Posted by: John Phoenix
Student protesters in 2026 generally have less space to operate than even this graduating student protester in New York City in 2025. Jimin Kim ZUMAPRESS.
American universities are failing in the face of Trump and the censorship efforts of pro-genocide politicians, administrators and students whose voices are outweighing the many students who want an honest appraisal of Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies.
By Michael F. Brown, reposted from Electronic Intifada, May 18, 2026
Does Vietnam still haunt Americans? Forever wars in the Middle East and Donald Trump’s war of aggression against Iran – which began with the killing of scores of young school children in Minab before moving on to casual threats of genocide from the US president – suggest otherwise.
Americans continue to vote for leaders who enmesh them in imperial undertakings that eviscerate the populations of targeted countries and leave the American soldiers participating with devastating physical and psychological scars.
I thought in recent days of the war crime perpetrated by Vietnam veteran Bob Kerrey, the former president of The New School as well as former Democratic governor and US senator for the state of Nebraska. His former university has recently received attention for Palestine-related efforts in the student senate and the resulting backlash against the attempt to stop student and university complicity in Israel’s Gaza genocide.
In 2001, The New York Times Magazine reported on Kerrey’s involvement in the 1969 massacre at Thanh Phong.
Gregory L. Vistica wrote of the massacre that “around midnight on Feb. 25, 1969, Kerrey and his men killed at least 13 unarmed women and children. The operation was brutal; for months afterward, Kerrey says, he feared going to sleep because of the terrible nightmares that haunted him.”
Other reports put the number of civilians killed at 20 and emphasize that Kerrey only spoke of his being “haunted” by the incident after decades of silence, suggesting political expediency. Bao Anh Thai, a lawyer in Vietnam, wrote on Facebook of Kerrey’s 2016 appointment to be chair of the board of Fulbright University Vietnam: “Please tell me the name of any prestigious university in this world, where a killer in cold blood of women and children – he admitted it and he is not charged for it – could be the president.”
The New School answered that question years earlier, part and parcel of a country that has never properly reckoned with the war crimes its military has committed.
More than 15 years after Kerrey’s departure from The New School, a private university in New York City, university administrators and Hillel International students there appear to have no qualms about student links to Israeli military units carrying out war crimes and human rights violations against Palestinians.
Hillel describes itself as “the world’s largest and most inclusive Jewish campus organization, serving nearly 200,000 college students each year.”
However, that inclusion has strict limits with an “Israel policy” that states: “Hillel is steadfastly committed to the support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders as a member of the family of nations.”
Furthermore, “Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice … deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders; delegitimize, demonize or apply a double standard to Israel; support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the state of Israel.”
In other words, Hillel opposes individuals who support freedom and equal rights for Palestinians and believe the nonviolent BDS campaign is a legitimate way to secure those goals.
As the full horror of what the Israeli military did, and is doing, in Gaza emerges in the years ahead, perhaps the university officials blocking student senate efforts to stop funding Hillel ties to Israeli military units committing war crimes will have to reckon publicly – as Kerrey eventually had to do – with what they did in the spring of 2026.
For now, however, President Joel Towers, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Richard Kessler, and Vice Provost for Student Success and Engagement Robert Mack have all indicated in an emailed announcement rejecting the student senate’s decision that they’re more comfortable with the status quo ante. They prefer backing students in abetting war crimes over grappling with their consciences and launching their own investigation to confirm the accuracy of the student senate’s concerns.
That University Student Senate voted on 1 May to “suspend funding and collaboration with ‘Hillel at The New School’ for ties to violations of international law.” Registered student organizations are required by the student senate to be “in adherence and compliance to international law.”
Students from Hillel at The New School have been found by their peers in the student senate to have “directly served soldiers from four IDF [Israeli military] units.” Additionally, the student senate determined that “Hillel materially and directly supported the specific brigades responsible” for atrocities.
These are very serious concerns. Yet Towers, Kessler and Mack in their email stated that a pause on funding to the group was “misguided” and an effort to “target fellow students.”
More dismissively, the email stated that the student senate lacks the power to make any such funding determination and that the university would “take all necessary steps.” In effect, students found by the student senate to be using student fees to assist Israeli military units engaged in war crimes and genocide would not even warrant a university investigation.
Nevertheless, the student senate pushed back and asserted it “will continue to sanction Hillel at The New School.”
This is a courageous stand in a difficult political environment with a Trump administration intent on undercutting higher education and, where possible, bending it to its will.
