University Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan is Suspended from Israel for Defending Israel in the Wake of Occultations

College campuses have been divided over Israel and Palestine for a long time, but never quite like this: violent threats against Jewish students; pro-Palestinian protests that pull major contributions; and campaigns sponsored by outside conservative groups.

Republicans cast these episodes as part of a larger culture battle over education that has been raging since the P.H. outbreak as angst over school closings and mask policies gave way to warnings of liberal indoctrination in schools.

The message has unified broad parts of the party, including socially conservative grass-roots activists who are focused on issues like school curriculums and so-called parents’ rights, evangelical voters driven by their faith to support Israel, and the highest-ranking members of the party establishment.

Republican presidential candidates spoke at an event hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas last weekend, where they described universities as incubators of a far- left ideology.

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs have fueled discrimination in American universities, the governor of Florida stated during his address on Saturday. “That’s anti-Israel, it’s anti-Jewish 100 percent if you take to that to the logical conclusion,” he said.

On Oct. 25, Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a lecturer at a college in Jerusalem, participated in a discussion in a faculty WhatsApp group about the horrific events of Oct. 7. She wrote that the slaughter of people in Gaza reminded her of what Jean-Paul Sartre said about race relations. Ms. Peled- Elhanan wrote that they saw the gaze.

Ms. Peled- Elhanan approached me for legal advice after she received this notice, which is an example of a similar case. In the past three weeks, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, dozens of students, almost all of them Palestinian citizens of Israel, have been suspended or summoned to hearings before being suspended from their academic institutions on the charge that statements they posted on social networks constitute support for terrorism. The group Academia for Equality has identified at least three other university lecturers at different institutions, one Jewish and two Palestinian, who were also summoned to hearings. There are two who are still in proceedings. Ms. Peled- Elhanan was given a severe reprimand but was still able to keep her job.

This isn’t an accident. Speech suppression and targeting of critics of the policy toward the conflict has always been a strategic goal. It is part of the grand plan to undermine the democratic values of the Israeli government, which included the establishment of a full, official ethnonationalist Jewish regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

It shouldn’t be surprising: In societies that contain widespread nationalistic tendencies, as is sadly the case in Israel, war and national tragedies create the perfect environment for witch hunts and the accelerated branding of critics and minorities as enemies from within. This is exactly what has been unfolding in Israel in the past three weeks.

But even this grave process of constantly reducing the space for political discussion of the Israeli occupation and treatment of Palestinians and the authoritarian suppression of criticism and dissent did not prepare civil society for what has been happening since Oct. 7.

I see it every day in requests for legal advice that I get from activists and nongovernmental organizations who are scared of being sued for their posts before Oct. 7, which was the day they would have lost their licenses.