It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to. While partisans of the Israeli-American mass slaughter in Gaza may have been offended by their protests, large numbers of the students whose rights of free speech have been infringed upon via draconian punishments were themselves Jewish.
Many of those faculty members who are about to be deprived of academic freedom and faculty governance, and perhaps fired, are themselves Jewish, indeed some are Israelis. If it were ever really about discrimination, the university would have taken action against the ceaseless harassment of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and faculty, and their allies and supporters, instead of endorsing and enabling it.
This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17-month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland. These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by the New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university.
These lies are rooted in blatant racism. Frantz Fanon wrote that the Manichaenism of the colonist sometimes “goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal”. Indeed, Israeli minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, in October 2023 called Palestinians “human animals”. Benjamin Netanyahu said of them: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.” In this colonial war, through this lens, Palestinian lives, like other brown and Black lives, are rendered a worthless, faceless, dehumanized mass, while other lives are uplifted and individually cherished and mourned.
We should hold on to these thoughts as long as we can, because in the dystopian world we have entered, simple mention of race and racism are, or will soon be, violations of the perverse current reading of federal law. Once the quislings who run Columbia University have implemented the diktats of their masters in Washington and on the board of trustees, once these diktats have spread to other universities under threat, teaching and even quoting Fanon will be perilous indeed, as will be mere mention of race and racism, not to speak of gender, disability and much else. We are approaching the status of Chilean universities under Pinochet, where on the orders of an authoritarian government, ideas and books were banned, students were expelled and arrested, departments were taken over, and faculty and staff fired.
We should not mourn what Columbia has become, for as great as it may have been, none of this is entirely new. Before the current expulsions and suspension, Columbia once in its history expelled a student for non-violent protest: in 1936 for protesting against offering a platform to Nazis. In 1953 its president signed a letter pronouncing communists unfit to teach. Columbia trustees fired two faculty members for opposing the first world war on pacifist grounds, while student conscientious objectors were arrested and jailed.
Columbia has long been run more like the vast, wealthy business and real estate empire that it is, than as an educational institution. It is a place where trustees, donors and powerful professional schools dictate its policy, not the rest of its faculty. In the spring of 2024, two-thirds of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted no confidence in a president who bowed to outside pressure, threw her faculty under the bus, and called in the NYPD for the first time since 1968. Her successor has outdone her, further garlanding Columbia’s already rich repressive traditions with groveling obeisance to government dictates that were promoted and eagerly seconded by shameless collaborators within the university.
After Friday’s capitulation, Columbia barely merits the name of a university, since its teaching and scholarship on the Middle East, and soon much else, will soon be vetted by a “senior vice provost for inclusive pedagogy”, in reality a senior vice provost for Israeli propaganda. Partisans of Israel, infuriated that scholarship on Palestine had found a place at Columbia, once named it “Bir Zeit on the Hudson”. But if it any longer merits the name of a university, it should be called Vichy on the Hudson.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
