Civil Rights Groups Warn UCSC Attempts to Censor Pro-Palestine Scholarship May Violate Federal Laws

We are thrilled to announce the first convening of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism in October 2023! This inaugural gathering will bring together ICSZ’s community of scholars and activists to build and share knowledge about how “the IHRA definition of antisemitism” both amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.

As detailed below, this is a working meeting for scholars and activists of ICSZ’s community, particularly those engaged in researching and confronting the repressive use of “the IHRA definition” to foreclose critical discussion and scholarship on Zionism. A selection of papers and videos of presentations will, however, be published after the event.

What it’s about: Sessions will explore the political, historical, and cultural conditions that enable IHRA campaigns, and share theoretical insights and organizing tools to support resistance. This event focuses on North American academia, government, and institutions while additionally mapping the ways IHRA is making incursions internationally. It will highlight victories, successful strategies, and paths of ongoing organizing.

Registering: Please use this form if you’re interested in attending. Due to limitations on attendance, filling out this form does not immediately register you for the convening. You will receive a response as quickly as possible from our volunteer team to confirm the status of your registration. Deadline: October 9: https://forms.gle/Z8TRKqHywTSYGz2a8

Who should come: This is an ICSZ organizational convening for academics and activists who are battling the “IHRA definition” — including students, researchers, faculty, organizers, artists, and activists — to build knowledge and develop strategies to advance that work. ICSZ warmly welcomes allied scholars and activists to join our research community.

Presenting research by activists and academics: The convening is structured by eight panels dedicated to theorizing, mapping, and political education. Presentations draw from the rich, wide-ranging landscape of academic, activist and community work that focuses not only on the “IHRA definition” itself, but also on the cultural, intellectual and political conditions that lend it power, its impacts, and our modes of resistance to it.

Building our organizing: The convening will include an organizing lunch on both days for local activist groups to connect individuals and organizations, share materials, and focus on building attendees’ support networks to push back on IHRA campaigns.

Starting points: This convening is the inaugural event of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. We invite you to read the Institute’s points of unity which are the basis for the Institute’s research community. We anticipate that our discussions will be accompanied by a set of materials that share essential information, definitions, and other knowledge. The purpose is to be able to bring together attendees from a range of backgrounds, without assuming that everyone is well-versed in all areas of the work to battle IHRA. We hope these materials will allow presenters tow bring us in-depth discussion of their topics. (If your activist organization would like to co-sponsor and help curate these materials, please be in touch!)

Updates & deadlines: The call for proposals is now closed.

Logistics: The convening will take place in the intellectual space of UC Santa Cruz (Oct. 13) and NYU (Oct. 14). Participants at each site will be invited to join the other site remotely.

Online attendance: When you register for in-person attendance in either Santa Cruz or New York, you will be invited (and strongly encouraged) to attend the other day online. The meeting is not organized as an all-remote event — we are trying to build our community and ideas in ways that work much better when we’re together! However, for comrades who are involved in this work but can’t make it, we will have limited slots for all-online attendance.

Organizational co-sponsors: The organizing collective is thrilled to be working with such an incredible, powerful, and varied set of co-sponsors. Below is a current list. If your organization is interested, please reach out at info [at] criticalzionismstudies.org, and see this co-sponsorship form for some initial information.

Current co-sponsors:

Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
American Friends Service Committee
Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program, SFSU
British Committee for the Universities of Palestine
Center for Creative Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz
Center for Racial Justice, UC Santa Cruz
Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Department, UC Santa Cruz
CUNY4PALESTINE
DSA Santa Cruz’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group
Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA)
Jewish Voice for Peace
National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP)
NYU Law Students for Justice in Palestine
Palestine Justice Coalition
ReThinking Foreign Policy
Sparkplug Foundation
Students for Justice in Palestine at CUNY Law
Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice
UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI)

2023 “Battling IHRA: Theory & Activism” Planning Collective (partial/in formation):