The over-the-top impression left by the university administration that Hillel students have a right to use student funds to assist Israeli military units committing war crimes will leave an indelible impression on a generation of students.
Quite possibly the administration will force its way in the short term, but the long-term implications will lead students – at The New School and elsewhere – to question the substance of democratic institutions like the student senate and the complicity of an older generation in hate and genocide against Palestinians. With Jewish students also protesting the Gaza genocide, student senators will be well aware that anti-Semitism is being weaponized to clamp down on those ringing alarm bells about complicity with genocide.
At a time when antisemitism remains prevalent on campuses, the New School Student Senate’s vote to defund Hillel was obscene. Though the school’s reversal is welcome, the initial vote signaled more than insensitivity – it reflected hostility toward Jewish student life. Every Show more
ADL New York / New Jersey
@ADL_NYNJ
As soon as we saw that @TheNewSchool student senate voted to defund the campus Hillel unless it disavowed Hillel International, we reached out to college leadership and were grateful to hear this would not stand. The students’ action and rhetoric displayed dangerous antisemitism
In a climate where politicians continue to target pro-Palestinian students protesting Israeli war crimes, these students are showing considerably more bravery than university administrators who aren’t searching for truth but buckling to the intimidation of the right-wing authoritarianism emanating from Washington.
And it’s not just Republican pressure.
Local Democratic Congressmen Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres also jumped in to condemn the student senate as Michael Arria documents for Mondoweiss.
Arria notes, “None of these criticisms actually address the contents of the report, which points out that the Hillel chapter has provided ‘direct personal service’ to multiple IDF units.”
Torres quickly put forward a straw man, writing on Instagram: “Pressuring pro-Israel Jews to renounce their Jewish identity is not only degrading to Jews. It is degrading to America itself.”
The student senate obviously isn’t asking anyone to renounce their Jewish identity, but merely not to use student funds to support Israeli military units complicit in war crimes. The suggestion by Torres that supporting Israeli military units engaged in war crimes is somehow a part of Judaism is, however, deeply anti-Semitic.
Efforts to bring to light the anti-Palestinian actions of Hillel International have occurred on other campuses previously and are growing elsewhere, including with voluntary partial disaffiliation of students from Hillel International at Middlebury College.
Le Moyne College
For months, reports have circulated about vanishing student demonstrations.
Intimidation by the Trump administration and the many university administrations that have proven supine before President Donald Trump and his henchmen, along with new regulations around campus demonstrations, has closed off protest possibilities and the exercise of First Amendment rights with time and place protest restrictions and the carrying off of international students to Louisiana prisons.
Meera Shah, legal network director at Palestine Legal, recently commented that “the policies and actions of the Trump administration in the past year around immigration, in particular, have imposed a huge cost on non-citizen students and faculty. We can’t underestimate the calculus that people are making in terms of the relationship between protesting and self-preservation because there are real consequences. At the same time, we continue to see people speaking out against genocide on campus and beyond, with freedom for Palestinians a common demand in this past year’s mobilizations against US authoritarianism and militarism.”
Indeed, attention landed squarely on the absence of Palestinian rights as the spring semester came to a close. Politicians and university administrators were exposed for their enormous effort to suppress speech upholding basic Palestinian humanity.
On 28 April, Le Moyne College President Linda LeMura verbally attacked Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha who had spoken to students earlier in the month. Her words disappeared his life experience and that of the Palestinian people.
LeMura wrote in a letter to her upstate New York college community: “I am writing regarding a guest lecture event on April 15, and concerns brought to my attention in the days since regarding the impact of the language used. During the event, the speaker used the word ‘genocide’ in connection with the state of Israel. I recognize the profound historical weight this term carries for the Jewish people and the real hurt its use can cause. We take these concerns seriously.”
This suggests that she believes all Jews are complicit in the genocidal actions of the government of Israel in Gaza. This, as with Torres regarding The New School, is anti-Semitism on her part.
Her comments also point to what Darryl Li, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, elsewhere refers to as a “culture of deference,” referencing Umayyah Cable and Cable’s work on “compulsory Zionism.” LeMura is so fearful of alienating supporters of Israel that she is willing to defer to their concerns and attack a guest speaker who has survived Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza.
Abu Toha puts it well in a tweet responding to LeMura’s effort to erase his lived experience. LeMura, he writes, “stated that she recognized the ‘real hurt’ that the word [genocide] caused to Jewish students. Seriously? Are the crimes of the Israeli state representative of all Jewish people? I personally refuse to believe that is the case.”
