When the current conflict began, there was understandable outrage over the pro-Palestine advocates’ unwillingness to condemn Hamas’s grisly attacks on Israeli civilians. Dozens of student groups issued reprehensible statements excusing Hamas and blaming Israelis for their own deaths. These incidents were then used — and continue to be used — to more broadly delegitimize pro-Palestinian sentiments. Republican officials have released a stream of congressional resolutions and public statements that conflate support for the Palestinian cause with support for Hamas. In October, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and his co-sponsors introduced a resolution that lumped Hamas’s “full-throated Jew hatred” with what they called “the subtle anti-Semitism that holds the State of Israel to a different standard than any other nation.”
These efforts are intensifying. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) recently called to suspend a CIA official for posting a picture of the Palestinian flag, comparing it to waving a Nazi flag during World War II. And in a charged congressional hearing last week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) grilled the president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, about antisemitism on campus. In an exchange that went viral, Stefanik zeroed in on students’ use of the word “intifada” and claimed it was tantamount to a call for genocide against Jews. Unfortunately, Gay did not challenge the premise of Stefanik’s question.
Intifada, which means “uprising” or “rebellion” in Arabic, came into popular use in the late 1980s during the first Palestinian intifada, which included mass protests, general strikes and economic boycotts against the Israeli occupation. Some uprisings have been violent, but this doesn’t mean the word entails violence. This would be akin to claiming that activists who call for “revolution” are endorsing terrorism because the Russian and French revolutions involved prolonged reigns of terror.
But lost in Republican grandstanding is perhaps the most far-reaching effort yet to punish pro-Palestinian speech — a seemingly innocuous bill in Congress to establish a commission to investigate antisemitism in the United States. The legislation uses verbatim the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
The bill doesn’t specify what constitutes “a certain perception of Jews” and neglects to mention the alliance’s own elaboration, which includes the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” and “applying double standards” to Israel as examples of potential antisemitism.
Under this reasoning, the commission will have broad powers to investigate any criticism of Israel that could be deemed unfair or overly exacting — including calls for a cease-fire or citing Israel’s disregard for Palestinian civilians in its targeting. As the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Lara Friedman, who monitors legislative activity on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, put it, “The GOP wants to formally open an era of modern McCarthyism, with criticism of Israel [and] fake concern about antisemitism as hooks to target progressive Americans.”
There’s no need to speculate about intentions. Leading Republicans have already made clear that something as unobjectionable as posting a Palestinian flag is beyond the pale. I have been on the receiving end of such attacks myself. Sen. Ted Cruz found time to tweet that I was “shilling” for Hamas because I said the Israeli military wasn’t prioritizing precision in its Gaza campaign.
I fully grant that for some pro-Israel voices, asking Israel to halt military operations — or using Arabic words — might be offensive. But being offensive is not the same as it being antisemitic. To conflate the two is to weaponize antisemitism for partisan and ideological purposes. Because antisemitism is a growing problem — with incidents increasing across the West — devaluing its meaning is dangerous. It’s also an affront to free expression.
The irony should not be lost on anyone. For years, Republican officials have portrayed themselves as free speech champions when it came to hard conversations on gender identity and race. They had legitimate reason to wave the cancel-culture flag. In their book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott note that, in 2022, 72 percent of conservative college professors feared they would lose their jobs or reputations for expressing unpopular opinions and that 45 percent of liberal professors admitted to being willing to discriminate against conservatives in faculty searches. This makes it all the more disheartening that conservatives are now canceling people they disapprove of — on and off campus.
There is a better way. The fight for truth must be fought in the push and pull of unfettered debate. Sometimes, these debates will be uncomfortable and, yes, offensive. That’s life. This standard applies to everyone: Black people, Hispanics, Jews and Muslim Americans like me. Islamophobic sentiments, as much as I dislike them, are protected speech, too, and I’d counsel Muslim students to resist complaining to college administrators when they hear something that offends their own sense of identity and belonging. They should instead toughen up and learn to argue effectively in a free, contentious debate. This isn’t rocket science. It requires applying free speech principles with moral clarity and consistency. If our principles can’t survive the toughest topics — and surely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one — then what use are they?
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