Alwaght- Nearly two years have passed since the Israeli regime’s brutal war on the besieged people of Gaza, yet the world continues to grieve the devastating consequences of this aggression—widespread famine, starvation, and the systematic genocide of Palestinian women and children. Across the globe, voices rise in unison, demanding an end to the bloodshed. Yet instead of holding Netanyahu’s government accountable, Western powers, led by the US, are increasingly silencing critics of Israel’s actions, suppressing dissent and shielding the Israeli occupation from justice.
Recently, Marianne Hirsch, a prominent genocide scholar at Columbia University, has said that after approving a new definition of anti-Semitism in the university, she is under pressure to stop here teaching there for the first time in her over 50 years of academic record.
According to the new definition, promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), criticism against Israel are categorized as hate, something Hirsch calls direct threat to the free speech in the classroom.
Hirsch said the new approach “imposes dangerous restrictions on classroom discussions and threatens to blatantly censor,” especially when discussing texts critical of Israel, such as Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”
The change at Columbia University comes after the university was forced to reach an agreement with the White House to receive its $400 million annual federal funding. The university agreed to adopt the IHRA definition in its disciplinary and educational processes, drawing widespread criticism from faculty and academic freedom advocates.
But despite the mounting pressure and the prospect of dismissal and loss of his job, Hirsch has affirmed that he will continue his research on the genocide, even if it means doing so outside the walls of the university, saying that discussing “ethnic cleansing and the crimes being committed in Gaza today” is a fundamental part of his academic mission.
The pressure on historical scholar is so heavy that even experts, including Kenneth Stern, who helped draft the Holocaust Association’s new definition of anti-Semitism, warn that the definition is being “politicized” and used as a tool to suppress pro-Palestinian voices, including anti-Zionist Jews.
Stern acknowledged that adopting the definition in this way could lead to legal action against professors and open the way for pressure groups outside the university (such as the FBI) to monitor academic content and push for the expulsion of those who deviate from a pro-Israel political orientation.
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is another university that has announced that it has been denied access to $584 million in federal funding by the Trump administration after the administration reprimanded the university for its pro-Palestinian protests.
The Los Angeles Times reported that UCLA leaders are preparing to negotiate with the government over the suspension.
Last week, the university agreed to pay more than $6 million to settle a lawsuit by some students and a professor who claimed they were subjected to anti-Semitic attacks under the new protocols.
Both institutions reportedly agreed to some of the government’s demands. Talks are also ongoing for a settlement with Harvard.
The Trump administration has threatened to cut federal funding to universities over pro-Palestinian protests against the US-Israeli joint genocide in Gaza.
Crackdown on pro-Palestinian students
Human rights advocates have raised concerns about academic freedom and freedom of expression.
The government, through the State Department and the FBI, has mounted an organized campaign to expel foreign student protesters, but has faced legal hurdles. So far, a number of pro-Palestinian students who participated in the protests have been arrested, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumisa Ozturk, and Mohsen Mahdavi.
Stanford University’s student newspaper sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, saying its student writers are censoring and rejecting assignments about Gaza to avoid being expelled by the government.
Redefining anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism
The most significant feature of the updated definition of anti-Semitism in the US is its deliberate attempt to make anti-Semitism synonymous with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israeli state crimes.
In 2020, the Trump administration issued an “Executive Order Combating Anti-Semitism,” which directed executive agencies to consider the IHRA’s new definition when implementing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Then, in 2024, the Zionist-influenced House of Representatives passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” by a vote of 320 to 91, which would go even further than Trump’s executive order, using exclusively the IHRA’s new definition and prohibiting the use of “alternative definitions of anti-Semitism” for “failing to recognize many modern manifestations of anti-Semitism.”
This definition was developed by a meeting of 35 member states of the IHRA (including the United States and Israel) in 2016, which stated: “Anti-Semitism is a specific perception of Jews that may be expressed as hatred of Jews. Anti-Semitism is verbal and physical manifestations directed at Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, Jewish community institutions, and religious establishments.” The new definition provides expanded cases of anti-Semitism, including “denial of the Holocaust, denial of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people, for example by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist effort,” or “comparison of Israeli policy with Nazi policy.” It is quite clear that the new definition of anti-Semitism is designed to prohibit any criticism of the Zionist state project and the criminal and racist practices of the Zionists in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Critics of this definition argue that there are very close and precise parallels between Israeli and Nazi policies. For example, the establishment of an ethnic state in a common land with unequal rights to citizenship, immigration, land ownership, and so on, is a racist endeavor, both in terms of the classical and the active definition. There are other things in the new IHRA definition of anti-Semitism that are quite obvious, such as the inclusion of the clause that “accuses Jewish citizens of greater loyalty to Israel than to the interests of the countries in which they live.”
In this regard, we can mention the recent words of Joseph Klein, an American anti-Zionist activist who is himself from the Jewish community. He says: “I was raised as an Orthodox Jew and sent to private Jewish schools from kindergarten to 12th grade, where the inculcation of Zionism into the students’ identity was an explicit part of the educational mission. “Despite being a full-blooded American, I grew up celebrating Israeli holidays, learned modern Israeli Hebrew, took Israeli history classes (or at least a certain perspective on it), and spent my senior year of high school traveling around Israel, a trip that included a week of IDF basic training and ultimately led to many of my classmates shooting their first rifles M16—the standard IDF rifle. This indoctrination worked for almost all of my classmates, several of whom even joined the IDF after graduation. None, however, joined the US military.”
There is also other research showing that many Zionist Jews are behind fundraising campaigns to redefine anti-Semitism, to expand Israel’s illegal construction in the West Bank, and to arm extremist settlers.
For example, Eli Clifton, an investigative reporter at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, has uncovered the leadership role of the Adelson network in funding initiatives to create the IHRA redefinition and other policies that restrict criticism of Israel. Casino mogul and ardent Zionist Sheldon Adelson and his widow Miriam Adelson gave hundreds of millions of dollars to groups such as the Maccabi Task Force and the Israeli-American Coalition for Action (IACA), which are lobbying hard to pass the redefinition of anti-Semitism. In another case, Joseph Sabbagh, the executive director of IACA, has taken credit for drafting the laws that led to the IHRA redefinition and passed at the state level. At the same time, Adelson openly made the huge budget allocated to Trump’s 2024 campaign—over $100 million—conditional on support for the annexation of the West Bank by Israel, because, according to Zionists, “God gave the West Bank to the Jews." Adelson had previously been sued as a major supporter of settlement construction and a funder of about $1 billion annually to provide weapons to violent West Bank settlers.
In the meantime, it is important to note that the aggressive policy of the supporters of Israel to limit freedom of expression and pressure opponents of Israel and the complicity of the US government in the crimes of Tel Aviv against the Palestinians, stems more than anything from the expansion of public access to social media and the removal of the dominant narrative from the hands of the mainstream media to distort the current reality in Palestine.
In recent years, even major platforms like Facebook and X haven’t escaped U.S. government censorship and heavy restrictions on posts exposing Israeli atrocities. Yet, as younger, more educated Americans increasingly reject the distorted history pushed by textbooks and films, Zionist lobbies have doubled down—silencing dissent by branding any criticism as anti-Semitism.
