Palestine Legal Urges NYU to Stop Politically-Motivated Investigation of Law Students
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Photo credit: razlan79/Flickr
Palestine Legal is supporting NYU law students active with Law Student for Justice in Palestine (LSJP) as they face an investigation based on frivolous complaints falsely alleging antisemitism following a public email exchange with members of Law Students for Israel.
Such an investigation clearly infringes on students’ speech rights as protected by NYU Law’s policies, and efforts to portray their email exchange as discrimination must be dismissed.
“We urge NYU to cease this politically-motivated investigation of students speaking out against Israel’s occupation and in support of Palestinian rights,” said staff attorney Dylan Saba.
Placing Israel’s violence front and center
On April 7th, the vice president of the campus group Law Students for Israel sent a message on the school wide email discussion forum condemning “acts of Palestinian terror” and extolling bipartisan support for Israel from the U.S. government.
In response, members of LSJP wrote a well-researched and sourced message of their own contesting this framing and condemning the illegal occupation of Palestine that is necessary context for recent escalations.
LSJP’s message presented Israel’s foundational displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and its ongoing colonial and apartheid practices as the fundamental violence that needs to be highlighted and condemned. The message also announced a film screening that anyone in the community was invited to attend.
False accusations, harassment and right-wing smears
Zionist law students reacted by sending a slew of targeted messages to individual LSJP members accusing them of playing into antisemitic tropes and demanding that they issue a corrective to their statement and condemn Palestinian resistance. When LSJP declined to do so, the anti-Palestinian students submitted complaints to school administrators and leaked the emails to right-wing press.
Since then articles have appeared in right-wing publications falsely accusing the students of antisemitism, and the students have been profiled on a harassing blacklisting website.
Several of these articles have also misrepresented NYU's 2020 settlement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), in which NYU voluntarily resolved a complaint of antisemitism before the completion of an investigation by OCR. The complaint itself was part of an attempt to silence the political expression of Palestine solidarity activists.
As a part of that settlement, NYU agreed to amend its discrimination policy to add shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics as protected categories and released a statement affirming that the university does not tolerate discrimination or harassment. Nothing in the settlement suggests the university should prohibit or in any way suppress anti-Zionist political expression.
In fact, NYU explicitly declined to adopt the examples of antisemitism included in the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism which present common criticisms of Israel and its human rights abuses as anti-Jewish in an attempt to silence Palestine advocacy. As NYU’s spokesperson explained: “[NYU] will devise its own examples to implement the new policies and…will affirm its long-held commitment to academic freedom and free speech."
NYU must protect students from harassment
To date, NYU has not publicly disavowed the deeply misleading characterization of its settlement with OCR published across the right wing press, nor has the university taken steps to protect its students facing harassment from outside organizations and blacklisting sites. Instead, on April 20th, NYU’s president accused the students (nearly half of whom are Jewish) of antisemitism in a public address.
“If NYU administrators truly wish to foster the free exchange of ideas on campus and support the right of students to exchange in political expression, they must caegorically reject attempts to silence individual students solely on the basis of their speech expressing a commitment to Palestinian liberation,” said Dylan Saba. “Unfortunately, NYU is proving to be much more worried about bad press than the safety and speech rights of its student body.”
LSJP’s statement garnered widespread support from affinity and social justice groups on campus, including the NYU Law chapters of Black Allied Law Student Association, Middle Eastern Law Students Association, National Lawyers Guild, Law Students for Economic Justice, Disability Allied Law Students Association, Women of Color Collective, South Asian Law Students Association, Ending the Prison Industrial Complex.
Learn More:
Read about the use of civil rights complaints to target campus Palestine advocacy here.
Read about efforts to use a distorted and politicized definition of antisemitism to silence Palestine advocacy here.