Loyola SJP Investigation Reflects Double Standard Towards Palestinian Voices on Campus
On September 19, the administration of Loyola University Chicago temporarily suspended Loyola Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and opened an investigation of the organization. The actions, which will culminate in a disciplinary hearing on Thursday evening, came after a diverse group of students gathered at a table hosted by Taglit-Birthright Israel, which provides trips to Israel exclusively for Jewish students, to register and ask questions about the program.
Through Taglight-Birthright-Israel, Jewish students from countries like the US with no ancestral connection to the state of Israel can vacation there for free—while over seven million Palestinian refugees are barred from ever returning to their occupied homelands.
Loyola’s investigation is part of a broader censorship of political speech on university campuses around the US over issues related to Israel and Palestine. At Loyola, the administration has emphasized that the university is a space for open political debate while employing a sweeping suppression of pro-Palestine speech, choking what is supposed to be the very foundation of the university and scholarship: a free exchange of ideas.
Student voices are silenced on a number of institutional levels. Loyola requires that students request approval from the administration days before demonstrating on campus. According to an administrator I spoke with after a student group was threatened with suspension or expulsion if we participated in an unplanned protest, the university implemented the policy explicitly because it wanted to avoid negative publicity around sensitive issues.
Since SJP found out about the Birthright table only a day before, the group was prohibited from planning an organized political response. Zahraa Nasser, the spokesperson for SJP and Chief Justice of the student government’s judicial branch, stated that the incident was not an organized demonstration; rather, two Palestinian students individually alerted other students about the Birthright table and encouraged them to show up and ask questions. Nasser said the questioning served to challenge the notion of Birthright and raise awareness that Palestinians cannot return to their lands, “while people with absolutely no ties to the land can [return] just because they are Jewish.”
“A lot of the people signing up for the trip don’t realize that it’s racist because they don’t know the historical implications behind it,” she said. “A lot of it was just challenging the students and raising awareness to show them ‘Look it’s great that you can visit this beautiful country. But that country once belonged to my ancestors and as a Palestinian I cannot return because I’m not Jewish.’”
The requirement that students ask for permission to demonstrate denies our fundamental understanding of free speech. Despite SJP’s acknowledgement and compliance with university policy, students of color who gathered to ask political questions were still racially associated with the organization and investigated.
Professor Steven Salaita, a Palestinian activist and academic, was fired from his tenured position at the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne this summer after tweeting numerous critiques of Israel’s massacre in Gaza earlier this year. His Zionist opponents willfully misconstrued his political criticisms as anti-Semitic and uncivil, and successfully pressured the university to fire him despite the fact that they had already granted him a tenured position.
Salaita says that the suppression of free speech in both his case and the temporary suspension of SJP Loyola punishes Palestinian activism and the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement currently challenging Israel’s occupation.
“It proposes very distinct solutions that exist outside of the consensus of the political and economic elite,” he said. “The value and threat of BDS is the fact that it asks us to confront things and discuss things and to think about things a lot of folks would prefer simply to ignore. The interests for those ensconced in positions of power are to not have the conversation in the first place. We’re basically saying we demand campus conversation.”
At Loyola, the immediate suspension of SJP illustrates the administration’s assumption of the group’s guilt before any democratic process or conversation about the incident could even take place. Only after the group supplied ample evidence that it had followed university codes did the administration undo its suspension, but continue the punitive investigation.
Nasser explained that administrators have subjected SJP to investigation and potential punishment without consistently or fairly informing the group of the investigative procedures or the hearing.
“We’re left in the dark, there’s no transparency; we don’t know what is happening with the hearing,” she said.
Throughout the investigation process, the organization has had no idea which individuals are under investigation or what charges and punishment they or the organization face. When Nasser herself requested written documentation of officially filed complaints, administrators said they would send them to her sometime before the disciplinary hearing; they have not. The university has set the hearing date for Thursday, October 30, allowing only four SJP members entrance to the hearing and prohibiting any legal representation.
The university’s right to arbitrarily try and punish students has also allowed it to strip the student governing body of authority over political campus issues. After the United Student Government Association (USGA) voted unanimously to pass divestment legislation sponsored by SJP in the spring, the administration forced student senators to vote again on the basis that the Zionist campus organization Hillel had not been properly notified of the discussion.
Before the second successful vote occurred, the Loyola administration proved its willingness to exert its power to delegitimize democratic student processes. In a statement issued on Loyola’s official Facebook page, the university said it would not comply with any divestment resolution, yet simultaneously, with a proverbial pat on the head, welcomed “open dialogue and debate on differing points of view.”
The expectation that SJP must warn Jewish students about the legislation, even after clear and extensive efforts to educate and inform the student body, including the collection of over 1,000 signatures in support of the legislation, illustrates how the university holds students of color and those working in solidarity with them to unfair and impractical standards. Nasser pointed out that in the spring, students who sponsored legislation to allow gay marriage on campus—another heavily debated issue—were never expected to notify the entire Catholic population on campus about their efforts. SJP has been held to a much higher standard than other groups presenting supposedly controversial legislation.
