Opinion

Human rights advocacy is not hate speech

P icture yourself in a university courtyard. A crowd congregates around a mock police checkpoint. Students with cardboard-cutout guns dressed as Arizona law officers stop others to ask: "Are you Mexican?" "Are you undocumented?" "What is your ethnicity?"

The officer-actors ask student-actors who do not look white for identification papers. They detain those without ID or who speak Spanish. Another group plays Latino detainees, their arms tied behind their backs. The performance demonstrates what racial profiling under Arizona's anti-immigrant law looks like.

Some might object that such a dramatization oversimplifies the issue, or casts all Arizona law enforcement officers in a negative light. Perhaps - but it would be a stretch to accuse the performers of hate speech or of demonizing white Americans by criticizing a state policy that is self-consciously motivated by race.

But that is the charge that has been leveled at University of California students who engage in identical performances criticizing the matrix of checkpoints Israel uses to control Arab civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Such protests seek to show that military checkpoints enforce Jewish sovereignty over an Arab population.

Every day, checkpoints prevent Palestinians from accessing their land, visiting family, reaching schools or hospitals. Most checkpoints are deep inside the West Bank, away from the Israeli border, giving lie to the claim they keep Israelis safe. Jewish Israeli settlers pass freely through checkpoints, asserting their domination.

We believe it is important to bring this political reality onto our campuses. But a UC working group has now suggested that such criticism is discriminatory. This conclusion reflects the faulty logic that, because some Jewish students who identify with Israel's policies are offended by such criticism, the protest is anti-Jewish. This is as absurd as calling all criticism of Iran or Saudi Arabia anti-Muslim.

That has not stopped UC administrators from suggesting that such activism creates a conflict between free speech and civil rights. However, nobody's rights are threatened by criticism of Israel. The real threat to students' rights is political pressure to shut down the increasingly widespread view that Israel should be held to international standards. Moreover, enforced silence helps preserve the continued violations of Palestinians' rights.

After an outcry, UC President Mark Yudof appears to be distancing himself from the group's recommendation that such speech be banned on campus. Although he rests on the First Amendment to oppose censorship, Yudof and other administrators have nevertheless stigmatized and attacked student criticism of Israel, a nod to Israel-aligned organizations that want to stem the growth of activism in support of the Palestinian people.

Moreover, administrators have paid little attention to how this contributes to a climate of intimidation. This is created by issuing statements that treat opposition to Israeli policies as uncivil or painful, while treating support for Israeli policies as normal and respectable. Administrators often privilege the concerns of Israel-aligned organizations over those of sizable and diverse, multifaith student coalitions critical of Israeli policies.

These disparities must be addressed for campuses to support a full range of political expression.