The Hamas-Israel War Obliterated the Campus Microaggression

This week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were dressed down by lawmakers for their refusal to unequivocally condemn expressions of antisemitism on their universities’ campuses.

Critics lambasted pro-Palestinian student demonstrators as antisemitic for chanting phrases such as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—both of which have been used by supporters of Hamas to call for the eradication of Israel—arguing that they are calls for the genocide of Jews.

The university leaders said, correctly in my opinion, that context was required to determine whether such statements constituted acts of harassment or calls to violence.

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In other words, their argument was essentially that nuance was needed in interpretations of controversial speech, that we shouldn’t immediately ascribe the worst motivations to the speakers of such speech, and that Jewish students who felt unsafe by such expressions should accept that this is all part of the robust debate that should rightly occur in places of higher learning.

As a civil libertarian and near-absolutist on free speech, this is music to my ears.

The problem is that it flies completely in the face of long-standing campus policies surrounding speech codes and microaggressions. And it isolates Jews as a singular identity group for whom the rules and protections of campus safetyism don’t apply.

“PROBLEMATIC SPEECH IS NOT FREE SPEECH!”

For much of the past two decades, colleges (and, increasingly, other institutions and workplaces beyond academia) have developed systems where people could anonymously make documented complaints against others for microaggressions—which as the name implies, were not overt acts of bigotry or harassment, but smaller offenses, some of which could be unintended. In a great many schools, the accused could be disciplined without having even heard the evidence against them.

This system was considered a righteous step on the path to social justice, despite being actively hostile to the principle of due process—where the guilty and the innocent are afforded the same rights to defend themselves. Freedom of speech, likewise, was framed as a “tool of oppression.”

Particularly after the social justice revolutions of 2020, the de facto policy in many arenas was that hurtful speech was “violence,” intent does not matter, the aggrieved party’s lived experience (or their identity group’s lived experience) is paramount, and if they say they were hurt by anything someone said, then that person was wrong and must be punished.

Safety first—nuance and context last.

Confoundingly, during a period of social upheaval following the police murder of an unarmed man, zero tolerance was adopted as the progressive path—the only way to fix society’s ills and bigotries.

But now that it’s Jewish students and faculty saying they feel unsafe by aggressive demonstrations on campus, ultra-wealthy donors are pulling their funds from universities—and some pro-Palestinian voices and groups have been silenced or shut down entirely—nuance is making a comeback among the left.

There’s an inherent contradiction here.

Either microaggressions, lived experience, and deference to the offended party are the modes by which campus justice is adjudicated, or they’re not.

If university presidents want to foster a culture of free speech and tolerance for even “offensive” or “wrong” speech (subjective judgments), I’m all for it.

But if there’s an exception for the feelings and safety of Jews—because they are supposedly not an identity group that has historically faced rank bigotry and persecution and continues to be, by far, the religious group most targeted for hate crimes—well, there’s a word for that.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW? CONTEXT AND INTENT MATTER NOW.

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, it deliberately targeted civilians, engaged in savage acts of wanton cruelty, and took hostages including women, children, and the elderly. It was the most devastating pogrom on Jewish people since the Holocaust, with levels of antisemitic barbarity not seen since the Nazis, and Hamas proudly broadcasted some of its atrocities. And yet, Hamas’ attacks were (and continue to be) denied or excused by significant portions of the Western left.

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While some on the far-left will offer a cursory condemnation of Hamas’ crimes, in the same breath they’ll remind you that the proudly homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic, theocratic, fascist death cult deserves the support of progressive activists across the world because they are part of a legitimate resistance movement against an occupying (or blockading) entity—Israel. And they will remind you, correctly, that such resistance is considered legitimate under international law.

It is also generally understood that Hamas knew full well that massacring Israelis en masse, taking hostages, and promising to do it again at the earliest opportunity would invite a brutal and unprecedented Israeli response that would certainly kill thousands of Palestinian civilians. Hamas has made no secret of this, and its long history of using schools, hospitals, and other civilian spaces as weapons depots and launching stations for attacks makes plain that it begs for Israeli attacks that will inordinately kill civilians.

