NEW YORK The City University of New York (CUNY) continues to be embroiled in a controversy related to antisemitism and pro-Palestinian activism. Jewish students and faculty allege that discourse on campus related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict constitutes hatred toward them, while Pro-Palestinian activists say they are being unfairly maligned.
The controversy has been ongoing since last year, the result of several displays of pro-Palestine and anti-Israel activism at the university. The situation erupted after a May commencement address at CUNY's law school that featured scathing critiques of Israel and its policies. Most recently, in late July, a Jewish advocacy group called for a federal investigation into CUNY due to alleged antisemitism at the school.
The issue at CUNY has captured the attention of local politicians and members of Congress and is indicative of the significant tension on US university campuses related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A campus divided
CUNY is New York Citys public university system, the largest such system in the United States. Reflective of the city's large Jewish and Arab populations, CUNY has a large number of students from both groups.
The CUNY community has been divided on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for some time. In 2022, the faculty at its School of Law passed a resolution endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which calls for a variety of boycotts against Israel to protest its treatment of the Palestinians. The resolution accused Israel of participating in apartheid, genocide, and war crimes," according to reports at the time. CUNY chancellor Felix Rodriguez subsequently said in a statement that the university does not support BDS.
The controversy continued into this year. In March, CUNYs Borough of Manhattan Community College hosted a display titled Visual Timeline of Occupied Palestinian Land. The materials read that the violence between Israelis and Palestinians is not a "conflict," but rather "settler colonialism, military occupation, land theft and ethnic cleansing." The display also accused Israel of hurting biodiversity by introducing European invasive (plant) species," according to images published by the The Times of Israel.
Jeffrey Lax, a professor at Kingsborough Community College, which is part of the CUNY system, said there is an overwhelming amount of antisemitism at CUNY, particularly against Zionist and religiously observant Jews.He cited the display at Borough of Manhattan Community College as one such example and said he disapproved of the school hosting it.
I respect the rights students and faculty have to take these positions due to free speech, but this is the administration doing that. Thats a whole different bowl of wax, Lax told Al-Monitor. Ive never seen taxpayer dollars used for something that is in my mind antisemitic.
Lax is also a cofounder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY, or SAFE CUNY. The group advocates against alleged discrimination toward Zionist Jews at the university. He said that the settler colonial allegation is specifically antisemitic because it is a false trope that denies Jews have been present in the area for thousands of years.
The Borough of Manhattan Community College subsequently apologized for the display.
Pro-Palestine activists at CUNY, on the other hand, say their legitimate activism is under attack. CUNY for Palestine, which advocates on campus for Palestinian liberation, told Al-Monitor that there is a repression of student organizing for Palestine at the school. The group referred to the Borough of Manhattan Community College exhibition as uplifting the Palestinian struggle and condemned the censorship and online attacks against it.
The May 12 commencement speech at the CUNY School of Law by one of this year's graduates, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, took the controversy to new heights. Mohammed, originally from Yemen but who grew up in the city borough of Queens, spent much of the address criticizing Israel, referring a few times to Israeli settler colonialism.
...that as Israel continues to indiscriminately rain bullets and bombs on worshippers, murdering the old and the young, attacking even funerals and graveyards, as it encourages lynch mobs to target Palestinian homes and businesses, as it imprisons its children, as it continues its project of settler colonialism, expelling Palestinians from their homes she said.
Mohamed also equated Israels bombing of the Gaza Strip that month to criminal justice issues in New York City, referencing the citys prison on Rikers Island.
Let us remember that Gaza, just this week [May 12], has been bombed with the world watching. That daily, brown and black men are being murdered by the state at Rikers, she said.
Toward the end of her speech, Mohammed called for action against Zionism, capitalism and other things.
May the rage that fills this auditorium, dance in the hallways of our elementary schools, in our home villages of Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza, and Yemen, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, she said. May it be the fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world.
In a statement on May 30, CUNYs board of trustees condemned the address, saying hate speech...should not be confused with free speech and has no place on our campuses."
Jewish groups also denounced Mohammeds remarks. Lax called it the most offensive speech he had ever heard, saying Mohammed came close to incitement to violence against Jews by calling for rage.
