_There are signs that weve reached a tipping point in US public recognition of Israels suppression of the rights of Palestinians as a legitimate human rights concern. Increasingly,students on campuses across the countryare calling on their universities to divest from companies that do business in Israel. Newly elected members of Congress aresaying what was once unsayable: that perhaps the US should question its unqualified diplomatic and financial support for Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East, and hold it to the same human rights scrutiny we apply to other nations around the globe. Global companiessuch as Airbnbhave recognized that their business practices must reflect international condemnation of the illegality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.Natalie Portman,Lorde and other celebrities have declined appearances in Israel, acknowledging the call to boycott the Israeli government on account of its human rights violations. AndThe New York Timespublisheda columnarguing, with unprecedented forthrightness, that criticism of ethno-nationalism in Israel (for example, defining Israel exclusively as a Jewish state) isnt necessarily anti-Semitic.

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At the same time, discussions on college campuses about the complexities of freedom, history, and belonging in Israel and Palestine are under increasing pressure and potential censorship from right-wing entities.In fact, new policies adopted by the US and Israeli governments are intended to eliminate any rigorous discussion of IsraeliPalestinian politics in university settings. Not since the McCarthyite anti-Communist purges have we seen such an aggressive effort to censor teaching and learning on topics the government disfavors.

Especially chilling, the US Department of Education recently adopted a new definition of anti-Semitism, one that equates any criticism of Israel with a hatred of Jews. This new stance was evident when the Departments Office for Civil Rightsrecently reopenedan investigation of anti-Semitism at Rutgers University regarding a complaint that had been examined and closed by the Obama administration. The case, which was brought by the Zionist Organization of America,alleged that Rutgers should not permit students to hold events at which the human rights record of the state of Israel is criticized. The ZOA applauded the reopening of the case by Kenneth Marcus, the new head of the Office for Civil Rights and along-time proponentof the view of that all criticism of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic.

In another recent case, the University of Michigandisciplineda professor who declined to write a letter of recommendation for a student who sought a fellowship in Israel. I would do the same if the situation arose, because I would regard it as ethically inappropriate to recommend students for an educational opportunity for which my other graduate students who are Palestinian or Arab would be prevented from applying.

Denials of entry to and deportation from Israel are becoming common for those who speak out against the governments policies.Lara Alqasem, an American student from Florida who planned to do graduate research at Hebrew University, is a salient example. The Israeli government held her for two weeks in a bedbug-ridden detention cell at Tel Aviv airport on the grounds that she has been involved in campus organizing critical of Israel. She sued the Israeli government, challenging the denial of entry and noting that she had already been granted a student visa. The Israeli courtsruled in her favor, but only after she promised not to criticize Israel and disavowed support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movementessentially waiving her free speech rights as the price of entry to the only democracy in the Middle East, as pro-Israel supporters like to describe Israel.

Newlydisclosedofficial documents show that the Israeli government prohibited Alqasem from entering the country based on a Google search that found her name on a blacklist of students and faculty members who have raised concerns about Israels human rights record. The list is published byCanary Mission, aright-wing website thatcritics have calledMcCarthyesque.Its intended audience is employers who do a web search of job applicants only to find their names tagged as anti-Semitic. Canary Mission has beenfunded bythe Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco, an organization that has alsofundedthe Tea Party, as well asfar-right and Islamophobicgroups.

Like Lara Alqasem,I was detainedat Tel Aviv airport last Aprilwhen I traveled to the region to meet with my Israeli and Palestinian graduate students, and to lead a delegation of civil rights leaders from the US. While I was interrogated at the airport, border control officials yelled at me, You are here to promote BDS in Palestineconfess! When I said I wasnt, the interrogator held up his cell phone, showing an entry about me on the Canary Mission website. I told him that this site trades in ugly and bigoted lies about US academics, yet he just kept yelling at me. I was held in the airport for fourteen hours before being deported and permanently banned from entering either Israel or Palestine.

Two weeks ago, Marc Lamont Hill, the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities and Solutions at Temple University, delivered a speech at the United Nations that laid out in granular detail the ways in which Israeli state policy violates the rights of individual Palestinians and the Palestinian peoples right to freedom and self-determination. In a clear example of what has come to be known as the Palestine exception to Free Speech, pro-Israel organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America inundated CNN with calls to terminate Professor Hill. The next day, CNN canceled Hills contract as a political commentator.

What did Hill say that was so objectionableindeed, anti-Semitic, according to the ADL and the ZOA? Hill had closed his remarks with a call to action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea. This last phrase hasbeen misconstruedas a call for destruction of the state of Israel, allegedly signaling Hillsalignment with Hamas. Yet the phrase is a commonplace in IsraeliPalestinian politics, and is used as a rallying cry by right-wing Zionists and settlers to signal the unification of_Eretz Yisrael_, or greater Israel. Professor Hills call amounted simply to a statement of support for a one-state solution, which may be controversial to those who still support the creation of two states, but it certainly isnt bigoted.