The current Israeli government is also the most far-right in the country’s history, and some of its most senior ministers have used language that can reasonably be characterized as calling for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as well as making no distinction between Hamas terrorists or Gazan civilians. Ultra-religious Israeli settlers in the West Bank continue to engage in purges of their own against Palestinians, at times murdering them and chasing them from their homes, often under the watchful protection of IDF soldiers. One of the top ministers of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition was once banned from the government for supporting terror groups, and he hailed as a hero the ultra-right zealot assassin of would-be peacemaker Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

It’s almost as if the Israel-Palestine conflict is filled on both sides with bad faith actors and sadistic religious zealots, but also innocent civilians enduring generations of trauma and injustice—and chattering classes around the world who are certain that one side is completely just and the other side is innately evil.

Maybe you think some of these observations are true, or all of them, or none of them. But they are all based in fact and presented with a certain perspective—a perspective you may find wrong-headed or offensive. While it might seem counterintuitive, the Israel-Palestine conflict demonstrates how facts (not Donald Trump’s imagined “alternative facts,” but actual, true facts) can be subjective when presented in an argument.

That’s why incredibly fraught debates—like this one—require nuance and a certain amount of grace between opponents, and not immediately leaping to the least generous interpretation of the things coming out of each other’s mouths.

SO YOU’VE BECOME THE UNPOPULAR MINORITY

In a conflict where partisans take the most maximalist position available, the most effective way to reach any semblance of reason is to support a culture of free expression, which means you may be offended by words and ideas. You may even feel unsafe by such expression. And you may feel as if pleading to authority to shut down the speakers of “bad speech” is the path to justice.

Is “from the river to the sea” a call for genocide? Well, Hamas sure thinks so.

But plenty of people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause insist it’s merely a call for a single, democratic secular state between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.

(Hamas, as undemocratic and intolerant a group as you’re likely to find on this planet, would never stand for Jews living on the land, making belief in a “single democratic secular state” hopelessly naive. Likewise, the Jewish State is by definition ethno-nationalist, meaning its claims to democracy will always be at least somewhat limited.)

As Jay Michaelson (a legal scholar and ordained rabbi), noted here this week at The Daily Beast:

“When, a few weeks ago, a crowd of New York City high school students ran through the school’s halls, shouted ‘Free Palestine,‘ vandalized school property, and tried to barge into a classroom of a teacher who posted ‘I stand with Israel,’ that wasn’t mere speech, [it was] conduct that qualifies as harassment.

“But what about when someone makes a statement in a classroom or a college lecture? If someone insists, in a classroom discussion, that Israel as a country is an illegitimate colonial outpost and should be ‘wiped off the map’?

“That sounds like a political statement to me, not an act of bullying or intimidation. But if a mob marches into a Shabbat service and shouts the same slogan, then that’s clearly harassment and in violation of the policy. Context matters.”

Conversely, as Israel bombards Gaza and well over 10,000 civilians have been killed, is saying “I support Israel” a call to genocide? Palestine advocates sure think so, while Israel supporters are appalled by the suggestion.

I’m not weighing in (at least in this column) on the accuracy or righteousness of these statements. Each side’s argument can be right, partially right, or entirely wrong. Once again, that’s why tolerance of “offensive” speech is so vital, and why zero tolerance toward controversial speech and microaggressions are short-sighted, counterproductive, and ethically dubious.

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Every social justice movement in U.S. history could not have gained a foothold without the First Amendment. That’s because, at their births, they represented unpopular, minority opinions. Attempts were invariably made to shut them down, usually to “protect the children” (as in the gay rights movement) or because someone was “offended” by the challenge to the status quo (as in the civil rights movement for Black Americans).

While progressives often wish we had more stringent restrictions on speech, like most of Europe, they’re now finding pro-Palestinian speech being swept up under certain countries’ vague and overbroad criminal prohibitions on “hate speech.”

A less extreme version of that is now playing out on U.S. college campuses, where pro-Palestinian sentiment is popular among much of the student body and faculty, but not among some ultra-wealthy donors.