Rabab Abdulhadi, AMED Studies Program, San Francisco State University/Teaching Palestine
M. Muhannad Ayyash, Mount Royal University
Dov Baum, PhD
Kat Cui, NYU Law
Arlo Fosberg, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Emmaia Gelman, Sarah Lawrence College
Yulia Gilich
Terri Ginsberg, USACBI
Christine Hong, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Literature, UC Santa Cruz
Jennifer Kelly, Feminist Studies and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Arun Kundnani
Sean L. Malloy, University of California, Merced
Jennifer Mogannam, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Sheryl Nestel, Independent Jewish Voices
Lisa Rofel, National Board, Jewish Voice for Peace; Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jenna Sharkawy

Points of Unity

* Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism, and abides by the international, Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.

* Studying Zionism – its direct work for the Israeli state and its “other work” – is politically necessary. The rigorous, transnational study of Zionism as a political ideology and practice, and of Zionist institutions as political actors, is necessary for political pursuits from democracy to decolonization.

* Academic research is not politically or morally neutral. The Institute’s research aims to interrogate and intervene in racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation of liberatory rhetoric by repressive political forces, among other harms.

* We join in resistance to structures of racism, group supremacy, violence, militarism, colonialism, and capitalism. The Institute works in conjunction with interconnected movements, led from below, for justice and self-determination. Researching the role that Zionism plays in struggles over racism and violence advances those movements. Neither studying nor criticizing Zionism is anti-Jewish.

* Research on power must center the narratives and perspectives of those it dominates. The Institute’s project is to support research from below, produced by a community led by people who are the targets of Zionist and state repression, with a research agenda determined in collaboration with communities resisting repression.

* We reject the exclusionary/scarcity model of academic work. US academia is an exclusionary environment, and it is additionally exclusionary for those engaging critically with Zionism. We reject academic professional success as a measure of the value of our colleagues’ research, ideas, and participation. Instead, we aim to broaden the community of participation in rigorous research and conversation on Zionism, ensuring that it includes and uplifts students, junior and contingent faculty, activists, and communities whose lives are shaped by Zionist institutions’ political work.

* We protect each other by working accountably together. Researchers and activists are subjected to different levels of repression. We protect each other by adhering to shared security protocols, and using less vulnerable voices to protect more vulnerable voices.

September 25, 2023

Dear Chancellor Larive and Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Kletzer:

The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an umbrella organization for the Faculty Associations (FAs) at each UC campus dedicated to protecting the best interests of UC faculty, writes to express our concern regarding your response to the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism’s (ICSZ) conference on the movement to oppose the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

We remind you that it is a misappropriation of university resources to use campus legal counsel funds to curtail faculty members’ academic freedom and First Amendment rights. To the contrary, it is campus legal counsel’s responsibility to ensure that the university protects faculty members’ freedom of thought, expression, and speech. We note that campus legal counsel, headed by Chief Campus Counsel Eréndira Rubin, was notified in late July that a faculty member’s scholarship and UC-appointed service work was the target of defamatory attacks by various media outlets because of their role in co-organizing the upcoming ICSZ conference. Rather than dedicating resources to protect this faculty member’s safety and defending their First Amendment rights, the UCSC administration issued a public statement (first on Sept. 5 and then updated on Sept. 8) stating that “UC Santa Cruz does not endorse” the conference. This irregular action sets a worrying precedent for future academic gatherings that might cover topics deemed sensitive in that it suggests that the administration should play the role of an arbiter in condemning or condoning the research activities of its faculty or campus units. Further, this institutional distancing from faculty members is particularly concerning given the ongoing attacks on academic freedom designed to suppress the teaching and study of racism and colonialism in other parts of the country.

