When it comes to Palestine, ain’t no such thing as free speech!
35,000+ Gazans dead, 70% of them women and children
78,000+ Gazans wounded
500,000+ Gazans starving
500+ Palestinians in the West Bank murdered by Israeli settlers
These are facts about Israel’s siege of Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Information is critical. As educators, we urgently need to inform our students about the lived reality of Palestinians under military occupation to counter the disinformation flooding our media and to provide a basis on which they can establish moral clarity and act—or not. I’m Jewish. Intellectually, I “knew” about the military occupation; what I saw when I went to Palestine in May 2022 traumatized me. I experienced a sort of gaslighting every time I contrasted the Israeli “news” with what I witnessed before me. Most Americans have no clue who the Palestinians are or what they have endured since 1948 because our perspective is so skewed by Israeli and American hype.
Israel does not allow foreign journalists into Gaza. What we hear and what we see is produced by Israel although it’s presented without acknowledgement of that source, as if objective and factual. In this crisis, misinformation is rampant because Israel cultivates and disseminates propaganda at industrial scale levels as “a tool to dehumanize victims, justify mass violence, and…sow seeds of doubt designed to muzzle calls for intervention,” writes Tariq Kenney-Shawa in “Israel’s Disinformation Apparatus: A Key Weapon in Its Arsenal” (https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/israels-disinformation-apparatus-a-key-weapon-in-its-arsenal/). Since October 7th, the world has seen an unprecedented flood of disinformation deployed to justify the IDF’s slaughter of Gazans and the settlers’ murder of Palestinians in the West Bank. Sadly, our government officials and journalists accept Israel’s “news” unquestioningly, even though it is widely known that American news offices must “clear” their coverage of anything Israeli-Palestinian through the Israeli government. Where’s the verification? And why the double standard of doubting voices on the ground? In Hebrew, “hasbara” means “explaining.” Israel employs hasbarists to shape how Israelis and the world see Israel and Palestine and the discourse allowed to discuss it. Israel spends over $30 million annually to support influencers and organizations to promote a particular Israeli perspective “while concealing direct ties to the Israeli government.”
This propaganda has made it possible for Israel to oppress and terrorize Palestinians with impunity for decades. Consider now how Israeli officials repeatedly tell journalists that they are more careful than any other military in the world when it comes to protecting innocent civilians, but they dropped hundreds of mammoth dumb bombs indiscriminately, leveling entire neighborhoods; or, they say they are allowing aid into Gaza while every relief organization serving Gaza says otherwise, and we see images of hundreds of trucks stuck at the Rafa Gate and thousands of desperate Gazans fighting for food when it is delivered by air. Like our former president, Israeli officials keep repeating the same lines as if that makes them true. Yet, they are blatantly lying. During my sojourn in Palestine, I noted that Israel always says that the IDF injured or killed Palestinians because the Palestinians did something wrong when I watched, instead, IDF soldiers harassing and then harming Palestinians for sport; the initial lie is necessary to justify arbitrary and cruel IDF behavior. The brainwashing has worked well on American Jews and politicians.
Compounding this onslaught of pro-Israel/anti-Palestine propaganda, American media is biased toward Israel. Micah Loewinger dedicated the March 9th episode of On the Media program to the bias in reporting the Israel-Palestinian conflict (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-measuring-bias-israel-palestine-coverage-mehdi-hasan-approach-covering-region). William Youmans, Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, reviewed 51 hours of television news October 8th-January 14th and documented American journalistic malpractice. Youmans found that 120 of the 140 guests were American; not one was Arab or Palestinian-American. US officials drove the pro-Israeli arguments. The 20 non-American guests were primarily Israelis, people from the Netanyahu administration, or other official spokespeople. Not surprisingly, these guests were 4.6 times more sympathetic to Israel than Palestine. Most of the pro-Israeli guests denied or ignored the reality that Gaza was under occupation, which is a critical context for understanding the violence that erupted against Israelis on October 7th. Genocide was mentioned 23 times, but only once in reference to Gaza. “Who is mostly getting killed in Gaza are Palestinians who are not members of Hamas. To assume that this is a correct framing and a factual framing embeds a certain degree of bias that reflects the Israeli government’s talking points,” said Youmans.