Progressives are now belatedly learning the value of free speech as a necessary tool to defend the rights of unpopular minority voices—even ones that can be interpreted by some as frighteningly bigoted, as when some pro-Palestinian demonstrators praise “intifada” and tacitly support Hamas’ war against Israel.

ZERO TOLERANCE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

Israelis and members of other nationalities were massacred with inhuman methods of violence on Oct. 7.

Palestinian civilians in Gaza have since been killed at extraordinary levels, with countless more made homeless and vulnerable to illness and malnutrition, with bleak hopes for any kind of stability in their lives.

Jews are perennially the largest targets of religiously based hate crimes in the U.S., and antisemitic conspiracy theories are regularly peddled by both the left and right—and recently by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.

Anti-Muslim bigotry and suspicion are very much a part of the American experience. And it invariably flares up when terror groups like al Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas kill civilians. (The widespread detention of ordinary Muslims in the U.S. after 9/11 is but one representative example.)

All of these things are true. But if you take only one or two and exclude the others, you have stripped context. Or, in the parlance of social justice, you have “erased” the lived experience of victimized identity groups.

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Partisans on each side are certain that there is no argument to be had about any of this. But as I recently argued in the case of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s absolutist, often contradictory definition of “antiracism,” declaring a debate to be “over” does not make it so. Shutting down dissent does not win hearts and minds, it only hardens the intractable.

The lesson here should be that, in a great many cases, immediately ascribing the worst motivations to speakers of “offensive” ideas is unhelpful, and that calls to authority to police “right” and “wrong” speech will ultimately boomerang on you when you’re not favored by the popular majority—when you’re not the one in charge. (I’ve made this case many times over the years, and in a 2016 essay for Vox specifically pointed out how pro-Palestinian voices were already being accused of violating certain university codes against “hate speech.”)

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To be very clear, it’s not only the progressive left that’s hypocritical on this issue. Prominent factions of the right and the “anti-woke center”—who long claimed to be pro-free speech, anti-cancel culture, and mocked the idea that speech could make one feel unsafe—have either been silent as pro-Palestinian voices are censored, equivocated that there should be an exception in this case, or called for even more severe penalties.

Culture warriors delighting in the cancellation of voices that offend them could easily say: “See? Cancel culture sucks, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offense—and we told you this all along.” Instead their message is: “I didn’t like cancel culture and censorship then, but I like it now and I'm not a hypocrite—suck it snowflakes, you made me this way."

Principles don’t matter, only victory. Now that they are in a position to punish and silence, they’re luxuriating in it.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been steadfast voices defending the right to free expression (short of direct incitements to violence or harassment). The nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) always walks the walk in these cases, and numerous centrist, liberal, and conservative free speech defenders have, too, held the line as pro-Palestinian voices are censored.

A culture of free speech can lead to hurt feelings or a sense of unsafety. But it is not a “tool of the oppressor,” it is a righteous principle—like due process—that earns its strength by being applied to both the minority and majority, the popular and the unpopular, the righteous and the wrong.

Colleges can choose to do away with their overbroad speech codes and systems of discipline that lack due process or consider intent, nuance, and context. Or they can keep them, and defer to the feelings of the offended.

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But what is clear is that you can’t have it both ways. For the authority to police speech to hold any legitimacy, it must be applied universally, and not excluded when the aggrieved are pro-Israel Jews. (Once again, there’s a word for that.)

I’ve argued this relentlessly over the years, but principled support for free speech is always under siege by the side that thinks the other has gone “too far”—so it’s worth repeating again: Do not demand fallible authorities to be the arbiters of acceptable discourse, because you will not always be favored by the authorities.

Many on the progressive left are shocked to find themselves and their allies labeled as unacceptably “problematic.” It’s a situation they could not previously conceive—but they should have. Real free speech advocates have been warning of this very situation the entire time.

The only way to ensure that your own ideas won’t be shut down when they are unpopular is to support—and demand—a culture of free speech, which does not include the right not to be offended.