Both the administration and Zionist students continue to employ inflammatory rhetoric to frame Palestinian activism in a way that spreads misinformation about the Israeli occupation. The administration and Zionist students essentialize both Jews and Muslims and reinforce any opposition to the occupation as anti-Semitic and divisive.
When SJP sponsored a divestment bill urging Loyola to remove its shares in companies profiting from the occupation of Palestine, Provost John Pelicero and Loyola President Father Michael Garanzini condemned the resolution by employing a false dichotomy between Jewish and pro-Palestine students. They framed the issue as “one-sided,” “unfair,” “harmful and divisive.”
Administrators responsible for investigating the tabling incident also seem ignorant about the diversity and broad support of the Palestinian movement. When administrators questioned SJP members about the students photographed at the incident, they singled out one student who wore a piece of paper that said, “I am an American Jew and I have more right than they do to go to Palestine.”
Nasser said, “We weren’t asked, ‘Who is this?’ We were asked, ‘Is this true? Is he actually Jewish?’ As if it’s impossible to fathom that an American Jew could be pro-human rights, pro-Palestinian.”
Nadine Darwish, chapter president of Loyola SJP, addressed the administration’s mischaracterization in Loyola’s student newspaper in the spring: “The Palestinian struggle is not one between Jews and Muslims, let alone Jews and Palestinians. It is one between those of conscience and those who uphold the systems that perpetuate oppression.”
Zionist Hillel students who hosted the Birthright table associated demonstrating students of color who were not members of SJP with the group and accused SJP of harassment, hostility, and threatening the safety of Jewish students on campus. The instant racial association of the demonstrators with SJP and the university’s punishment of only Muslim students affiliated with the group are not only racist, but also ignore the ethnic and religious diversity of the broad support of Palestinian activism, which includes Jews both at Loyola and across the globe. The ambiguity of political and apolitical Jewish identity in Hillel itself misrepresents the Jewish student population as a monolith devoid of diverse opinions on the question of Palestine and alienates Jewish students who do not conform to Zionist ideology. In contrast, Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian students maintain respective apolitical identity organizations at Loyola separate from SJP.
“The Jewish people were an oppressed people,” said Nasser. “That’s something that you never get over as a people. That’s something that Arabs can relate to, that’s something that Muslims can relate to. That’s something that anyone that’s not the majority can relate to. For anyone to feel alienated from that special circle because of something like political views is very unfortunate.”
The charge against the tabling event as “bias-motivated discrimination and misconduct” invokes the same ideas about “civility” that cost Salaita his job. Salaita said the term enables those in power to easily justify shutting down dissent.
“The notion of civility is a broad, sprawling term that suggests something undesirable without the burden of having to precisely state what it is that is objectionable,” he said. “It’s a catch-all. It can be invoked in various ways to suppress or discourage viewpoints that the administration or political and economic elites find discomforting.”
The university’s unfettered power to discriminate against political speech based on ambiguous standards of “offensive” and “respectful” and the obfuscation of Zionist and apolitical Jewish identity makes it nearly impossible to separate legitimate political critiques of Israeli policy from anti-Semitic hate speech. The blurring of Jewish apolitical and political identities, facilitated through trips like Birthright, forms a new Jewish identity based on ethno-religious nationalism. Political criticism of Israeli human rights violations, then becomes anti-Semitic by definition.
Salaita, who was punished himself for what UIUC Zionist students and donors considered anti-Semitic speech, said unwarranted accusations of anti-Semitism distract and silence political discourse.
“It’s intellectually dishonest,” he said. “It’s a very forthright way of shutting down a conversation before that conversation even has a chance to get off the ground,” Salaita said. “It puts the person who’s critiquing unjust colonial policies on the defensive and then that person is in the spotlight as having done something wrong, rather than the nation-state he’s criticizing. We end up spending most of our time discussing what is or is not anti-Semitic or who is or is not anti-Semitic. The fundamental issue here, which is unjust Israeli policy, gets lost.”
The immediate assumption of the guilt of SJP members based on biased accounts of the incident illustrates how accusations of anti-Semitism can have a chilling effect on political dissent.
“It attempts to make people think twice about stating any sort of criticism of institutions with power,” Salaita said.
Loyola expects students to dialogue through democratic processes, yet it prohibits us from engaging in dissent; it encourages us to engage in critical discussion and action, yet it vows that it won’t heed our ideas even if we do engage in the processes of dialogue and debate that the university says it respects.
“There’s nothing more threatening to an unjust power structure than freely engaged exchange of intellectual ideas,” Salaita said. “There’s a reason that all repressive regimes throughout history have thought to curtail speech and thought. … Because a thinking populace, a populace that’s critically engaged in these issues is one that’s fundamentally inimical to the interest of the particular power structure.”
On Thursday evening, SJP Loyola will defend its right to engage in civil political discourse on campus. The administration’s decision to suspend or acquit the organization will proclaim whether it truly stands with students, with freedom of expression, and with social justice. Suspending SJP will not only slice the stem of a just cause, the liberation of Palestine, but it will poison the roots that proliferate the emancipation of all people on this campus, across this nation, and throughout this world.
Lillian Osborne
Mondoweiss