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This, in turn, has fueled racist narratives that these college students, many of whom are themselves Jewish, are antisemitic terror supporters, often implicitly encouraging outside violence against them. Instead, these students have been smeared as fake Jews, a slur of convenience that allows those who are ostensibly concerned with the safety of Jewish students to place these protesters outside the protections of the tattered social compact they claim to champion. Our leaders are signaling to the public that the mere feelings of pro-Israel supporters are sacrosanct, but the physical safety of Arabs, Muslims, and pro-Palestinian Jews are not.

Despite the fact that these students have been censored, arrested, slandered, assaulted, and harassed—and through it all demonized by journalists and politicians on a national level for their principled stance—the campus movement to divest from Israeli apartheid is only growing stronger. Solidarity and divestment encampments are popping up at universities across the country, including at my alma mater, the University of Southern California, which has controversially prevented its valedictorian, Asna Tabassum—a Muslim woman—from speaking at commencement after cowing to a racist pressure campaign against her. Instead of taking student and faculty concerns about censorship of Tabassum seriously, USC cancelled its main commencement ceremony to halt the risk of protests and sent LAPD officers to attack its own students.

Everywhere, academic freedoms, free speech, and civil liberties are under attack when they are used for the most basic criticism of war crimes, wanton bloodshed, an illegitimate occupation, and America’s material support for these and other violations of humanitarian law perpetrated by a corrupt Israeli government that’s under mounting criticism from its own citizens. Because they can no longer defend Israeli crimes against humanity at face value, pro-Israel forces are deflecting focus away from the horrors in Gaza. Instead, they are deploying tired, reactionary tropes about student activists, a conservative bogeyman dating back to the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. This pathological hatred of student activists embodies the worst tendencies of an unjust society.