Calling for rage, fighting Zionism, capitalism. The word 'rage' has some serious connotations for Jewish people. Its a dog whistle nowadays, he said. Days of rage against Jews in the Middle East usually means calls for violence against Jews. I thought her speech was dangerous.
Palestinian civilians and armed groups sometimes call for a day of rage protest against Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. These often lead to clashes with Israeli forces.
I think there needed to be a serious discussion on if it would incite violence, Lax added about the speech.
Lax clarified that although he is critical of the speech, he is not against Mohammed speaking on campus in general. He also said Palestinians are victims in the conflict.
Anyone who tells you Palestinians are not victims is either a liar or a terrible person, said Lax. I think everyone should stand up for the rights of Palestinians.
Pro-Palestinian activists at CUNY defended Mohammeds speech and condemned criticism of it.
Once again, CUNY has exposed students to violent Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate with no condemnation of the attacks they face, Nerdeen Kiswani, who delivered a similar speech at CUNY School of Law last year, told Al-Monitor.
CUNY for Palestine also dismissed the notion that Mohammeds speech was antisemitic.
There was nothing antisemitic in Fatimas speech so Jewish fears and discomfort about antisemitism are not organically responding to an objective reality, said the group.
Some anti-Zionist Jewish groups are active at CUNY and likewise defended Mohammed. One such group, Not In Our Name, said that Jews feeling uncomfortable with Mohammeds speech is the result of a Zionist propaganda campaign.
Fatimas speech is a truth of its own and doesnt need the validation of Jewish students, the group told Al-Monitor.
Meanwhile, Mohammed told the progressive website Jewish Currents in June that she had no regrets about the speech, saying, I would not change a single word of my speech.
One thing the opposing sides share is a dislike for the CUNY leadership. Lax believes that Rodriguez should be fired. Kiswani said that Rodriguez and the board threw Fatima and the entire CUNY Law community under the bus when they labeled her address hate speech.
Spokespeople for CUNY did not respond to Al-Monitors request for comment.
Congress steps in
Mohammed's remarks were criticized by several members of Congress as well as by New York City Mayor Eric Adams Rep in late May. In June, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) introduced legislation to rescind federal funding for colleges that promote anti-semitism" in response to the speech, according to a statement.
The criticisms prompted CUNY for Palestine to release a video on July 3 in which supporters re-read Mohammeds speech aloud in response to what the group characterized in a press release as a coordinated national smear campaign against her.
The controversy surrounding pro-Palestine activism and alleged antisemitism at CUNY is now ongoing. On July 18, Alums for Fairness, a group that works to counter antisemitism on college campuses, launched a campaign for a federal investigation into CUNY. It specifically asked New York Governor Kathy Hochul and CUNY board chairman Bill Thompson to enlist the US Department of Educations help regarding allegations of antisemitism at the school. The group specifically mentioned Mohammeds speech as well as CUNY law school faculty endorsing BDS, among other things.
Going even further, as the university has proven unable to do so on its own, we are calling on Governor Hochul and Chair Thompson to invite the U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights to investigate and address the prevailing issue of antisemitic hate on CUNY campuses, said the group in a press release.
Alums for Fairness also called on CUNY to adopt the definition of antisemitism put forward by the Berlin-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The group's working definition, adopted in 2016, is supported by a number of Jewish advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The definition does not equate all criticism of Israel with antisemitism, stating, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. It does, however, include Israel-related examples, among them 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.
A gray area
Whether the criticism of Israel espoused by CUNY activists constitutes antisemitism is a matter of debate. Kenneth Stern worked on the IHRA definition when he was the American Jewish Committees antisemitism expert and is now director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate at the eponymous university in New York State.
Stern said the definition was written in 2004 and 2005 in response to an uptick in attacks in Europe in the early 2000s that coincided with the second intifada in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Associated Press reported a wave of violence against Jews in France in 2002, for example.
Antisemitism at heart is a belief that Jews conspire to harm non-Jews, Stern told Al-Monitor, adding that sometimes people cut and paste Israel in place of Jews.
Stern also said, however, that what is happening at CUNY and other US universities is not necessarily antisemitism.
