A public lecture by Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal.
Amid a nationwide push to curtail the teaching of institutional racism and the dark sides of US history, we can learn important lessons from another subject on which campus communities have long experienced attacks on free speech and academic freedom: Palestine.
In what can only be characterized as a “Palestine Exception to free speech,” academics, students, and others who speak out for Palestinian rights are routinely falsely accused, investigated, surveilled, harassed, and sometimes suffer severe consequences to their reputations and careers. Right-wing efforts to dictate what academics and others can and can’t say, teach, or write are proliferating.
What is at stake? What can we learn from Palestinians and their allies whose histories, narratives, and experiences are constantly denied, erased, and criminalized, even in academia?
How can we ensure that universities and other entities can be bastions of academic freedom and free speech and not enforcers of corporate, lobbyist, and governmental political litmus tests?