How the Haverford antisemitism settlement harms free speech
As someone who believes in Israel, I need to hear from people who see it differently — which is exactly what Haverford’s new policy threatens.
I believe in Israel.
I oppose its current leadership and its policies in Gaza and the West Bank. But I support its right to exist as a Jewish state. And I reject the idea that Zionism is inherently racist or malevolent.
That’s why it’s important for me to hear from people who see Israel differently than I do. I need them to question, provoke, and challenge me. That’s how I learn.
And that’s also why I’m worried about the settlement Haverford College announced last week, pledging to protect Jewish students from antisemitic speech. In a statement, Haverford president Wendy Raymond declared that the college would not tolerate “discrimination, harassment, and bias” against “students who identify as Jewish” or “those who support Zionism.”
So does that mean you won’t be able to say “Zionism is racism” or “Israel is an apartheid state”? The lawyer representing Jewish students who sued the school — and who said she was “very pleased” with the settlement — seemed to think so.
“It’s a new form of antisemitism, saying, ‘Oh, no, I don’t hate Jews, I just hate Zionists,’” she said. “For a Jew to hear that was incredibly painful.”
I’m sure that it was. I’m Jewish, and anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear, as well.
But that’s why I should hear it. Zionism is probably the most contested question on our campuses right now. Unless everyone can address it, freely and openly, we’ll never get a good purchase on it.
Ditto for Columbia, where I went to college 40 years ago. Back then, you could argue about anything. But now Zionism, too, is effectively off the table.
That’s because the university adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. According to the IHRA, “claiming the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israel policy to that of the Nazis” are antisemitic.
But a competing standard, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, argues that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” or offering “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state” are not, on their face, antisemitic. Haverfordʼs settlement seems to lean entirely on the first definition and ignores the second, which has not been adopted by the college or most other institutions, but was endorsed by Bucknell University’s faculty last year.
Under the IHRA definition, would a student or professor who said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza — like the Nazis did in Europe — face punishment at Columbia? I don’t think Israel’s action in Gaza constitutes genocide, but I know other historians do. And again, I need to hear from them.
In their 2024 lawsuit against Haverford, Jewish students complained that a professor called supporters of Israel “racist genocidaires.” I can understand why they felt “pain and harm” about these kinds of comments, as Raymond acknowledged at the time.
But you can censor anything — literally, anything — on those grounds. During the 2016 presidential campaign, students at Emory University said they were harmed by campus chalk messages backing Donald Trump. “Supporting him, repeating his catchphrases [is] an implicit attack on the Muslim, Latinx, Black, and other communities at Emory and across the country,” protesters declared. “This is not political expression; it is hate speech.”
And in 2021, Harvard biology professor Carole Hooven caused an outcry when she told Fox News that gender could take any number of forms, but sex is binary: male or female. After a colleague denounced Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments on Twitter (now X), she became a campus pariah. Her mental health plummeted, and she resigned.
Anti-Zionist rhetoric is hard for me to hear, as well. But that’s why I should hear it.
Like Zionism, the biology of sex is a hugely contested and complicated matter. And we won’t be able to learn more about it if we inhibit discussion of it.
How many people celebrating the new restrictions on anti-Zionist speech at Haverford would be OK with prohibiting claims that sex is binary? Likewise, would any of the critics who pushed out Hooven rest easily if critics of Israel were silenced, too?
We all want to have our own say, of course. But when we feel pained or harmed by someone else’s political expression, we call it hate speech. And we try to blot it out.
To be clear, nobody should be subject to threats of physical violence. Whatever you think of Zionists on campus, you can’t say you’re going to assault or murder them. That’s against the law, and our colleges should be vigilant in enforcing it.
But at Haverford, it would now appear, you can’t say anything negative about Zionism. Period. If you don’t think Israel should exist, you’re an antisemite. And you need to keep your big mouth shut.
I know some people on campus have been “deeply hurt” by anti-Israel rhetoric, as Raymond said in her statement last week. But once that becomes the barometer for what the rest of us can say, we won’t be able to speak — or listen — across our differences. Isn’t that why we gather at universities in the first place: to learn from each other?
Either you believe in free expression for everyone, or you don’t believe in it at all. Period.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.
