“Despite the state’s professions of fairness and benevolence, free speech is never fixed or disinterested… it’s conditioned by race, gender, nationality, class, religion, ideology, culture, sexuality, and so forth.”
— Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores
Academia has, for so long, been controlled by a dominant power capable of influencing universities and students towards ends far more ruthless than ever before. Academia has, for so long, been constructed as the hallmark of free speech, the great “marketplace of ideas,” and a place of refuge for academics with nowhere left to run.
But, as it turns out, the academy is being conditioned.
As the genocide in Palestine continues to dominate headlines, free speech remains in direct conflict with elite power structures, leading to the systematic erasure of anti-Zionist epistemologies both domestically and globally.
This is hypocrisy, held at the level of meta-politics. Zionists condition the liberty of free speech on support for a genocidal, far-right regime, where the government has created conditions so abysmal in Palestine that the colonial ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his minister. They have conditioned the support of the apartheid state by law, encouraging Trump and other far-right political figures in the United States to pass legislation and executive orders in order to subjugate the Palestinian population.1
The academy never acts alone. The academy maintains a strong, colonial episteme through a larger, dominant actor – the United States. Palestinian protestors on college campuses are threatened, their presence in the United States being attacked due to their fight for a liberated West Bank, free from the horrors and human rights abuses that millions of Palestinians face daily. The government has removed any possibility of immigrant protestors from engaging in civil rights activism for Palestinians on college campuses by threatening to revoke their visas, which independently raises the question, why does Trump – and the U.S. – feel the need to silence and police immigrant populations?2
Their voices are systematically suppressed, caught between state repression in the U.S. and the ongoing struggle for survival in Palestine. The U.S. openly criticizes communist countries such as Cuba and China for their violations of democracy, but in the midst of a seemingly never-ending ethnic cleansing, the United States holds the blade of hypocrisy, utilizing free speech whenever it serves their own political agendas. And unfortunately, academia has inherited this regressive approach, striking down on all activism that actively contradicts the system. William I. Robinson,3 a professor at U.C. Santa Barbara, was almost fired for consolidating anti-Zionist pedagogy within his curriculum, receiving death threats and hate-mail all the way through.4 While he was able to come through, the cracking down on individuals such as himself displays the intersections between the state and the academy.
This is Zionism perfected.
State-imposed restrictions on speech are designed to reshape academic discourse, ensuring that dominant epistemologies remain unchallenged. A failed democracy. A democracy in name, hypocritically maintaining the guise of free voice and thought, but authoritarian in reality.
Ask Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Badar Khan.5 In the hour of genocide, silence appears to be the safest option, manifesting itself as a cure for a deadly sickness, a guise of neutrality in the midst of polarization.6 But as Fúnez-Flores wrote, “We cannot become… “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent,” as silence would offer protection from the government, but concede the validity of such horrendous ideas to proliferate throughout the “marketplace of ideas.”
These are not isolated instances, but rather part and parcel of a broader, unrelenting structure of suppression. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rescinded a job offer to Steven Salaita in 2014 due to his tweets criticizing Israel’s assault on Gaza. Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2023, reinforcing the violent silencing of Palestinian intellectuals. Columbia University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for organizing protests. Trump signed Executive Order 13899 which expanded Title VI protections to include antisemitism, weaponized to target anti-Zionist activism.
Unfortunately, free speech was never meant for the Palestinians.
But why are we so worried about maintaining free speech when it was never ours to begin with? After all, discussions of Palestine have always been censored, immigrants have always been deported, and Muslims have always been portrayed as terrorists. However, you must understand that I am not for free speech absolutism; rather, I am for the epistemic insurgence that would fight the facade of democracy that our current institutions uphold. We must work to create a society where all opinions can be accepted – except for those that justify xenophobia, racism, transphobia, misogyny, and all relevant matters – so that the Palestinian crisis ceases and never occurs again.
