Discipline and Deny: American Academia, Zionism and Anti-Zionism, and the Gazan Genocide, 1973–2025

Many around the world, including in the United States, charged that the State of Israel's assault on Gaza beginning in October 2023 was a genocide. This claim excited sharp and sometimes coercive responses from those who disagreed, including in American universities like Columbia, Dartmouth, and elsewhere. Disputes arose over the true basis for university administrations' disciplinary measures taken against students. Some Zionist or pro-Israel figures argued that labelling the actions of the Jewish state genocidal was inherently antisemitic. These controversies belied the deeper roots of these disciplinary efforts, which were not merely responses to new events and disagreements. The way had been paved for this repression by more than one antecedent. The idea of a "new antisemitism," which cast anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, appeared in the 1970s and provided an enduring form for disciplinary justifications. After the 9/11 attacks, in the early 2000s, conservative Zionists identified higher education, particularly Columbia University, as a source of threatening criticism of Israel and of Zionism, and pressured university leaders to censure or oust particular faculty members. Also important were concepts and practices around emotional harm to students, and the responsibility of universities to prevent or remediate such harm, in higher education in the 2010s and 2020s. These ideas and practices were used to discipline speech and activism disfavored by those with institutional power, including, in the 2020s, anti-Zionist speech and action. Such efforts failed to achieve their goals, ironically, until widespread perceptions of Israeli genocide in the 2020s made anti-Zionists more, not less, vulnerable to these disciplinary pressures.