In addition to being a highly unusual practice, the UCSC administration’s public repudiation of the ICSZ conference risks conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. We state in the strongest possible terms that criticism of Zionism is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. This conflation has been used at university campuses across the country to attack academic freedom, as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has clearly articulated, and to derail research, teaching, and good-faith debate. A report issued on September 5, 2023, by the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), “Suppressing Palestinian Rights Advocacy through the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism – Violating the Rights to Freedom of Expression and Assembly in the European Union and the UK,” highlights the disproportionate harm that acceptance of the IHRA definition inflicts on Palestinians, Jewish activists, and organizations advocating for Palestinian rights. It concludes: “This suggests the definition is being implemented in a discriminatory manner. Individuals who are targeted suffer a range of unjust and harmful consequences, including loss of employment and reputational damage.”

Issuing a statement of “non-endorsement” has a chilling effect on the critical study of Zionism at UCSC and on the examination of any subject that administrators deem undesirable. This is a slippery slope. The history of McCarthyism teaches us that while scholars engaged in the critical study of Zionism are being targeted today, this target can shift or multiply at any point and be directed to those who are involved in scholarship on any topic that is in solidarity with the struggles of peoples fighting for their freedom.

For the sake of the academic freedom of UCSC scholars and those from around the ten UC campuses, CUCFA supports UCSC faculty in calling on UCSC’s administration to retract its September 8 statement and publicly affirm the right of faculty, staff, and students to continue their intellectual work without fear of retaliation, defamation, policing, or censorship from their campus administrators.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UCSB

Wendy Matsumura
Vice President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
and Associate Professor of History, UCSD

For the CUCFA Executive Board

October 11, 2023

Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) is a department at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) that studies race intersectionally in the context of power. In this moment—when we are grieving lives lost, fearing the many more to come, and witnessing Israel once again retaliate against a trapped Palestinian population in Gaza—we want to underscore the need for study. What we are witnessing needs to be understood in the context of 75 years of settler colonial displacement, military occupation, and enclosure. As in the past, racialized media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians, delegitimizing their aspirations for freedom from militarism, colonial rule, and incarceration. We are again witnessing the circulation of technologies that are weaponized against Palestinians first, and, subsequently, our most vulnerable populations in the United States, on our borders and globally. It is for this reason that we support the critical study of Zionism. The study of Zionism in the context of power is more imperative than ever.

We condemn the recent public attacks, the institutional backlash, and the campaigns of harassment against organizers from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ). At UCSC, the administration has cast aspersions on the work of the institute, maligning the organizers as well as the CRES department, the Center for Racial Justice, and the Center for Creative Ecologies for co-sponsoring the event. These campaigns against the ICSZ represent a misguided attempt to censor a forthcoming discussion, “Battling the ‘IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition’: Theory & Activism,” on October 13-14. The conference is dedicated to the collective study of, and resistance to, the use of a distorted definition of antisemitism—which dangerously conflates criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism—as a means of silencing advocacy for Palestinian rights.

UCSC issued its September 5 statement (updated on September 8) after it was pressured by organizations and individuals who have a long history of publicly attacking our field, our faculty, and Palestinian scholars and advocates for Palestine, and who, without any basis, have slandered them and their research by calling them antisemitic. As soon as organizers announced the bicoastal, two-day conference as a launch event for the institute, they were subjected to multiple forms of harassment not limited to defamatory public smear campaigns mobilized through defamation, misattributed speech, and fabricated quotes; condescending demands to cancel the Institute’s programming; racist hate mail; and underhanded efforts to disrupt their community collaborations, including through threats. We further note that central to attempts to disparage our faculty and their research are groups like AMCHA and Stand with Us, which have a long history of harassing Palestinian and ethnic studies scholars, students, and organizers, even developing toolkits aimed at keeping content related to Palestine out of ethnic studies classrooms. In July, organizers alerted the campus to this campaign against them—and more broadly, ethnic studies—yet UCSC took no administrative action to protect them from these vile and baseless campaigns to smear them and their work as antisemitic.