Later, he adds, “I never once used the word ‘Jewish’ during the entire event; I refuse to conflate the faith of Judaism with the actions of the state of Israel.”
LeMura also wrote that she was committed to “making it unequivocally clear that anti-Semitism, along with all forms of bigotry and hate, has no place at Le Moyne. Our Jewish community members – and indeed all students, faculty and staff – are valued and protected members of this community.”
She is right to object to anti-Semitism. But Abu Toha calling Israel’s military action genocide is not a manifestation of anti-Semitism. His is a cry to protect the Palestinian people from the depredations of an apartheid army.
One would think that the social justice commitment of a Jesuit college would strongly uphold the life and experience of Abu Toha, but courage can be in short supply these days. This dearth of courage was demonstrated last year with the timid remarks of Haverford College President Wendy Raymond representing that Quaker origins college before the often anti-Palestinian House Committee on Education and Workforce.
Academic space is fast being closed off by preemptively acquiescing university leaders like LeMura.
As Abu Toha explains: “How dare you tell a person who survived a genocide that they cannot speak about it? … It is utterly ridiculous to begin a letter by stating that your institution welcomes the ‘free exchange of ideas,’ only to immediately condemn a speaker, not for sharing abstract ideas, but for sharing his own life.”
University of Michigan
Much the same backlash against pro-Palestine speech occurred following the graduation ceremony on 2 May at the University of Michigan. There, Derek Peterson, outgoing chair of the faculty senate, said a handful of words lauding students who had alerted the campus to the grim Gaza reality. That was enough to ignite rage from the Israel lobby, politicians and university regents.
“Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza,” said Peterson.
Peterson later noted he didn’t use the word genocide in an effort to be “diplomatic.”
The attacks against him, including violent threats, establish yet again that one should speak forthrightly as expressing concern as gently as possible seemingly does not invite good-faith engagement but further vitriol. If you’re going to be attacked anyway, speak the full truth rather than just a part of it, though better to speak up to some extent than say nothing at all.
Peterson, it must be said, did at least partially find his voice and surely knew that speaking up for the most politically vilified people in the world would bring animosity and furious words his way.
The respondents didn’t disappoint, providing a response totally out of keeping with the words about Gaza and Peterson’s broader remarks buoying the history and rights of women, Jews and African Americans. The angry respondents’ message seems to be that they’re okay with established advances for women, Jews and African Americans, but reference to the injustice faced by Palestinians is totally unacceptable.
Domenico Grasso, the university’s president, quickly apologized for Peterson’s gentle exercising of academic freedom. Grasso referred to the speech as “inappropriate” and claimed it did not “represent our institutional position,” leaving open the possibility that the university in the Trump years supports the “injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza” as Peterson put it.
The University of Michigan president added, “We regret the pain this has caused.” Indicating just how far some university presidents may want to go in policing speech, or attempting to pressure speakers into self-censorship, he noted that Peterson’s speech “deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony.”
Grasso, of course, made no mention of the pain his apology would cause to Palestinians whose family members have been killed in the Gaza genocide or to the students and people around the world who have struggled to get politicians to take steps to stop Israel’s war crimes.
Sarah Hubbard, Regent, University of Michigan
While I wasn’t there yesterday to see it in person, what I have seen is incredibly troubling and disappointing. It is very difficult to execute meaningful consequences on tenured faculty but as a leader I can help set the tone and expectations for their conduct.
University regent Sarah Hubbard pushed for “changes” as a result of Peterson’s mild remarks, insisting that what transpired was “incredibly troubling and disappointing” and “unbecoming.” This sort of threatened restriction of professors’ speech is sure to lead to a backlash and to students wondering if nothing they were taught about speaking courageously is actually true when it comes to speech about Palestinian rights.
The angry right-wing response to Peterson’s mild statement remembering Palestinians on graduation day is striking after years of conservatives insisting on the right to make bigoted statements. The furious denunciations, however, are a boon to organizing efforts around securing Palestinian freedom and ending Israeli war crimes.
Benny Shaevsky
@brshaevsky
@UMich Professor Derek Peterson shoutouts terrorist sympathizers during this morning’s commencement. Unbelievable.
Republican politicians such as Nikki Haley and Senator Rick Scott also weighed in. Journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded Haley, “The protests against Israeli genocide were filled with, and often led by, Jews on every campus.”
