Introduction
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is releasing a new analysis on the disturbing role of universities in targeting students protesting against the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Rather than strive to ensure the safety of all students, university administrators have not only enabled anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia on their campuses but have also sought to silence Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, Jewish, and other students speaking in support of Palestinian human rights. It is urgent that university administrators act immediately to reform their approach, which has put students in danger and threatened the very existence of the university as an institution for free speech and discussion.
For over six months, the Israeli government has been engaged in heightened military operations in Gaza that have threatened the very existence of the Palestinian people. As of May 2024, the Israeli government has killed over 34,500 Palestinians since October 2023. As early as October, hundreds of scholars of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies have warned of the “possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” In January, the International Court of Justice, the UN’s principal judicial body, declared that South Africa’s charge of genocide against the Israeli government was plausible. Since the ruling, the Israeli government’s disregard for Palestinian human rights has become increasingly evident, as reports emerge detailing sexual assault of Palestinian women, forced starvation of Palestinian civilians, massacres of Palestinians at designated sites of humanitarian aid, and mass graves on hospital grounds. In May, the United Nations warned that the Israeli government’s planned military assault on Rafah, where over one million displaced Palestinians are currently seeking refuge, would place hundreds of thousands of people “at imminent risk of death.” On May 11, the U.S. State Department released a report that “described incidents in which Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has likely been ‘inconsistent’ with humanitarian law ‘or with best practices for mitigating civilian harm.’”
In response, students have taken to their university campuses to take part in a long American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience. Across the country, students, particularly Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, organized clear, legitimate, and popular demands in response to the dire conditions facing Palestinians in Gaza. They have gathered in peaceful protests, invited experts to discuss the assault on Palestinians in Gaza, and used democratic means, such as their institution’s student council, to spark discussion on the university’s role in investing in companies that profit from the Israeli government’s ongoing genocide, as well as apartheid and occupation of Palestinian land.
Many university administrators have not only opted to ignore students’ peaceful and popular calls for Palestinian human rights but have themselves explicitly sought to stifle them. They have canceled and censored voices calling for Palestinian human rights, introduced new university policies with the seeming intent of suppressing free speech, and even unleashed law enforcement on their own students. In some instances, universities have even sought to suppress the democratic voice of their own student body, condemning or even shutting down resolutions calling for divestment. Without protest, many important advancements in American history–ending child labor, voting rights for women, ending school segregation–may have never come to pass. Rather than engage in uncomfortable conversation, a fundamental value in higher education, universities have chosen police batons and tear gas.
As universities turn their back on their own students, these students have also become increasingly vulnerable to Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian attacks from external organizations, political leaders, corporate leaders, and even fellow classmates, staff, and faculty at their own institutions who have sought to justify the Israeli government’s actions and suppress their advocacy. In 2023, CAIR received a total of 921 education-related complaints, which includes bullying and education discrimination, a 219% increase over the previous year. In 2024, 84% of Muslim students in higher education or in a trade/vocational program reported experiencing religious discrimination in the last year, according to a new report by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. A vast majority of Muslim students (68%) reported facing discrimination for their religion by people in authority. In other words, many university campuses have, with the support of university officials themselves, become utterly hostile for Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and others in support of Palestinian rights and opposed to genocide in Gaza.
Even as we author this report, students on university campuses are urgently facing extraordinary threats in response to their peaceful protests calling for Palestinian human rights — threats that arguably have not been witnessed in over half a century. University leaders have exchanged open discussion for police officers, who have resorted to pinning down, tasing, and arresting their own students and faculty. United States senators have openly called for President Joe Biden to send the National Guard to quell peaceful protests. These calls can only be taken as incitement of potentially fatal violence against students, as we are reminded that, in 1970, when the National Guard was deployed against demonstrators at Kent State University, four were killed and nine students were wounded. Other political leaders and even university administrators have sought to justify the use of law enforcement and distract from the overwhelmingly student-led, peaceful, and popular nature of these protests by pushing the narrative that “outside agitators” have infiltrated campuses, rather than acknowledge that students themselves are protesting against university and government support for Israel’s attacks in Gaza.
This special report consolidates these incidents as both a recording of trends for allies and partner organizations and a warning for university leaders of the repercussions to their institutions should they continue to defend a foreign state’s blatant disregard for human rights over the safety of their students and their commitments to free speech and open discussion. It begins with an analysis of attacks directed toward Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, as well as universities’ failure to support these students, before demonstrating how universities have themselves engaged in a nationwide campaign of suppressing free speech in support of Palestine and concluding with recommendations that universities must undertake to rectify their approach.
Due to the sheer number of incidents targeting Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, as well as students practicing free speech to call attention to human rights issues, this report does not seek to be a comprehensive account. Instead, it is a sampling of experiences, intended to highlight key patterns across institutions of higher education in the United States.