Instead, the UCSC administration’s unprecedented public statement indicating it “does not endorse” this conference, even after the “principles of unity” were removed from the conference website, intimates that the content of the conference has no place on our campus. This unusual intervention into the intellectual pursuits of faculty by the administration undermines the work of many faculty and students at UCSC whose research centers Palestine and the displacement of Palestinians. As scholars across interdisciplinary fields including Palestinian studies, postcolonial studies, settler colonial studies, and ethnic studies have shown, Zionism, like other political ideologies attached to colonial practices, merits critical research-based study from the standpoints of those it impacts and harms. What is especially concerning is that the administration’s statement sets up a harmful precedent by undermining the right to academic freedom, while also fomenting a hostile climate for Palestinian scholars and students here at UCSC and those who conduct research in Palestinian Studies, Arab American studies, and Middle East studies.

The statement also implies that the Institute’s work is antisemitic. We must be clear: the critical study of Zionism is not antisemitic. Opposition to Zionism is not an opposition to Jewish people—either their/our ethnicity or religion. To be critical of Zionism is to be critical of the state of Israel, and the ability to critique government is a foundational exercise of democratic rights. Many Palestinians and anti-Zionist Israelis across Historic Palestine have called for an end to the state of Israel’s campaign of war, occupation, and apartheid. There are and have always been diverse opinions within Jewish communities. Indeed, Jewish opposition to Zionism has existed since its inception. Many of the conference organizers and ICSZ’s founding collective and advisory board are, themselves, anti-Zionist Jews. In this respect, the attacks on this conference are also attacks on the Jewish community, as well as attacks on those who support Palestinian rights, Black freedom struggles, Indigenous landback campaigns, queer liberation, and intersectional anti-racist work writ large.

We welcome the statement that “the university rigorously honors the freedom to present the widest range of viewpoints irrespective of agreement on those viewpoints,” and the further recognition that disagreements should be discussed and debated freely and openly in a scholarly community.” Such a principle of academic freedom should surely lead to support, not distancing and tacit criticism, of the ICSZ conference. The university’s own Principles of Community value the “free exchange of ideas [that] requires mutual respect and consideration for our differences.” These Principles of Community were set up by the Chancellor’s office to protect faculty and students from harassment and discrimination when discussing controversial topics in the classroom and other university spaces. The idea that, in initially calling for Principles of Unity designed to identify common themes of discussion and exploration, conference organizers engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” is a dangerous check on the very principles of academic freedom to which the September 5 letter commits itself. Academic exchange depends on the ability and circumstances to come together to discuss common beliefs as well as to debate them with others; any suggestion that the two must always coincide is a curtailment of academic freedom. No other field would be required to invite people who hold opposing views to a convening of scholars and activists within that field. The administration would not accuse climate change scholars of “viewpoint discrimination” for limiting conference attendance to those who believe in climate change. Debate about foundational ideas have a place in some arenas but it curbs the possibility of higher-order research collaborations.

We find it untenable that the administration not only misappropriated university funds by consulting lawyers to craft their UCSC statement meant to curtail faculty members’ academic freedom and First Amendment rights, but that UCSC failed to use these same resources to support and protect one of our CRES faculty who was the central target of racist hate mail and public media defamation. By aligning with these groups and individuals, and failing to support our faculty who have received numerous racist and misogynistic hate mail, UCSC is contributing to the damage against faculty reputations as well as against our interdisciplinary field of study. The September 5 campus statement has only added fuel to ongoing harassment campaigns against faculty and students here on campus who advocate for Palestinian rights. The racism of the attacks against our faculty is not lost on us, and it only amplifies the urgency of the antiracist, decolonial work that we, as a department, do.

As an educational institution, UCSC must ensure that all of its community members, including those who advocate for Palestinian rights, are able to engage in community dialogue and the production of knowledge without interference. For this reason, we call on UCSC to retract its public statement and, instead, replace it with a statement committing not to discriminate against Palestinians or those who advocate for their equality. A revised statement must guarantee academic freedom to all of our community members at UCSC. Faculty and students who challenge systemic forms of injustice and domination must be assured that their intellectual work is supported and that they can proceed without fear of retribution, censorship, slander, or policing.