It’s an important reminder that efforts to restrict speech are targeted at both Palestinian students and the many Jewish students who oppose the ruling Trump administration and the Gaza genocide.
Vile anti-Semite @NikkiHaley thinks Jews should be offended by condemnations of genocide.
Nikki Haley
@NikkiHaley
What happened at the University of Michigan is bigger than one speaker and it deserves more than an apology. It’s well known Michigan has a large Jewish student body. The administration knew the speaker’s record and still handed him the mic—leaving those students isolated and
No professor at any taxpayer supported university should support the violent, antisemitic, pro-Hamas chaos that occurred at @UMich or anywhere else. Congress should cut off EVERY dollar of federal funding. Enough is enough.
The Daily Signal
@DailySignal
Of course, it is visiting Palestinian and Muslim students who have borne the heaviest consequences of the Trump administration’s crackdown on disfavored political speech. Peterson may well prove to be relatively safe, though the animosity directed his way is both notable and worrisome. It is intended to cow professors and students who might speak up in future.
Other speakers aren’t even getting to the podium.
The City University of New York Law School administration has eliminated student speakers due to previous student speakers engaging in pro-Palestine speech at commencement events. A press release sent to The Electronic Intifada from Writers Against the War on Gaza cited an unnamed CUNY Law student as stating, “It’s past time to expose the cowardice and anticipatory obedience of both CUNY Central [representing the entire CUNY system] and CUNY Law, which they have put on full display since they refused to protect past student speakers who used their speeches to support Palestinian liberation.”
Invite and disinvite
The engineering school at Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey, went so far as to invite and then disinvite alumnus Rami Elghandour to address its graduates. Elghandour is a tech entrepreneur and the executive producer of The Voice of Hind Rajab, an Oscar-nominated film.
Following the decision to disinvite him, Elghandour tweeted: “After a ‘few’ students complained about my selection as speaker because of my social media advocacy for Palestine, Rutgers has canceled my speech. They decided that the feelings of a handful of students who said that my social media posts ‘opposed their beliefs,’ were more important than the experience of the entire graduating class, the reputation of the school, the dignity and belonging of Arab and Muslim students, and the First Amendment.”
He added, “The message Rutgers is sending to this class and everyone around the country is alarming. Don’t dare stand for anything. Don’t dare speak up. There will be consequences for being a humanitarian. For advocating for social justice and equality. Avoid people and ideas that contradict your own. Cancel them if you can.”
I love Rutgers and it’s disappointing and heartbreaking to see it abandon its students and its ideals. My full statement.
American universities are failing in the face of Trump and the censorship efforts of pro-genocide politicians, administrators and students whose voices are outweighing the many students who want an honest appraisal of Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies.
Peterson at the University of Michigan received booming cheers from students for speaking up as much as he did. Censorship of speech upholding the rights and freedom of Palestinians is the approach when politicians and administrators are losing the substantive debate.
Except at Cornell University, where, to avoid further debate, the university’s president hit a student and a recent graduate with his car. He then misrepresented the incident which followed a talk by Norman Finkelstein titled “Israel Was Not Justified in its Response to Oct. 7.”
The Board of Trustees investigated the late-April encounter amid calls from the union for graduate students for the president to resign. President Michael Kotlikoff may not have liked being followed to his car by dissenting students concerned by the administration’s limits on student speech, but a university leader using his vehicle as a weapon to avoid further conversation should be a red line in what even a friendly board of trustees can tolerate.
It quickly proved not to be a red line.
This was, however, as Students for a Democratic Cornell noted, a “violent response” by the president.
The physical bludgeoning of free speech advocates backing anti-war students by a university president is a dangerous development following the UCLA administration’s dereliction of responsibility as violent off-campus demonstrators attacked pro-Palestine students in 2024.
Cornell, like other universities, is showing itself to be far more interested in “defense” contracts than in the speech rights of its students. Administrators are clearly intimidated by the Trump administration.
This period will not be recalled positively by historians when the blanket of threat from Trump and his sycophants is no longer thrown over university grounds. Attacking pro-Palestine speech and protest, vilifying professors and poets for gently exercising academic freedom or giving a personal account of their lived reality, and using a car as a weapon all demonstrate an ongoing heavy-handed response from opponents of Palestinian rights and freedom.
Michael F. Brown is an independent journalist. His work and views have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, TheNation.com, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The News & Observer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post and elsewhere.
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