A lot of stuff is in the gray area. The challenge on a campus is that you dont want to suppress ideas, he said. When you go after ideas you may find totally disagreeable and hurtful, the response is not censorship; its to speak out against them.
The IHRA definition was not designed to suppress criticism of Israel, according to Stern.
I dont think any definition should be used to hunt speech, he said, adding that calls to deny funding to CUNY over the issue are dangerous.
Stern criticized Mohammeds portrayal of Israel in the speech at CUNY, but said her remarks do not meet the definition of antisemitism.
It was clearly very anti-Israel. It was not nuanced. It painted with too broad a brush, he said. Not everything we find disturbing about Israel should be used with the term 'antisemitism.'
A repeated line of criticism of Israel at CUNY and elsewhere is the settler colonialism charge. Jews have continuously maintained a presence in modern-day Israel and the Palestinian territories, but began arriving in relatively larger numbers in the 19th century with the advent of Zionism. Migration from Europe and the Middle East accelerated into the 20th century due to pogroms and the Holocaust as well as hostility toward Jews in Arab and Muslim-majority countries. Many Jews celebrate the establishment of a Jewish homeland, but Palestinians often refer to the creation of the state of Israel as the "nakba," which is Arabic for "catastrophe."
Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia University, said that "settler colonialism" is an accurate term to describe Israel as a whole not just Israel's settlements and other actions in the West Bank.
The theft and colonization of Palestinian land in the West Bank is of course settler colonialism, but this is true of the entire Zionist enterprise from the very beginning, Khalidi told Al-Monitor.
Khalidi, one of the leading experts on Palestinian history in the United States, pointed to remarks on the matter made by early Zionist leaders, including Zeev Jabotinsky. In the 1923 essay "The Iron Wall," Jabotinsky compared Jews migrating to what was then the British mandate Palestine, to the Europeans that settled North America.
The ADL disputes the settler colonialism allegation. In a 2021 report, the organization said both Jews and Palestinians are native and indigenous to the land.
There is no motherland to which the Jewish population in the land of Israel may otherwise return, read the report. The French in Algeria could return to France, and the British in India could return to the United Kingdom, many Jews in Israel, including the many who fled persecution, have no other country to which they may return.
Khalidi also said that antisemitism is not a major motivating factor among those who actively support the Palestinian cause.
I do not believe that it is a significant factor among most activists, many of whom are Jewish, he said.
Some secular, left-wing Jewish groups, among them Jewish Voice for Peace, frequently criticize Israel. There are also religious Jews who oppose Israel on theological grounds.
Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews," said Khalidi. "Criticism of Israeli policies, of Israel's discriminatory laws, or of Zionism, which is a political philosophy, is not anti-Semitic.
A country-wide issue
CUNY is hardly the only campus with intense divisions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2021, a sexual assault support group at the University of Vermont announced that Zionists were no longer welcome to participate. The incident led to an investigation by the Department of Education, which concluded in April that the university had mishandled the complaints of antisemitism stemming from the case. In June, the department opened an investigation into a similar incident at the State University of New York at New Paltz.
The CUNY saga has led other students to also speak out. In California, Jana Abulaban slammed Israel as an apartheid state at the graduation ceremony in June for El Camino Community College. Abulaban, who emigrated from Jordan to the United States, told The New York Post that she felt inspired by Mohammeds speech at CUNY. Abulaban was likewise accused of antisemitism for the speech.
The divisions in the United States over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict extend beyond college campuses. Several state legislatures have enacted laws barring their state governments to varying degrees from doing business with supporters of the BDS movement. Also of note, in 2018, Bahia Amawi, a speech pathologist in Texas, lost her job at a public school for refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel. She later sued the state.
The tensions surrounding the conflict have even led to violence. In late 2021, a Jewish man was attacked in New York City for wearing an Israel Defense Forces sweatshirt. This past May, city resident Suleiman Othman pled guilty to attempted third-degree assault as a hate crime and was slated to receive a 60-day jail sentence for the attack, prosecutors announced at the time.
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What does City University of New York controversy say about antisemitism, censorship? - Al-Monitor