<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div id="container" class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div id="reader-header" class="header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/lawyer-who-says-palestinians-dont-exist-sues-san-francisco-university">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/lawyer-who-says-palestinians-dont-exist-sues-san-francisco-university</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">Lawyer who says Palestinians don't exist
sues San Francisco university</h1>
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/charlotte-silver">Charlotte
Silver</a></span> <span class="field field-blog">- </span><span
class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single"
content="2017-06-23T15:43:57+00:00">23 June 2017</span></span>
</p>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div id="moz-reader-content" class="line-height4" dir="ltr"
style="display: block;">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div class="sumud-region-main">
<article class="node-20856 node node-blog view-mode-full
node-is-page image-landscape">
<figure id="file-48431" class="media
media-element-container media-figure file file-image
file-image-jpeg"><source media="(min-width: 72rem)"><figcaption
class="group-caption field-group-html-element"><small
class="credit"><span class="field field-publisher"></span></small></figcaption></figure>
<p>A lawyer who denies that Palestinians exist is suing
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/san-francisco-state-university">San
Francisco State University</a>, alleging the
administration there fosters a hostile environment for
Jewish students.</p>
<p>But faculty and civil rights lawyers say the lawsuit,
filed on behalf of six plaintiffs, is yet another
attempt at censorship by conflating criticism of
Israel with anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>The <a
href="http://thelawfareproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SFSU-Federal-Complaint.pdf">complaint</a>,
filed in federal court in Northern California on 19
June, was prepared by <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/lawfare-project">The
Lawfare Project</a>, a group that <a
href="http://thelawfareproject.org/">describes</a>
itself as “the legal arm of the pro-Israel community.”</p>
<p>Last year, the group’s director, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/brooke-goldstein">Brooke
Goldstein</a>, was filmed asking Israel lobby
leaders in New York, “Why are we using the word
Palestinian?”</p>
<p>“There’s no such thing as a Palestinian person,”
Goldstein asserted:</p>
<p>In the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lawfare-group-plans-massive-punishments-activists">same
speech</a>, Goldstein also revealed new strategies
to undermine the movement for Palestinian rights,
including preparing legal challenges against US
institutions, among them specifically San Francisco
State University.</p>
<p>“The goal is to make the enemy pay,” Goldstein
explained.</p>
<p>The Lawfare Project <a
href="http://thelawfareproject.org/lp-files-lawsuit-sfsu/">says</a>
that the lawsuit was filed after the US Department of
Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced it would
be “scaling back” investigations of alleged
discrimination on campuses around the country.</p>
<p>Claiming that San Francisco State University is
“among the worst of the worst” campuses for Jewish
students, the plaintiffs, three students and three
area residents, say administrators have “fostered,
fomented and systematically instilled an anti-Jewish
animus” on the campus.</p>
<h2>Criminalizing criticism of Israel</h2>
<p>The 73-page complaint lists about a dozen incidents,
some dating back to the early 1990s – before many of
the university’s current students would have been born
– in an attempt to paint of picture of systematic
discrimination.</p>
<p>Nearly all of those incidents involve disputes
between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian communities on
campus, including the disruption of an event last year
featuring the Israeli mayor of Jerusalem <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nir-barkat">Nir
Barkat</a>.</p>
<p>Israel’s municipality includes <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/east-jerusalem">occupied
East Jerusalem</a>, which no country recognizes as
part of Israel.</p>
<p>“The incidents they are complaining about involve
activism for Palestinian rights, which is political
speech that is protected by the First Amendment,” <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/dima-khalidi">Dima Khalidi</a>,
director of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestine-legal">Palestine
Legal</a>, told The Electronic Intifada.</p>
<p>“The whole premise of their complaint relies on the
conflation of anti-Jewish animus and criticism of
Israeli policies,” Khalidi added. “That’s where the
complaint is going to fail.”</p>
<h2>“Unconstitutional and unwise”</h2>
<p>The lawsuit invokes the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/state-department-definition-anti-semitism">State
Department definition of anti-Semitism</a>, which
describes much criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.</p>
<p>The definition has no legal force, but Israel lobby
groups have been been pressing institutions and
governments around the world, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/democrats-advance-palestine-censorship-ahead-trump">including
the US Congress</a>, to formally adopt it.</p>
<p>But even <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/kenneth-stern">Kenneth
Stern</a>, the former American Jewish Committee
executive who <a
href="http://jkrfoundation.org/about/kenneth-s-stern/">authored
the definition</a>, has <a
href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/should_a_major_university_system_have_a_particular_definition_of_anti_semit">vigorously
opposed</a> its adoption into legislation, warning
that it would be used by Israel advocacy groups to
police speech.</p>
<p>Stern <a
href="http://jkrfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Stern-Letter-links-corrected.pdf">told
US lawmakers</a> in December that legislating the
definition would be “unconstitutional and unwise” and
would “actually harm Jewish students and have a toxic
effect on the academy.”</p>
<h2>Dead end</h2>
<p>In recent years, Israel lobby groups have urged the
Department of Education to investigate Palestine
advocacy as a potential violation of <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/title-vi-civil-rights-act">Title
VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act</a> – landmark
legislation that requires administrators to ensure
campuses are free from a pervasive atmosphere of bias.</p>
<p>But in 2013, the strategy hit a dead end as the
Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/victory-campus-free-speech-us-dept-education-throws-out-anti-semitism">threw
out</a> a slew of Title VI complaints against the
University of California campuses at Berkeley, Santa
Cruz and Irvine, where there had been active Palestine
