In this episode, we host Sean Malloy in conversation with a SWANA Collective member to discuss the intensifying repression of Palestine solidarity on US university campuses. Over the past ten days or so we have witnessed the alarming spectacle of the arrest and detention with a view to deportation of Palestine solidarity activists who are in the United States legally and are accused of no crime. These include Columbia students Mahmoud Khalil and now Leqaa Korda, both Palestinians, though they may only be the ones we are aware of right now. Their arrest, and Donald Trump’s proclamation that more will follow, comes in the wake of a year of violent crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters since the encampments on US campuses last Spring. Other students and faculty, from Columbia and NYU to UCLA and UCI have been arrested by armed police actions, suspended from their universities, jailed and prosecuted, all for the crime of protesting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Others, like legal scholar Katherine Franke at Columbia and international legal scholar Helyeh Doutaghi at Yale, have been summarily fired in the last few months.While we should not be surprised at such actions that bear all the hallmarks of secrecy and violation of due process characteristic of any police state from Trump’s avowedly fascistic regime or, indeed from the previous Biden regime with its fanatical and weirdly disturbed commitment to Zionist slaughter, more troubling is the complicity and eager participation of US universities in a wave of repression unprecedented even during the revolutionary 1960s. Almost without exception, our universities, including the University of California, have joined in the repression of student, staff and faculty activists, often prior to any pressure from DHS or other law enforcement. They have embraced spurious Zionist talking points and implemented tendentious definitions of anti Semitism, introduced unprecedented restrictions on speech and protest, fired faculty and staff, canceled classes, and more. What explains this extraordinary amping up of repression? How far is this ardent support for Zionism opening the door to repression in other areas of the university? What is the cost to universities and to our wider intellectual life of succumbing to and even embracing the censorship of research and teaching for political reasons? We discuss these and other questions today with Professor Sean Malloy.

Sean Malloy is Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. His research interests include issues of colonialism, war, white supremacy, and the critical study of Zionism. His early work focused on nuclear history as a way of examining the intersection between science, ethics, and decision making. More recently he has explored the radical internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its relationship to the Third World, the Cold War, and neoliberal globalization. He is the author of Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism During the Cold War (2017) and Atomic Tragedy: Henry L. Stimson and the Decision to Use the Bomb Against Japan (2008). His current book project, tentatively entitled "The Iron Wall and the Ivory Tower: The Zionist War on Higher Education," is a critical analysis of the countermobilization against Palestinian solidarity on US college campuses. He is a founding member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council.