Sandy Tolan
The Guardian / March 20, 2025
For speaking up for Palestine, I have been targeted – and have seen colleagues and students face arrest and sanctions.
The Trump administration’s attempted deportation of the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the US, is sparking outrage and nationwide protests. But as shocking as his arrest may have seemed to the world, it was sadly unsurprising to those of us on the frontlines of the war at home over Gaza. Here in the US, a building fury of anti-Palestinian hatred, especially since the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, is giving Donald Trump cover to cleanse the country of “undesirables” and undermine free speech and academic freedom.
“If you love Hamas so much why not pack up and move to south Gaza,” an infuriated reader wrote to me last spring, after the LA Times published my opinion article criticising my own university, the University of Southern California (USC), for calling in riot police to arrest peaceful protesters. “Then, there’d be hope that in a future bombing raid your name will be on one of the projectiles.” A few months later came the blast of robo-emails, an estimated 4,000 of them, which all began “Deeply hateful Sandy Tolan,” after my satirical piece lampooning the lockdown of our campus. And who can forget (I can’t) the angry, shouting Texans who objected to my speech outlining evidence for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, just last week?
All of this comes with the territory. My experience has been minuscule compared with many of my colleagues, who’ve put their bodies on the line to protect our students, then faced arrest and sanctions. Or the students themselves, who’ve been blacklisted, fired, suspended, doxed and had job offers rescinded.
Even this shrinks immeasurably when compared with what’s happened to the people of Gaza over the past 17 months: more than 47,000 killed, many by US munitions fired by Israeli forces. Countless more maimed and missing limbs. All of Gaza’s universities destroyed. More than 100 university deans, professors and other university staff killed, along with hundreds more students; 170 journalists killed, nearly all Palestinian, some deliberately “murdered”, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Desperation. Surgery without anaesthesia. Bread made from animal feed. An estimated 62,000 dead from starvation. Last week I met a doctor who has lost 200 members of her family in Gaza.
The enraged response to those of us who insist on bearing witness to this reality is a byproduct of the near-complete erasure of the Palestinian narrative. In the US media framing, with few exceptions, Palestinians are terrorists or victims, never fully human.
This dehumanisation helps explain the deeply alarming arrest of Khalil. President Trump made it clear that frightening higher education is precisely his intent: “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country,” he posted on Truth Social. “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”
Universities must resist our authoritarian leader’s dictates while there is still time. But the long erasure and dehumanisation of Palestinians is working against our urgent task. And robotic acceptance of bogus charges of antisemitism has only made the job of resistance that much more difficult.
The charges of antisemitism are rooted in last year’s overwhelmingly peaceful Gaza encampments, which included charges of genocide and slogans such as “from the river to the sea” – a concept found in the original platform of Israel’s ruling Likud party. And given that South Africa, supported by other nations, brought genocide charges against Israel in the international court of justice, and that growing numbers of genocide and even Holocaust scholars have come to the same conclusion, it is hardly antisemitic to express that opinion. Of course, genuine cases of antisemitism should be taken seriously. But some powerful people are making these charges not because they’re worried about antisemitism, but as a broader attack on free speech and universities themselves.
This month, 77 Jewish and Jewish Studies faculty, staff and allies at USC wrote a letter to the university’s president, Carol Folt, denouncing the Trump administration’s new executive order on “additional measures to combat anti-semitism”. The letter refuted “in the strongest terms the weaponization of Jewish identity for this Administration’s goals of repression and deportation,” and demanded that our university “not sacrifice our free speech principles”, even when threatened by cuts in federal funding.
Now the Justice Department is sending investigators to 10 universities, including USC, to “monitor for and report activities by alien students”. The arrest of Khalil at Columbia, Trump promised, is “the first of many to come”.
Billions of dollars in cuts are precisely what may compel universities, even private ones such as USC and Columbia, to comply with Trump dictates on student protesters and university diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes. This is how last year’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters was a kind of test case. This is why acquiescence to this suppression, lazy acceptance of false charges of antisemitism, and passive erasure of Palestinians, have been so dangerous and consequential. They have led us to the present moment.
Already universities are scrubbing references to DEI from their public-facing websites. As the Los Angeles Times reported, one department at USC even deleted references to a scholarship for Black and Indigenous students. This suits Department of Education priorities and raises the question: will it next target Black studies, Asian studies, Latino and Native American studies, or declare that simply being transgender is illegal? When do universities draw the line and say, no?
This month, Columbia signalled to the administration that it would cooperate with the Justice Department investigation. But no matter: the Trump team eliminated $400m of the university’s federal funding.
It makes no sense to comply with authoritarian mandates, especially when you lose anyway, and when the broader repressive agenda is no secret. Trump administration officials have made it clear that their aim is to cripple universities. The goal, the senior Trump strategist Christopher Rufo told the New York Times, is to put “universities into contraction, into a recession … in a way that puts them in an existential terror”.
For universities, the response should be obvious: no more buckling under repressive pressures from petty, narrow-minded autocrats. It’s time for us to unabashedly defend our values, to advance courage over compliance, to defend knowledge, to fight for our students. A note from the University of California chancellor to the UC Berkeley community, helps point the way: “[W]e are gravely concerned about recent Federal action in regard to higher education … in ways that threaten core values: academic freedom, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression … we will be steadfast and unrelenting in our efforts to defend those core values.”
Universities must become centres of resistance. Silence is not a solution to the mounting tyranny – not on DEI, not on federal interference, and certainly not on the exercise of free speech on Gaza, Israel and Palestine. Whatever the issue, we are called to continue the fight, along with our students, to show the humanity, the dignity, and the rights of our communities at risk.
The forces of darkness have the upper hand. We must counter with facts, context, reason, compassion and, above all, courage, for as long as we possibly can.
Sandy Tolan is a professor at the Annenberg school for communication and journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and author of two books on the history of Israel and Palestine, including the international bestseller The Lemon Tree
