• United States
• Howard W. French

July 24, 2025, 6:31 PM View Comments ()

Throughout the 21 months of Israel’s catastrophic offensive in Gaza, a parallel struggle has been underway in the United States—one with monumental consequences for America’s future as well as that of Israelis and Palestinians.

The U.S. battle is around the scope of free speech, a pillar of the country’s identity and constitutional order. In particular, it concerns what sorts of criticism of Israel will be tolerated and deemed legitimate in the media, on university campuses, and in public life more generally.

This struggle takes place against the backdrop of two extremely troubling claims: The first is that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, launched in reprisal against Hamas for its murderous attack on Oct. 7, 2023, has tipped into genocide; the second is that the United States is in the grips of a dangerous crisis of rising antisemitism.

The first claim has recently resurfaced but is by no means new. Voices in the international human rights community, many of them Jewish, began to decry Israel’s offensive as genocidal in the early months of the conflict. I am deliberately not calling it a war, as many do, because the vast majority of casualties have involved unarmed Palestinian civilians, not combatants.

In recent weeks, accusations of genocide have taken on more urgency as day after day has borne new reports of Israeli forces killing—including by airstrike—dozens of desperate Palestinians lining up for meager rations of food or water. On top of this has come coverage of rising starvation among children following months of Israel severely restricting food supplies to Gaza as well as attacks against the staff of international agencies such as the World Health Organization.

The second claim of antisemitism has roiled U.S. society since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Just as genocide is a matter of widely varying interpretations, claims about the breadth or depth of antisemitism in the United States are subject to dispute. To be clear, this column does not doubt their veracity and deplores racial, ethnic, or religious hatred of any kind.

However, there are serious dangers to government politicization of the charge of antisemitism. The Trump administration has invoked combating antisemitism as the basis for a range of recent actions, including intrusive efforts to control the finances, governance, and admissions policies of U.S. universities; restrict immigration and revoke student visas; and most fundamentally, narrow the scope of freedom of speech to restrict criticism of Israel.

In recent months, Israel’s offensive in Gaza and the campaign against antisemitism have entered into a sort of collision as public causes. To address the latter, many campuses—including Columbia University, where I teach—are putting in place increasingly restrictive rules governing speech about Israel. Protest, which is itself a form of speech with venerable historic associations with student life, has been tightly regulated. Where this has been done, university administrations have invoked the safety and comfort of Jewish and Israeli students.

The importance of ensuring students’ safety is a no-brainer. No group of students on any U.S. campus should be subjected to threats of violence or harm on the basis of their identity. There is no room for ambiguity here: These actions must be prevented and strictly punished.

Comfort, though, is much more subjective, and prioritizing it places society on a slippery slope. If it’s interpreted either too broadly or in favor of one constituency over another, freedoms long cherished as essential values in American life, such as free speech and freedom of assembly, could be in jeopardy.

That is what is currently happening with regard to Israel. Trump and his allies’ definitions of antisemitism come close to saying that any criticism of Zionism—a political movement that takes Israel as the rightful homeland of Jewish people—amounts to antisemitism.

Yet many people, like me, who strongly support Israel’s right to exist, have long been deeply troubled by the notion that life in the country is organized in highly unequal ways for Jews and its large Arab minority population. For the most part, this topic has been largely avoided in recent mainstream U.S. press coverage. Now, the crisis in Gaza has dramatically compounded this problem. Can support for Israel’s right to exist be extended so far as to justify genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the growing dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank?

I do not believe so. But this is a profoundly moral question, one that deserves much more open and honest public debate. Unfortunately, amid the Trump administration’s campaign to use claims of antisemitism to deny federal funding to universities and intrude on their long-standing academic freedoms, the possibility of a frank discussion of difficult questions is becoming less likely.

In their eagerness to appease Washington and not lose the enormous flow of federal grants that make U.S. excellence in higher education possible, universities have been curtailing free speech on their own initiative. Witness, for example, Harvard University’s recent decision to cancel an already written and edited edition of a journal devoted to “education and Palestine.” Many other universities have quietly undertaken similar efforts that lower the visibility of topics related to Palestinian rights or canceled programs and activities that relate to them altogether.

These decisions have implications for not just the future of Israel-Palestine, but also that of the United States. When subjects get banned or sidelined for reasons of political sensitivity, academic inquiry suffers—and along with it, free speech. There is no reason to believe that if speech concerning Palestine or genocide in the Middle East today can be stifled, topics dear to other political constituencies will be safe from censure or sanction tomorrow. To allow this to happen is to undo what it means to be American.

Efforts to hold the line on speech about Israel and Palestine are by no means limited to U.S. campuses. As a longtime resident of New York City, I have watched with alarm and chagrin as media outlets have policed language about this crisis among local political candidates.

The surprise leader in the city’s ongoing mayoral campaign, Democratic Party candidate Zohran Mamdani, has faced almost unremitting press questions about his refusal to condemn the pro-Palestinian slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” as if its only possible interpretation could be an incitement of violence against Israel. (Mamdani recently said that he would discourage the use of the slogan.)

While many Jews conflate the slogan with calls for violence, many Palestinians insist that intifada is a peaceful call for resistance. The word, which comes from the Arabic root translating to “shake off,” can simply connote a struggle against oppression. Mamdani, for one, interprets the term as “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”

Today, Gaza’s Palestinians cannot even line up for water without risk of slaughter, and every possibility of resisting mass violence and possible forced relocation from their homeland has been denied them. Under this reality, “globalizing the intifada” might include actions such as public protest to demand that the United States and other governments apply much more pressure on Israel to immediately lift restrictions on food distribution in Gaza, end the indiscriminate killings of civilians there, and demand justice where there have been war crimes.

In fact, with hope evaporated in Gaza and Palestinians now powerless to protest on their own behalf, there is a global obligation to call for an end to Israel’s ongoing military actions against Palestinians. Americans and people around the world must insist that the choice is not a false one between the annihilation of Palestinians or Israelis, but rather, safety, security, and human decency for both.