Two Demands: Free Gaza, Free Speech
College administrators have been trying to preemptively shut down the eruption of new protests against the genocide in Gaza. The movement needs to emphasize the urgent importance of protecting free speech.
A pro-Palestine protester uses a bullhorn during a demonstration on the University of California, Berkeley, campus on April 22, 2024, in Berkeley, California. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Last semester, I did a teach-in at the antiwar encampment at Princeton University. I knew that the media propaganda I’d been seeing about the protests for months was mostly nonsense. Even so, I’ve never felt such a visceral gap between the image I’d been fed and the reality on the ground. I was told the students at these encampments were violent and dangerous antisemites. The reality was that they were a curious and attentive audience. They asked thoughtful and perceptive questions. And lots of them were Jewish.
Meanwhile, it seems like every time there was a report of serious violence at the protests around the country, it was directed against the protesters. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a mob of counterprotesters from off campus violently assaulted the encampment for hours while police let it happen. At Columbia University, a cousin of the late extreme-right-wing Israeli politician Meir Kahane engaged in what looks like an act of Charlottesville-style lone-wolf terrorism, driving his car into a crowd of protesters. Nevertheless, it was the protesters themselves who were relentlessly demonized by the media and blacklisted from future jobs by angry billionaires like Bill Ackman. There were even Joe McCarthy–style Congressional hearings demonizing the protests and demanding that college administrators crack down harder.
As the fall semester kicks off, administrations around the country are laying down new rules to prevent a revival of the protests. Some are banning “amplified sound,” which has of course been part of every protest on every issue since time immemorial. Some are prohibiting masks, which would make it easier for employers to enforce those blacklists, perhaps intimidating future job-seekers out of attending. The Washington Post reports that some campuses are also “limiting places where demonstrations can happen or requiring groups to seek permission in advance.”
In a truly astonishing understatement, the Post avers that asking the institution you’re protesting for permission to protest them might “strike some” as contrary to the whole idea of protest. But freedom of expression, you see, must be balanced against safety — namely the safety of those who disagree with the protests from ideas they don’t want to hear.
Going into the fall semester, it’s apparent that protesters against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza are going to have to combine their antiwar activism with a response to this wave of censorship. They’ll have to hearken back to left-wing struggles of previous eras and put free speech at the center of their activism.
Tying Together the Issues
Last Monday, I interviewed Norman Finkelstein on my podcast. Norm was, infamously, at the center of a related controversy about academic freedom decades before October 7. Alan Dershowitz, a prominent apologist for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, was so incensed by Norm’s writing and activism on this subject that he publicly (and successfully) campaigned for DePaul University to deny him tenure. When I asked what advice he’d give for student protesters returning to campus this fall, Norm told me that “the best slogan would be free Gaza, free speech.”
[If you] join together those two issues . . . some people may not agree with you about Gaza but they will agree you have the right to speak your mind . . . and a label shouldn’t be a fixed to you like “antisemite” . . . because your opinion is different. I think you can create a very large coalition if you join the two issues.
It’s good advice. Some leftists in recent years have learned to associate talk of “free speech” with apologetics for bigotry and have even proactively advocated for censorship of others. Now false accusations of bigotry are being used to justify widespread censorship of antiwar activism — a climate of repression that, while nothing new for the Left, might be some young people’s first rodeo. Perhaps it’s clear now why jettisoning free speech was such a big mistake.
New York University has gone so far as to expand its definition of antisemitism to explicitly include anti-Zionism. We can and should push back against that on the substance of the issue. Anti-Zionism follows from basic liberal democratic principles according to which there should be no such thing as a nation-state “for” a particular ethnicity, but rather every nation-state should equally be for everyone who lives within its borders. (I’ve made that case repeatedly.) But we also need to be able to fight back against this kind of censorship without needing to restrict our coalition to people who already agree with our geopolitical analysis.
Free speech has always been a left-wing cause, and for very good reason. Strategically, the idea of trusting reigning institutions to decide which views are “safe” enough to express is a very bad bet for anyone with a radical critique of the status quo. And in principle, you can’t both believe that ordinary working-class people are capable of self-government and think benevolent technocrats need to decide which points of view they get to hear for their own good.
Some on the Left think that “turning” Palestine “into a free speech issue” distracts from the core of the issue. Carl Beijer, for example, worries that “instead of affirming the basic humanity of Palestinians, the illegality of the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the moral depravity of Zionism,” the movement will get drawn into “a procedural debate about the right to criticize.”
I understand Beijer’s point. Hearing people argue about whether the encampments make Jewish students feel “unsafe,” for example — beyond being infuriating in that it erases the disproportional Jewish participation in the protests — can be maddening when we remember what’s actually happened in Gaza. Millions of civilians have been driven out of their homes at gunpoint or under the threat of bombs. Israeli soldiers regularly post videos of themselves on social media rifling through the lingerie drawers of Palestinian women who fled or playing with the toys of children who may now be dismembered or dead.
It’s clearly true that all of this is vastly more important than what the rules are on college campuses. But the conclusion that those of us who want to free Gaza shouldn’t be ringing the “free speech” bell very loudly right now does not follow.
In the early 1900s, when the radical labor unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) would come to a new town to organize, they would wage what they called “free speech fights” until they were allowed to say. The newspaper of anti-lynching crusader and NAACP cofounder Ida B. Wells was called the Memphis Free Speech. Wells and the IWW knew what they were doing, and we should follow their lead.
Talking about Gaza and talking about our right to talk about Gaza aren’t in competition with each other. On the contrary, our message should be that apologists for the genocide want to silence the protests because they know they can’t defend the horrors being perpetrated against millions of innocent men, women, and children.
There’s a video I saw days ago that I can’t get out of my head. It’s shows a thirteen-year-old girl in Gaza screaming into the camera about all the members of her family who have been killed by the Israeli military. Her mother. Her father. Her nephew. Her brother, who’d just gotten married. “We’re exhausted,” she yells. “Everyone left us behind.” And she asks a haunting question, addressed to the world in general. “Why can’t you feel for us?”
Campus protesters are bravely telling the truth about what American bombs are being used to do to these people. Right now, unfortunately, the majority of Americans aren’t quite lined up behind them, thanks largely to demonization in the media. But the majority of Americans do support freedom of expression on principle, with 94 percent saying the First Amendment is vital.
The free speech issue thus puts a different and easier-to-answer question to onlookers: Should protesters be allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights? Most, if asked directly, will say yes. A few principled ones will even rush to the aid of protesters whose message they find disagreeable, defending their right to say it.
Those who say no will no doubt struggle to square their position with their stance on free speech. Watching them perform those mental gymnastics will be extraordinarily illuminating about the real reasons for cracking down on the campus protests. They don’t have a good answer to that thirteen-year-old girl’s question, so they’d prefer to silence anyone who brings it up.