Columbia University Suspended Me for My Pro-Palestinian Activism
I’ve been punished for two different divestment movements – I know first-hand the 'Palestine exception' is real.
This week should mark the start of my final year at Columbia University as a PhD student; I should be back on campus distributing syllabi to the undergraduates I teach, and heading to the library with my classmates to work on the last chapter of my dissertation.
But in late July, Columbia suspended me for two years because I participated in a pro-Palestine teach-in named for Basel al-Araj, a teacher and revolutionary who Israel extrajudicially assassinated in 2017 just after he was released from a Palestinian Authority prison. Inspired by the original Popular University in the West Bank, where al-Araj taught about Palestinian resistance and the role of the intellectual in liberation, the Basel al-Araj Popular University sought to transform the university from a “site of elite knowledge production into a base for struggle, collective education, and resistance against the institutions that fund, legitimize, and profit from genocide.”
When I first joined the movement for Columbia to divest from Israel nearly a decade ago, I never expected it could end my academic career, but as a scholar of Palestinian solidarity movements, I know all too well the chilling consequences of the Palestine exception to free speech – the selective application of First Amendment rights that systematically suppresses anti-Zionist speech. Having been part of a campaign that successfully pressured Columbia to divest from fossil fuels a decade ago, I have also added my voice and body to the movement for Palestinian liberation and seen firsthand how schools like Columbia exceptionalize protests in support of Palestine.
The events leading up to my suspension were shocking.