Relatedly, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times contributor Mona Chalabi, who argues that “the language and framing used in straight news reports likely plays the greatest role in shaping impressions of the war,” documented the disproportionality and contrasting language re: coverage of deaths of Israelis versus Palestinians in hundreds of articles and thousands of American and BBC posts over the first month of the war. The BBC described Israelis as “murdered, massacred, slaughtered”; only once was the word massacre used for Palestinians and slaughtered never. In the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, ” the term slaughter was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, a massacre was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2… Horrific was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4,” according to Loewinger. Chalabi added that “Israelis were more likely to be humanized in the reporting.” The fact is that many more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And many more Palestinians who are not Hamas have been killed.
At Montgomery College, the administration has repeatedly and reflexively responded to a small minority—mainly residents of the county, not members of our academic community—who voice their opposition before our events start and shout us down during the events. They don’t listen. They harass and threaten us sometimes. Yet, the administration hasn’t attended the event; nor does it seem concerned about our safety. Instead, after the event, a college-wide email goes out condemning the event and labelling it hateful and anti-Semitic and reassuring the (Jewish?) community that Public Safety is hypervigilant. I used parentheses because I wonder who constitutes community in our administration’s eyes. In fact, the majority of our students are outraged by the administration’s one-sided stance and would like recognition of the humanity of the Palestinians being attacked. Furthermore, many of our students feel an affinity with the Palestinians, and some of our students are Palestinian—and have lost countless family members. I’m not sure why one people’s feelings matter more than another people’s feelings. Like many institutions across the country, our administration asserts a double standard that is inherently biased and misinformed. One assumption is that criticizing the Israeli government or Zionism is automatically anti-Semitic. The other assumption is that anything Palestinian-related is terroristic, and thus, inherently violent. The “violence” on our campus has come from pro-Israel people only. And I consider it anti-Semitic to lump all Jews together and expect us to share the same perspective on Israel. I am Jewish, and like many Jews I know, find that the Israeli government, in its policies and treatment of the Palestinians, exercises supremely un-Jewish values. (FYI, I’m not unique: the American group, Jewish Voice for Peace, has more than half a million members.)
We haven’t witnessed the brawls that have occurred on some campuses, but our students are hurting nonetheless. It is for our students that we faculty must speak up. In fact, our college’s Values Statement demands it: We believe in conducting our teaching and service duties with distinction in an ethical and trustworthy manner.” To ignore the full picture in the Israel-Hamas war, to further lies promoted by Israel would be unethical.
Our college’s former president couldn’t finish a sentence without the phrase “radical inclusiveness” and “social justice,” and our current president is obsessed with “belonging.” The schools I attended didn’t have a mission statement, but I imagine that if they had, it would look like ours: “where students discover their passions and unlock their potential to transform lives, enrich the community, and change the world.” Shutting down student groups and events and cracking down on free speech when it comes to Palestine contradicts this mission if this is a student’s passion and fighting to end the military occupation of Palestine is one of the ways a student seeks to change the world.
Yale Law School Professor Stephen L. Carter in his New York Times article “College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech,” distinguishes between what the classroom has become versus what it should be. He notes that postsecondary institutions seem to be “yielding…to the ‘vocational ideal’…college as a path to a better job and a higher income.” Yet, Carter argues, “The classroom is first and foremost a place to train…minds toward a yearning for knowledge and a taste for argument—to be intellectually curious—even if what they wind up discovering challenges their most cherished truths…The most vital tasks of higher education are to help students realize that the [information] gap always exists and to stoke their desire to bridge it.” Carter concludes, “Impediments to free speech are impediments to free thought and can only interfere with that search. That’s why academic freedom is so precious.”
The clampdown on free speech amounts to mind control, the antithesis of education. In an effort to seem unbiased, Montgomery College, like many other institutions, is, in fact, perversely biased against Palestinians. Imagine if the movement to dismantle apartheid in South Africa through boycotts and divestments had been shut down the way most institutions in America are expelling or outlawing anyone who speaks the truth about a situation that resembles apartheid and prison as well as military occupation?