Some argue that free speech on campus is not solely being restricted against anti-Zionist perspectives, but rather that universities are attempting to maintain a balance between competing viewpoints. They contend that while anti-Zionist activists face backlash, pro-Israel speakers and Jewish students also experience hostility, censorship, and even threats on campus. Universities, in this view, are not engaging in systemic suppression but are instead trying to prevent hate speech and maintain an environment where all students feel safe. Moreover, some claim that certain anti-Zionist rhetoric crosses into antisemitism, justifying administrative actions to prevent discrimination rather than stifling political debate.
However, this argument ignores the asymmetry in power and the structural suppression of Palestinian voices. While pro-Israel speakers may face protests, they are rarely banned or sanctioned in the same way as those who criticize Israel’s actions. The mere act of opposing Zionism—an ideology tied to a state’s policies—does not equate to antisemitism, just as criticizing the U.S. government does not mean one is anti-American. Framing anti-Zionist speech as inherently hateful serves as a convenient excuse to silence voices advocating for Palestinian liberation. If free speech is truly valued in academia, it must extend equally to those challenging dominant power structures, not just those who defend them. Pro-Israel voices, despite claims of suppression, are institutionally safeguarded, while Palestinian activists are surveilled, punished, and deported. To conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to deliberately blur the lines between a settler-colonial project and an ethno-religious identity, weaponizing Jewish trauma to silence those resisting apartheid.
Tangentially, we need to decriminalize the Muslim;7 ever since 9/11, America’s War on Terror has assisted in the propagation of genocide, where the Western state of Israel finds itself “just” in settling in the Native Palestinian region.8 These racial signifiers assist in the police state’s project of silencing the Native “savage,” implying a strict, racist undertone that serves the settler colonial state of Israel. Whenever these people want to debate, they are often disregarded as “supporters of Hamas,” or some other Islamophobic stereotype meant to harass and invalidate any meaningful resistance.
The academy has never been neutral—it has always been a battleground where power dictates whose voices are heard and whose are erased. The suppression of Palestinian resistance is not just about censorship; it is about ensuring that the very framework upholding Zionist settler-colonialism remains unchallenged. But silence is complicity. Neutrality is a death sentence. And to accept the repression of anti-Zionist voices is to accept the continued erasure of an entire people. Academia must be reclaimed—not as a passive marketplace of ideas, but as a site of epistemic resistance, where free speech is not a privilege reserved for the oppressor, but a weapon wielded by the oppressed.
Footnotes
- “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians.” Amnesty International, August 12, 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/. ↩︎
- Wise, Alana. 2025. “Trump Administration Advances Immigration Crackdown on Foreign Student Protesters.” NPR. March 28, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/g-s1-56780/trump-administration-advances-immigration-crackdown-on-foreign-student-protesters. ↩︎
- Truthout. 2017. “William I. Robinson.” Truthout. December 10, 2017. https://truthout.org/authors/william-i-robinson/. ↩︎
- Robinson, William I. 2014. “As Repression Escalates on US Campuses, an Account of My Ordeal with the Israel Lobby and UC.” Truthout. August 17, 2014. https://truthout.org/articles/as-repression-escalates-on-us-campuses-an-account-of-my-ordeal-with-the-israel-lobby-and-uc/. ↩︎
- Staff, Al Jazeera. 2025. “Who Are the Students Trump Wants to Deport?” Al Jazeera. March 27, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/27/who-are-the-students-trump-wants-to-deport. ↩︎
- Fúnez-Flores, Jairo I. 2024. “The Palestine Exception to Academic Freedom.” Substack.com. Decolonial Thought & Praxis. May 20, 2024. https://jairofunez.substack.com/p/the-palestine-exception-to-academic. ↩︎
- Najib, Kawtar, and Carmen Teeple Hopkins. 2019. “Geographies of Islamophobia.” Social & Cultural Geography 21 (4): 449–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1705993. ↩︎
- Ayyash, Mark Muhannad. 2020. “Israel Is a Settler Colony, Annexing Native Land Is What It Does.” Al Jazeera. July 7, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/7/7/israel-is-a-settler-colony-annexing-native-land-is-what-it-does. ↩︎
