Expert Q&A: Trump’s Executive Order on Campus Anti-Semitism

Expert Q&A: Trump’s Executive Order on Campus Anti-Semitism

Expert Q&A: Trump’s Executive Order on Campus Anti-Semitism

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This Q&A was originally published by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding on 18 December 2019 in response to recent developments concerning President Trump’s Executive Order on Combatting Anti-Semitism.]

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to use a definition of anti-Semitism that conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism when investigating civil rights complaints alleging anti-Semitism on campus. Critics warn the order will increase the targeting of campaigns in support of Palestinian human rights on university campuses, which risk losing federal funding if they don’t adequately address complaints of anti-Semitism.

To explain the order and the dangers it poses to human rights activism and free speech on campus, the IMEU offers the following expert Q&A with attorney Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal and Cooperating Counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). 

Q: What exactly does the executive order call for and why is it so problematic?

Dima Khalidi (DM): This order requires federal executive departments and agencies to consider a widely contested and distorted definition of anti-Semitism when investigating allegations of anti-Semitism under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The definition, which Israel and its supports have been pushing for over a decade in Europe and the U.S., falsely equates criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish hate by labeling things like “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” as examples of anti-Semitism. These examples reveal the true purpose of the definition, and the order as a whole: To censor Palestinians’ calls for freedom and equality in all of historic Palestine. 

Such censorship not only demeans Palestinians’ agency in determining their own future, it also violates the First Amendment. As Trump himself noted, Congress has refused - two times over the past three years – to pass similar legislation, in large part due to the enormous push back from civil liberties groups, and even the definition’s original author, who warned of the erosion of First Amendment rights that it would cause. You can imagine that if the highest office in the land can tell us what is and isn’t ok to say when it comes to Palestine and Israel, it is a very slippery slope towards a complete erosion of our civil liberties. 

Q: What impact do you think it will have on campuses across the country?

DK: The order sends a message to universities that they risk federal investigations and the loss of federal funding if they don’t censor and punish speech, research, and other advocacy for Palestinian rights that pro-Israel students claim is anti-Semitic. In effect, it enlists universities as censors of a growing student movement led by Palestinians and their demands for equality and freedom in their homeland in order to avoid federal consequences.

Based on how pro-Israel groups have already attempted to use the definition to censor advocacy, we expect that this order will embolden more complaints to universities and the Department of Education about Palestine activism on campuses, which, in turn, will lead to more investigations of speech activities of students and professors. The intent and effect could be a massive chill on such activism if we don’t challenge the entire premise of the order and its implementation. 

Q: It’s obvious that Trump isn’t motivated by a desire to fight anti-Semitism, which he regularly spouts and fuels himself, including most recently in his controversial remarks to the Israeli American Council a couple of weeks ago. Why do you think he’s doing this?

DK: Trump is clearly doing this because some of his closest advisors – Kushner, Adelson and Friedman among them, all of whom are also close with Netanyahu – are invested in destroying the movement for Palestinian rights.

Sadly, Trump also likely understands that falsely accusing human rights activists of anti-Semitism deflects from the resurgent and deadly anti-Semitism of the white nationalist base that he has ignited, and whose support he needs to win reelection. So it gives him cover for his own anti-Semitism and appeases his mega-donors, while letting his base off the hook – a win-win for him. 

Q: Can you put the order into the context of the larger war that Israel and its US supporters are waging against the rights of Palestinians and those Americans who support Palestinian freedom?

DK: The tactic of accusing Palestine advocates of anti-Semitism and using civil rights laws to undermine a human rights movement is just one of many being employed by Israel and its supporters to crush this growing, diverse, grassroots and intersectional movement for Palestinian freedom. We've seen McCarthyite efforts to publish blacklists of individuals accusing them not only of anti-Semitism but also support for terrorism because they speak out for Palestinian rights. Twenty-seven states have passed laws punishing boycotts for Palestinian rights. Dozens of pro-Israel groups are working to file lawsuits aimed at supporters of Palestinian rights, and pressure institutions to censor Palestine speech. 

Israel itself, along with billionaires like Sheldon Adelson, Robert Kraft, and Ronald Lauder, are investing tens of millions to make sure that Israel maintains the status quo. The result is an all-out assault on our rights to organize, to speak about, to research, and to try to effect change on this country's policies towards Israel. Trump's order merely brings home his commitment to bolstering Israel's military occupation and annexation of Palestine by trying to prevent the movement in the US from continuing to shift US public opinion towards support for Palestinian rights and away from the bipartisan chokehold Israel has had for decades. 

Q: Its problems notwithstanding, do you think this order will do anything at all to protect Jewish students from actual anti-Semitism, which is alarmingly resurgent in large part thanks to Trump himself?

DK: Unfortunately, the order does nothing to address the violent anti-Semitism of the white nationalist base that Trump relies on. The only new thing it does is to define advocacy for Palestinian rights as anti-Semitic, giving the green light to Israel front groups to target people who are calling for Palestinian freedom.  Rather than protect Jewish students, not to mention other marginalized groups like Muslims, immigrants, and the Black community who are also targets of white nationalist groups, the order only shields supporters of Israel from uncomfortable truths about Israel. This will, sadly, only serve to distract us from these real threats to our communities and lives, and to steadily erode our fundamental right to freedom of expression.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412