Yet the ZOAs presidentdenounced Hills speechas Jew-hating, violence-inciting and genocidal and the charge of anti-Semitism aimed at Hill swiftly reached beyond his position at CNN. The chair of the Temple University board of trustees joined the furor two days after Hills UN speech,commenting thatPeople wanted to fire him right awayWere going to look at what remedies we have. Temple Universitys president jumped in,adding thatthe speechs river to the sea reference was seen by many as a perceived threat.

Even when the Temple University boardannounced on Tuesdaythat it would not sanction Professor Hill because his remarks to the UNwere made as a private citizen and thereforehad FirstAmendment protection, the trustees condemned Hills views. This leaves open the question of whether the board would have terminatedHill had hequestioned Israels human rights record when speaking in hiscapacity as a Temple University professor.

The effort to vilify, if not blacklist, Marc Lamont Hill should be understood as part of a much larger campaign, so far focused primarily on university campuses, to shut down any discussion of Israel or Palestine that casts a critical light on the state of Israel. Each year, I teach a class to high school and college teachers called Citizenship and Nationality in IsraelPalestine. The course provides an introduction to the history of political Zionism, pre-World War II visions of a Jewish state in Palestine, the founding of Israel in 1948 as a homeland for the Jews, the competing claims to both dispossession and belonging that are at stake for Jews and Palestinians in IsraelPalestine, and careful consideration of the question of how a state can manage a commitment to being a democracy while also declaring itself a homeland for one ethnic-religious group.

When I taught the course for the first time three years ago, Columbia Universityreceived aggressive demandsfrom the Zionist Organization of America that the course be cancelled because the group was certain it would be biased against Israel, even though the ZOA had not seen the syllabus or materials, all of which were Israeli. Its complaint was based primarily on the title of the course, which included reference to a place it claimed did not existnamely,Palestine. The groupthreatened to filea charge against me and Columbia under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. The threats from theZOAescalated to such a degree that I had to hire security to guard the door of the classroom.

When I teach the course this spring, I now worry that efforts to censor the academic discussion of dispossession and belonging in Israel and Palestine will come not only from a rightwing advocacy organization but from the US Department of Education. Since I taught the course last year, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed theNation-State Law, which moved the state of Israel further from its secular-democratic tradition and solidified its definition as a Jewish state. Some of the provisions of the new law merely clarify policies that have been in place for many years; others build into the law new provisions that reinforce a two-tiered conception of citizenship.

For instance, the law declares the right to exercise national self-determinationin IsraelPalestineto be unique to the Jewish people. Another provision effectively overrules an Israeli Supreme Court decision that some regard as Israels_Brown_v.Board of Education,_Aadel Kaadan_v.Israel Lands Administration, whichfound thatthe states policy of allocating land only to Jews violated a fundamental commitment to equality. The Nation-State Law explicitly repudiates the_Kaadan_decision, not only permitting the state to establish Jewish-only communities in Israel, but actually prioritizing the building of these settlements as a national value.

I always include the_Kaadan_case in the materials I use in my Citizenship and Nationality in IsraelPalestinecourse.Under normal circumstances, I would update my syllabus to include the Nation-State Law, which raises serious questions about whether the Israeli Knesset has built a form of discrimination into its Basic Law (its equivalent of the Constitution). Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset, a number of European political leaders, and prominent human rights organizations maintain that the new law formalizes a kind of apartheid in Israel.This is, to be sure, a serious charge. But it seems likely that I might be accused of anti-Semitism under the new Department of Education guidance if I were even to discuss the merits and flaws of this position in my class.

Watching how Temple University leaders failed to defend Professor Hill when the pro-Zionist right went after him, I wonder: Will Columbia University stand up for the academic freedom of its faculty when these same forces recruit the Department of Education toaccuseColumbias instructors of anti-Semitism because we teach and write critically about the policies of the Israeli government?

All of these incidents are part of a larger effort by both the US and Israeli governments and their supporters to undermine the universitys civic role as a crucial forum of democratic engagement. The First Amendments guarantee of free speech as well as fundamental principles of academic freedom are violated when governments that profess to be democratic declare certain topics off-limits. The capacity to critically evaluate the way in which state power is exercisedin the US,in Israel, and in other places around the world where human rights are under threatis vital to responsible citizenship and is central to our mission as educators. The American and Israeli governments alike should stand up for, rather than stand in the way of, open and vibrant academic debate on IsraelPalestine, just as they should for debate about any contentious subject essential to democracy.

Katherine Franke is Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming “Repair: Redeeming the promise of abolition” (December 2018).

First published in the New York Review of Books, 12 December 2018