and Safety on Our Campus,” threatening students with disciplinary sanctions and arrest should they attempt to sit in on our campus, an act with a long history in higher education. Such sanctions against students protesting the genocide in Gaza have been seen at universities across the country.
We in FSJP find this pattern of censorship, surveillance and punishment at AU particularly concerning, given other local university responses to student organizing. GWU was recently forced to settle an anti-Palestinian discrimination suit filed against the university. After George Mason University (GMU) worked with Virginia state police to raid the homes of two organizers involved with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), GMU’s chapter of SJP was suspended, and the students were arrested and banned from campus for four years, effectively expelling them. In the lead-up to the suit against GWU and the raid on the GMU students’ homes, patterns of suppression of pro-Palestine voices looked very similar to what we witness daily on AU’s campus.
The biased messaging from AU administrators is putting Palestinian lives on campus at risk. By distorting, censoring and surveilling anti-Zionists and Palestinians, actions like the death threat against a Palestinian staff member on campus and the burning of a Palestinian flag are implicitly supported, especially when followed by generic statements that conflate, obfuscate and distort the issues, with no concrete consequences deterring such hateful actions.
What is happening at universities in our area is not a unique or isolated pattern. Censorship and unquestioning obedience are tools of authoritarianism and are being wielded unabashedly against Palestinians and anti-Zionists. As we fight authoritarianism nationally and internationally, we must fight it on our campus, too, to maintain the basic safety and civil rights of our students.
As a 2024 report by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said, “The aggressive approach by extremist Republicans has had a chilling effect across the political spectrum — Democrats … have unfortunately contributed to the broader anti-Palestinian climate that has led to a McCarthyist witch hunt of Palestinian advocates … The result has been repeated attempts to draw false equivalencies between student civil disobedience and antisemitism.” There is a direct line between the surveillance and repression of students protesting the genocide in Gaza under a Democratic administration to new policies threatening those students with deportation under this administration. Untempered attacks on civil liberties must be stopped at every level and faction of governance.
We call on the AU community to center and protect the people most impacted both by what is happening in Palestine and by the AU policies that have been enacted as a result. Messaging across campus should disentangle Jewish identities from Zionist identities and anti-Palestinian racism from Islamophobia. Our students are on campus to be educated, not to be targets of authoritarianism. Expression of their views, commitment to the rights of others (or, in some cases, their own families) and advocacy for those rights are all part of the educational experience.
The American University Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine is an independent coalition of faculty and staff who educate and advocate in support of Palestinian self-determination, full equality and freedom.
This article was edited by Quinn Volpe, Alana Parker and Abigail Turner. Copy editing by Luna Jinks, Emma Brown, Nicole Kariuki and Charlie Mennuti.
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