Trump’s Education Department Targets UCLA with Investigation into Palestine Advocacy

Royce Hall at UCLA

The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights has reportedly opened two investigations into UCLA’s response to Palestine advocacy including a student conference in November 2018 and a guest lecture by Professor Rabab Abdulhadi last May. 

The investigations into UCLA come just weeks after Trump signed an executive order adopting a distorted redefinition of antisemitism that targets advocacy for Palestinian rights.

NSJP 2018

In November 2018, students from throughout the United States and Canada gathered on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, for the eighth annual National Students for Justice in Palestine conference.

The conference, which convened students from diverse backgrounds to discuss achieving equality for Palestinians, was successful despite a barrage of attempts by Israel proxy groups to shut it down. 

Within hours of the conference beginning, the Zachor Legal Institute, an anti-Palestinian group that has repeatedly demanded criminal investigation of human rights activists, filed a federal complaint against UCLA claiming that discussing Palestinian rights was an attack on Jewish students.

Over a year later, the Office for Civil Rights has reportedly accepted the complaint and opened an investigation. 

Complaint against lecture

In October 2019, a right-wing group with close ties to the Israeli government filed a second complaint targeting Palestine advocacy at UCLA. 

The complaint from StandWithUs arises from a May 2019 lecture by Professor Abdulhadi that focused on Islamophobia and its interplay with concepts such as settler colonialism and imperial feminism. The complaint alleges that a student attending the lecture was shocked and surprised that a lecture on Islamophobia would address Zionism and its impact on Palestinians and that UCLA failed to properly intervene after Professor Abdulhadi’s refusal to support Israel brought the student to tears. 

The complaint acknowledges that UCLA conducted an investigation into whether the student had faced religious discrimination or retaliation and that administrators met with her multiple times over the course of months before concluding in August 2019 that there had been no wrongdoing. 

The complaint directly attacks free speech and academic freedom protections. For example, StandWithUs argues: "Professor Abdulhadi first expressed her disagreement with [the student’s] position of support for the existence of the State of Israel, a blatantly antisemitic statement according to the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism." 

The logical conclusion of this argument is that federal law requires UCLA to intervene when professors fail to support Israel. The law can require no such thing. As the Supreme Court explained in 1943, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics.” 

Student responses

UCLA students have spoken out against the Trump executive order and its chilling impact on their campus. They are demanding that UCLA defend the rights of students and faculty because the complaint is baseless.

“According to Trump’s narrative, it is now a violation of ‘civil rights’ to speak out against Israel’s dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” explained Omar Zahzah, a doctoral candidate, teacher, and activist at UCLA. "This mirrors how some claim it is a violation of ‘academic freedom’ to boycott Israeli universities complicit in depriving Palestinians of their right to education vis-á-vis colonialism and military occupation."

“There is no legal basis to make capitulation to Israeli propaganda imperative,” continued Zahzah. “As scholars, intellectuals and educators, we have not only a right but an ethical obligation to ensure that students are exposed to the urgent political questions of our day and age, and this must include the Palestinian struggle for justice.”

Zahzah organizes with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, UCLA (GSJP-UCLA).

For information about the lecture and UCLA's initial investigation, read our blog post from last May.