solidarity campaigns.</p>
<p>Khalidi says it is revealing that The Lawfare Project
is now citing the State Department definition in its
lawsuit.</p>
<p>“This is about an effort to categorize any and all
criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic and crush a
growing movement that is looking critically at
Israel,” she said.</p>
<h2>Two incidents</h2>
<p>While painting a lurid broad-brush picture of
anti-Jewish hatred on campus, the lawsuit is centered
on only two specific incidents: a protest of Israeli
government official Nir Barkat’s visit in April 2016,
and the exclusion of the campus chapter of the Jewish
student organization Hillel from a “Know Your Rights”
fair in February 2017.</p>
<p>Students disrupted the Barkat event with chants,
forcing his audience to huddle around to hear his
speech. Leslie Wong, SFSU’s president, immediately <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-are-university-heads-racing-slander-protesters/17061">condemned</a>
the protest and announced an investigation.</p>
<p>That investigation <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/free-speech-triumphs-over-pro-israel-bullies-us-universities">upheld</a>
the students’ right to protest and found that campus
police and administrators acted in accordance with how
they had handled protests in the past.</p>
<p>The investigative report also affirms that “the
protestors did not create a credible threat to public
safety” and that they “did not engage in any
threatening physical conduct or raise any direct
threats that could be interpreted as incitement to
imminent lawless action.”</p>
<p>Yet the lawsuit claims that by not intervening to
stop the protest as it happened, the administration
violated the audience members’ First Amendment right
to hear Barkat.</p>
<p>This video, posted online by a pro-Israel group,
shows Barkat speaking to students gathered around him,
while chants of “Free, Free Palestine” can be heard
from protesters in the back of the room:</p>
<p>In the second incident, plaintiffs claim Hillel was
barred from a Know Your Rights fair on campus because
of its Jewish identity. The university is still
investigating the incident.</p>
<p>Responding to the lawsuit, San Francisco State
University affirmed its dedication to free speech,
diversity and inclusion.</p>
<p>But its statement repeats the allegation that the
protest of Nir Barkat was anti-Semitic.</p>
<p>“The disruption of the event featuring Jerusalem
Mayor Nir Barkat in spring 2016 and bias incidents
that were reported this year were ugly reminders that
anti-Semitism, like all forms of discrimination, is
real and our community has work to do.”</p>
<p>This new position contradicts the university’s own
earlier investigation, which found that the protest
targeted Barkat’s politics, not his Jewish identity.</p>
<p>“In the end, the record demonstrates that the protest
was directed towards the Mayor of Jerusalem based on
his politics, and not towards any of the audience
members,” the investigation concluded.</p>
<h2>Equating Jews with Israel</h2>
<p>Barkat oversees the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/palestinians-face-biggest-expulsion-years-settlers-jerusalem">ongoing
forced displacement</a> of Palestinians from their
homes in occupied East Jerusalem to make way for
Jewish settlers.</p>
<p>In 2016, Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in
the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israeli-home-demolitions-break-records-shatter-lives-2016">hit
a new record</a>.</p>
<p>Yet the lawsuit frames the protest against Barkat as
an attack on Jewish students on campus, not as
political speech against a foreign government’s
objectionable behavior.</p>
<p>The complaint alleges for instance that protesters
“had every intention of making the Jews in the room
feel intimidated and that they reveled in threatening
them.”</p>
<p>Such assertions manufacture the anti-Semitism the
lawsuit claims to expose, by identifying all Jews with
Israel and Israel with all Jews. This is absurd on its
face, not least because Israeli settlements are <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/us-lets-security-council-pass-resolution-against-israeli-settlements">illegal
under international law</a> and are opposed not only
by Palestinians and dozens of governments but by also
by many Jewish groups and activists, <a
href="http://peacenow.org.il/en/about-us/who-are-we">including
Israelis</a>.</p>
<p>The lawsuit also describes the boycott, divestment
and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights as
“inherently anti-Semitic.” It attempts to link BDS
activists to “terrorist” organizations.</p>
<p>It even claims that murdered Palestinian cartoonist <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naji-al-ali">Naji al-Ali’s</a>
iconic character Handala – a child holding a key who
represents Palestinian refugees’ desire to return home
– is “an established anti-Semitic symbol.”</p>
<p>The image of a key is often used by Palestinians as a
reminder of the houses they left behind in the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/nakba">Nakba</a>
– the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. But to the
plaintiffs, “the key represents the destruction of
Israel as a Jewish state.”</p>
<h2>The spirit of 1968</h2>
<p>Another target of the lawsuit is San Francisco State
University’s <a
href="http://www.sfsu.edu/news/2008/fall/8.html">historic</a>
College of Ethnic Studies.</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, part of the legacy that evolved from
[the College of Ethnic Studies] has been an extremely
disturbing pattern of blatant anti-Jewish animus at
SFSU,” the complaint claims.</p>
<p>The first of its kind, the College of Ethnic Studies
was founded in 1969 after the Black Student Union and
the Third World Liberation Front waged the longest
campus strike in US history, starting the year before.</p>
<p>It quickly became a model for Black and ethnic
studies programs across the country.</p>
<p>In 2007, in the same spirit, San Francisco State
University founded the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and
Diasporas Initiative. Professor <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/rabab-abdulhadi">Rabab
Abdulhadi</a>, who teaches in the department, is
named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along with the
dean of the College of Ethnic Studies.</p>
<p>The university’s statement responding to the lawsuit
does not mention or defend the college.</p>
<p>Abdulhadi has been the repeated <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/racist-group-launches-national-offensive-us-campuses">target</a>
of Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian attacks by Israel
advocates.</p>
<p>“These right-wing, pro-Israeli groups are well funded
but tiny,” Abdulhadi told The Electronic Intifada.
“They don’t represent a consensus of the Jewish
community.”</p>
<p>“They are trying to stop the scholarship and activism
on campus,” she added. “They are attacking the spirit
of 1968.”</p>
<br>
</article>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>