On Recent Repression of Anti-Genocide and Pro-Palestinian Protest by the NYU Administration

Statement from Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council.

On December 12, two NYU faculty and several students were arrested by the NYPD on the NYU campus in response to a student protest against (i) Israel’s genocide in Gaza and (ii) NYU’s institutional complicity in that genocide.  In addition, the university administration declared three faculty and several students “persona non grata” (or “PNG”), restricting their access to NYU buildings, disrupting and diminishing teaching and learning, and subjecting those so designated to punishment outside of established university procedures grounded in shared governance or even any minimal due process or basic fairness. 

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP AC) condemns the NYU administration’s deployment of both state powers of policing and the university’s own para-state powers in order to stifle peaceful and lawful speech and assembly in resistance to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

In this context, JVP’s Academic Council applauds the timely responses defending campus speech rights, academic freedom, and labor rights by the American Association of University Professors and the AAUP/AFT Local 6741, which correctly noted that the conduct of the NYU administration is “anathema to the free functioning of higher education.”  The JVP AC also calls on the AAUP to sustain and extend its response to the NYU administration, specifically by initiating an investigation to determine whether the conduct of the administration merits an AAUP censure of NYU.  

Along with endorsing the statements of the AAUP and AAUP/AFT Local 6741, the AC of Jewish Voice for Peace adds the following three points.

First, the conduct of the NYU administration is but one additional instance of the  anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel hysteria that has swept across US higher education over the last year, compromising and harming colleges and universities in a manner that echoes the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, some seven decades ago.  University presidents, provosts, and deans must be held accountable for targeting and repressing resistance to Israel’s ongoing genocide and broader denial of Palestinian freedom.

Second, the NYU administration, like higher education administrations across the US and internationally, has repeatedly invoked concern for “Jewish safety” to defend its repressive actions and punishments.  Jewish Voice for Peace’s Academic Council rejects the disingenuous claim that support for Palestinian freedom and equality, and opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, is in any way a threat to Jewish safety or an expression of hostility to Jews or Judaism.  Anti-Zionism is opposition to a project of ethno-supremacist state-making and a commitment to the liberation of Palestinian people.  Anti-Zionism is not opposition to a religion or a people: anti-Zionism is opposition to the ethno-supremacism that is fundamental to the Israeli state. (The falsity of NYU’s concern with “Jewish safety” is exposed by the fact that many of the faculty and students targeted by the university are Jews.)  Simply put, using Jews to defend the repression of pro-Palestinian speech and assembly is itself a calumny against Jews and Judaism—and of even more urgent and greater concern, it is a baleful camouflage of anti-Palestinian hate. 

Third, along with defending the NYU faculty and students who were targeted and materially harmed by the NYU administration in this episode, the JVP Academic Council endorses the demands of the anti-genocide protestors for (i) full disclosure of NYU’s investments in apartheid and genocidal Israel, (ii) full divestment of those assets, and (iii) the closing of NYU’s Tel Aviv program.  We note that these three demands are in accord with and honor the BDS “picket line” established by the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).

As Jews we say “not in our name”; as Jews we know that Jewish safety cannot be gained at the expense of Palestinian safety and liberation.  As Jews we know that none of us are securely and sustainably free until all of us are fully free, no exceptions.  Repressing anti-genocide faculty, students, and staff—as NYU’s administration and so many other higher education administrations have done repeatedly in the past year—makes all of us less safe.

JVP is a national, grassroots organization working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. With roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants in the last year, JVP is the largest such organization in the world. The Academic Advisory Council is a network of scholars within JVP with a shared commitment to JVP’s core values.